Last night I came across an interesting statement in an old Guinness Book of Answers from 1976. It said that only thirteen irregular plurals survived in the English language. The irregular plurals were listed as:
brother - brothers/brethren
child - children
cow - cows/kine
die - dice
foot - feet
goose - geese
louse - lice
man - men
mouse - mice
ox - oxen
penny - pennies/pence
tooth - teeth
woman - women
There was no definition of “irregular plural” but I assume it was one where the plural wasn’t formed by adding s, es or ies.
From a 1976 viewpoint I can accept “brethren”. One still hears it occasionally now in religious contexts. “Pence” too may still have been current in the UK. But I’d have thought that even in 1976 “kine” was archaic.
Even so, a total of thirteen irregular plurals seems remarkably low to me for the whole English language. Without using examples based on the Guinness list (e.g. stepchild / stepchildren) can anyone provide additional examples of irregular plurals?
A datum is a statement accepted at face value (a “given”).Data is the plural of datum. A large class of practically important statements are measurements or observations of a variable.Such statements may comprise numbers, words, or images.
Then, technically, die > dice shouldn’t count. The spelling disguises it, but it actually is the regular + s ending, with an archaic pronunciation. (Apparently, in Middle English, they all ended in an }ess{ sound, only changing to }ezz{ in the Early Modern period. “Bodice” is supposedly from “bodies,” the old pronunciation only preserved in the garment.
A lot of archaic plurals remain in the dialects: shoon, eyen. I would argue that both “brethren” and “kine” are archaic, and standard English speakers say “brothers” and “cows / cattle.” “Oxes” is also sometimes used, though it sounds wrong to me.
“Pence” might not count, either, since it’s an old possessive plural used for quantity. The plural of “penny” (the coin) is “pennies,” and “pence” is only used for amounts.
This is all based on hazy memories of a book on Early Modern English grammar, so if I’m wrong, my apologies.
Presumably the plural form aviatrixes was not considered irregular since it merely added es. And the Latinised plural, aviatrices, was likely excluded to prevent the hundreds of Latin/Greek examples going onto the list.
It would certainly have been more helpful had some definitions been included with the list.
The women in their chateaux discussed whether female dwarves, elves, or homunculi would make good aviatrices, as the sheep, the cattle, and the oxen grazed in the meadows outside.
Old English (or even earlier). Many of the common Romance Language loan words (Latin and French, if not Spanish and Italian) were a part of Middle English, and even Old English had a number of Latin loan words.
How about the plural of I --> we? Or He/Her --> They? Do those count as irregular?
What about sheep and fish which are also the plural forms. Those must be words from old English, though I supposed there might well have been different plurals in old English.
The OP didn’t state it, but I assume it meant irregular plural nouns. “I”, “he”, “we”, “they”, etc. are pronouns. FYI, “we” and “they” are classified as plural pronouns.
The list also seems fairly random in that it includes “man” and “woman” as two seperate words despite a single common root. After all the only reason that woman is irregular because it is a conjunction of “wife” and “man”.
But if they are allowing conjuctions of that sort then why exclude “stepchildren”, “doormice”, “clubfoot” or the literally thousands of similar conjunctions? It seems really odd that “woman” is considered a separate and distinct word to “man” but that “postman” is not.
Yes, exactly. Historically, the -F is actually a -G. This makes more sense when you think of words like tough, laugh, cough, etc., and the German cognate word for dwarf, Zwerg. If only we spelled it dwargh and dwarghs: The dwargh laughs at the thief’s knife / dwarghs laugh at thieves’ knives. Stupid language.
I think the list in the OP is words that have a unique word for its plural that is not subject the regular rules of ANY language; all the subsequent examples offered in the thread are regular in the “home” language, and subject to those rules. Irregular = ain’t no rule, it just is.