Yes, that would be logical. However, there are some words where the plural form seems to predominate, and so it takes over the singular form. “Data” and “you” have already been mentioned: a more extreme case is “agenda”, for a list of things to be done, which is a plural in the original Latin. However, the singular “agendum” is never used in English except as a linguistic joke, “agenda” is the singular form in English, and the plural is “agendas”. Languages are not always completely logical.
I agree with everything you say in this post. The phrasing of the earlier post suggested some assumptions that I wanted to clarify; it wasn’t clear that your mouse / mice analogy was entirely synchronic.
I thought “y’all” did not have primarily a singular meaning for true y’all-dialect speakers, and that this sort of usage was a Yankee bastardization. (And I’ve had Southerners tell me “y’all” is always plural, too.) The distinction between “y’all” and “all y’all” is akin to the difference between “you (pl)” and “all of you (pl),” a sort of emphatic that stresses all the individuals in a group, rather than the group itself.
Have things changed or are there dialects that do use the words the way you describe above?
A similar phenomenon can be seen with “children”. The singular, of course, is “child”. In Dutch, the plural was formed regularly according to Dutch rules as “childer”. Then, when it got to older forms of English, they further pluralized it using the standard Old English plural ending -en (also seen in “oxen” and “brethren”), to “child(e)ren”. And now, in some dialects, it’s getting the standard modern English plural ending, too, and becoming “childrens”.
Another Brit here. I know this is correct, but it just doesn’t work anymore - ‘die’ as the singular of dice is:
-Too easily misunderstood as a confusing reference to death
-Too scarcely understood as the singular of ‘dice’
-In and of itself, a more quiet little word than ‘dice’ and therefore often just slips through the cracks of the conversation unnoticed.
So I usually say ‘dice’, inwardly hurting because I know it’s incorrect.
Weirdly, “childer” is still alive in some parts of the UK. My Grandma used to pluralise children as childer, and you still here it back home amongst old people.
I don’t think I ever use “die”, except to jokingly correct people who use “dice.” It sounds wrong.
Instead I say “one of the dice” or just “it” when the context is clear.
Michigan 70’s and 80’s, but pretty much the same thing. Dice as singular with board games until a little dabbling in RPG’s introduced me to die.