Oggi voglio proporti un post leggero, da gustare in questi giorni che passiamo aggrappati al ricordo del profumo di mare, sole ed allegria. Nel video qui di seguito, una delle redattrici del dizionario americano per antonomasia, il Merriam Webster, ci racconta la storia della parola octopus, polpo, e dei suoi vari plurali. Storia che ci ricorda la regola generale applicata alle parole straniere che entrano a far parte di una lingua. In italiano, ad esempio, le parole inglesi oramai fanno la parte del leone: killare, spoilerare, raidare, laggare, ecc, sono solo alcuni esempi di quello che sento dire a volte nei podcast tecnici italiani che ascolto, con buona pace delle mie budella che si contorcono ad ogni parola. Uso improprio a parte, killare dimostra proprio come la parola in questione venga assorbita all’interno della grammatica italiana e ne comincia a seguire le regole. Altro esempio? I plurali: se proprio devi dire che hai aggiunto delle feature alla tua applicazione, almeno abbi la decenza di non aggiungere la s finale, come si farebbe in inglese. Ascoltiamo dunque Corey e la sua lezione sui polpi.
Hi, welcome to “Ask the editor”. I’m Corey Stamper, an associate editor here at Merriam Webster. So let’s say you’re swimming in the ocean and you see some eight legged cephalopods. You say to your friend, “Hey, I saw a group of octopuses“. And your friend says, “Hey, you’re an ignorant slob. You saw a group of octopi!” So is it octopuses, or octopi? Well, octopus first showed up in the English language in the mid 1700s. And it was given a standard English plural. Octopuses. That’s easy, right? No, of course, it’s not. Because there was a grammatical movement afoot at the time to make English less irregular by making more like Latin, which is nice and even and predictable. So these grammarians took a bunch of the Latin based words in English that end with us like octopus, and gave them proper classical latin plural endings. Inter octopi, the correct plural of octopus. There’s one problem: octopus isn’t latin. It’s in fact, ultimately from Greek. That’s okay. Some smarter grammarians figured this out and gave the plural of octopus the Greek ending it needed, and hence we have octopodes, which is pretty rare and appears only in British English. They all forgot one thing. Whenever a word from a foreign language enters English, it becomes an English word, and gets inflected just like other English words. So octopuses was just fine. Well, what does this mean for you? If you say octopuses, you can continue to do so without fearing you’re an ignorant slob. If you say octopi you can continue to do so, but realise you have no grounds to tell people that say octopuses that they are ignorant slobs. And if you say octopodes, you’d better be prepared to deliver this spiel at a moment’s notice and in a British accent. Stay tuned for future episodes of Ask the editor here on merriamwebster.com.