grammatical number - How are plural forms like "status" pronounced?


The question What is the plural form of "status"? caused me to think about how plural forms like "status" are pronounced. There seems to be some variation, and I had a hard time finding out what exactly the existing variants are and when each was first used. (This is probably because plural “status” seems to be mostly a theoretical word, not one that’s actually ever been in common use.)


I've posted an answer with the results of my research, but I'd appreciate any corrections or further information.


Background


In Classical Latin, the singular of the word status was pronounced something like [ˈstatus] or [ˈstatʊs], and the plural was pronounced [ˈstatuːs].


But there is no direct contact between present-day English and Latin. Latin words entered English via a mixture of transmission over centuries (with some pronunciation changes naturally occuring during this transmission), and learned borrowing (with some pronunciation features established as conventional standard spelling-pronunciations).


In addition, English doesn’t even have the exact same sounds as Latin.


For these reasons, English speakers don’t as a rule pronounce borrowed Latin words with their original pronunciations. (Some people try harder than others, but even the people who try to do this generally only approximate Latin vowel sounds with the closest English ones.) The pronunciations people actually use are based on various additional factors such as custom, spelling-pronunciation and analogy.


For example, the word matrix has the plural form matrices; according to the OED, this is typically pronounced /ˈmeɪtrᵻsiːz/, but has the variants /ˈmætrᵻsiz/ and /məˈtraɪsiːz/. None of these is the same as the reconstructed Latin pronunciation, /maːˈtriːkeːs/ (which would be approximated according to the English "restored" pronunciation of Latin as something like /mɑːˈtriːkeɪs/).




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