Participles have gender, which means that some parts of most verbs have gender, if only rather incidentally. (Decimata est legio, but decimati sunt decuriones.)
So what word was used in the latin texts that is translated as decimation?
decimatio
Yes, as I said in post #58. It’s necessary to distinguish between how the word evolved in Latin and how it was then borrowed and evolved in English. In early modern English, many words were borrowed from Latin and classical Greek. It was assumed that any well educated person would know Latin and possibly classical Greek. At the point they were borrowed, they were modified to fit into the style of English. The words “decimate” and “decimation” are English words, although they are borrowed from Latin.
So there is a verb in Latin meaning to decimate, it just isn’t conjugated as decimate, decimated, decimates, etc
Well, no. Latin is not English, and it follows its own rules for things like verb conjugations.
Too bad you werent around to tell this to all those English people some hundreds of years ago who changed our language for the worse by making it more like Latin. Most silent letters, Rhythm instead of Rime, “don’t split infinitives” and “no ending sentences with prepositions”., and modern idiots saying “octopi” instead of “octopuses”.
I mean I’m a nerdy classics pedant but that’s seems too far even for me. That’s like saying the ancient Romans didn’t have legions because they called them legio
Silent letters? What are you on about? The silent letters are because of sound changes since the orthography was fixed, not the influence of Latin.
No, but that would also be true: the Romans didn’t have decimation, they had, at most, decimatio (although there may have been legends about serial decimatio).
Anyway, if you confuse etymology with semantics (“what the Romans really meant by some word that they never used”), you are hoist by your own (nerdy classics pedant) petard.
And “Rhythm instead of Rime” makes no fucking sense.
Part of the reason that in early modern English (and still occasionally in contemporary English) people would take words from Latin and classical Greek was that this was going on all over Europe (and sometimes all around the world) in most languages. This is why you can often look at a technical word (in science, medicine, philosophy, etc.) in any of those languages and tell what it means. The word might have different endings in different languages or slightly different spellings in those languages. Still, they took the words from Latin or classical Greek.
There are than fifty dollars on the table. – Fifty one-dollar bills and/or coins are on the table.
There is fifty dollars on the table. – A sum of money – coins and/or notes – which adds up to fifty dollars is on the table.
Or even worse, “virii” instead of “viruses”.
Personally, I think “octopi” rolls off the tongue more mellifluously than “octopuses”, so I am willing to consider it one of English’s myriad exceptions to the general rules.
As for the thread topic, the logic behind decimation was, “The entire unit committed an act of cowardice, and should be killed. We are going to be magnanimous and only kill 10% of them. The gods will decide who lives and who dies. Those who want to live had better obey the gods. (And their officers, in future battles.)”
I like to give the plural of Doctor Who’s TARDIS as TARDII.
Here’s a list of many words in English for which the plural is not formed by adding s or es. The number has been decreasing for centuries. For some of the words in this list, some people use s or es and some use the irregular form:
https://www.thoughtco.com/irregular-plural-nouns-in-english-1692634
Nope.
Rime was the original spelling, but people who though English should be more like Latin, changed it to Rhyme. Autocorrect did me in, sorry.
Good one. Hippopotamuses is right, Hippopotami is wrong.
In some contexts, it has been mouses, instead of mice. This needs to continue.
But in your list, note how few end with an “I”.