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From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@r...> > Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > I shall personally continue to use "schemata" as the plural > > of "schema", and continue to argue that others should do so. > By all means. That is the Way of the English language, where > orthography (or in this case, morphology) evolves by a Hartree-Fock > iterative process (consult your local physicist). Is there any word in English which uses the -ta plural (apart from in Rap)? Stigmata is used as a collective rather than a plural: people talk about stigmas for the things that "attach" in my experience. I don't think it is so much ignorance of Greek as -ta being bad communication in English: the use of an unfamiliar ending (rather than an unfamiliar word) distracts the hearer from the meaning of the sentence. Actually, I am not sure how many plurals that end in -a are thriving either. Data versus datum would be the classic: no-one seriously thinks the horse can be put back into the stable for making data a plural. Schemas is an English word, used because the borrowing "schemata" does not fit in with idiom. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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