Hi, students, hope you are while in today's lesson,
I'm going to teach you a special set of words
which have different forms for the singular
and for the plural.
And this is because these words entered English via Latin
and we could go back further to ancient Greek.
If you know how to use these words correctly
in the singular form when you need it and in the plural form
that creates an impression of you as being very intelligent.
Let's start with the first word.
The ones that you see here on the board.
These are the singular form so we've got fungus.
If you already know the plural form
you can say it aloud, fungi.
There's more than one pronunciation
but this is the one that I use, fungi.
This is a scientific word for mushrooms.
Let's look at the second one now, cactus, cactus.
This is that spiky plant from the desert
you don't want to touch it Ow.
The plural form is cacti.
The second part is like the tie that you
wear around your neck cacti.
Crisis is the singular and this is when something traumatic
happens to you.
You're going through a difficult period in your life,
something shocking happens.
Crisis is like cry and the beginning of sister, crisis.
Do you know the plural crises, crises.
The second syllable here is like the sea, the water, crises.
And then we have a word that you may not
be so familiar with criterion and criteria.
So the meaning of this one if we take it
back to the root of the word it comes
from the same word as critic so the meaning in ancient Greek
is to judge something.
And when we have a set of criteria,
these are the things we're judging.
The rules by which something is judged
so you might have for example, selection criteria for a job.
And we have our example down here
is quite a long word, phenomenon.
And I didn't want to write the whole long word out
again so for the plural form it's phenomena.
Cover that bit, cover this up and add the 'a'.
The 'ph' spelling is a fff, 'f' sound, phenomena.
When I was thinking about how to explain this word I thought,
Oh, there's a song with it in by the Muppets (SINGING)
and I thought that song was saying phenomena
but it's not actually saying manah manah.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
Manah manah.
[END PLAYBACK] The meaning of this word
is to do with something that is observable
in a scientific sense.
So we could be talking about the weather,
or we could be talking about the social sciences, something
something that has changed in behavior.
So if we think about more people than ever are working
from home so we could say, that working from home
is a recent social phenomenon.
It's a new thing that's happening.
Let's move on to our next example.
I've never used it in my life so this one is just
in here for your interest.
And if you can create a sentence with it
feel free to go ahead and write in the comments.
So the singular form is datum and the plural form is data.
This is the information that's collected.
We don't share your data with anyone.
Now we have another long word here, memorandum.
The plural form is memoranda.
So we take off the end and stick the 'a' on.
This is an official note.
Most people are going to use it in it's shortened form which
is memo.
Did you get the company memo?
It's much easier to say and this is very, very formal
and it sounds official and serious.
Medium and media.
So the media is the word that we use
to refer to the newspapers, the television channels that
are putting the news out there or the radio
whereas medium which is a singular form of the word,
it has it a different kind of use.
If you go into an art gallery and you read the descriptions
under the art that you're looking at you'll
see that the medium of the artwork is pastel on paper.
It's the thing that is being used to create the artwork.
I want to go through now and you can do this with me,
to say what you shouldn't say.
These would be considered a mistake
if you said these and the incorrect plural.
So if you say funguses, that's wrong funguses.
Cactuses, wrong.
Crises, wrong.
Criterions, so if you put an S here,
considered wrong criterions.
Phenomenons, Datas, we don't use that.
Memorandums, mediums I think we may sometimes
use that and medias, no we don't use
so we don't talk about the news medias.
So there you go.
Thank you for watching today's lesson
and for practicing your Latin plurals with me.
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And other than that I hope come again soon
to watch another one of my lessons.
I'll see you then bye.