It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns.
It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive!
Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is)
Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species
Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s
Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
It's not like you can stop it. English words mean whatever it is that they communicate and that can drift significantly over time.
I recall reading that back in the day, there were criticisms that the neologism "television" would never catch on ... because it combined Greek and Latin roots.
Romances in a nutshell.
And given the time available to an octopus while she waits for her eggs to hatch, what is the recommended reading list from the Loeb library for the octopus's consciousness if there were a universal translator babelfish she could use?
Yet we still have names ending in -ano. Mariano, Emiliano, Cipriano, Maximiliano...
I think 'octopodes' is 'most correct', but 'octopuses' is fine. And most will mispronounce 'octopodes' if they choose it anyway, so 'octopuses' probably would've been better.
As far as the plural goes, it is just a weird corner of the language where there is no consensus on what the right word is. merriam-webster lists all three variants as plurals.
English is an absolute mess
So thin flat things like paper or shirts are 1 mai, 2 mai, 3 mai, while to count books you say 1 satsu, 2 satsu, 3 satsu.
Long round things like pencils or umbrellas go 1 pon, 2 hon, 3 bon, 4 hon, 5 hon, 6 pon, etc (yeah you read that right).
There are different counter words for different kinds of animals, small things, vehicles, shoes, drinks, people, etc.
https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-numbers-co...
grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves
That's a really good point actually, one I've not heard before.
I think it's still harder learning from an ungendered language, since you naturally think of mapping word:word, but you also need word:gender now. With your point though, maybe I can have an easier time of it by trying to consciously think of it instead as word:(word, gender), if that makes sense.
You'd have a hard time counting all the stars, but "sky of star" doesn't work like "head of hair" does. I love how expressive English is, but it's got issues for sure.
That's not an uncountable. It's the count form, explicitly being counted by the count-noun-exclusive determiner many. (The mass form of many is much.)
The entire difference between "the hair on my head" and "the hairs on my head" is that in the second one you're counting the hairs.
It's a pattern matching phenomenon.
It would be less weird if there were not spelling irregularities, since the -pus is meant to be foot (like pes, pedes...in Latin, or pos, podes,... in Greek).
Basically, the spelling irregularity triggers a sensible pattern match, which happens to of course not honor the spelling irregularity.
And then nerds like me write too much about such, but i had years of Latin for something!
--fellow Latin nerd
used as a noun, it's an (implicit thing) prepared (which preparatus would describe, but i guess we don't have any other word in English other than apparatus.
i don't have a Latin dictionary though
I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)