No, this isn’t about reindeer. A random grammar question wandered into my head and now it won’t leave.
If the plural of hoof is hooves, why is the plural of roof roofs? What happened to rooves? Is there a rule exception that explains this?
The plural of hoof is also hoofs. Especially when refering to the ends of a reindeer’s legs.
as told by Robert E. Howard
Alright, then I suppose the question should be, “Why hasn’t roofs followed the same pluralization convention as hoof or proof in having ves replace the f?”
I know both of those words also have “fs” plurals, but roof doesn’t seem to have the ves like the others.
You raise a quite distinct question in bringing up proof.
The plural of the noun “proof” is “proofs” – “Class, bring your proofs of theorems 1-3 to class tomorrow.” “Uncirculated coins sell at a small premium; proofs, a higher one.”
There are two related verbs:
“To prove” is “to establish proof of by logical or evidential means” and of course takes a third-person singular in “proves.”
“To proof” is “to do proofreading on; to vet.” And its 3rd sing. is “proofs.”
Note the following (some nouns, some verb, some both:
[ul][li]goof → goofs[/li][li]hoof → hooves, sometimes hoofs[/li][li]poof → poofs[/li][li]proof → proofs (but see “prove” above)[/li][li]roof → roofs[/li][li]woof → woofs[/li][*]spoof → spoofs[/ul]
Lenition is the process seen in some languages whereby (among other effects) a voiceless consonant (e.g. f, a sound that does not require the vocal chords) transforms into it’s voiced equivalent (i.e. v, which is the voiced form of f) under certain conditions.
Regarding the plural of hoof and leaf (leaving the Canadian hockey team aside for the moment), adding s, the f it no longer finishes the word (so there is no natural “stop”), and the s sound is formed with a different part of the mouth than the f. All of this lenition causes the vowel preceding the f to “bleed in”; thats a gross oversimplification, and there are probably details of this I’ve overlooked, but that’s the general tendency.
So then why didn’t the plural of roof become rooves? My guess is that leaves and hooves are seen and discussed far more frequently in their plural form than roofs. The general push toward standard orthograthy liked to keep things simple; leaves and hooves were (I assume) fairly-well established in common speech before the dictionaries were written, and people didn’t deal with the plural of roof until much later.
By that time, the strength of orthographic convention was enough to withstand the spoken tendency to change f to v, though I’d bet most folks even today pronounce roofs as if it were spelled rooves.
just one of the thousands of irregularities in the English language.
You might just as well ask about mouse, grouse and house.
Silly, reindeer don’t have hooves (or hoofs). Don’t you remember the song? “Up on the housetop, reindeer paws…”
