Virus-viri et viri-virorum

[Curtis Clark]

At 07:20 PM 12/5/99 +0100, Piera e Piero VISENTINI wrote:
>My ancients (I'm italian) used the word
>"virus", a neuter of the second latin declension
>whose plural is "viri", but the mining was obviously
>slightly different:

Another post supported what I have heard (and unfortunately have no
reference for): that "virus" is a coined English word, from "virulent", and
that the homonymy with the Latin is convenient, but not intended.

It reminds me of an ad in Science a number of years ago from a biotech
company; the Greek letters gamma-epsilon-nu, supposedly the Greek word
"gen", the root of "genetics". The actual connection of "genetics" to Greek
is multi-step, through German, and there is no "gen" (at least with that
meaning) in Greek. The ad never ran again.

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Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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