Strange English Plurals Leftover From a Bygone Age

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you doing today?

My name is Eric Guns from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

What’s going on, Eric?

Hey, I have a question for you regarding the plural use of some nouns.

I was driving down the road the other day with my son, and he’s a pretty smart kid.

He’s only six years old, but he knows a lot.

And he said, hey, Dad, how come when you say some words in the singular form, they’re one word,

But if you say it in the plural form, it changes into another word?

I was like, well, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.

He said, what about the word, if we’ve seen a mouse in the yard, we’d call it a mouse.

But if there was more than one, we would call them mice.

And then he went on to tell me about goose and geese.

And then he even mentioned his tooth.

If his tooth falls out, he says tooth.

But if more than one tooth fell out, he’d call them teeth.

So I went and did a little research, and I noticed, well, it looks like whenever you have a noun,

You typically add S or ES to make a plural.

Why those words?

You know, why did you physically change the actual word?

I have no clue.

That’s a smart kid you got there, Eric.

He’s very observant.

Yeah, yeah, he is pretty smart.

Actually, he’s kind of questioning where I went wrong in life sometimes

Because I don’t know some of the things he knows already.

Yeah, just keep feeding him the right books and the right entertainment, and he’ll grow.

Sounds like a nerd in training.

Yeah.

Well, Eric, the answer to this is really interesting.

When you come across those words that have these irregular plurals, you are looking at some of the oldest parts of the English language.

You are seeing the dusty bones of English.

Let’s take, for example, the word goose and geese, just as one example.

There was an older form of English that, like Germanic languages, to make a plural, you didn’t add an S on the end.

Instead, you changed that main central vowel.

And other words have behaved the same way.

He picked up on tooth and teeth and foot and feet and mouse and mice.

And so when English became modern, there’s no one day or one organization that makes everything modern.

Each word becomes modern on its own or it’s dropped from the language or it isn’t changed at all.

And these are remnants of words that weren’t changed to adopt the new plural style of adding an S to make them plural.

There were other changes that did happen, pronunciation changes, for example.

For geese, for example, might have pronounced something like giza at one point in English, but we don’t keep that.

We did modernize pronunciation, but we didn’t modernize the pluralization by adding an S.

So they’re kind of leftovers from the past.

They’re leftovers, yeah.

They’re artifacts.

Yeah, that’s very interesting.

I had envisioned like there was some committee somewhere in Washington, D.C.

And some big office somewhere, and they all sat around and said, hey, let’s figure out the proper way to say certain words.

Because certain words, when you look at it, you’re like, that doesn’t make any sense.

How are you getting that word out of it, let alone changing the name of it?

It’s kind of interesting how it works.

And some words like house, we did modernize it fully.

We don’t use the old plural of house anymore.

We say houses, but house is another one of those old, old words that could have stayed and could have kept its old plural form.

Yeah, there’s no committee in D.C. or London or Oxford or any place like that.

Each word changes on its own as the different dialects and variations in the language rise to prestige or fall away from prestige.

Yeah, and there are a couple of other examples of plurals that aren’t formed with S, like children and oxen, because in Old English you would add an EN.

To make a plural.

That’s interesting.

That’s great.

Sounds good.

Well, hey, I thank you guys very much for answering my questions, and I’ll definitely relay the

Information over to him and maybe do a little research on the subject myself and do a little

Learning exercise with him.

Yeah, say hi to your son.

What’s his name?

Tell him we said hi.

His name is Eric as well.

Oh, Eric.

Tell little Eric we said hi and good luck.

Yeah, that’s how good I am with the English language.

I had to keep it simple.

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Hi to Eric.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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