Re: [OT] The stigma of schema

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

 From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> Uche Ogbuji wrote:

> > I shall personally continue to use "schemata" as the plural
> > of "schema", and continue to argue that others should do so.

> By all means.  That is the Way of the English language, where
> orthography (or in this case, morphology) evolves by a Hartree-Fock
> iterative process (consult your local physicist).

Is there any word in English which uses the -ta plural (apart from in Rap)?
Stigmata is used as a collective rather than a plural: people talk about
stigmas
for the things that "attach" in my experience.    I don't think it is
so much ignorance of Greek as -ta being bad communication in
English: the use of an unfamiliar ending (rather than an unfamiliar
word) distracts the hearer from the meaning of the sentence.

Actually, I am not sure how many plurals that end in -a are thriving
either.  Data versus datum would be the classic: no-one seriously
thinks the horse can be put back into the stable for making data
a plural. Schemas is an English word, used because the borrowing
"schemata" does not fit in with idiom.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe