Chupacabras is only plural because the animal chupa the cabras. If it were to chupar only one cabra, it could certainly be a chupacabra. So they probably start out as a chupacabra when they’re little, and turn into a chupacabras as they get bigger.
The Latin for chupacabras is caprimulgus, whose plural is a perfectly regular caprimulgi, also the plural in Italian (singular caprimulgo).
Why would there be a Latin or Italian word for an animal found only in the New World?
That’s because “data” is plural in Latin, but singular in English. The Latin meaning is irrelevant unless you have an agenda.
Ahem. I think you mean an agendum
Exactly. No one objects to saying “an agenda” or “the agenda is,” but many go all pedantic if you say “the data is.” The fact that “data” is plural in Latin is no more than an interesting but irrelevant fact. We’re not speaking Latin.
The monster is named after the bird, whose name comes from a strange folk belief.
Bird? What bird? I was referring to the often-sighted but seldom-photographed and never-captured animal.
My parents grew up speaking Hungarian, another genderless language, not Indo-European to be sure. They have a very hard time with “he” and “she”, getting them mixed up all the time. To a native English speaker it sounds very odd.
Here’s a good one. I think it’s another from Steven Pinker:
What’s the plural of “lowlife”? It’s “lowlifes”, not “lowlives”. The word is sufficiently removed from the word “life” that it is no longer irregular.
I find Hungarian to be fascinating. I tried to do the Duolingo lessons and I found it terrifically difficult. Inflected nouns!
I think the Duolingo style is probably not suited to that kind of language. Almost like Latin, it might be better to learn the grammar before you learn vocabulary.
That reminds me. How do you describe what a batter does when he hits a fly ball caught by a fielder. Most announcers will say he flied out, but occasionally one will say he flew out.
Most people do not realize that house has an irregular plural in most dialects, analogous to life, lives. Some dialects have the plural of roof as roofs, some as rooves. Then there is a hoof, hooves with a change in the vowel.
…OK, what’s the irregular plural of “house”?
I assume vocalisation of the /s/ phoneme to /z/ in the plural. Bit I don’t know that I would call that “irregular.”
In most dialects, it is pronounced houzes, just like life, lives. I became aware of it because my Philly dialect is an exception.
For that matter, I would argue that the f → v thing is according to the normal rules of English, and that therefore it is the words that keep their final f in the plural that are the irregular ones.
Though there are several words that can be pluralized with either f or v, such as dwarf/dwarfs/dwarves and staff/staffs/staves.
It’s Verner’s Law at work.
This does seem to be a normal consonant mutation in English:
The “misunderstood plurals” phenomenon seems to be well at work, in any case, because I have absolutely seen reference to a “stave” (in a big fat book about music, for instance). Tolkein jokingly proposed “dwarrow” (from dweorgas/dwerghes/dwarrows)
(nevermind)
A pronunciation pet peeve of mine is about how -ae plurals (Algae, antennae, alumnae, vertebrae, hyphae, etc.) are frequently mispronounced. All my biology professors back at the university averred the correct pronunciation is a long E as in tree, so that’s what I deem correct.
In English, that’s correct. In Latin, the ae digraph was pronounced the same as a long-I in English (/aj/ in IPA). OTOH, the -i plural ending of 2nd declension masculine nouns was pronounce the same as an English long-E (/i/) in Latin whereas we usually pronounce it as a long-I in English. So basically English switched the pronunciations of those two Latin plural inflections.