Talk:Mineralogy

Thank you for all those corrections :)

It's been a while I have been curious about the word "millenia". I know it exists, yet my orthographic corrector don't recognize it and apparently it can't be plural at all ? Karbo

"Millennia" is actually plural. The singular is "millennium". :) French-snack 04:50, 5 October 2012 (PDT)

Interesting; "orthographic corrector" is a fancy way of saying "spellchecker"; I didn't know this. As for "millennia", "millennium", and "millenniums", it is a word we kind-of stole from Latin, and it appears that it is sometimes treated as such (but under a screwy set of Latin grammar rules); hence "millennium" becomes "millennia". But at other times it is treated as a native English word, and so get pluralized with the standard "add s to the end" rule; hence "millenniums". You see the same sort of screwiness with words like "virus", which gets pluralized as either "viri" (the Latin way) or "viruses" (the English way), and "octopus", which gets pluralized as "octopuses" (the English way), "octopodes" (the Ancient Greek way), and "octopi" (the incorrect Latin way). But wait, it gets worse! Sometimes people use the phrasing "a millennia" to describe the same thing as a "millennium"; while technically incorrect, it doesn't sound incorrect, and I doubt anyone other than an English Professor would even notice.

The thousands of instances like this in the English language, and the lack of a central authority to define the language (even our major dictionaries often disagree on things), is the reason why there are no good spelling or grammer checkers for English, and probably the reason why your orthographic corrector doesn't recognize it.--Oldman40k2003 19:17, 5 October 2012 (PDT)

Wow thank you for the precisions, I learned something there :D So let's go for Millennium / Millennia. As for "orthographic corrector", it's me forgetting the word "spellchecker" and making a brand new one out of french ^^; Karbo