What is the plural of syntax? Would it be syntacies? What rule would govern this kind of construction?
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6General reference - there are many "different syntaxes", but only one plural form for the word itself.– FumbleFingersCommented Apr 24, 2012 at 22:19
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5Related: Which style of Latin plurals should I use? I'd like to specifically quote this passage: "Unless you are absolutely, completely sure you know the correct classical plural, use the English plural. Using the classical plural may have a nice ring to it, but if you get it wrong it's so, so wrong."– RegDwigнtCommented Apr 24, 2012 at 23:33
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2Oh, and closing this as general reference because you can just look it up in a dictionary.– RegDwigнtCommented Apr 25, 2012 at 8:46
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3@RegDwigнt: Neither Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, the OED or the ODO specify any plural for this word, so Wiktionary is quite alone in that trait.– SarahofGaiaCommented Jul 15, 2015 at 19:58
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2 Answers
As FumbleFingers has commented, the plural is syntaxes.
That's probably because the normal plural -es is added to the root word, or it may possibly be because the Greek/Late Latin word from which syntax is derived is syntaxis and Greek words ending in -is are pluralised with -es.
If we were to create a spoof plural for syntax it would be syntaces (words ending -x get -ces; the preceding vowel can change as in index/indices). But no-one uses that, or would know what it meant.
answered Apr 24, 2012 at 22:36
An erroneous plural, which I offer for comparison is:
syntagma
It has a rough comparability in frequency to the less exotic, more naturally English sounding 'syntaxes'.
This is erroneous as a plural of 'syntax' because it is a linguistic term having to do with rule based things but it is not a word to describe a multiplicity of a collection of rules. 'Syntagma' is a sequence of words that form a syntactic unit (for example, a noun phrase), a -single- syntactic constituent (no rule or rules, the plurality is in the (expected) number of words).
Note: I have no explanation whatsoever of the shifted character of the graphs.
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7At a guess? Computer Science. In linguistics, you may not need to discuss multiples of a syntax very much, but it is exceedingly common when discussing programming languages, APIs, etc. And here, 'syntaxes' rules the day, being simple and intuitive to English speakers, and English being the lingua franca of CS. Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 8:01