Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

CanadianGurlfren t1_j6m5ea8 wrote

Reply to comment by BrokenEye3 in TIL that between 1895 and 1908 the population of the Belgian Congo declined by between 2 and 13 million due to colonial brutality and diseases caused by colonialism. by hetkleinezusje

Censi

34

BrokenEye3 t1_j6m6hcf wrote

Yeah, I assumed that would be it too, but I checked and for reasons I'm not highly educated enough to understand, the Latin plural of "census" is "census" (unless its in the genitive case, in which case the plural is "censuum", which seems pretty rad but not strictly relevant to this usage) and thus in English the rarely used "proper" plural is too. Maybe it wasn't originally considered a countable noun? That'd be kind of ironic.

13

BowzersMom t1_j6opd7u wrote

In the fourth declension nominative cases are the same for singular and plural. But which words are 4th declension and how can you tell? If I knew I might have scored better on my AP Latin exam 16 years ago.

3