grammatical number - Plurals of foreign words


What rules of thumb govern when to pluralise a foreign word as it should be in the original language and when it should be pluralised as an English word?


For example, you'd get some funny looks using "octopodes" or "lemmata" in normal conversation. (I don't know what contexts would allow mention of cephalopods and mathematics, but you know...)



Answer



General rule of thumb is that words which obviously originate from Latin and are not in frequent use might be given the Latin plural (e.g. alumnus/alumni with 22m Google hits). More common Latin words usually have an English plural (e.g. campus/campuses 122m; bonus/bonuses 108m).


For languages other than Latin (and perhaps French), English plural is almost always used, even for rare words (e.g. klutz 5m), except where plural is the predominant or only form (e.g. spaghetti).


This is completely unscientific, my intuition as a native speaker (American). Counterexamples are welcome.


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