I would have sworn on my life that an acceptable plural of the word “Templar” is “Templar”, but everywhere seems to use “Templars” now. I can’t even find a cite for “Templar” ever being an accepted plural form. My guess is maybe I’m conflating the plural construction (not sure if there’s a technical name for this) “Knights Templar” with assuming “Templar” itself is plural, but it still feels right to me.
Am I just completely off my rocker or is/was it acceptable at some place/time?
In “Knights Templar” Templar is an adjective, and in English adjectives don’t have different forms for singular or plural. The construction is like mothers-in-law or Attorneys General.
Templar, however, does not always occur in the phrase “Knights Templar” and can be used stand-alone. I was asking about the stand-alone noun. I was just acknowledging that perhaps I was accidentally applying the adjective form in “Knights Templar” incorrectly to the noun “Templar” when pluralizing it.
I think “Knights Templar” could be seen as a sort of short-hand for “Knights of the Templar Order”. Since “Templar” is used in no other context, calling them “Templars” is a logical contraction.
Yes, exactly.
I was more asking though if instead of “Templars” anybody ever used “Templar” as the plural, though. For some reason it just feels like “moose” to me, if I were to refer to a group of them, I’d say “The Templar…” not “The Templars…” and I was wondering if I’m just completely insane or if there’s any evidence that I could have picked that usage up from some formerly common usage. (Or, barring that, some English phonetic property dealing with plurals that would make it reasonable for me to make that mistake)
Well, given that the English language still has an active third-person singular conjugation distinct from the third person plural, you could use “Templar” as a plural and people would be able to infer it from your verb usage. Would probably sound funny, though.
Is there any other Latinate -ar word that is its own plural? Briar, justiciar, and jugular are three that immediately come to mind as having -s plurals.
I’ve never seen Templar used alone in a plural sense. It’s either been “Templars” or “Knights Templar” in my experience. If you picked it up from common usage, perhaps it was by seeing the second usage.
On the other hand, I’ve certainly seen fanatics of a particular subject decide that some weird version of a word is the One True Way for no apparent reason. Maybe there’s some conspiracy nut furiously blogging away about how “the Templar are destroying humanity” or something.
Or for the Poor Fellow Soldiers Of Christ And Of The Temple Of Solomon.
Imagine if today’s websites were named by medieval people…
YourHallowedVideosOfFunnyOrDisgustingOrPrivateThingsOnTheInternet.com
Or the British – Youchube.com