One of the biggest issues I am having with being an ESOL tutor is that my student asks me “Why” a lot. She wants to know why we do things we do and say the things we say. The trouble is, I am not a teacher. I am a regular college student. I’m not even going to school to BE a teacher. For some strange reason, the answer “because” doesn’t seem to sit well with her (although it did make her laugh).
The question I promised to find an answer to this week is this…
Why is it that some words are made plural by adding -s or -es while other just have their spelling changed (man - men). I racked my brain but I honestly don’t know WHY we do that, I just know that we DO do it and I know when to do it. I know that men sounds good and mans sounds stupid.
So, can someone please explain in idiot language so that I can understand? Also, if anyone knows of a really good website or a really good book that breaks this stuff down, I’d appreciate it. I have looked at dozens of grammar websites but a common theme to them is that they explain what something is (a noun is a person, place, thing, or idea - yep, I’ve got that thanks) but none of them explain WHY.
When I was being trained, they said that there’s no specific way to teach ESOL because no 2 students are the same. So, they taught us to understand the complexity of being a tutor but didn’t actually teach us how to BE a tutor. My student speaks English and is quite understandable but her grammar is atrocious and she has a very low reading ability. Mans doesn’t sound stupid to her like it does to me.
History, as usually with stuff that just “is that way”. English is a Germanic language and shares a lot of its features with other Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, or Swedish. Irregular plural forms are common in these languages. On the other hand, even languages that share common ancestry go their own way, and especially after the Norman conquest English developed a life of its own separate from that of the continental Germanic languages. The heavy influence of French vocabulary in English is one of the examples for this, but there are also features of that sort in grammar. English got rid of a lot of the grammatical complications other Germanic languages still have (such as declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs), and it got rid of a lot of irregularities such as irregular plurals, but not all. Modern English grammar is essentially a simplified and heavily, but not completely, regularised form of older versions of English, which were much closer to the grammars of e.g. German.
Generally, the common English words that form their plural by changing the vowel are Germanic – mouse/mice, goose/geese, brother/brethren – and that’s something that’s found in (many) Germanic languages. It doesn’t have much to do with logic.
IIRC, it’s just a leftover from Old English, where many plurals ended like that. Here’s a wiki explanation of “Geese”*The word Goose is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European root, *ghans-. In Germanic languages, the root gave Old English gōs with the plural gēs and gandra (becoming Modern English goose, geese, and gander, respectively), *…
*The plural is sometimes formed by simply changing the vowel sound of the singular, in a process called ablaut (these are sometimes called mutated plurals):
foot feet
goose geese
louse lice
man men
mouse mice
tooth teeth
woman women
This group consists of words that historically belong to the Old English consonantal declension, see Germanic umlaut#I-mutation in Old English.*
So, 1000 years ago, OE (heavily Germanic) often changed the word ending to make a plural. When we went to ME, which is heavily influenced by French and Latin, we started using the “s” plural. However, a few old and very common words kept their older plural forms.
In some few cases, the “s” plural is starting to gain acceptance- “mouses” “louses”.
It’s always nice to define acronyms like that the first time you use them. I have worked with “English as a second language” teachers in the past, but never heard of ESOL until this post.
One thing about human language that’s important to grasp for any language learner is that natural human language does not follow obligatory logical rules. The short bowdlerized answer as to why human language works this way is that the human brain is something more than just a mess of logic gates, and thus does not function in the same way that, say, a digital computer does. Many exceptions and irregularities in human language actually help the brain process many common words and constructions more quickly and efficiently than if all forms were perfectly regular. This linguistic processing, being based ultimately on a biological entity, is imperfect, causing irregular forms at times to spill over and influence similar-sounding words.
The cognitive scientist/psychologist/linguist Steven Pinker, among others, has done much work in this field and has published many books that make these arcane psycholinguistic topics accessible to the interested layman. Here are some recommended readings:
Words and Rules by Pinker – this book is now 11 years old, but it well explains the then-current findings of the psycholinguistic/cognitive-research community into the “whys” and “hows” of irregular verbs and nouns in human language.
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature also by Pinker – this 2007 book updates and puts finer points on some of the concepts from Words and Rules and also pans out to take a broader view of other vagaries of human language (transitive/intransitive verbs, use of reflexive verb forms, verbal aspect, mass/count nouns, etc).
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by linguist John McWhorter – Also discusses a lot of the “why things are the way they are” regarding human language. Written for popular consumption … famiarity with Pinker’s books will help fill in the gaps of McWhorter’s.
One more:
The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer – this one was written in 1944 and the book’s frame of reference is now very much dated. However, there is one chapter that would be well worth reading for both you and your student. Chapter X, titled “The Diseases of Language”, will demonstrate for your student that ALL human languages have illogical constructions, redundancies, and general linguistic detritus. This won’t necessarily satisfy her “why” questions, but it can help her (and you) understand that there really is no natural human language that is more “logical” and “sensible” than any other.
I like the “Mutating strong nouns” section there: it suggests that as well as having foot/feet we should have “beek” as the plural of “book” and “neet” as the plural of “nut”. Perhaps those plural forms were lost because of confusion with the similar words “beak” and “neat”.
Congodwarf, what language does your student speak natively? There will be logical weirdness in her first language as surely as there is in English – perhaps the house can help you come up with some specific examples to present to her.
What I’ve told students (and this is true) is that we use language before we write it. Spoken word always comes first. How people began pluralizing sticks, whether it makes sense to us or not. So how most of our plurals were spelled was an England decision when people started publishing. I hope you don’t have to cover plurals of animals with her (murder of crows). English can be irrational.
In proto-Germanic (if I understand a linguistics textbook), mouse was pronounced much like our “moose”, its plural was “moosees” and these were regular. The evolution to our mouse/mice was through a series of regular sound changes. The reason we don’t have house/hice is that that word’s ancient history is different.
Sound changes can get pretty wild. I’m astounded that “five” and “cinco” are cognates.
Language evolves over time. By the way, she can see the evolution of words today. Pronunciation, spelling, emergence of new words, and even grammar. Examples off the top of my head (before morning coffee):
The term “you know” has become a way of pausing, been used way more than it was (say) 30 years ago, and is being shortened to “y’know.”
Computer-terms like LOL and IMHO are in common usage, but weren’t a decade or so ago.
Etc.
Thank you all for your responses. Unfortunately she had to cancel today so I wasn’t able to teach her anything about plurals.
Her native language is Spanish. I’m sure there are irregularities in Spanish too but I dropped out of Spanish after 2.5 years of learning to count to 20 and to ask where the library was. After 15 years, I’ll be attempting Spanish again starting next month.
She learned to speak English without really learning how to read or write very well. Sadly she learned to speak it from the people she is around most often - other immigrants who learned to speak from other immigrants. My mother is a borderline grammar-nazi so I learned how things should sound before I ever started learning to read or write (saying ain’t in my mother’s presence was liable to start her lecturing and using a Worcester accent was worth a smack on the back of the head). I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that she really doesn’t know how things should sound. It’s a foreign concept to me.
I’m not sure this is a good example. It certainly wasn’t scarce 30 years ago, nor indeed long before that. And it has always been a prominent aspect of casually spoken English that sounds are shortened, often radically: “Jeet yet?” is a common way of saying “Did you eat yet?”
I will again mention on these boards having seen the irregular plural of roof almost completely disappear in my lifetime. It now is apparently completely grammatical to say roofs, which as recently as 30 years ago would have been as laughably ungrammatical as *gooses still is.
Then someone else should probably be her English tutor.
ETA: I didn’t mean that as an insult, I was being serious. If you can’t grasp how something that comes naturally to you doesn’t come naturally to someone else, you’re probably not going to be much good at explaining it.
Congodwarf, I’ve taught ESOL with students with backgrounds in Spanish, Russian, and “Ghett-fabulous-what’s-a-dictionary.” The thing that I found most useful was to ask them how various usage patterns work in their native tongue - there are often/usually parallels. English “ain’t” the hardest language in the world - we just like to think that we’ve mastered something complex; hell, look at the rules for comma usage in Russian as a starting point.
All languages are intuitive… you’ve just got to have the intuition. I’ve learned during travels that I can often discern what someone is saying without having a flipping clue about how their language works (although it’s sometimes… a bit dodgy… like that Matt Dodge punt against the Eagles… but that’s another thread that I shan’t start).
I think it’s a natural reaction for someone to assume that a person speaking your language will know how things should sound. After all, I tend to assume that other native English speakers are capable of using proper grammar (and I’m so frequently wrong). I’m certainly not perfect either. I occasionally have to work things out in my head before I say them (or type them). However, I am very good at explaining things, as long as I understand them myself. So, I will have to prepare before I see her to make sure I fully understand each topic so that I can explain it to her. Since I do things because of intuition, I’m finding myself needing to refresh things from early elementary school because I haven’t thought of them in over 20 years. It’s definitely my own problem and has nothing to do with her skill. Frankly, I’m impressed that she learned to speak as well as she does without any formal lessons. As I prepared for the lesson we were supposed to have today, it was refreshing to realize that I really had already learned this stuff and just needed to jump start my brain.
Anyway, I’ve only met her once. Our meeting last week was supposed to be a getting acquainted thing but we got roped into a lesson on singular nouns. I was totally unprepared (especially since I had been planning for a native English speaking reading student). I did warn her that I wasn’t expecting a lesson so it was going to be a short and easy one. Before the lesson ended, I told her we’d be working on plural nouns this week and that’s when the question came up.
I am very adaptable so I think I’ll be fine. After all, I learned to stop being annoyed by 10 items or less signs.
You are very right though. If I can’t shake the bafflement then any ESOL tutoring is probably not for me. We are told to give any student a couple lessons before deciding that the match wont work because it’s hard to make a decision without knowing more about them or how compatible you are. All Literacy Volunteers go into it knowing full well that they may fail. There’s no way to know if I’ll be a good tutor until I try it. I just have to have the common sense to admit I have failed if it happens. I have tutored other subjects before though so I think I’ll be fine once I adjust my thinking.
By the way, ESOL is English for speakers of other languages. The name was changed when some bright person realized that just because a person can’t speak English, it doesn’t mean they only speak 1 language. Our trainer told us about a student she had who spoke 6 languages, none of which was English.
