And following up on this, “Socrateses” is probably wrong. 😅
In Modern Greek, the plural would be Socratides (Σωκράτηδες; the primary stress is on a) or Socrates (Σωκράτες; way less commonly used). With a 2-min search I found this ref to make the case for Socratides.
[And since I happen to have an Ancient Greek language teacher in the next room, by asking her, she gave the following reference]
In Ancient Greek, it would be Σωκράται. If you look at section “133. α” here you can find its conjugation in the example. This would be translated to either: Socrate, or most probably Socratai (again with the primary stress on “a” and with the last “ai” pronounced as the “ai” in “air”.
Given the above, the term originally used by Duncan (Socrati), is pretty damn accurate.
Huh, interesting. I still think “Socrateses” is preferable in English—generally foreign imports into English don’t pluralize according to source-language patterns other than the best-known ones; e.g., if someone writes “octopodes” you can be pretty sure they are doing it for humour, and if someone writes “censūs” you can be pretty sure you’ve somehow dropped into an alternate universe.
Still, I hadn’t realised that there was any standard Greek plural for “Socrates” (it’s not obvious that proper nouns necessarily have plural forms, after all) and in particular hadn’t realised that “Socratai” would be the canonical thing.
I don’t think I agree that “Socrati” is a good anglicization of “Σωκράται” if you are going to use a Greek plural, though. Is there any other case where a Greek plural ending -ai turns into an English version in -i?
And following up on this, “Socrateses” is probably wrong. 😅
In Modern Greek, the plural would be Socratides (Σωκράτηδες; the primary stress is on a) or Socrates (Σωκράτες; way less commonly used). With a 2-min search I found this ref to make the case for Socratides.
[And since I happen to have an Ancient Greek language teacher in the next room, by asking her, she gave the following reference]
In Ancient Greek, it would be Σωκράται. If you look at section “133. α” here you can find its conjugation in the example. This would be translated to either: Socrate, or most probably Socratai (again with the primary stress on “a” and with the last “ai” pronounced as the “ai” in “air”.
Given the above, the term originally used by Duncan (Socrati), is pretty damn accurate.
Huh, interesting. I still think “Socrateses” is preferable in English—generally foreign imports into English don’t pluralize according to source-language patterns other than the best-known ones; e.g., if someone writes “octopodes” you can be pretty sure they are doing it for humour, and if someone writes “censūs” you can be pretty sure you’ve somehow dropped into an alternate universe.
Still, I hadn’t realised that there was any standard Greek plural for “Socrates” (it’s not obvious that proper nouns necessarily have plural forms, after all) and in particular hadn’t realised that “Socratai” would be the canonical thing.
I don’t think I agree that “Socrati” is a good anglicization of “Σωκράται” if you are going to use a Greek plural, though. Is there any other case where a Greek plural ending -ai turns into an English version in -i?