|
Unusual Plurals |
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, goes the Dr.
Seuss children’s story. Why isn’t it two fishes? You may
think, “Ok, it’s hard to count fish so we group them all
together. No problem.”
Life on the farm
It’s easy to understand that farmers would not worry
about making plurals when they talk about sheep. After
all, they are almost always in a group. When you have
one sheep, you can also call it a ram or a ewe, and make
those nouns plural by adding an –s: rams and ewes.
Let’s look at some other things we can make plural.
You’ve got a left foot and a right foot. Put them
together and what have you got? Two feet. That doesn’t
follow the “add an –s” rule.
Same with mouse and its plural, mice. What happened to
our neat rule for making words plural?
The German influence
The answer is in our history. English came from German
roots. German grammar changes the vowel sound in the
middle of the word to show it is plural. The plural form
of the German word for goose, Gans is Gänse. The vowel
with two dots over it is called an umlaut. So goose
becomes geese in English.
There are other plurals where the vowel changes like in
the German pattern. Man – men and woman – women are
examples of different vowel sounds in plural words.
Sometimes a consonant changes, as with words that end in
an f sound, such as leaf. The voiceless sound f takes on
a voiced quality, or v, and an s sound is added to the
word. We have autumn leaves and sharp knives.
Another way to make plurals in English is to add the
suffix –en. We see this in the words brother – brethren;
child - children and ox -oxen. These are words that come
from Old English.
Words of foreign origin
With words that come from foreign languages, there are
some patterns that may help you remember the plural.
Many technical words in English came from Latin. Let’s
look at the plural of some words from Latin. Words that
end in –us drop that ending and add –i to become
plural, as in fungus – fungi and cactus – cacti.
What is that orange thing on the tree?
It’s a fungus. There are a lot of different fungi in this
forest.
For words that end in –um, the ending changes to –a, as
in the words datum – data and medium – media. These two
words are more common in their plural forms than the
singular forms in our digital life. Listen to how the
words medium and media appear in this conversation.
I heard you got a job at the New York Times.
Yeah, I’m glad to be working in mass media.
But newspapers are a dying medium, aren’t they?
Hey, I hope not. I’m writing a blog for them.
When a word from Latin ends in –-ex or –ix, the plural
ending is –ices. This results in index – indices and
matrix – matrices. Here is another conversation
The financial news is bad. The Dow Jones index is down.
Don’t worry, there are other indices, like employment, going
up.
Try it yourself
Are you ready to try making plurals with some English
words?
Use the Germanic pattern for these words:
tooth (plural: teeth)
wolf (plural: wolves)
Use the Latin pattern for these words:
mémorandum (plural: memoranda)
focus (plural: foci)
There are many more irregular plural forms in English.
We’ll look at those in another episode of Everyday
Grammar. For now, we leave you with Frank Sinatra,
singing Autumn Leaves,
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
I’m Jill Robbins.
Dr. Jill Robbins wrote this story for Learning English.
Kathleeen Struck was the editor. |
|
