[Ads-l] Idly wondering

[Laurence Horn]

> On Feb 25, 2016, at 10:51 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Why is _cacti_ usual, but _millennia_ unusual?
> 
> Or should the question be,
> 
> Why is _millenniums_ usual, but _cactuses_ unusual?
> 

I don't share the intuition; I find "millenniums" less usual than "millennia", maybe about the same ratio as with "cactus"/"cactuses"/"cacti", especially if you eliminate people who traffic in the latter (raise them at home, live in the Southwest, whatever).  But if there *is* a difference, maybe it's because millennia usually are considered one at a time (I often refer to things that happened in the last millennium, i.e. 17 or more years ago, and not things that happened in the previous two or three), while cacti are usually considered in bunches, so the plural is more often encountered, thus reflecting the well-established inverse relation between frequency and morphological regularity.

LH

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