Zero Plurals and 50 Cent

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marissa Kestel.

I’m calling from Greensboro, North Carolina.

Station WFDD.

FDD.

Awesome.

Yes.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question for you all about the way that the S is left off when describing change.

Like when it’s down here in North Carolina.

I’m originally from Pennsylvania, and I moved down here to become an elementary school teacher.

Did teach money. This was 20 years back. But I have noticed throughout the years that no matter what the socioeconomic status is of an individual down here, that they always seem to leave the S off of the word sense, C-E-N-T, when it comes to describing change and coins and money.

And I wasn’t sure if there was a way to figure out why and where that came from.

So tell me how that transaction goes.

So you’re in the store, you’re buying something, and a little bit of some coins come back your way.

What do they say where you hear that?

Well, typically speaking, they would be re-addressing the change that would be given, and they would say something like 15 cents instead of 15 cents.

So I always felt like I was like a little snake in my head going.

Adding the S sound.

Yes. It’s hard to hear on the radio, but it’s the letter before T.

Well, you know, what’s interesting is that you’ve zeroed in on a really fascinating element of dialect in that area, particularly in Appalachian English or parts of the South.

It’s a well-established feature of that dialect that when preceded by a numeral, a word that indicates quantity, whether it’s cent or mile or pound or year, you know, he’s 10 years older than his brother, that S doesn’t play a part there.

And what I find super interesting about this is that it reflects a very old structure in the English language, which is called the partitive genitive.

Now, this goes back to a time when English nouns had different endings to indicate their function.

And the genitive case, the genitive ending indicated possession.

And so in Old English, to say four miles, you would say feor mila, like four units of the quantity that is a mile.

And then over time, English began losing those case endings.

And by the late 1300s, that partitive genitive had mostly disappeared, but it was preserved among some English speakers, and it was preserved in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

And the people who settled in the area where you are tend to use that.

And there’s another element here, which is that you’ll also hear African-American speakers of English.

Many of them use that same construction.

But what’s also interesting there is that that may derive from a lot of the English-based Creoles and some of the West African languages that were brought in along with enslaved people.

So there’s a whole lot of history behind this usage.

And I don’t know, I think it’s a cool thing to think about whenever you hear it there.

I agree because there’s a couple of things you said that were on point that I know that on the coastal stretch of parts of Southern North Carolina is a very big Irish and Scottish ancestry that the way that they still speak their diction and their language is often mistaken for people who are directly over because their families came over and they locally they call it when they get high tide, they would call it hoitoid.

Yeah, like over there on the Outer Banks.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s correct.

That’s fascinating.

So a couple more things.

So not having that S is called a zero plural.

So if you Google zero plurals, you’ll come up with a lot more information.

And so what’s happening here, that preservation was made a lot easier because having the number there already tells you that it’s a plural.

So you don’t really need to have the S because the S is redundant.

If I say $5 or he’s, you know, he’s 10 foot away, the 10 already tells me it’s plural.

I don’t need to pluralize foot as feet, you know.

True. It’s redundant.

That is true.

However.

And then you talk about something that’s 10 foot tall, you know.

Right. Yeah, we do it a different way.

Yeah, it’s a different structure.

And we do that in passing without even really thinking about it.

Yeah.

We appreciate your call today.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

I i appreciate the information that you provided.

It really did explain an awful lot.

So thank you.

All right.

Take care.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Marissa.

Bye-bye.

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