linguoboy wrote:I didn't come here to argue either. But one of the main reasons I participate in Unilang is to promote the spread of accurate information about languages and stem the flow of misinformation.
As long as this is meant as a pure factual statement only: I fully agree that one needs to have true and valid information about languages.
linguoboy wrote:To that end:
SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:(Because even if the person you quoted was something like an expert on the German language, I still wouldn't take his words as a valid argumentum ad verecundiam [argument from authority].
For that, I refer you to the Duden, and all other recently-published German lexicographical works, which uniformly give the plural first as
Kommas and only secondarily as
Kommata. Since this ordering is based on frequency, it indicates that it's far more than "some people" who use the analogical plural, it's the clear majority of speakers.
As for books like the Duden, while I do not believe in something like "Blindly Believing The Language Experts" (again, not ascribing that one to you either), I certainly do recognize that those books are a much more complete and useful source of information for questions like this than the words of a single person, even if he was a German language expert.
Also, if books like the Duden confirm that there still is a second possibility called Kommata, then this even contradicts the citation mentioned in one of your recent posts in this thread. This is because the person quoted said that the only form being used (in both everday and expert speech) would be Kommas.
And as for "some people say Kommas", I didn't use "some" in the meaning of "a few". Instead, this is about one of its meanings (as mentioned in the dictionary of Merriam-Webster online), which is " being one, a part, or an unspecified number of something (such as a class or group) named or implied".
So if I was to rephrase my previous words, I also could say: "It is without any doubt a part of the German language to use the Latin and Greek plural when using Latin and Greek words. One example would be Kommata. But there is a certain amount of persons saying Kommas. This usage is neither entirely new, nor incredibly old".
linguoboy wrote:Ultimately this is an empirical question. Can you find even ten recent examples of the plural Kommata in published works? I can easily find ten examples of Kommas.
I
possibly could find some recent examples, but I do not have any reason to search for them. "Expert speech" (Fachsprache) obviously is about both written and spoken communication. I couldn't deny that there still are many Latinophiles and Greekophiles among those experts, and those people really like using Latin and Greek terms as often as possible when talking to each other, and when talking to non-experts with a similar affinity, too, not only using nouns that still are rather well-known, but also full well-known phrases (among themselves) and proverbs.