Talk:rhomboides

Latin gender

Dictionaries mention masculine and feminine gender and the digital L&S also has neuter gender.

• The digital L&S might have an OCR error in it or it might have a printing error.
  There is at least one other English dictionaries which mentions neuter gender. So L&S could have neuter gender too. But neuter gender does not fit to the plural rhomboides.
• Feminine gender is mentioned in good dictionaries, while masculine gender is mentioned in an older Latin-Spanish dictionary by Stephanus Ximenez.
  However, I guess sometimes dictionaries make up genders based on rules and guessings. E.g. agricola and poeta are masculine and if one would find a similar word in -a denoting a (male) person one would assume masculine gender even when there's no proof.
• Masculine gender makes more sense as rhombus is masculine too and as German Rhomboides was also masculine and declined like a Latin word. As far as I saw the neuter Rhomboides is always declined in a German way (singular always Rhomboides, plural always Rhomboiden), thus the neuter gender should be younger, maybe similar to Trapezoides (related to trapezium).
  Also one can find this quote: "His vero iam dictis parallelogrammis adiiciendos rhombos et rhomboides tetragonos arbitramur" ("Euclides Megarensis Boetius, Geometria, PL 63, 1345B"). This could prove masculine gender or the existence of adjectives of the form "tetragonos, os (not a), om". But dictionaries just mention the adjective "tetragonus, a, um", so tetragonos should be masculine accusative plural.
• The example from 1858 at Citations:rhomboides could proof feminine gender for New Latin. However, it's New Latin and might be a barbarism. In New Latin one can also find "iisq; [= iisque] subjiciuntur duo rhomboides" (books.google.com/books?id=HAJmAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA27&dq=duo+rhomboides) which could proof masculine gender for New Latin.

-80.133.101.204 01:04, 24 August 2016 (UTC)