Conference thebay::joyoflex

    I thought there was only one Kerberos (three-headed dog guardian of the
    underworld, n'est-ce pas?) at any one time.  Kind of like the Phoenix. 
    So a plural would really be unnecessary.

    Roy

    No fair begging the question.
    
    :-)
    

Is that males, females, or both?

In this case, I'm referring to multiple instances of the kerberos security 
service which is a component of DECathena and OSF/DCE, not that it makes any 
difference. I was just curious about it since the name is Greek. If gender is 
important here, I suppose the original was male, but do include other forms 
if you know them.

My limited understanding of Koine Greek led me to kerberoi by way of analogy 
to presbyteros and episkopos. (I don't know much about the origins of Koine, 
but I seem to remember it being related to Attic Greek.)

I suppose I could use standard English rules, but Kerberoses sounds like a 
skin disease or a psychological disorder.

Kerberi would be a Latin backformation, no? Besides, the Latin form is 
Cerberus, the plural being Cerberi, right?

Any classics majors want to take a stab? Maybe a religion major?

Wook

    ... it would help, wouldn't it, if your name were Perseus...?       :-)
    
    But more seriously, I also would turn up my phonetic ear at Kerberoses,
    and would also look to the patent medicine drawer for symptomatic relief...
    
    But "Kerberi" would sound OK despite its backfomation; perhaps
    "Kerberoi" because it kinda gives a nod to its origins in the Attic.
    

    If you *must* pluralize, then I suspect Kerberoi would be the least
    odious choice.
    
    Is it possible to re-write?

    	Kerberos (in the context you are talking about) is an architecture,
    so you only need a plural if you are referring to version four and
    version five (the latest) in the same breath. There can be no more
    than two Kerberos (version four) servers on a LAN. A LAN can support no
    more than one version of Kerberos at a time.
    
    	I can say all of that without having to use "Kerberoi", so as .6
    suggests you can probably avoid the plural. You would possibly have
    problems with "All versions of Kerberoi use DES as the basis of their
    security technique", but even then I suspect the singular form would be
    accepted by most readers. Since, as far as I know, no manufacturer
    currently ships anything but Kerberos version four I would be surprised
    if you needed to talk about Kerberoi.

    .7 implied something important: Kerberos is probably a trademark.
    In which case, it should be used as an adjective, not a noun.
    
    Adjectives aren't pluralized; they modify plural nouns.
    
    						andrew

    	I am uncertain if Kerberos is trademarked. If it is it would be by
    MIT, but Digital, as one of the major contributors to its development
    would probably be entitled to use of the trademark anyway.
    
    	Certainly for use it should always be thought of as 
    "Kerberos architecture", even if in some contexts "architecture" is
    silent.
    
    	If it isn't a trademarked adjective then it probably should be.

    >	If it isn't a trademarked adjective then it probably should be.

    Even if it weren't, you would probably do well (grammatically) to treat
    it as if it were.
    

I doubt if I'd ever use Kerberoi in anything but informal conversation and
related information exchange media such as JoyOfLEX. I only mentioned the
Kerberos security architecture and the related software components found within
the OSF's DCE product in a vain attempt to skirt around the question of the
intellectual acceptability of hypothesizing the existence of a plurality of
tricephalic canine (or should we say canoid) guardians to the gates of Hades. :-)

Wook

Dan, how about Medusae? Or should we be applying Attic grammar? (Is that Norman
Bates' mother to his offspring?)

    According to VTX LAW, Kerberos is a nonregistered trademark of
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Re: .8, .9, .10
    
    Over three years ago, I posted a diatribe against the corporate dogma
    that trademarks are necessarily adjectives.  I wasn't going to repeat
    it, but Andrew encouraged me.
    
    I should point out, as I did in mail to Andrew, that there are two
    layers of my disagreement:
    
    1.  There is a policy question of whether to place a generic noun after
        a trademark to clarify that the trademark is not itself generic.
        I disagree with this policy, because I believe it is neither
    	necessary nor sufficient to protect trademarks.  However, I respect
        the right and obligation of corporate lawyers to be overprotective of
    	corporate property.
    
    2.  There is a grammatical question of whether a word that is placed
    	before a noun is an adjective.  I'd say that a noun can be used
        as an adjective, but the word is still primarily a noun.  Perhaps
        this is even clearer in the case of proper nouns.  "Lasher" is a
    	proper noun, despite the possibility of saying "the Lasher family."
    
    So, as a question of grammar, my position is that the overwhelming
    majority of trademarks are nouns, proper nouns.  Only a few are
    adjectives, for example "Scotch" [tape] and (possibly) "Quaker" [oats],
    although I think the latter is more probably a noun.  I listened this
    morning to a commercial radio station in the Boston area, and heard one
    trademark that was used as a verb: [it's time to] "Stop and Shop."
    It's possible that "Midasize" could be a trademarked verb.  More
    likely, "Simonize" and "Scotchguard" could be trademarked verbs.
     
================================================================================
Note 763.11                      Language Change                        11 of 23
4GL::LASHER "Working..."                             58 lines  12-JAN-1990 06:32
                   -< Trademarks are nouns, not adjectives >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Re: .10 [Re: .6]
    
    	"I feel obliged to put in the obligatory reminder that 'VAX' is a
    	registered trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation and MUST always
    	be used as an adjective and never as a noun."
    
    At the risk of launching a tangent on a matter of corporate policy, I
    feel obliged to point out that there are good reasons to disagree with
    the "requirement" that trademarks be used as adjectives.  The reason I
    bring it up in this notefile at all is to encourage people to think
    clearly about how they use language.
    
    Trademarks (also known as trade names) are not adjectives; they are
    nouns, proper nouns, that is, names.  Consider the most well-known,
    successful trade names; they are invariably used as nouns: "This is not
    your father's Oldsmobile," "This Bud's for you," "Things go better with
    Coke."  (The Coca-Cola corporation, which is probably the most
    successful enterprise of all time in protecting its "intellectual
    property," does not hesitate to use its trade names as nouns.)
    
    Where did this urban myth arise that trade names are adjectives?  From
    the policy statements I have seen from the corporate Legal Department,
    I surmise that there is a concern about trade names becoming generic. 
    As most of us are probably aware by now, certain trade names have
    become too successful for their own good, with the result that they
    have lost their proprietary value: cellophane and (in the U.S., but not
    in Canada) aspirin are now improper nouns; Kleenex and Xerox are in
    danger of a similar fate.  Note that they began as nouns and remain
    nouns.  The critical transition is from *proper* noun to *improper*
    noun, a grammatical distinction doubtless too subtle for the Legal
    Department.
    
    How should we prevent a trade name from becoming generic?  I am tempted
    to say that we should only be so lucky that any of our trademarks
    become so successful that the public would use them to refer to our
    competitors' products.  But given that there is a possible problem,
    however theoretical and unlikely, I respectfully disagree with the
    official corporate "solution."  I especially disagree with the
    description of the solution as deeming trade names to be adjectives,
    which they are not.  The corporate rule actually requires us to
    append a generic, improper noun after a proprietary, proper noun.
    This works because English allows nouns to be used as adjectives, thus
    leading to the mistaken impression that a noun so used is an adjective.
    This clumsy usage is neither necessary nor sufficient to keep trade
    names from becoming generic.  As mentioned above, successful trademarks
    are almost always used as nouns.  On the other hand, an example of a
    trademark in danger of becoming generic despite its use preceding a
    second noun is "Scotch tape."
    
    What actually protects a trademark is vigilance in insisting that the
    trademark be used as a proper noun, not adherence to mistakenly
    conceived, awkward grammatical constructions.  "Coke" remains
    proprietary because of squads of testers who order "Coke" in
    restaurants and complain when served anything other than "The Real
    Thing," not by the promulgation of superfluous phraseology such as
    "Things go better with Coke brand cola soft drink."
    
Lew Lasher

At the risk of cutting off an interesting rathole, I've found that -os is the 
masculine, singular, nominative ending in Attic Greek. I haven't yet found a 
reference to the plural, but it's a start.

Re medusa:

I've run across a mention to "diakonia" or deacons. Unfortunately, I don't 
know what the corresponding singular is, though I know that this is Koine 
Greek. At the risk of jumping off to the Isle of Conclusions, (any 
Phantom Tollbooth fans out there? [yikes, another rathole looms]) I'll 
speculate that the Greek plural for "medusa" is "medusia."

Wook (who learned in college to *tell* people when he's speculating)

>At the risk of cutting off an interesting rathole, I've found that -os is the 
>masculine, singular, nominative ending in Attic Greek. I haven't yet found a 
>reference to the plural, but it's a start.

-oi.

Thanks, by now I figured that -oi was correct. Maybe its time for me to go 
and find a book on Koine Greek. I wonder whether there's much difference 
between it and Attic Greek.

Wook

    A big difference, not unlike the difference between Classical Latin
    and Medieval Latin. The story as I remember it was that the hoi polloi
    (you know the the ones?) got hold of Attic and did the sort of
    unspeakable things people do when they have the effrontery to _use_
    language. A bunch of purists tried to hit back by using what they
    called the `katharevousa' (`pure' [version of the language]), but
    the katharevousa didn't catch on.
    
    I recommend Toynbee's The Greeks and their Heritages if it's still in 
    print, and if you find a typo blame me (as Toynbee was dead long before
    I laid hands on the ms.) It's not expressly about the languages, but the
    footnotes (which go on sometimes for pages) often are.
    
    b

    .17 was taken from memory, and not a very good one, so it
    over-simplified and telegraphed things. What people know as the Koine
    is usually the Attic Koine (although the word `koine' is just
    a (nominalized) adjective and could be added after any dialect-defining
    name). The people who tried to turn the clock back were the
    neo-Atticists (who would no doubt have said that the Attic Koine
    was not `proper' Attic). They used a more formal sort of Attic, and
    they used it in the immediate pre-Christian era. Neither the Attic
    used by the neo-Atticists nor the Attic Koine had much relation to
    Hellenic (the basis of what we know as Classical Greek).
    
    The katharevousa is a more modern phenomenon, and nothing to do with
    the neo-Atticists. It was still in wide (if politically-enforced) use
    in the '70s - I have no information about anything more recent. The
    katharevousa was introduced in a vain attempt to stamp out what is
    known as `demotic' Greek.
    
    There are lots of holes in this story and many more variables: Greece
    has a Language Issue, and has had for over two thousand years. The
    issue is more than usually tied to politics and history, and is not
    settled yet.
    
    b

    So, playing around with ths then we could have:
    
    one Kerberos architecture
    two Kerberos architecturoi, (or two Kerboros architecturi)
    two Kerberos architecturuses
    etc.