Categories
Tags
1984 Alcoholic Drink Are You Amazon AMEX antarctic AP Apple bad marketing Bail out bailout Bankrupt BBC Best and Brightest Best Buy Billy Durant BMW Boeing books Boston braking Comma Commenters Count the errors duh eBay Facebook General Motors GM Grammar Kindle Language Loose Marketing Marketing Gaffes National Grammar Day Newegg Punctuation Robert Farago Spelling their there TTAC Twitter Words WTFRecent Tweets
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/pacifi40/public_html/ttag.me/wp-content/plugins/wordtwit/html/twitter.php on line 4
Legal
© 2008-2010 All Rights Reserved.

The OED has a number of citations of “tsunamis” or “tunamis”. According to M-W, the plural can be “tsunami” or “tsunamis”.
I stand by my assertion (and I’m not alone) that tsunamis is improper. If people started using “sheeps,” “gooses” (as a noun), and “scissor,” should we acquiesce and allow it as proper?
Hi,
My earlier comment on this subject seems to have been expurgated, so let me try again —
First, I don't agree that tsunami is "both singular and plural." It's probably more accurate to say that tsunami, like all nouns in Japanese, is neither singular nor plural. I know it's metaphysical-sounding, but singularity or plurality (of the noun) is meaningless when the word undergoes no change at all. Whether the concept (not the word) is plural depends on context.
More importantly, tsunami is undoubtedly a loanword in English. Thus, it is an English word, and should, by and large, obey English rules of inflection. And one of these rules is, yes, the affixing of "s" to the end of it to denote plurality. It's particularly odd when you think of loanwords like kimono. In English, kimono demonstrates plurality with an "X."