English plurals; mice and mouses
English nouns usually have
both singular and plural forms. The usual ‘regular’ plural is spelled with
‘s’ books or ‘es’ batches and pronounced as ‘s’ chairs,
as ‘z’ times or as ‘iz’ grasses.
But quite a few words have irregular plural forms. The reason is often the language
that they originally came from; sometimes English has kept the original plural,
sometimes it has created English plurals.
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Latin is one key source, dating back to the period when it was the language
of the educated. Stimulus/stimuli and
larva/larva have kept the Latin plurals. Crocus
is still in the process of switching over from croci
to crocuses, as are gladiolus and fungus. Area
and drama have completed the switch to
English plurals areas and
dramas.
-
Greek had a similar impact through academic words: crisis/crises
and phenomenon/phenomena. Many of
these now only have English plurals like electron/electrons.
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French
contributed some words where the plural is spelled as ‘x’ but pronounced as
‘z’, bureaux, adieux, though many
words have made the switch completely such
as plateau/plateaus
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Old English plural forms survived more or less intact in a handful of words: children,
oxen, brethren. This is usually also the source of plurals with consonant
changes half/halves, or with vowel
changes woman/women and
foot/feet, or when nothing changes like sheep.
When a word with an irregular
plural is used in a new meaning,
however, it often takes a regular plural. So while leaves
is the usual plural of leaf, the
Toronto hockey team is called the Maple
Leafs, a tea in Taiwan is called Leafs
and a Swedish band is called Fallen Leafs.
The usual plural for computer mouse
must be computer mouses; mice gives a strange image of little creatures dashing about the
mouse-pad.
This
has provided an important source of data for psycholinguists to resolve the
debate over whether the mind knows a few rules (‘Make plurals by adding
‘s’) or thousands of examples (‘Plurals are; ‘books, mice, batches, men,
…’’). Steven Pinker uses them to show that our knowledge
of language
must actually involve both; we won’t get very far if we don’t
know how to make plurals, say for new words – ‘one wug’, ‘two…’?;
but we still need to remember a few hundred one-off plurals like ‘schemata’
or ‘crises’. In other words he insists on a dual component view of language
made up of both rules and instances.