Talk:Dual Kamas Prime/@comment-101.162.43.249-20151012110014/@comment-192.76.8.46-20151020012514

That's not how language works, though. The word kama isn't Japanese - you can tell because I am not speaking Japanese and I used it.

The correct plural of a word like this - what's known as a borrowing - depends on its degree of naturalisation - which is why the correct plural of octopus is octopuses, not octopodes - or how it was originally acquired - which is why the plural of panini is paninis, because we acquired a term that happened to be plural as our singular.

In the case of kama, the word for the weapon has been naturalized in English as the singular - that is, "kama" is the same part of speech as "sword" in English, and takes the same regular pluralisation. In Japanese, a category word is already plural and one specifies the singular; in English, it's the other way around, and we have been using this word enough that examples of the pluralisation with "-s" are common on the internet and in text corpuses.

It is, however, also arguably correct to use "kama" as the plural, because it's commonly used that way, and there is the obvious aesthetic and consistency advantage to going this way.

Also, basically pluralise stuff how you want, according to actual professional linguistic scientists there's no such thing as "correct" language anyway.