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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

"virovore"...

latin years in school flashback, but that word is malformed, because virus is Latin 4th declension and there's no -o stem in any case. seems "viruvore" would be more appropriate, and matches the forming of actual latin present active participle (think -ing in english) "virulens" (virulent).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...

Assuming "virus" is 2nd declension leads to a contradiction, in there is an -o stem in a case, but that assumption contradicts the centuries old "virulent" which wasn't written "virolent".

And the reason i mention all this is that i have no idea how one finds modern etymologies for classical words without knowing the languages (or subsets of course) outright.

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I don't think virus is a 4th declension noun, and I've seen it described in multiple sources as a 2nd declension (meaning slime, poison, infection, mucus, or something thereabout). It is unusual in being a -us noun despite being neuter, but irregularities happen (other examples of neuter 2nd declension -us nouns being vulgus and pelagus). In classical Latin, it is a mass/uncountable noun, and only got the modern meaning (and the ability for form plurals) in recent times.

references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Virus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Latin https://gaffiot.fr/#virus

That said, your point about virulent vs virolent is interesting, but I don't know enough about sound changes, or how that word came to be and made it's way to us to know if this is counter evidence to being 2nd declension, or if it can be explained away otherwise.

It is not uncommon for a language to borrow two words from one source language in different centuries. The two borrowings can then follow different mechanisms, perhaps because something about the target language has changed in the meantime. Or maybe because knowledge of the source language was widespread in the target language community when one word was borrowed but not when the other one was borrowed.

i'm trying to think of an example. do you have an example?

i can come up with a composite word whose two parts are non obvious and obvious, but they're not loan words : were+wolf, with were germanic cousin to Latin vir and wolf obvious.

> Many words of French origin were borrowed twice or more. There were at least three periods of borrowing: one that occurred shortly after the Norman Conquest and came from Norman French, one in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from standard (Parisian) French at the time when English nobles were switching from French to English, and a third one during the sixteenth to nineteenth century, when France was at the height of its power and international influence. Examples of doublets from the first and second periods are catch vs. chase, cattle vs. chattel, and warden vs. guardian. More recent borrowings are often distinguished by maintaining the French spelling and pronunciation, e.g. chef (vs. chief), pâté (vs. paste), fête (vs. feast).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(linguistics)#Norman_v...

thank you

If you're doing that, the Latin word "virus" means slime, so we should treat the English word as something entirely different.

I guess Greek "contagion" closer matches what English refers to with "virus" and it's repurposed meaning?

"contagion" while Greek in ending looks like con- (together) and a Greek analogue of "tango, tangere, ... , tactus" (touch). Like whatever happens with two things touching?

"Contagion" is not Greek in ending (or in any other part; e.g. the Greek equivalent of con- would be syn-). As you surmise, the word is directly derived from Latin contingo; the "n" which is present in the Latin stem, but not in the nominative singular form of the word, is realized in the English borrowing, just the same way it is in station / vision / legion / etc. etc. etc. etc.

Oh excellent call and i definitely overlooked that (and understand just what you wrote) right under my nose.

Gratias ago

Cool name candidates for security people to use for their software.

Viruvore Antivirus LLC ? :)

Thank you for doing your part to keep the pedantry of this site intact.

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