Economist, Oct 20, 2018 (II)

choi

In Economist, Oct 20, 2018 (I), I wrote I did not know how the Economist came up with its title.

When I composed the above posting, a librarian in Brookline Public Library told me about Rikki Tikki Tavi. At the same time, she recognized Economist's title was meant to be was Latin. I did not have time at the time (library was closing). But now I confirm -- and expand -- what the librarian said. See
plural form of words ending in -us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in_-us

, whose summary is that in Latin, alumnus and radius are nouns masculine, whereas virus (meaning 'poison') is noun neuter (and a mass noun in Classical Latin). In ENGLISH, plural forms of radius can be either radiuses or radii; however, plural of alumnus must be alumni, and of virus, viruses.  

Of course, the Economist's title (not found anywhere in the Web) is pseudo-Latin, pretending to be the singular form of Rikki and Tikki, respectively. The tavius would have taviī as the plural, if there is one (that is, if tavius is noun masculine, not neuter).  Then again, none of the six words (rikki, tikki, tavi, rikkus, tikkus and tavius) is found in Latin.

Further:
ignoramus (n; Did You Know?): "an utterly ignorant person : DUNCE"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignoramus


========================
Johnson | Out of One, Many; Why Arabic, one of the world's greatest languages, punches below its weight.

Quote:

" 'Arabic,' today, is not really a single language at all. Scholars call it 'macrolanguage' instead. 'Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the medium of serious writing and formal public speech across the Arab world. But Western students who sign up for a class in it [eg, after Sept 11, 2001] soon discover that nobody speaks this 'standard' as a native tongue; many Arabs hardly speak it at all. MSA is based on the classical Arabic of the Koran -- written in the 7th century -- with additional vocabulary for modern life.  But oral languages do not sit still for 14 centuries, and spoken 'Arabic' is really a group of dialects different enough to be considered separate languages. * * * Speakers [of Arabic] from distant regions can struggle to understand each other's dialects.

"The standard version relates to them roughly as Latin does to today's Romance languages.

"And the grammars are utterly different: the dialects are simpler than MSA, but they must still be learned mostly anew pafter one has learned MSA grammar first].  The foreigners who want to both read and speak Arabic, in other words, needs to acquire, if not quite two languages, one and a half. Worse, none of the dialects is big enough to play the role that Mandarin does in the Chinese family.

"For Arabs, the dialects pose less of a everyday problem than all this might suggest. By improvising, Arabs from different regions do manage to talk to each other. They use features shared across the bigger dialects [Arabic dialects spoken by more people, such as Egyptian language by Egyptians 'but its native speakers are mostly limited to Egypt'], as well as bits of MSA, while avoiding the peculiarities of their own dialects as much as possible.  A bigger problem is the nature of MSA. To read or write, Arabs essentially uses a foreign language

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) The title is the converse of E pluribus unum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum
("was considered a de facto motto of the United States until 1956 when the United States Congress passed an act (H J [for House Joint; naturally there is R J for senate Joint] Resolution 396), adopting 'In God We Trust' as the official motto")

Latin-English dictionary:
* ē (preposition; short form of [preposition] ēx [out of]): "out of"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e
* multus (adj; comparative plūs [more], superlative plūrimus): "many or much" (English preposition plus came from Latin plūs. The literal meaning of "ē ūluribus ūnum" is "out of more, one")
   ^ plūs (adj; plūribus is a reflected form): "more"
   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus
* ūnus (noun masculine; feminine ūna, neuter ūnum): "(cardinal [number]) one"  
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unu