Thursday, November 08, 2012

Three espressi please waiter.

Interesting article in the paper the other day about the way you should grammatically treat foreign words which have been accepted into the English language.  Did you know, for instance that "panini" which is now regularly used in English for a posh toasted sandwich is, in its original Italian, plural?  So to order "two paninis" could be said to be a nonsense.  Of course, we've always been used to the potential peculiarities of Latin and Greek words - like "what's the plural of octopus?" (strictly it's octopodes) but these are now so well embedded into the language that none but a pedant (like me) would baulk at octopusses.  But with some more recent imports it's not that easy.  Pizza for instance is an Italian word, the plural of which should strictly be pizze.  Is it now so accepted as an English (or maybe American) word that pizzas goes without comment?  I've talked before about the strength of English being its easy absorbtion of words from other languages, so there's no right answer - it's pizze for the purists and pizzas for the rest.

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