RE: [OT] The stigma of schema

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 1:01 PM -0400 6/29/01, Steve Rowe wrote:
>Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>>  Is there any word in English which uses the -ta plural
>>  (apart from in Rap)?
>
>At least 80 of them, by my count:
>

Interesting, with the single exception of stigma of the words on the 
list I actually recognized, particularly these three:

>  4. anathema/anathemata
>23. enema/enemata
>24. enigma/enigmata
>78. trauma/traumata
>19. diploma/diplomata
>20. dogma/dogmata

I would be inclined to say their plurals end in "s", not "ta". In 
fact my spell checker flags a lot of the "ta" endings as incorrect 
even when it recognizes the singular word.
At Altavista:

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: anathemas 3146
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: anathemata 338

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: enemas 47753
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: enemata 122

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: enigmas 37075
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: enigmata 266

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: diplomas 278171
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: diplomata 21654

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: dogmas 47722
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: dogmata 1909

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: traumas 91838
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: traumata 6105
That's not quite as bad, but then I realized most of the traumata 
pages were in German.

  And of course:

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: schemas 175591
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: schemata 50078

so schemata's doing better than most of the other words but schemas 
is winning 3 to 1.

I think what's going on hear is that the "ta" plural is just so 
bloody weird to an Anglophone ear, that it cannot survive in a common 
word. I decided to try some uncommon ones:

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: fibrosarcomas 1220
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: fibrosarcomata 12

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: chiasms 1565
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: chiasmata 1490
That one's almost even but chiasmata is still losing.

The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: stemmata 2501
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: stemmas 556

Finally! a word where the "ta" ending actually seems to be preferred 
by a large majority of users, not that I know what it means. I think 
it's obvious that the more common the word is the faster it's going 
to go into an Anglicized ending.
-- 

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