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While reading an article about history and use of the camera obscura and camera lucida the use of camera obscuras for the plural felt increasingly wrong. (whinge over)

In general when a (foreign) noun-adjective phrase is used in English the noun take the plural (aides-de-camp, adjutants general, etc.)¹. TFD cites "Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary" for the plural camera obscuras, which is also given in wiktionary without citation; no other dictionaries online list a plural.

Of course, camera as an English word derived from the Latin camera = chamber has the plural cameras, but that doesn't mean cameras obscura would be right because in the phrase camera is still Latin. So should we be using camerae obscurae? This is stated in wikipedia without citation. Have I even got the plurals right in Latin? Probably not, I haven't studied Latin for nearly 25 years. Should we semi-anglicise it to cameras obscura?

¹There are many more words and phrases which take the plural in the middle in the answers to this question.

"Which style of Latin plurals should I use?" is relevant but doesn't provide an answer to what we should do in the case of a phrase. I would even say that it might support "cameras obscura" which nothing else does.

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Chris H
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  • Given by Wiktionary; RHK Webster's. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '15 at 08:47
  • I was unconvinced by RHK Websters cited through TFD, hence my question (though I abbreviated it differently to you). As for wiktionary (I must admit I didn't check there specifically) with no citation I'm not inclined to treat it as independent of the one I mentioned in the question. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 08:54
  • Also -- wikipedia disagrees but lacks a citation. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 08:57
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    Do whichever or whatever you want. There are no set rules for this. And even if there were you could break them. This isn't French. Are you of the kind that orders three whoppers junior or three whopper juniors? Squirrels to the nuts and nuts to the squirrels. Just don't say octopi. – pazzo Jun 02 '15 at 08:59
  • @pazzo spaghetti ! – Yohann V. Jun 02 '15 at 09:17
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    That's right. @YohannV. Everyone in USA but Italian-Americans call the meal lasagna, which is patently wrong, since it takes more than one lasagna to make lasagne. – pazzo Jun 02 '15 at 09:23
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    @pazzo I'm hungry and angry now ! – Yohann V. Jun 02 '15 at 09:26
  • possible duplicate of Which style of Latin plurals should I use? – Mari-Lou A Jun 02 '15 at 10:01
  • I didn't recognise your abbreviations (I'm dealing with a roof repairer at the moment); TFD is non-standard and Random House a publishing company, perhaps with a style guide.// If a variant is given in two dictionaries, and no others give alternatives, I'd go with the obvious. This choice is supported by Google Ngrams. I'm surprised this usage is so old. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '15 at 10:12
  • @Mari-LouA can we go with "related" for 2 reasons: The question you link deals only with single words, not phrases; following on from that, if we accept that we should use an English plural, how should we form it (Attorneys-general etc.)? – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 10:16
  • I believe the principles which are outlined in the answers can be applied directly to your Latin example – Mari-Lou A Jun 02 '15 at 10:21
  • Google Books claims 3280 written instances of camera obscuras, but only 444 for cameras obscura. Fairly obviously the former is far more common, and you wouldn't normally expect dictionaries to list "regular" plural forms like that. – FumbleFingers Jun 02 '15 at 12:39
  • @FumbleFingers I wasn't seriously proposing cameras obscura, but pointing out that it fits a pattern. I would have thought (I'm apparently wrong) that this is a case in which there is some doubt as to what the regular form would actually be and that the dictionary should confirm it, given the more common case of noun-adjective phrases in which the noun takes the plural. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 12:44
  • @Chris: I'm quite surprised to see that 50% of all writers seem to have doggedly stuck with *adjutants general*. I'd have expected the more "regular" *adjutant generals* to have eventually come to dominate, but it's been pretty much neck-and-neck for at least a couple of centuries now. – FumbleFingers Jun 02 '15 at 14:13
  • ...by strict rules, we ought to use *cameras obscura* in your case. That's because camera is the "principal" word (and the noun), so it should work like sons-in-law. But there's a degree of uncertainty (as with court-martials for a significant proportion of writers) because these are effectively "foreign compound words", so native speakers aren't really sure which is the more important word. Consequently, they tend to apply the generic default pluralisation (stick the *s* on the end). – FumbleFingers Jun 02 '15 at 14:22
  • @FumbleFingers adjutants general isn't as good an example as the (presumably more common) attorneys general or courts-martial, but I was struggling to come up with examples, I could only think of simple French phrases that aren't used in English. Incidentally court-martial behaves slightly differently for 2 reasons: the hyphen, and the use as a verb; similarly son-in-laws is also seen (no point in an NGram if I understand correctly how it would handle the rather common possessive son-in-law's. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 14:28
  • The possessive *'s* isn't a problem in Google Books (where there are 1.5M instances of mothers-in-law). The 1100 instances of mother-in-laws ("incorrect" for both possessive and plural) are indexed separately from 20,000 mother-in-law's, because the apostrophe is treated as if it were a space. – FumbleFingers Jun 02 '15 at 14:39
  • @FumbleFingers, I just realised that while playing around with your adjutant[s] general[s] NGram. I remembered that it struggled with punctuation but didn't know exactly how. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 14:42
  • In the long run, Indian usage will probably come to dominate (just as currently, American usage dominates what was originally the British language, by sheer weight of numbers). At the very least, Indian usage will have far more influence in future, and I have the distinct impression from looking at Google Books results for the supposedly incorrect (but more "standard", in the grand scheme of morphology) *son-in-laws* that this version is far more likely among Indians than Anglophones at large (but I do realise they're mostly not native speakers as yet! :) – FumbleFingers Jun 02 '15 at 14:56

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From wiktionary :

Etymology

New Latin, from camera, chamber, + obscura, dark.

Noun

camera obscura (plural camera obscuras)

You can find example of usage in wikipedia page :

Most practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole (as in a pinhole camera) because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus.

This is a book in references :

  1. Smith, Roger. "A Look Into Camera Obscuras". Retrieved 2014-10-23.

There is a website :

Cameraobscuras.com George T Keene builds custom camera obscuras like the Griffith Observatory CO in Los Angeles.

And this is also a category : Camera_obscuras

The funny part is that camera in english came from this.

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Yohann V.
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  • I was editing this into the question at the same time as you were writing your answer -- it copies the unconvincing definition only given in one relatively minor source. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 09:04
  • @ChrisH Edited my answer. – Yohann V. Jun 02 '15 at 09:10
  • You've found a few more sources, but note that the wikipedia article is inconsistent. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 09:27
  • @ChrisH wiktionary or wikipedia? If you can read, hebrew article is nice – Yohann V. Jun 02 '15 at 09:32
  • Wikipedia uses both "camera obscuras" and "camerae obscurae". I like the second, I trust neither. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 09:39
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    @ChrisH The term is based on the Latin camera, "(vaulted) chamber or room", and obscura, "darkened" (plural: camerae obscurae). This is Latin as you said. It is not the usage in English. (The other mention is by a french, in a french museum.) Do as you want, but I find wiki totally fine. – Yohann V. Jun 02 '15 at 09:44
  • I've accepted your conclusion, though it wasn't the body of your answer that finally convinced me. OED 1st ed from archive.org doesn't give a plural but does have a citation for "Camera obscuras" from 1796. I'd given up on the 200+MB pdf but tried again. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 10:18
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Your immediate reaction probably arises from other phrases such as court martial and inspector general. The difference is that these phrases are derived from French, and already have plurals associated with them (courts martial and inspectors general). The term camera obscura seems to have originated with Kepler in 1604, and the term spread as a fixed phrase. As a result, in English the plural is formed by simply adding an s to the final word: camera obscuras.

WhatRoughBeast
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  • Wikipedia credits Kepler but the cited source actually mentions Herschel. Or would make sense for Herschel, who worked in England, to have introduced the term to English; Kepler on the other hand wrote in Latin and lived mainly in German-speaking countries. He may of course have coined the term. I tagged the discrepancy earlier. I reckon I could find a Latin example though I can't think of one off the top of my head. – Chris H Jun 02 '15 at 17:43