This one is about animal plural: Why is it that certain animals (and fish) form a plural by adding an “s” at the end (as nouns typically do), for example “dogs”, “lions”, “horses” and others often don’t, for example “salmon” as in “this river has a lot of salmon”, “buffalo” (“heards of buffalo used to roam the wild West”), and so on?
The plural of “buffalo” is “buffaloes”. How ever the plural of bison is bison.
A holdover from old english.
and the collective is “herd”
is there a nitpicky smilie? – ah. here we go! ;j
OK fellows! I appreciate all your corrections {I wish Straight Dope had a spell checker :)]. My question still remains unanswered:
Why a “herd of bison” and not a “herd of bisons” ?
Danielinthewolvesden answered your question. Some words are irregular and don’t follow the general rules. The plurals of fish and deer are fish and deer. Some words change spelling, but don’t add an s or es. Child – children, ox – oxen.
Hey Danielinthewolvesden, if it is a holdover from old English, how do you explain Borg? 
Um, I thought the plural of “Borg” was “Borgs”. It isn’t? I guess I wasn’t paying attention.
Sheep/sheep. Goose/geese.
Racial memory.
Or, maybe it’s Swedish “bork borg borg”, ala the Chef.
the Borg is a collective, right, so ‘Herds of Borg are coming to take you away’ is what should be written. By whom, I don’t know.
panama jack
heard of bison? Of course I’ve herd of bison!
I think it should also be noted that the plural of any Pokémon is identical to the singular. For instance, “Look at all the Pikachu!” and “The Tentacool have taken over the city!”
“Herds of Borg are coming to take you away” is usually said by the next generation of Borg.
I have no idea who might say, “The Tentacool have taken over the city!” I don’t expect to have occasion to say it.
It’s simple really. It was decided the same way everything else was in the English language…arbitrarily based on sound. The guy who sat around and made up English just thought that herd of bisons sounded weird, and he was right.
Right? That is the way English was made up wasn’t it? I’m so confused now.
This isn’t just animals, either. “Cannon” is commonly used as a plural.
So is fathom.
It’s my sense that, in general, it’s the animals that are usually seen in groups whose plurals are the same as the singulars; almost as if they’re thought of as a substance rather than a collection of individuals: sheep, salmon, fish, etc. You can say “salmon” and mean a bulk of salmon; a quantity of salmon. Bison, too, were at first alway seen in huge herds.
Now obviously there are exceptions to this (pigeons, e.g.): I’m in no way suggesting it’s a rule of English grammar. I’m only hypothesizing why some nouns have tended, in linguistic history, to behave in such a way.
The more I think of it, though, the more it seems right to me. I can think of more adherents to this putative rule than exceptions. Think of animals usually seen in large groups: wildebeest, vermin, geese, cattle.
How many exceptions are there? How many herding, schooling, flocking animals have standard plurals? Birds. Ducks. (Really, most birds, besides geese. Wonder why they’re the exception?) Think of animals normally thought of as solitary that have s-less plurals: Moose. Can’t off the top of my head think of any more.
It goes back to certain Old English declensional classes. If you have not studied Old English, you have no idea how complex the morphology was. It was comparable to Latin, Classical Greek, Lithuanian, or Sanskrit. Depending on the declensional class of the noun, the plural form might differ from the singular, or it might not. We still have the ghost of that system in the odd plurals that are singular in form.
As for the Pokémon collective nouns, it’s enough to note that that Japanese has no plural forms at all. If you spend time in Asia where languages including Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Indonesian, and sometimes even Hindi do not use plural forms, you will notice how this tendency carries over into their local use of English.
What I was wondering about is when this happens in certain ethnonyms but not others.
For example, “the Chinese”, “the English”, “the French,” the Malay," the “Eskimo” – all singular in form but used as collective nouns agreeing with plural verbs.
But if you say “the Italian,” “the Russian”, etc. it will always be understood as singular.
We seem to have very few ethnonym endings: -ese, -ish, -(i)an, or no suffix.
-ese and -ish are usually understood as collective.
-(i)an is always automatically singular.
The non-suffixed ones (e.g. Tajik, Khmer) can go either way.
A few end in -i: Israeli, Omani, Pakistani. These are also automatic singulars requiring a plural ending to become plural.