GLOSSARY

You probably know that a large percentage of modern English vocabulary comes from ancient Latin and Greek. In ancient times, these were international languages and have since had a huge influence on the educational and cultural systems of the rest of the world.

As a general trend, words from Latin and Greek have become anglicised or naturalised, which means they have been reformed and today behave as ‘normal’ English words. There are no cases, plural is formed by adding an -s at the end of the word etc. These naturalised words appear to be English and we do not explore their etymology because they do not cause any problems in their usage. However, certain English nouns, particularly those of a Latin origin, have kept their original plural form and that is where we may encounter some problems.

You might have heard the word database, but did you know that data (Latin) is the plural form of datum? Accordingly, data should be used with a plural verb (These are important data), however nowadays there has been a growing tendency to use it as an equivalent to the uncountable noun information, followed by a singular verb, especially in the context of information technology (This is important data). Other singular nouns ending in -um and -on also take ending -a in plural, for example a popular medium but popular media, one criterion (Greek) but many phenomena, the sole crisis but a set of criteria. Another common classical ending is -is in crisis and analysis. One single analysis can push you into a number of different crises, and the first successful analysis can lead to a series of further analyses.

Since all these words have retained their Latin and Greek singular/plural rule in English, we need to learn them by heart. To help you identify singulars and plurals of Latin and Greek origin, we have created the following table of common endings:

There are also anglicised plural forms of Latin and Greek words which are commonly used in spoken language. So, formula can be both formulae and formulas in plural, cactus both cacti and cactuses, and index both indices and indexes.

Exercise 1 Insert the singular or plural form of the verbs in the brackets.

Exercise 2 Following the rules, provide singular or plural for the following words:

Exercise 3 Translate the following sentences (paying special attention to the singular and plural forms of the nouns):

Exercise 4 Provide English translation (singular and plural) for the following Croatian words.

English at Work 1 i 2’ – lekcije objavljene u Lideru možete naći u dva izvršna priručnika za učenje poslovnoga engleskog jezika. Sadržavaju presjek čestih poslovnih tema, od onih iz financija, poslovnih odnosa i marketinga, odnosa s javnošću do onih koje se bave uspješnim komuniciranjem u poslovnom okružju.