Latin Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, and students wanting to discuss the finer points of the Latin language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In English, it's very common to talk about letters of the alphabet in the plural: he writes his R's backwards, for example, is a perfectly natural sentence. But the Latin names for the letters don't seem to follow any declension pattern.
If I wanted to pluralize (or more generally, decline) a letter name, how would I go about it? Are they indeclinable? y at least seems to be feminine.
I doubt that the letter names themselves were ever declined, but I expect that if the need arose, one could use litera in apposition, e.g. literae R. (I expect that's why you say "y at least seems to be feminine" - from an implicit litera assumed.)
P.S. I now see that W. Sidney Allen cites quite a few quotations in Appendix A of his Vox Latina. There seem to be usages of letters treated both as neuters and feminines (but I think mainly feminines). There's far too much there for me to type out by hand, but scanning the citations I see things like
u litteram digamma esse
u autem, quamuis contractum
e quae sequitur
inter litteram n et g est alia uis
r: non multum est
Maiiamque geminata i scribere
Some additional examples:
Nam ‘divus’ et ‘rivus’ et ‘clivus’ non ‘us’ syllaba terminantur, sed ea quae per duo u scribenda est ... (Gellius)
est tamen quando idem Aeolis inveniuntur pro duplici quoque consonante digamma posuisse (Prisc.)
In addition to the good suggestion to use littera together with the letter, you can also use a plain adjective, pronoun, or numeral when they are needed. That is, you could render "he writes his R's like so" as sua R scribit sic. If you want to have an implicit litteras, replace the neuter sua with suas. I would not decline the letter itself, as the names don't really conform with Latin declensions.
