I know I don't usually post, but I found this article that pertains to one of the Latin roots we studies this week:
populus: people
It does not mean one single person, so I asked my husband if he knew whether or not "people" or "persons" was the plural of "person". Instead of spending time exchanging our own opinions on it, he wisely went to the internet and discovered this article.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/people.htm
Here is a little bit of practical application for our Latin. There is more information in the article, but here is a section that I thought particularly informative:
The words people and person derive from different Latin roots, the former from populum, referring to the people in the sense of the populace, the latter from persona, “an actor’s mask; a character in a play” and which in the English form person came to refer to an individual human being. (It was first brought in via French in the form parson, which for some unexplained reason soon took on the separate and specific sense in which we still use it, so that the word had to be re-borrowed with a new spelling. And persona itself was borrowed in that form by Jungian psychologists early this century to identify the personality a person presents to the world.)
The normal plural of person was persons, as in “two persons were present”. However, there is evidence from Chaucer onwards that some writers chose to use people as a plural for person, not only in the generalised sense of “an uncountable or indistinct mass of individuals” but also in specific countable cases (Chaucer wrote of “a thousand people”). This began to be questioned in Victorian times, and the pseudo-rule grew up that the plural of person is persons when a specific, countable number of individuals is meant, but that people should be used when the number is large or indefinite.
May God bless you and your home!
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