Previously, if I absolutely had to pluralize barf, I would have instinctually gone “barfs”. But now if I ever run into the chance to do so, I am totally going with “barves”. As in “his barf was one of the more voluminous barves I’ve ever seen.” Most of the time it would be nonpluralizable.
Hmm. I was playing a word game last week in which the answer was OCTOPODES, which Wiktionary claims is “rare”, but is the only correct plural, if you think about it, if one is after a deliberate learned borrowing.
IME the the modern virology literature talks about “viruses” all the time; I wonder where you are seeing anything else!
As for silent letters, my opinion is that unless the goal is phonetic spelling, they can offer some useful etymological information or disambiguation, so they are not necessarily a bad thing.
What about the ones that are fake/wrong?
My understanding is that “could” picked up a silent ‘l’ just so that it would match “would” and “should”, which are etymologically derived from Old English conjugations of “will” and “shall”. Both of those words actually had pronounced “l” sounds at one point.
Scribes in the 15th century just didn’t know any better and assumed that “can/could” needed that silent “l” too even though it was always pronounced “cud” or “cudde” and was never spelled with an “l”.
Those are all Germanic words, so Latin has nothing to do with it, but it’s still an interesting story.
Yes, of course. There are many reasons for silent letter in English. I’d say the primary one is pronunciation changes from Old English (“knight”, “knife”, etc). Then probably pronunciation changes from French (sometimes spelled differently depending on when the word was borrowed). In both of those cases the silent letters were originally not silent.
But there are a few that are explicitly because scribes wanted to reflect the etymology of the word (typically either Latin or Greek). There was a period when English was seen, by the educated, as a “bad language” that should be updated to be on par with French and Latin. So they stuck letters in even when they had never been pronounced that way in English or even Old French (“debt” was borrowed from “dette”). And sometimes they just flat-out got it wrong (see above re: “could”).
It obviously didn’t help that spelling became stuck by the printing press not long after most of the vowels had changed sounds and scribes had done a lot of their monkey-business but before any spelling reform could actually take hold. It’s left us with a right-old mess.
For one thing, I teach a course on Latin influence on English at a university. If you need me to be more specific, please PM me.
Fake letters are not particularly helpful, obviously. From the spelling there appears to be a relation between would and will and should and shall, but the “l” in could is a bit WTF.
Is it not a point in Don Quixote that he keeps talking about the “insula”? That concerns Spanish, of course.
In writings not produced by professional virologists.
In Old English, there were a number of different ways to make a plural from a singular for nouns. The nouns in Old English were divided into a number of different declensions, each of which had its own way of making plurals. These have been slowly disappearing over the centuries since then. A few of them have continued to exist, like children being the plural of child. Others have disappeared, like beek which used to be the plural of book. Words borrowed from foreign languages sometimes are borrowed using both the singular and plural in that language. They also tend to slowly change to the English system of adding s or es for the plural.
We had a dog who after he barfed, he’d try to eat it. If not stopped, he’d snarf up his barf (or barves).
If only he’d snarfed his barf off a scarf on a dwarf wharf. 
Why someone needs a “deliberate learned borrowing” is beyond me. True, Octopus comes from the Greek, not the Latin.
Very little in most cases.
I said “MOST”, not all. And perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration for the sake of emphasis, I never counted them and made a %. Still, quite a few.
Right.
“Octopi” as the plural of “octopus” is a mistake that comes from knowledge of Latin. “Virii” as the plural of “virus” is a mistake that comes from lack of knowledge of Latin. Most people writing things that can be described as “the literature” know enough Latin that they might make the “octopi” mistake, but they won’t make the “virii” mistake.
As used in Latin, “virus” was an uncountable noun and hence did not have a plural, but if we were to pluralize it according to Latin rules, it’d probably be “vira”.
“Children” is a more complicated case, being doubly pluralized. The original plural of “child” was “childer”. But -en was also a way of pluralizing nouns (see also “oxen” and “brethren”, and a few more archaic ones like “shoen”), and that got stuck on there, too. And now, of course, in some dialects, one sees “childrens”.
Ouch! Dad, make it stop!
I’m not disputing you, just curious. But what dialects? Cite?
That’s much less common now(IME), but that was common in rural AAVE. Probably non-rural, too, but that’s all I can attest to personally.
A STORY ABOUT THE LITTLE RABBITS
FINE um whar you will en w’en you may,” remarked Uncle Remus with emphasis, “good chilluns allers gits tuck keer on. Dar wuz Brer Rabbit’s chilluns; dey minded der daddy en mammy fum day’s een’ ter day’s een’. W’en ole man Rabbit say scoot,’ dey scooted, en w’en ole Miss Rabbit say ’scat,’ dey scatted. Dey did dat. En dey kep der cloze clean, en dey ain’t had no smut on der nose nudder.”
Involuntarily the hand of the little boy went up to his face, and he scrubbed the end of his nose with his coat-sleeve.
“Dey wuz good chilluns,” continued the old man, heartily, “en ef dey hadn’t er bin, der wuz one time w’en dey wouldn’t er bin no little rabbits—na’er one. Dat’s w’at.”
Funny. My Dad used to read Uncle Remus stories to bros & I before we could read. He was, to my kidly knowledge, pretty good at the accents.
Chilluns indeed. Thanks for the nostalgia trigger.
Sadly, a quick search failed to turn up any mention of childrenses.
You’re the first in this thread.
Gollum, is that you?