Weird plurals in English: Men, geese, sheep, knives and many more
Everyone knows that you make plurals in English by an adding an S. So how come we have "men" instead of "mans" and "mice" instead of "mouses"? And why are "sheep" and "fish" the plural and the singular terms?
In this video, I explain the fascinating history of these words and many more from their Old English origins.
You'll also learn why the plurals of wife, knife, life and half all swap their Fs for Vs to become wives, knives, lives and halves.
I'll help you navigate the "phenomena" of the Latin and Greek plurals in English. By the end, you'll know your "crises" from your "indices" and your "cacti" from your "octopi" (it should actually be "octopodes").
And I'll also put to bed any confusion over how to order "panini" and to judge "graffiti".
Check me out on Twitter & TikTok:
/ robwordsyt
/ robwords
==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introducing weird plurals in English
2:10 Plurals from Old English (men, geese, mice, feet, teeth)
4:00 Middle English plurals (children & brethren)
5:19 Plurals that don't change (sheep, fish, moose, deer)
6:32 Knives, halves, wives & lives
8:50 Greek & Latin plurals in English
11:05 Plurals we're getting wrong (panini, biscotti, grafitti, pierogi)
11:53 Goodbye
This reminds me of the old tale of the zookeeper who wanted to order a pair of mongoose from overseas but was uncertain of the plural. So he wrote "Please send me a mongoose. And while you're at it, please send another."
That made me spit my beer. Silly, but very amusing.
Hahaha……good one!
I take it it’s not mongeese then? 😂 mongooses?
Mongoosi?
There’s a Brian Regan bit about these type Plurals and it’s fantastic…. “A flock of Moosen” 😂
Another interesting case of plural can be found in the Tatar language The word for chips (or crisps) came from American English in plural already, in Russian it gained an additional plural ending (-y) - “chipsy”, and when it arrived from Russian to Tatar, it gained yet another plural ( -lar) - “chipsylar”, making it a triple plural
Fantastic!
Cool. May I have three times as many of them? :D
No-one can eat just one.
that's a lot of chips.
I think I'm gonna get me some chipsylars.
In my career as an engineer, we usually used "minima" and "maxima," rather than "minimums" and "maximums." It rolls off the tongue more easily. To talk about both together, we used "extrema." Also, the word "datum" has the special meaning of a line or plane that things are measured from, as in a drawing. Most of us used "data" as a singular collection of numbers, although I knew an engineer who always used it as a plural ("The data show that..."), which was somewhat grating.
When you say "singular collection", you actually mean mass (non-count) noun, which is neither singular nor plural, like "water", "gold", etc. In linguistics, a mass noun and a collective noun are very different concepts. Lots of words like "data" can freely alternate between mass and count depending on the intended meaning. (And almost any count noun can be shifted to mass via the "universal grinder": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grinder) I find plural "data" grating too, unless the specific context makes the data conceptually countable, but the count form is standard in academic publications because people feel it's "correct". In everyday life, it's normally mass. Even just in high school math, I think "minima", "maxima" and "extrema" are common words.
In mathematics and science, many Latin/Greek forms have been retained, probably because of the influence of ancient Greece and Rome on STEM subjects. Math textbooks often refer to "mathematical formulae" rather than "formulas," and biology textbooks talk about an insect's "antennae" rather than "antennas."
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_M%C3%A1xima_of_the_Netherlands
@@MikeInlitersI learned them as "uncountable" nouns. Essentially, they refer to things that aren't considered distinct units of themselves. You can have 5 apples or 5 chairs, but not 5 milks, because "milk" refers to the substance, not some measure of it. So we create those measurements, and end up with bottles of water, grains of flour, sheets of paper, and pounds of iron. However, there are also ways to break that rule and assert(?) plurality. You can have an inherent "quantity" in mind and end up with different (types of) breads and (styles of) dances. You can also account for different definitions of words and create clear waters, or give oneself airs.
Datum is a Latin word adopted into English meaning a singular item of information. The plural in Latin is "data' so "the data show that..." is grammatically correct and "the data shows that..." is wrong despite its ubiquity. Similarly "criterion" is the singular and "criteria" is the plural
Rob is a brilliant and joyful teacher of English through the ages. Any good university would surely and gladly drag him in as a lecturer.
Haha...you didn't get the like from him!
any even better university would compensate him beyond what a "lecturer" gets (I assume "lecturer" is "adjunct").
As a German native speaker I find it remarkable how close English and German once were and still are somehow.
As a native English speaker, when living in Germany I thought the same thing.
I’m not a native English speaker (German neither) but I always say this observation to my friends
Why is it remarkable? Angles, Saxons, Jutes - all Germanic. I suppose it is remarkable if you have no idea about English history.
@@TheJamesRedwood why would you expect a German to know English history lol
@@samgyeopsal569 Given it's shared German/English history YES!!! lol ... not. I don't expect anyone to know their own history, sadly. What I might expect is, given that they are sitting at a computer looking at the Internet, they might check things out before taking the time to write something in a comment section. lol As you might have, lol, but you didn't either.
"Sistren" is NOT long gone! It is alive and well in Jamaican English. I heard it used by a young man who lived next door to me in South London in around 2007. He was calling after two female friends who were on their way to the shop and he had remembered something he wanted them to buy. They also use "bredren" (brethren). I think it is time for someone to make a full programme about Jamaican English. It preserves much of 16th - 17th century English that we have forgotten. It is sadly being lost rapidly in favour of the American version.
Yea, I went to a Jamaican school for grade 4. It was quite the lesson in alternative English and, as a smaller than average blond boy, how to take a daily beating. The Jamaican accent still causes the hairs on the back of my neck to go up.
Same with French Canadian.
I still heard brethren periodically until the 1990s in the United States, but usually only in a religious or fraternity context. Sisteren, only a few times in a religious contexts in a conversation over the King James translation of the bible.
Don't know about UK English, but in the USA "brethren" is still used occasionally. It just doesn't have the exact same definition as "brothers". It generally refers to a group of people who aren't related to you, but you see yourself as in line with and connected. I've heard it used in the same sentence as the word "mankind," for example. Merriam-Webster Dictionary says its "used chiefly in formal or solemn address or in referring to the members of a profession, society, or religious denomination" and Collins Dictionary says it can be used for fellow members of a group to yourself, and that also "you can refer to the members of a particular organization or group, especially a religious group, as brethren."
I've heard Jamaicans call each other "brudda", which could be mistaken as an "accent" saying brother, but it's very clearly always pronounced that way with intent, so I'm willing to say it's a separate word that's just got an obvious lineage.
Everyone who enjoyed this video I highly suggest reading the short story 'Foxen In The Henhice' it's (as you can probably already tell) all about taking irregular plurals and making them regular by making all plural words irregular. It's about a 10 minute read and absolutely hysterical.
That sounds like an absolutely delightful read.
@@SmallBobby yeah it's great, check it out!
I'm 67 and and love learning things, especially history. Good stuff here.
I remember hearing a story about Tolkien where when he was writing his books he would always pluralize “Dwarf” with “Dwarves” even though the correct way is to use “Dwarfs.” He did this because he didn’t like how dwarfs sounded and thought dwarves would fit better within his book. This apparently got him in a lot of trouble with publishing houses who kept correcting his intentional mistake.
Yes! He was treating the word "dwarf" as if it had been in the same level of usage as "half", "wife", "knife", and so gave it the same plural suffix.
He rather regretted not using 'Dwarrows' as the plural, but retained it in the old word for the Mines of Moria: 'the great realm and city of the Dwarrowdelf'.
Elf became elves so why not dwarf to dwarves. Some sources even list the plural of a Tolkien dwarf separately from another kind.
What makes this even better is that when Tolkien basically said “no, this is how it’s spelled, now go away” the editor said something to the effect of “well that’s not what the Oxford dictionary says” to which Tolkien replied “I wrote the Oxford dictionary”, which was true! He did LITERALLY help write the then-most-recent edition of the Oxford dictionary, he was the philologist in charge of researching the etymology of the words included.
@@joeyuzwa891 omg I didn’t know that bit, that honestly makes it so much better. He must have felt so good using that line lmao
What I love about this channel is how it alway turns a simple answer “Well, it’s complicated…” into a 12-minute video that is entertaining till the very end. Thank you for that!
Not only that, it also uncomplicates (decomplicates?)* the question into a video that is clear and sensible as well as entertaining! * Have you done a video on the complications of prefixes? For example, why we have both "in-" and "un-"--not to forget "non-"--for negatives.
@@elainechubb971 Thanks for the nice words and for the idea. Prefixes would make for a great video!
You're very welcome. And thanks for being so kind!
@@RobWords Plurals? What about spelling of normal words? and even the "normal words"
I concur, however, I do find they tend to become a lot less entertaining just after the very end.
I'm not a native English speaker, but I use it every day for work. Despite this, I find your videos very informative and interesting. I wish I had access to a channel that dissects Swedish!
There are two plural forms in Dutch: the "s" and the "en" additions. Also in words like "Wolf" the "F" becomes "V" in the plural "Wolven". There are also peculiarities "Kind" (child) is in German plural "Kinder", but in Dutch it is "Kinderen", the same with "Lied" (song) in German plural "Lieder" but in Dutch plural " Liederen". However we do use the word "Kinder" in combination such as "Kinderboek" (Children's Book) or "Kinderbroek" (Children's pants) etc. In West Flemish, "Kinders" is often used for the plural of "Kind" (Child). In Afrikaans the plural is also "Kinders", as in West Flanders. Plural is also not used for measures of volume, dimensions and the like. For example: "2 cent", "10 meter", "100 kilometer", "60 mijl" and 1.000 liter" etc. Mijn 2 cent uit België, my 2 cents from Belgium.
We have a few Hebrew ones in English, like when we say "cherub" (and "seraph") the plural is "cherubim" (and "seraphim"). Also the words "nebula" and "(super)nova" are first-declension Latin words so the plurals are "nebulae" and "(super)novae". And if I ever get a chance to refer to more than one kitchen spatula I'm definitely going to call them "spatulae".
in portuguese "serafim" is used as singular, i'd never guess its origin is hebrew
Apparently, the plural of "spatula" is just "spatula". I am both surprised and underwhelmed. Apparently, the word I was looking for was "disappointed".
The King James Bible uses the plural “cherubims.”
Great point! Though I was certain the words "Seraph" and "cherub" were Latin and not Hebrew in origin
@@tiermacgirl English borrowed from Latin, who borrowed from Greek, who borrowed from Hebrew.
one of my favourites is in the 'italian plurals borrowed into english' group: spaghetti. and in this case it actually makes sense, because you're basically always going to have a plate (or dish, whatever dinnerware you prefer lol) of multiple spaghetti. you're never going to have just a single spaghetto. but there's an image on wikipedia of a single spaghetto, simply labelled 'a single spaghetto', and it just makes me smile
On what Wikipedia page did you find this single spaghetto?
@@Klabbity_Kloots currently it's on the wiktionary page's definition of 'spaghetto' with the description 'a spaghetto'
You can always make one spaghetto multiple. :)
Spago = string or a piece of string. Spaghetto = little piece of string (similar to -ette suffixes in English). Spaghetti = little pieces of string.
When I'm cooking them, I usually take out a single spaghetto to test if it's al dente.
Your content is some of the most valuable I've ever seen on KZhead. Thank you for this service.✌️✌️
5:25 Actually, there is a rule in English stating whether to use “fish” or “fishes” as the plural: Say you have caught a clownfish. You have a fish. Now, if you catch another clownfish, you have two “fish”. Add a salmon into the mix, and you have “fishes”
@cool_guy87 There is no such rule. Indeed early modern English didn't have this rule -- the King James Bible refers to both all the "fish" and the "fishes" of the sea interchangeably. I note that beyond fish/fishes there's another word with two plurals: brothers/bretheren
Actually it's still just fish, it's only if you're emphasising the fact that they are different species that you then have fishes. E.g. "What kinds of fishes do you have?" and "I have 12 clownfish and 4 salmon, that makes 16 fish in total."
Hello! In polish language we have more plurals for each word, depending on their number - a different word for 2-4 something and 5+. For example dog 1 pies 2-4 psy 5+ psów And this goes for all nouns!
On top of that, psy and psów are irregular. If they weren't, they'd be piesy and piesów.
It's similar in Serbian (or Serbo-Croatian): 1 pas psi (more than 1, but you don't specify how many) 2-4 psa 5 (or more) pasa Slovenian also has dual, which refers to exactly 2 of something.
Same in Russian. That's because 2-4 used to be proper nouns rather than numbers))
Russian: 1 pios (there's 1 pios), 2-4 psa (there're 2 psa, 3 psa, 4 psa), 5 psov. And if you don't know how many you just say "There are psy". And that's just Nominative)
In Slovenian, we got you beat by slapping an extra dual in between: 1 pes 2 psa 3-4 psi 5-x psov And then it gets extra juicy when you get to 101, because for some reason, 101 dogs is singular again, and this repeats every time you hit a hundred and one or thousand and one (201, 1001, 3001 etc): 101 pes
Fishes is still used in publishing. "Grants Guide to Fishes" is a popular fish identification book. "Fishes" seems to be used mostly when talking about multiple species or types of fish. We talk about "reef fish" & "pelagic fish" but often in print we say "both reef & pelagic fishes".
That is also applicable to grass/grasses.
Yes, there are a few different words that fall into this category. Person becomes people as well as persons, for example.
Johnny tight lips "sleeps with the fishes".
Same with "peoples" which means different groups of people, rather than the plural or person
As well as in the phrase “sleeping with the fishes”
I like that you just keeping on trucking past the linguistic humour without really smirking/breaking stride. Adds entertainment value whilst not distracting from the information too much.
The amount of research you are putting into this must be enormous. And then you deliver informative, excellent, and positive videos that I watch from beginning to end. If I could subscribe twice, I would. Bravo! ❤
"Minima" and "datum" are used quite often in mathematics and engineering, as are a few of the plurals you mentioned that end in "-ii". "Axes," with a long 'e', also comes to mind.
I waited so patiently for him to say Vertices but he never did 😢
Just like WGS-84 datum
In my native language Bengali, there is no separate word for the plural of a noun. If I do a literal translation, the plural for the word “cat” is “many cat” 😊
Like Hungarian.
And Vietnamese!
Same with Cebuano/bisaya. We just say "mga" or "Daghan" which just means "The" and "Many". Although "mga" can be considered a prefix with a space before the noun because you wouldn't use it before "Ang" which is the standard "The" unless you want people to know that there's more.
@@myverypersonalstuff Hungarian does have plural markers: ház - house, házak - houses. Az én házam - my house, az én házaim - my houses.
@@egbront1506 I realise. I meant to say that, whilst 'people' is 'emberek' with a plural marker, 'many people' is 'sok ember.' Whenever plurality is given by qualifiers, the plural suffix is omitted. My knowledge of Hungarian is sketchy. I picked it up when I was frequently travelling to Hungary in the 70s and 80s. I love the language and its sound.
Thanks for this fascinating video! As a speaker of both English and German, I really appreciate the similarities you mentioned. My pet peeve? When playing a board game, members ask to "pass me the dice", referring to a single "die" ...😮
I think you'll find that the plural of 'die' (as in tap and die) is 'dies', at least in British English. A dice (a thing with numbers displayed as dots on each side) is a different thing from a die. American (we should stop calling it English as it deserves a status all of its own) may see it differently of course.
How about "Please pass me one of those dice" 🤔
pass me the douse 🐭
@@sem1ot1c Good to know. In American English, the cube with dots on the faces is called a "die," and multiple such cubes are called "dice."
Never say the singular form of "dice"!
This was not only a very good video on the history of the English language, which often gets ignored, but it also taught me to say "datum" and "Stadiæ"
OCTOPODES!! Who else just learned the *ONLY* *WAY* they will ever refer to a group of those critters ever again! Your videos are amazing. I have always been fascinated by words and the history of words and where they come from and how they morph throughout time. Please keep doing what you are doing!
I've also heard three ways to pronounce that word: OCTopoads, octoPOdeez, and ocTOPodeez. Not sure which one is closer to the Greek, so choose your favourite, guess.
Don't forget platypodes. "I saw a paddle of platypodes at Pennypack Park." 🙂
@@adambacchus839 Gosh, I want to know the answer to this question now 😂 It’ll annoy me until I find out!
I’m sticking with Octopuses. It’s fine to borrow words from other languages, but why do we also have to borrow their plural forms?
Until I saw this video, I thought the correct plural was "octopi," something I learned in kindergarten, although I always have said "octopuses."
As a linguist in the field (West Africa) for 30 years I really enjoy your videos. The Baga languages of Guinea pluralize nouns by changing the first syllable or consonant, or by adding an initial syllable. Thus, in the language in which I work, abaf (field) becomes yabaf (fields), dikma (machete) becomes (sedikma), tat (caterpillar) becomes mat, etc. There are about 20 ways to pluralize nouns, depending on the first letter or syllable.
Wow, that is so different! Fascinating!
Interesting!
As a data visualization journalist, I held my breath for 10 minutes, waiting for you to talk about data as singular/plural and decide whether I should stay subscribed. I love you even more now :)
I just moved to francophone Quebec and so often I’m asked why some animals are pluralized in English with an ‘s’ and others … not. Thank you so much for explaining this because I truly had no idea! Oh. My response to any further questions will be…. “They’re leftovers from old, old, old English. Just think of them as irregulars and deal with it.” Thank you so much for posting this!
Ask them why they put an “s” on the end and then don’t pronounce it.
Italian here! Plurals in Italian depend on the last vowel of the word. All words in Italian end with a vowel, well, all the non-imported ones Words that end in -a will be pluralized with -e those that end in -o and -e will be pluralized with -i Examples: DOG is “cane” plural “cani” CAT is “gatto” plural “gatti” CHAIR is “sedia” plural “sedie”
How to you know if a word ending with -e is plural or singular?
@@Klabbity_Kloots you learn while growing up, there is not rule much like the article (feminine, masculine or neutral) in German. Also every word in Italian is either masculine of feminine, that also doesn’t have a rule and you just have to memorize it. The same happens in Spanish French and Portuguese. The weird thing is a lot of words are the opposite gender in Italian, French and Spanish I also speak French and Spanish so you can imagine the confusion ahaha
Because of this, since I studied Italian to what I might call an intermediate level, and I also happen to be quite fond of pasta, I often think of a single strand of spaghetti as a "spaghetto."
@@TranslatorCarminum that’s correct! It’s a little cringe to hear in English “lasagnas” or “spaghettis” since the first plural is lasagne and spaghetti is already plural ahaha Kudos for using the correct term
@@gregre99 I speak a decent amount of Spanish, so this plurality rule seems very Italian and very un-Italian (or rather un-Romance) at the same time.
One more where we got confused is "peas", which was the original singular form but people thought the "s" meant it was the plural of singular "pea".
That's a good one. We still have pease pudding!
Pease porridge hot Pease porridge cold. Pease porridge in the pot Nine days old.
Also, it was originally spelled "pease." People assumed a singular "pea" and then further assumed that "peas" ought to be the standardized spelling of the plural. I've taken to calling a single grain of rice a "rouse" for this same reason, and am hoping it will catch on. It is my hope that, in a few centuries, people will be sitting down to a nice bowl of rouses.
@@adreabrooks11 oh no, then you're in direct competition with my attempts to change the plural of rice to ricen. /J
@@darkseraph2009 Haha! This is English; why not both? XD
"Octopodes" is my favorite weird plural. Thanks!
I recall my mother talking about recording multiple episodes of the TV show "ALF" as "Alves."
Tolkien actually used those examples of old plurals to come up with "dwarves" as he argued dwarfs would be common enough in Middle-Earth for the word to resist modernization. He even used "dwarrows" once.
Wait, it's not dwarves? My gestural keyboard has dwarves.
@@gasdive Only because of the influence of Tolkien and thus D&D which borrowed from Tolkien wholesale. (Interestingly the Tolkien Estate vigorously defends "hobbit" as its own intellectual property, so D&D has to use "halfling". But in actuality, Tolkien invented "halfling" and the word "hobbit" for a short barefoot near-human was historical.)
@@FadkinsDiet wow. Cheers!
But by using 'elves' instead of 'elfs' he was actually using a more modern form of the word. I think...
@@joemck74 Elves perfectly fits the f->v rule in the video!
Interestingly, in the dialects of Yorkshire and Lancashire (and perhaps others in the north), the plural of child is childer (or occasionally chilther), of shoe is shoon and of eye is een. I often wondered where they came from, and now I know.
Irish English, which often preserves older forms of English, also sometimes uses "childer". The Scottish "MacCrimmon's Lament" has "my blue een wi' sorrow are streaming" although the lament was originally in Gaelic.
Nice! Same thing in the low-saxon dialects in Dutch!
Please cherish that carefully, it is a treasure!!
Scots has shoe/sheen and eye/een.
My dad, from Lancashire like me, often called us childer when we were young. That explanation really interested me. Sad that it probably won't be passed on to younger generations.
Thank you for including Easter eggs in all of your videos. It's very satisfying
I have great respect for anyone who learns English as an adult. They are smarter than me, I could never do it. Someone's broken English far surpasses my ability to a speak their language.
A point of information: speaking of loanwords from Latin and Greek, the plural ending of the nouns ending with -x depends on whether the origin is Latin or Greek: e.g., "vortex" and "apex" are Latin, thus "vortices" and "apices", but "coccyx" and "larynx" are Greek, thus "coccyges", not "coccyces" and "larynges", not "larynces", etc.
Fascinating!
So is the plural of "phalanx," "phalanges"? Nope. Two different words. The two biggest problems with English are that it mutated like mad after the Black Plague, and that it picked up loan words from absolutely everywhere in the world. A lovely mongrel tongue, more so than any other tongan.
@@donnarichardson7214 At least in medicine, the plural for "phalanx" IS "phalanges", and they're NOT two different words.
@@pikckazinkavicius1235 not just medicine but the larger field of biology
@@rhoharane Even so - "phalanges" is a plural form, not a separate word. If we trust Webster's dictionary, the plural form is "phalanges" if we talk about "one of the digital bones of the hand or foot of a vertebrate" and "phalanxes" if we talk about "a massed arrangement of persons, animals, or things" or "an organized body of persons".
Probably my favorite that you didn't mention is "person" becoming "people." I believe their etymology is just that they were two separate words, and one became the usual singular, while the other the usual plural. Of course, we do have "peoples" to mean multiple groups of people, and "persons," a word which I never know how to tell anyone when to use.
i feel like "persons" means several separate individuals, whereas "people" is more of an indistinct group of individuals
Wouldn't you say: there were two persons of interest in the room, and I want to know their name. But : there were only two people in the room. ? I'm not a native English speaker, but I feel like if you use persons, it becomes more direct and often negative. Like: watch out for those three persons.
Police services use exclusively ’persons’ when reporting an incident. Typically “two male persons were seen running from the scene”. Sounds quaint and old fashioned and always makes me smile.
People indicates a group with something in common. For example, people attending a party. Persons is archaic and indicates a group of individuals. Pretty much only used in relation to law in modern usage, for example a person or persons in possession of said items shall be prosecuted. So unless you're a lawyer, in law enforcement or transcribing Shakespeare it'll be people not persons. Unless of course you're a bit weird and like old fashioned diction.
@@dtnicholls1 I would probably argue that persons exists in law and certain fixed phrases, like the aforementioned "persons of interest." The problem is I owing when a fixed phrase using "person" is pluralized by "people" (the vast majority of time) or "persons."
Having learnt high german plurals in school it was fascinating to find later when living in germany that old english/saxon plurals also crop up in local german dialects to this day - Fiess =feet instead of for Fuesse = Feets and Meis=Mice instead of Maeuser.
Swabian is virtually Middle High German on speed. I had next to no problems with reading out MHG texts in college, although many words have of course changed their meanings or died out completely.
The bummer is that they got rid of the esszet!
It is really impossible not to enjoy your smart, erudite and useful videos. They show the beauty and appeal of linguistics even for obtuse and illiterate foreigners like me. Thank you.
My name is Yasmeen and I was born and raised in Pakistan. Learned our own style of English there. Moved to Canada and I am STILL learning...It is not an easy language to master. I find your program very interesting. Keep up the great work.
Just remember : a lot of native speakers make errors too, and it's ok. It's all a process. :)
@@jamesismyfriend4403 absolutely correct. I've met plenty of people who learned English as a second language and ended up MORE fluent than the average native speaker.
@@2bfrank657 hahaha! Yes! Me too! 😂👍
Do you wear a head scarf or do wear head scarves?
@@siddharthshekhar909 Who doesn't wear head scarves?
Great to see you're still making videos. I think these are the most entertaining English language videos on the KZhead and you most certainly deserve more views.
As a keen amateur marine biologist, I note that we use the plural "fishes" when talking about species of fish but "fish" when talking about individual fish. We don't say "octopodes" but "octopuses", unless we're pedantic, when we say "octopoda". We have borrowed the words "cherub", "seraph" and "kibbutz" from Hebrew along with their plurals "cherubim", "seraphim" and "kibbutzim".
You are amazing man. Doing a really great job educating, especially the history and connections between the languages and things evolve.
A video of yours just popped up for the very first time for me a week ago and I immediately subscribed! I only just now realized you hadn’t posted in a year until now!
In my native Finnish, I find it really weird that when counting things, instead of plural, we use singular partitive. 'A dog' is 'koira' and plural 'dogs' is 'koirat'. But for 'two dogs' we say 'kaksi koiraa', literally "two of dog".
This also happens in Turkic languages. Something similar was used in ancient Greek too, and specifically in Athens, and was called Attic syntax. They were forming the plural of a noun but they were writing the verb in singular. For example: the children is playing "ta paedia paezei".
Not surprisingly the same happens in Hungarian as well - "kutya" means "dog", the plural is "kutyák", but we simply say "két kutya" meaning "two dogs".
The same in ukrainian, russian, polish, and I guess in belorussian, czech and bulgarian. Те саме відбувається в українській мові.
I think it's the same in Irish (dog = madra, dogs = madraí, two dogs = dhá mhadra)
Well, I'd say koirat is more like "the dogs" or all dogs - singular partitive is for "counted as a unit but not one, some" plural partitive for "not counted, many, lots of". I figure the idea is that if you're counting them individually, there's not that many of them so it's singular partitive. If you're not counting or use a measurement first, it's plural partitive. Mind you, the word "yksikkö" in Finnish can mean both singular and a unit.
I'm not sure if this is now out of fashion in the UK, but here in the US "datum" and "agendum" are still occasionally used. I live in a small university town and in scientific presentations I hear the singular "datum" fairly frequently. In formal meetings/conferences I also see and hear the singular "agendum". So its not extinct yet, but probably headed there.
I think that American (English) has developed enough in its own direction to be recognised as a separate language from (British) English, in the same way that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (particularly Norwegian and Danish) are very similar but separate and named as such.
@@sem1ot1c Oh no, it's not gone nearly that far yet in the US. A slightly better example would be English as one of the official languages of India, or try English as commonly spoken in Jamaica. There are substantial GRAMMATICAL departures not seen in American English.
I really think that is has. In so many cases the differences are leading to misunderstandings and unintended offence. (Don't ask for examples; as usual when put on the spot I can't recall any but having a Texan son in law we are well aware of the potential! Whilst the two languages are perceived to be 'the same' these misunderstandings will persist even at the highest levels. If American were given the respect it deserves, Brits and Americans would be aware of the potential for differences and not be upset or worse when they are pointed out.
Agenda is an odd one. As far as I am concerned, it is a container, like a notebook, for containing items: zero, one, or many. Thus, you don't change between agendum and agenda because there is only ever one agenda, even if it's empty.
@@starfishsystemsYes, it has. It might be better if people started calling it 'American' rather than 'American English'. At least it would shut up those who keep saying that US English grammar/idiom/pronunciation is inferior to English. It /is/ inferior when considered a 'dialect' but not so, when considered a distinct language. We don't say that German is 'wrong' for spelling 1000ml as 'liter' rather than 'litre', but we do that sort of thing all the time with 'American English'. Treating it as a separate language, albeit derived from English, would forestall many of these differences.
Have just come across your channel and thoroughly enjoying it. As a mildly dyslexic, native English speaker I have always been perplexed by the spelling of our language, which I had such trouble accepting and learning. Your explanations of the origins of the spelling are great. I speak Polish fairly fluently now and French too, as well as rather passive Dutch, so I have learned to delight in the same grammatical complexities you clearly delight in too. Your presentation style is excellent and extremely engaging! Keep them coming. Richard
I’m a scientist, so I do use a lot of Greek and, especially, Latin endings and other grammar. Data, for example, are always plural, datum the singular is used extensively, too. Once learned, it’s just such a hassle to switch to more modern English usage to suit a different audience all the time.
In my job, woe betide those who did not use datum & data correctly!
@@annesaffer629 I obstinately refuse to use ‘datum’ ever and ‘data’ as anything but a mass noun - damn the torpedoes! I can handle all the woe. (Or is that woes or woa?)
In my field, an applied science area, we only use datum to refer to a fixed reference point. Everything else is data.
As far as double plurals are concerned, you will see the same in dutch as you mentioned for the english "children" In dutch the word for child is "kind" and the old (sometimes still heard) plural was "kinder" (as in German). However, somewhere along the line, we decided to add yet another plural to it, so now it is "kinderen". Something similar happened to "shoe" which (and you will still hear that in Limburg) used to be "schoe" with plural "Schoe-n" which then became the current singular "Schoen" with plural "Schoenen". More recent is the word ¨rail" (from english I believe) with the plural "rails", but now you will hear the word "rails" as the singular and the word "railsen" as plural.
I understand that in the 20th century there was a rage on to de-Germanize Dutch from some grammatical teachings that had been promoted in education. Out went any dative case endings and the genitive case got restricted to being a personal possessive. My suspicion this anti-Germaness and thus pro-Frenchness is a reaction to WW2. To think I almost went into linguistics. Interesting subject but not many career opportunities!
Ooh I have never heard railsen. With rails I often think in a hybrid between singular and plural, like water is used, and I never use a plural for rails because I always mean plural rails
Just to add to your point about some double plurals in Dutch. The commonly used plural for "ei" (egg) is now "eieren" in Dutch instead of the old "eier".
Fascinating, educational, and fun… All rolled up into one. In Chinese, they almost always leave their plural words unchanged, but add a separate word to make it plural, or multiple. For example: 人=man/person-pronounced “rún” (with a rising tone). 人門=men/people- pronounced “rún mǔn” (with two rising tones). Most pronunciations for objects just specify how many, such as: 一個人=one person-pronounced “yī gė rún” 兩個人=two persons-pronounced “lián gė rún” 三個人=three persons-pronounced “sān gė rún” etc. etc. etc… the “rún” sound never changes, and the character always stays the same.
Dear Rob, as a native (swiss)german speaker I love your channel. In our dialect we use many old expressions that have vanished in high german. Example: seer=sore, in high german: schmerzhaft. Or: tiirä=to tire, in high german: quengeln, betteln, ermüden. That's what toddlers do. A plural I always find weird is police ("police are looking into this" vs "die Polizei untersucht das"). And last: German feet are FÜSSE👣 without R. Thank you for your wit( Witz is not exactly the same), I hope to hear more of you Susanne Schnyder
Moose is actually a loanword from an Algonquian language from the East coast of North America! It may have not gained the plural because people assumed it acted like those other words you mentioned 'sheep' etc.
Out of interest, in Algonquian, is "moose" the singular or the plural form ?
@@EeBee51 Algonquian is a group rather than an individual language (like saying 'indo-european', but out of curiousity, I hunted down one of the language members, Abenaki, and found out it's singular, 'Moz'. Plural is "Mozak'. From now on, I'm saying, "Look at all those mozak!"
@@efretheim If you anglicized it to match "moose", would the plural be Muzak?
Speaking of moose, it has another humorous plural: meese, but that one is too informal to use formally.
@@michaels4340 Moosek, Maybe?
German speaker here. I love your content! It is so fascinating to see how the English language has developed. 2:33: I want to add that the old plural versions of "tongue" and "ox", which were formed by adding an "n" sound, are very similar to the modern German plural versions of these words: The plural of "Zunge" is "Zungen", and the plural of "Ochse" is "Ochsen". Adding an "n" for plural is still very common in modern day German: We have "Scheren" (scissors) in our drawers and "Lampen" (lamps) on our ceiling, we wear "Blusen" (blouses), "Hosen" (trousers) and "Brillen" (glasses) and we are afraid of "Spinnen" (spiders) and "Schlangen" (snakes).
We have "Dächer" (roofs, Dach) on our "Köpfe" (heads, Kopf). We go out of our "Türe" (doors, Tur) and ride our "Fahrräder" (bikes, Fahrrad). German is fun xD
And Madchen (girl) is NEUTER...
@@paulwilliamdixon3674 Mädchen
since you brought up Ochsen. You may find it interesting that in english an Oxen is a castrated bull calf, where an intact bull calf grows up to be a bull, a steer is a castrated bull calf raised for beef, and eaten before it is old enough to be an oxen for work. in German we have Ochsen, Bullen, and Stier, but a Stier is an intact bull calf. zuchtstier and zuchtbulle means the same. That did confuse me at first when i moved to the US.
So "Brillenn" in German is the root word to "Brilliant " in English? If true, then that lends a whole new meaning to Brilliant. It means that someone "focused to determine a newly revealed truth " rather than "was struck with a bolt of inspiration ".
As a writer, these videos are so much fun. Giving me an even bigger and more accurate vocabulary. Love it.
All of these things exist in Swedish too and to a much larger extent than in English. The plural of "man" is "män" except for when you're talking about the army or the police, where forms like "man" and "mannar" are used. But we've got some other irregular plurals too like gås > gäss (goose > geese), mus > möss (mouse > mice) and lus > löss (louse > lice). Then there is the group of longer umlauted plurals like fot > fötter (foot > feet), hand > händer (hand > hands), rot > rötter (root > roots) and tand > tänder (tooth > teeth). And a lot of neuter nouns have the same form in the singular and the plural, so much that this is actually the most normal way to make a plural out of neuter nouns. But a group of common gender nouns which mostly are words for occupations or ethnicities and nationalities also have the same form in the singular and the plural. Examples of this is "lärare" (teacher > teachers), "magiker" (magician > magicians), "italienare" (Italian > Italians) and "indier" (Indian > Indians).
Interesting, it’s very similar to German
@@jenm1 Yes, it is two related languages.
Plurals in English are so much easier to wrap your head around than the ones in Welsh. We have many different plural endings in Welsh and there's no real pattern to it at all. You just have to learn all the different plural forms on a word-by-word basis. Word stress is always on a the penultimate syllable too, so adding an extra syllable will affect where the stress falls, this change in stress can also cause some letters to change their sound (mostly the letter Y which can sound /ɪ/, /ə/ or /iː/ depending on the syllable). Some examples, with singular followed by plural: -au/-iau (actores/actoresau - actresses; cwrs/cyrsiau - courses) -on/-ion (athro/athrawon - teachers; prawf/profion - tests) -i (trerf/trefi - towns) -oedd (cenedl/cenhedloedd - nations) -od (cath/cathod - cats) -ed (pryf/pryfed - insects) -edd (dant/dannedd - teeth) -ydd (gwlad/gwledydd - countries) -feydd (amgueddfa/amgueddfeydd - museums), -iaid (blaidd/bleiddiaid - wolves) Some irregular ones such as: (tŷ/tai - houses; castell/cestyll - castles; asgwrn/esgyrn - bones) Some where you drop a suffix to make a plural: (coeden/coed - trees; plentyn/plant - children) That's not even getting into how different regions can have different words too (capel/capeli/capelau/capelydd - chapels)
Yes, but there is a death rate associated with the dangers of trying to learn Welsh so let's not go there for safety's sake eh? ,-)
Wales is full of geniuses as it takes an Einstein to master the language.
Oh but there is a pattern.
Also one F is a V and 2 F is F as in of and off
Also, the plurals in Welsh only apply to an unspecified number of the entity. If talking about a specific number, the singular form is used. e.g. Cath (a cat), cathod (cats), dwy gath (two cats, effectively "two cat")
Actually that's exactly the way you make plurals in Persian language, with adding -an. For example Baradar-an means Brotheren, Maradar-an means Mothers, or Doghtar-an means daughters. Now I have a wider view about the fascinating journey of Indo-European Languages 👍✨🌟
Also cool to know that "Iran" is actually the plural name for the word "Ir" or "Ar", adjective "Aryan".
kzhead.info/sun/lK6vhq-ymX94nmw/bejne.html This a fantastic song in Late Middle Persian language, you can clearly see that the word "Iran" is used as the plural for "Ir"
Are these PIE words? They seem like they are very similar to their Germanic counterparts?
@@JM-The_Curious Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian, believes that Germanic tribes originally migrated from Iran and settled in Europe. This was a key reference in the Aryan Race theory. Although there isn't sufficient evidence to prove the point, one thing remains clear; the languages are both Indo-European and share many words together. Even the grammar is almost the same; I would say over %90. Very similar indeed. Also, there are theories of where these terms (Madar, Pedar, etc.) come from. Like Pedar is believed to be Pa-Daar means (foot-out), the person who was always out of the house working, or Ma-dar (we-out), someone who we come out of her, or dogh-dar (milk-out), someone who milks the animals! (Daar is the same as Door in English, and also means out in Persian) They all make perfect sense if you speak Farsi. But who knows the truth! 🤷🏻
I can't buy the Pliny the Elder hypothesis. I'd look toward explanations that incorporate more recent evidence of population movements with DNA as well as language. But that's a really interesting response, thanks. Very interesting to hear the thoughts on the etymology of madar, pedar and doghdar. The DNA side of this, along with movements of people, is one of my big current interests, so it's very interesting how it intersects with language and linguistics.
I remember being taught at school that the change from 'f' to 'v' in the middle of a word for plurals was because the consonant was between two vowels, thank you for explaining further as to WHERE it comes from originally. And I rather like the sound of ''speaking in tongen'' as opposed to ''speaking in tongues''. I think I'm going to begin using this plural instead.
I like the regularity of plurals in Turkish. You add lar or ler directly to the end of the noun based on vowel harmony (based on the final vowel sound). "a, ı, o, u" get a lar and "e, i, ö, ü" get a ler.
As an ESL teacher, I'm fascinated with your videos. They've helped me go deeper than "it's just crazy English" when answering students' questions. The "f" vs. "v" sounds are tough for Latin American Spanish L1 students. Thanks for your great work!
Owing to the two sounds being much less distinct from each other in spoken español. S and Z also. Strong differentiation within these pairs is a hallmark of an English speaker.
It seems to me the real toughies are the English short U sound, and the recessed R. Some English speakers never really master the trilled R. I put that down to their never having played with toy trucks as kids and making motor noises.
@@w.reidripley1968 ironically, some latinos cannot roll their Rs. I roll Rs better than some of my latino family. 🥴
I just found this channel and I love it. An odd plural I learned recently is the animal mouse is mice but the computer mouse is mouses.
No. In English, a computer mouse uses 'mice' as its plural.
I have no idea why I find this kind of stuff fascinating, but I do. Good explanations too.
It always enjoyable to hear someone talk about something they love.
Along with panini and biscotti which are often used as singular in English, there's opera, which is the plural of opus. But now it's firmly entrenched as a singular in English, so that's a fun one!
Hello Robert Opera in Italian means work (singular) and the plural is opere for example Le opere di Dante In Italian opera is singular and in this case English did not make hash of it. You could argue that Italian made a mess of the Latin Opus but that is another matter (and complicated!).
@@davidforbes2557 That Italian made a hash of the Latin plural opera is exactly what I meant.
I wish he'd give the other singulars. He gave "panino" and I know "pieróg". What are the rest? (yeah, I'll google them) "biscotto" "grafitto" ...I see a pattern here
@@RobertKelleyPhD nobody made a hash of anything. Opera already existed in Latin language also as a collective plural, and therefore referred to as a singular noun. It just kept being this way.
@@CeccoGrullo But in Italian, it's not a collective noun, as far as I know. Maybe you can connect the dots for me?
English took many forms of plurals from Latin, which makes it even stranger. In Portuguese there are some strange plurals too, like: Glass: Óculos which in the plural becomes óculos Goal: Gol which in the plural becomes gols or golos in European Portuguese Bad: Mal which in the plural becomes males Blue: Azul which in the plural becomes azuis Station: estação which in the plural becomes estações Bread: pão which in the plural becomes pães Pencil: lápis which in the plural become lápis Portuguese: português which in plural becomes portugueses Hand: Mão which in the plural becomes mãos Player: jogador which in the plural becomes jogadores Abajour: Abajur which in the plural becomes abajurs or abajures Paparazzo: paparazzo which in the plural becomes paparazzi Anything: qualquer which in the plural becomes quaisquer Loyal: fiel which in the plural becomes fiéis Stable: estável which in the plural becomes estáveis
Having skimmed over the comments, I’m not sure if this might’ve already been mentioned, but words borrowed from French that end in ‘-eau’ still frequently retain the original pluralization by adding and ‘x’ to the end of the word (e.g. tableau[-x], plateau[-x], chateau[-x], beau[-x], etc.), although replacing the ‘x’ with an ‘s’ seems to be increasingly acceptable in mainstream English - not to mention perhaps less commonly used pluralizations like bijou[-x], bayou[-x], jeu[-x], etc.
Hi Rob! Thanks for the video! Sometimes in Russian we have weird plurals too, when it comes to words of foreign origin. For example, an informal word for “a dollar” is “бакс”, which is originated from an English word “bucks”, which is plural. So in Russian, when we have more then one dollar, we say “баксы”, which is something like “buckses” in English.
That makes total sense because it's a Russian word at this point so it doesn't need to follow English grammar rules. It explains why panini is singular in English but plural in Italian.
Dollar's nick name is not from word bucks but from back. Green back of Lincoln's dollar.
Russian language is very difficult. I am still cant understand why the name harry in russian gary, gary in russian also gary same on harold. Harold in russian garold, Harrison is garison but garrison also garison.
yeah, the same Russians do with boots, rails, jeans and even chicks, we pluralize them once more time
Another one of my favourites is бизнесмен (biznesmen = businessMAN) and бизнесмены (biznesmeni = businessMEN)
Your channel is the most interesting one that I've found, and the comments are always just as fascinating to read. You bring all of the countries together to discuss what they have in common. It's delightful!
Rhythmically if I get half a chance it will be octopi on paper…
Amazing video! Old English seems to be a fascinating stage of English...It would be worthwhile to know more about it, just to understand the modern English better! Please make more videos on topics related to Old English :-) It's amazing how German has retained so many old features whereas English has lost them. Old English seems like a sister language to German, albeit being much older than the latter...
As a native Dutch speaker these plurals make very much sense! Old English shows many similarities to our common ancestors. For example house and housen - Dutch: huis en huizen. Or raven - Dutch: raaf and raven.
Aw, you left out my three favourite plurals, "sphinges", "cherubim", and "passersby"! The first is from Latin, the second from Hebrew, and the third is a noun phrase that ended up turning into a single-word noun (but because people pluralised the noun within the phrase, the -s ended up stuck in the middle of the word instead of at the end). Ithkuil III (a constructed language) takes plurals to an extreme. The closest analogue to grammatical number in that language is "configuration"; instead of just "singular" and "plural", there are nine different types of "configuration"; I won't go into them specifically, but other than a "singular" and an "identical/complementary dual" configuration, if you want to express "a group of things", that's affixed differently depending on whether the things are alike (e.g. "a group of birds of the same species" vs "a group of birds of various species"), and how much the group as a whole is a single thing (e.g. "a set of shelves" vs "a set of connected shelves" vs "a set of shelves that form a bookcase"). Oh, and you can also configure verbs in the same way (e.g. "to light up" vs "to flash once" vs "to blink on and off randomly" vs "to blink on and off in a regular pattern" vs etc.). Fun!
Along with passersby, we have culs-de-sac.
@@boriskortiak320 And "fleurs-de-lis"!
Sphinges?? What next, lynges and minges?
There are plenty of plurals where the"-s" plural ending is attached to the main noun, such as editors-in-chief or mothers-in-law, but I can't think right now of any that, like your passersby, aren't hyphenated. I shall have to try to think of one! I think "passersby" is unusual in having the modifier at the end--as opposed to bystander or onlooker, for example, or, indeed, bypass. Aren't quirks of the language fun?
@@elainechubb971 How about Attorneys General.
I've always been a word nerd, but after home schooling my children (one of which is dyslexic) and teaching ESL, I've been so much more interested in understanding WHY our spelling is as crazy as it is! Thank you for all of these videos, I find them fascinating!
English spelling is "crazy" because everything went nuts in 1066, when the Normans conquered the English. The English language is technically Germanic in grammar but predominantly (although not entirely) Romantic in vocabulary. That means it is a massive amalgam of words borrowed from other languages with other phonologies represented in other archaic writing systems that didn't assimilate into English well - why we have silent initial "h" in loanwords from French like "hour" and "honour", or from Greek like "rhino". Or why Irish names like "Siobhan" are pronounced "Shuh-vawn". Remember, writing is less definitive language but more often arbitrary graphic representation of language - especially across languages. Also English has its only vestiges in spelling of former pronunciations like both the "k" and "gh" in words like "knight". And the Latin alphabet has only 5 or 6 letters called "vowels" while English has around 20 distinct vowel phonemes, not to mention the regional allophones those phonemes break down into. Furthermore, English has also undergone several Vowel Shifts in the early stages of Modern English, resulting in spellings that are locked to a specific time period but are pronounced in a variety of ways as a myriad of dialects spread across the British colonies before and after the Shifts. George Bernard Shaw once tried to reform English spelling. The issue is that there are so many dialects of English that each would be spelled differently, creating more ambiguity and discord in intercommunication than it would unify.
@@uiscepreston I think the Danes messed it up first, though the Angles and Saxons also had different dialects which give different words
Hey Rob, a fellow philologist here. The plural of fish is indeed fish, but only if they are of the same species. After all, one would not say "All the fish of the sea" when "All the fishes of the sea" is preferred. My best regards, Dave
"all the fish of the sea" vs "all the fishes of the sea" can have different meanings, so it's not just a matter of preference. Other comments here have mentioned that "fishes" is often used for plural of "fish" in the type meaning. (type vs token, species vs individual, etc). For me, I can accept both "fish" and "fishes" as the plural with a type meaning, but there is a general preference in English to add the "s" for type plurals even when it can't be used for token plurals (e.g. nobody says "5 fishes" to mean 5 individual organisms). Hence it's better to say "there are 5 deers from the eastern region that have white hair near the front legs and only 2 deers with this feature in the western region", in a context where zoologists are studying deer and talk about them all the time, making the deer type meaning salient in their discourse. "all the fishes of the sea" can only mean "all the fish types of the sea". It can't mean "all the individual fish of the sea". But maybe it can for some people? I question myself whether I could say "all the individual fishes of the sea" and maybe even "5 individual fishes" could be used if one wished? Usually there is a lot of freedom and variation in how a speaker can shift the meanings of nouns between singular, plural, mass and collective, so it can be hard to say what is acceptable or not. As far as the other sentence, "all the fish of the sea", I find this sentence more natural than the other, because "fish" is mass noun in the most natural reading, even though in theory it could be read as a plural token or plural type. The mass reading is no different than "all the gold in the world", which is more natural than "all the golds in the world", meaning "all the types of gold". In the context of fish, the speaker might be conceptualizing the genetic diversity of fish--their colors, shapes, behaviors, etc--which shifts the meaning to the type/species/genus/category meaning, but my first reaction to that sentence is to conceptualize the mass meaning, as in "all the fish of the sea might not suffice to meet the future nutritional needs of the human population". An example to bias the type meaning is "all the fish of the sea have proven to be fine sustenance for humankind through the ages". In this example, I find "fish" and "fishes" about equally acceptable, but perhaps you would prefer "fishes"? As a tiny quibble, when you said "of the same species", it could be any category besides species. It could be breed, subspecies, genus, tribe, family, etc, so a more generic term like "type" or "category" works better.
I should've added a 3rd example to bias the plural token meaning of "fish", as in "all the fish in this tank have lymphocystis but only 2 fish in this other tank have it".
This is my favorite type of language content. Really scratches an itch
4:45 Sistren isn’t actually long gone. It is still used in Jamaican patois in England. My dad uses it all the time and he was born/bred in Nottingham.
Yeah, I was confused when he said "sistren" was long gone. I can't believe he's never heard it! It's interesting though: because I've only ever heard it coming from a Caribbean English context I'd always assumed "sistren" was invented more recently in that English to mirror "brethren". Maybe it's just that it's the only form of English where "sistren" survived and it disappeared everywhere else!
Same with childer, it can be the plural of child in Ireland
The Czech word for a female cousin is sestřenice. Not far off.
A lovely word, let's try to revive it!
¡¡VERY INTERESTING FACT!! I would have never thought that was the case.
You covered the rule, but "beeves" is my favorite English plural. Also, I was taught "Fishes" and "Peoples" were acceptable if talking about multiple groups of these thing. Neat video as always. Edit: I get a reply on this comment every few days and I just want you guys to know that I was taught about fishes and peoples etc already. Thanks to all who are confirming my education. I was just sharing this knowledge as they are some of my favorite plurals. I wasn’t questioning their correctness. Much love.
Yes, 'peoples' as in different groups of people is a different kind of plural. Not sure I have heard 'fishes' used like that, but I believe I have heard it with some other words. But "beeves" ? are you telling us that "beeves" is used for the plural of bees? Please say "yes"! Long ago one of my children (hmm, we also say "childers" now and then, for fun) started saying "Here is the beehive, Where are the beeves". We pretty much always say it that way now.
I've heard that fishes is acceptable for groups of fish, but it's sounds like a cute mistake, rather like sheeps would.
@@josephineherbohn160 Not bees. It’s the plural of beef. Cute story though. Lol
@@nataliebutler I think I first encountered it in the song Joy to the World, “joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.” I think I tried correcting it, but my teacher explained what it meant. I think something similar happened with “peoples” which is probably why I quickly link them together.
@@nataliebutler In the King James Version of the Bible--the standard English-language Protestant Bible until more modern translations began to emerge in the late 19th century (I think), in the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, miraculously converting a small amount of food to enough to feed five thousand people (with twelve basketfuls of leftovers), the wording is that he took "five loaves and two fishes." Somewhere between the early 17th century and now, this plural became archaic and confined only to show the different species are meant.But if you were brought up reading the KJV, the usage is probably familiar.
I started watching this video thinking "he's probably going to explain a lot of non-standard English plurals without getting to any recent additions to English with non-standard plurals." More specifically, the example I had in my head was the word "pokémon" which has the plural of "pokémon". Lo and behold, the explanation you gave for animals somehow managed to explain it anyway lol.
1 pokemon 2 pokemon, not pokemons?? How odd. In Dutch animals have plurals. 1 schaap, 2 schapen, 1 hond, 2 honden etc.
@@hetedeleambacht6608 In English, most animals also have plurals (1 cat, 2 cats, etc), but for some reason, specifically words like "fish", "moose", and "pokemon" just don't. It's not even all pokemon: we usually say "1 pikachu", "2 pikachus", "1 charizard", "2 charizards", etc
That's in keeping with Japanese grammar where plural forms are optional, only used for emphasis or clarification. Normally they just rely on context.
Another great video among many of your “videos”. Basically if one wants to master English then one should learn French Latin old English, Norse, and German .
This is incredibly interesting. I'm an ESL teacher and find your videos very helpful when I'm trying to explain some of these anomalies to students. Thanks for all the interesting linguistic facts.
Wow, this is great! I am German, but studied (20 years back!) English as well as medieval German, and there are a lot of similarities. (in fact: if you know English you can read - or at least guess your way through - old Saxon documents). Absolutely love your content!!!! We also have those strange plural forms.
Well, English and German kept on branching out. When I was posted to Germany, I discovered that I could read the Nibelungenlied in Medieval German much more easily than the same work in Modern German. [Both in Latin letters]
Im Deutschen gibt's fast NUR unregelmäßige Pluralformen, nach dem Motto "die Ausnahme bestätigt die Regel"
I've been casually learning German. I find that the German I do know is more helpful when reading old English examples than knowing modern English.
@@replica9000 As a German I think so too. Not only words, but grammer too.
@@replica9000 Englisch hat sich viel mehr verändert als Deutsch; darum sind für Deutsche die Canterbury Tales leichter verständlich als für gegenwärtiges Englisch sprechende Menschen.
Rob, I love your videos! I am an American living in a former British colony in Africa and a fellow lover of language. Both of the Bantu languages I have learned over the past 11 years employ more than a dozen noun classes. At first they are bewildering, but after a while you start to just "feel" them. Each class of nouns is pluralized in a different way (with a few overlaps), but never at the end of the word. Either the beginning of the word is changed ("umuti," tree, becomes "imiti"; "icintu," thing, becomes "ifintu"), or the word stays the same but the verb or adjective changes to indicate a plural ("inkoko yandi," my chicken, becomes "inkoko shandi," my chickens). In Shona (spoken in Zimbabwe), certain words of the noun class which is pluralized by adding "ma-" at the front of the word require a consonant change, e.g. "gomba," hole, becomes "makomba." This gets really interesting when the plural is derived from English, but the singular is required. For example, for the word "papers" most people use the quasi-English "mapepa" (in the plural). However, plurals in that noun class only have a "p" following the "ma-" if the singular starts with a "b." So, you end up calling a singular piece of paper "bepa," which bears less resemblance to its English counterpart! Congrats on your wedding, by the way!
I love this channel. It's so fun to learn these random facts about language. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for pierogi! Criterion exist in polish as a Latinised "kryterium", plural kryteria Very interesting stuff. etymology is so rarely looked at and I love it. 🇵🇱
In Dutch too: criterium-criteria
Is "pieróg" that hard to pronounce? Pierogies are still fun though given how many nouns in polish pretty much don't have singular form "pierogi" mistaken for singular isn't that wird. As fot criterion, I was sure the word criterium is used in English too... Turns out it is... An has completely different meaning. So thanks. I hope I didn't make that mistake too often.
In Arabic, there's a different word for when there are 2 of something. There is single, dual & plural Example 1 month - shahr 2 months - shahrain 3+ months - shuhr
I always look forward to your videos. I’ve watched more than I can remember. Much love from South Africa 🇿🇦
Thank you so much - that was absolutely fascinating and I must admit, it has stimulated me to discover more about old English (somewhere I'm sure!)
In Hungarian, there are a couple things that we use in the singular, but they are meant to be plurals. Dual body parts, such as the eyes, ears, arms or legs are often used with singular while referring to both, and when referring to only one of them, we need to specify either left/right or just say "half" of it. So a pirate would be "half-eyed". The same applies to things like shoes and gloves, where using the plural implies multiple pairs, so saying "I bought a glove" implies a pair by default.
Interesting!
Fascinating. As a native English speaker it’s great to learn stuff we take for granted. 👍🏼
Wonderful symphatic insightful yet entertaining video.
Absolutely super - thanks!
I'm an ex-Brit whose been living in Germany for 15 years now and I still find the plural forms difficult to remember for a variety of reasons. There are many ways to make a plural, very few rules (e.g. anything ending in -chen stays the same in plural and no word ending in -e in the singular stays the same as -e is one of the ways to make a plural) and a few rough guidelines with too many exceptions to be of much use. And then there is the "emergency plural form", i.e. -s for when the other plural forms just don't work, e.g. Autos as Auton, Autoe, Autoen, Äuto, etc. would just be silly. One of the things that should help one to learn plural forms is simply hearing them, but this doesn't work very well in German. Because of the dative -n. Any plural noun that can sensibly add an n at the end should do so for plurals in the dative case. Just because. That means that Hände (plural of Hand) becomes Händen in dative. That means just because I often hear a plural form with an n at the end, that does not mean that it should be so in other cases. Then there's the the good old "n-Deklanation", which means that some masculine words (called weak nouns) have an n added on the end when used in singular form in any case other than nominative. So when you hear the word "Löwen", it could be singular - but not in nominative - or it could be plural. Finally, glasses, jeans, shorts, and trousers (die Brille, die Jeans, die Shorts, die Hose), are all confusing for me. They are all feminine and used in the singular form, but as die is "the" for feminine AND plural and -e at the end can indicate feminine or plural, I often try to use the singular forms as plural, i.e. "my new glasses are great" (meine neue Brille SIND toll) instead of the correct "my new glasses is great" (meine neue Brille IST toll) because "die Brille" sounds plural to me, which matches my English expectation. Guess who recently had some confusing conversations with his optician!
A lot of the funny plurals in English are because of their German roots; we Romanised many of them in English (we got the 's' plural from French) but for some reason not all.
Jeans and shorts of course are English plurals that we Germans forgot about because Hose definitively is singular. And Brille used to be plural too, but that was in 1500. They are feminine because plural 'die' and feminine 'die' were confused.
@@stephanpopp6210 "Brille" is called that way because it was first made out of beryllium. There it got its name. In Dutch the glasses are also called "de bril" (singular) and "de brillen" (plural). Dutch itself has a far easier way to form the plural: Just add "en" or "s" with some easy rules for that and very few exceptions (as de koe - de koeien, cow - cows or, same as in English, de kind - de kinderen, child - children).
I guess you haven't encountered the quirk that "Hosen" (in the plural) can be used for one item (as long as it has 2 legs), in which case the singular form can not be used for one trouser leg anymore (even when they are not connected).
@@HenryLoenwind I think that used to be a Northern German way of speaking of a pair of trousers (I have relatives there). But this is definitely no standard high German.
When my daughter was little she thought the singular of "geese" was "gee". "Minima" and "maxima" are actually in pretty common use in mathematics and technical fields. And "datum" has some specialized meanings. Generally it means a reference point or reference frame that other things are measured relative to, for instance in surveying.
I met a German tourist who thought it was goose / goo
I have heard datum from a few science youtubers (I think NileRed uses it, could be wrong), the first time I heard it I did a mental double-take. I knew that datum was the proper singular form, but had never heard anyone actually use it.
When I was little I knew that "St." on a street sign was short for street, so I thought that "Rd." was short for "reed"!
I’ll accept the blame - mand/mænd, gås/gæs 🤐
@@markdavis7397 Well you are talking to Matt McIrvin here. It doesn't get any geekier than that!
Waited eagerly for you to touch on my favorite plural: Opera. (Plural of opus.)
Thanks again for sharing
In Texas, we have a substantial Czech influence, and it can be seen in the prevalence of restaurants serving kolache, which is actually plural for kolach. They are very similar to a "danish." Of course, even though kolache is the plural form, lots of folks here will use kolaches as the plural. There's also plenty of folks who bristle at the use of the term "sausage kolache," and instead refer to it as klobasneky, which is plural for klobasnek. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolach_(cake) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klob%C3%A1sn%C3%ADk
Because kolache is an English word, so it's logical for the plural to be kolaches. It happens to be of Czech origin which is neither really here nor there. Lots of very bazic English words have all kinds of origins.
Wow. I got super into your channel a few days ago and then found you stopped making them a year ago. Now this drops. Amazing. Keep up the amazing work. These are fascinating.
This is so fascinating! Now I know why my wife tells me to ‘put my shin on’! I would appear that ‘shoen’ has hung around in Scots (as ‘shin’) long after it has been forgotten in English. Thank you!
Here's more for you, Rob. I'm afraid I've long ago forgotten my sources since I learnt much of this before there was an internet. But you should do a video on the words that have changed their plurals, past tense, etc over the years. I had read that some words have been 'normalised' from their original conjugations/declensions. I can't think of a good example right now, so I'll use 'to drown'. The original past tense was drownded, but eventually became drowned. I also read a hypothesis that proposed that when someone was trying to think of the proper conjugation/declension for a word and couldn't remember it, they were likely to use a "normal" conjugation/declension instead. Usually, this would happen to words not in common usage. If you commonly used irregular verbs (think 'to be'), then you were familiar with the various forms, as odd as they may have seemed. But if it weren't a common word, say "to flarg", to reflect upon one's life at the end of it (yes, that is made up) where the proper past tense would have been "flurg", but you probably hadn't heard that in your lifetime, or if you did, it was so long ago you wouldn't have remembered it, you were likely to say "flarged" instead. And over time, flurg would have become normalised to flarged, like drownded to drowned. I have to wonder now if this explains the original plural for book. In Old English, the plural for bōc (OE book) was bēc (pronounced "beech", btw). I would imagine it wasn't very common for people to be talking about books a thousand years ago, so when the concept of multiple books became common enough that it became a usual part of the language, the bēc had been mostly forgotten, so the plural became "books" instead. I'd like to know your take on this. By the way, I'm sorry I didn't discover your channel until just now. As you can probably tell, I like words, too. Keep up the good work. I'm thoroughly enjoying this.
One more interesting point that non-natives often get wrong: The way the regular plural "s" is pronounced changes depending on the situation. Following vowels and certain consonants (like the infamous "L" you mentioned), it's actually pronounced like a "Z". I can't tell you how many times I've heard non-natives mess this up ("I have lots of storieS from my travelS" instead of "I have lots of storieZ from my travelZ"). Weird that this consonant shift is shown with F/V, but not when it comes to the plural S.
yup, the final S is often pronounced like a Z Mars is actually said "Marz"
In phonology class, we treated the English "s" ending as an underlying /z/ that remains the same after voiced sounds and changes to /s/ after unvoiced ones (i.e. assimilates in voicing). But I haven't studied the history of English much, so I can't explain the spelling issue.
There was no letter 'z' in Old English. There was no letter 'q' either.