Two farthings = One Ha’penny. Two ha’pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). Once Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
There’s something interesting in this Prachett quote. We have multiple plurals. Three pennies (coins) are worth three pence (“Cents,” but not really.) We have one penny, then many pennies, pence, and… pences! Pences seems to mean coins in your pocket rather than value, like pennies does, when the coin is called xpence. I’d call this a pluplural.
Are there any other weird extra-plurals, in English or other languages? I understand that there’s child → childer (arch.) → children, but that’s a different kind of phenomenon.
Agendas is an example of a plural of a plural (the root singular being agendum; several of which make up “an” agenda). I imagine there will be more examples where we pluralize Latin plurals.Same for some words borrowed from other languages as well, I shouldn’t wonder.
I don’t know if it’s quite the same thing for you, but some languages have the dual number, in addition to the singular and plural. Slovenian, for instance, still retains the dual (and I believe all the Slavic languages used to have it). Arabic seems to have it (from looking it up – I don’t know much about the language) as well as many of the Semitic languages.
That quote doesn’t contain “pences”. It does contain, for instance, sixpences. But “a sixpence” is singular: it’s one single coin, that has a value of 6d. There are multiple plurals in the etymology, but not in the usage.
A person and another person and another person are people
A bunch of people in one country and a bunch of people in some other countries are many peoples
ProtoIndoEuropean had the dual number, so all IndoEuropean languages have it or had it somewhere in their history. For English, it was lost somewhere between Old English and Middle English.
The dual plural. Hebrew has it. I think it’s roughly equivalent to the English phrase “a pair of _______”. But it’s used is a wider variety of circumstances, for example, any body parts that come in pairs.
Come to think of it, “pierogi” is another ethnic food that’s plural in its language of origin, but usually treated as singular in English (and thus re-pluralized).
The stuffed cabbage dish gołąbki/galumpki/halu(m)pki or whatever your local spelling is for this Eastern European dish is similarly already in the plural.
It happens in the reverse, too. For example, my Polish father and his friends pluralize the already plural “hot dogs” when he says “chcesz hogdogsy?” (“Do you want hot dogs [with both -s, English plural marker, and -y one of the Polish plural markers.]”) This seems to be a characteristic of immigrant Polish, as in Poland they say “hot dogi” for the plural of “hot dogs.” Or “czypsy” for “chips” instead of “czypy.”
If you have no ha’penny then God bless you. 