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."
@@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.
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
Many years ago I started teaching myself Ancient Egyptian, which is a Semitic language. It was the first time I encountered a language with not only singular and plural, but also dual, for referring to two of something. Other Semitic languages like Arabic also have duals. So cool!
We do something similar in Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) where the plural form is a semi-different word from the singular, but the dual is the aspirated form of the singluar. eg. The word for dog is cù, and "one, two, three" is "aon, dhà, trì". Counting dogs is: - Aon cù - Dhà chù - Trì coin There are exceptions, and words beginning with vowels and un-aspiratable consonants (such as R) use the singular for the dual
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.
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".
Apparently, the plural of "spatula" is just "spatula". I am both surprised and underwhelmed. Apparently, the word I was looking for was "disappointed".
@@tiermacgirl It depends what was used as a source for the translation, especially in biblical translations. Vulgate used LXX (Septuaginta, a greek translation of the hebrew bible done by 70 scholars), so all translations that use Vulgate or LXX as a basis will use the latinised / graecianised forms. Starting with Luther's Old Testament, he took the Hebrew Old Testament as a source. And it gets REALLY interesting if it went something like "Greek/Sanskrit -> Arabic -> Latin -> English".
"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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
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
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."
@@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
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 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.
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'.
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.
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” 😊
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.
@@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.
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".
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! ❤
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.
"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.
Yeah, though I consider "data" and "datum" to be different words. Data IMO is uncountable, with the singular being "a data point" or "a piece of data", much like "a drop of water". A datum is a physical location or surface on a physical object which measurements are taken from.
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.
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.
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"
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”
@@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
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.
@@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.)
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.
@@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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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".
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.
@@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.
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.
Great to see you're still making videos. I think these are the most entertaining English language videos on the RUclips and you most certainly deserve more views.
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!
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".
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.
@@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?)
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
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 ".
great lesson. We non native english speakers always admire English for just adding the famous "s" at the end. But, as you explain here, there are some loop holes even in English. Excellent work, as always! Georg (German teacher and happy to be one)
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.
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 👍✨🌟
ruclips.net/video/aJvVKzbMBk4/видео.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"
@@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.
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)
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")
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.
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.
@@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'm not an English native speaker, yet I am fascinated by Rob's explanations. I will recommend this video to all my English teaching acquaintances. Thanks a lot Rob!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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!
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!
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!
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
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!
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]
@@replica9000 Englisch hat sich viel mehr verändert als Deutsch; darum sind für Deutsche die Canterbury Tales leichter verständlich als für gegenwärtiges Englisch sprechende Menschen.
You are easily one of the best presenters on here and on any other platform including TV. I love your content and hope that one day you delve into Esperanto.
My favourite example of multiple plurals at the end of the same word is "blinis". The Russian singular is "blin", the Russian plural is "bliny", and the -s is added in Western European languages. Now when someone says blinises or similar, they're using three plurals at the same time.
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.
As an English teacher in a Chinese university these videos are great. I have to spend time subtitling them because my freshers aren't the best listeners/understanders yet, but they are really useful. (I've learnt a few things myself too BTW) The main ESL problems from (Chinese professors to high school students) are plurals, tenses, articles, collocation and prepositions. Thats the big five. Added bonus, my name is Rob too 🙂
@@amybee40 In the English language, collocation refers to a natural combination of words that are closely affiliated with each other. Some examples are "pay attention", "fast food", "make an effort", and "powerful engine".
In Portuguese generally we just put a S for plural: casa -> casas; but there are a lot of exceptions... dog: cão -> cães man: homem -> homens easy: fácil -> fáceis civil: civil -> civis cannon: canhão -> canhões german: alemão -> alemães hand: mão -> mãos Some words accept two or three different plurals: * ancião: anciãos, anciães, anciões (elder, ancient, old person etc) * guardião: guardiões, guardiães (guardian) And there is the weirdest word: Qualquer -> Quaisquer The plural is in the middle of the word wft Sorry my bad english. I'm lazy.
Well, qualquer is basically the two words 'qual quer' ('which + want' = whichever you want = any) and the plural just turns the 'which' into plural: 'quais quer' And while there are some different plurals, they at least all end with an s. You just simply have to remember that ão becomes õe + s, em becomes en + s and il becomes is
Never apologize for the quality of your English! You must have worked very hard to have the command of the language that you do. But here’s one thing I learned many years ago from a Music Teacher: Language, like Music, must be practiced in order to maintain your grip on it. It’s a “use it or lose it” proposition!
There's a particular noun whose plural is sometimes confused with its singular form, to the point that they are swapped. Those cube-shaped things with dots that are often used in board games. The proper singular form is "die", and the plural form is "dice". However, I've heard most people use "dice" for the singular form, such as "Throw the dice". But what's weird, is that I've heard people use "die" as the plural form, as in "I have three die" Also, here are some weird plurals, some of which are archaic, and some of which are just more examples of the types featured in the video: stamen -> stamina* colon -> cola cow -> kine mythos -> mythoi But by far, the weirdest plural in the English language, is one of the most common words in the English language. It is so weird, that the only part that remains the same, is the first letter. person -> people** *Possibly fun fact, stamina in this sense, and stamina in the sense of "being able to do something for a long time", are related, as they both come from the Latin meaning "to stand", related to words such as "stay", "status", "state", and words that come from the Latin "sisto" meaning "I place", such as "insist", "consist", "assist", "exist", "persist", and so on. **person comes from the Latin "persona" meaning "character, mask, role, individuality, a lord, dignity, etc" hence also the words "persona" and "parson" people on the other hand, comes from the Latin "populus" meaning "a nation", which is also related to the Latin "publicus" meaning "of or belonging to the people" (from which "public" comes from), and the Latin "plebs" meaning "common people" which, of course, is where we get "pleb" from, which is usually used in a derogatory manner for a member of the lower class.
The plural of “person” is “persons”, not “people”. I am a lawyer and in legal writing we say “two persons”. “People” means the group of persons but not a specific number. It is common but incorrect to use people for a specified number of persons.
@@allanburton9385 ... Hmmm! Isn't that legalise, and so more formal? "People" is more common (as in community) and therefore more acceptable, and thus, correct in common use.
@@freyatilly I don't think it's necessarily legalese, just correct English, but I agree with you that it's not common usage and that our language is evolving that direction. I, like everyone else, say "people" for "persons" all the time. Thanks for your comment! Language is fun.
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.
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 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.
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".
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. 🇵🇱
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.
It's true that for a long time, the 3 words "Octopus", "Fish" and "Cactus" have always intrigued me by their plural forms, so thank you so much for the video and just every other video in general! I'm glad you came back!
I'm pretty confident the plural of octopus is octopuses (in English at least). For the longest time I'd say "I saw an octopus; in fact I saw two" to avoid a plural.
Fish can be pluralised as fishes when referring to more than one species. The first time I heard otopodes spoken it was pronounced octo-po-days. Not sure which is correct.
It gets even more weird with virus and viruses, as in Latin, virus, meaning something like slime or toxin, has no plural at all. So all plural forms of virus you can come up with are late inventions anyway.
@@stegra5960 alga algae, vertebra vertebrae. And when do you use es or s on a word ending in o? Tomatoes, yes, but Eskimoes, no. Americans say a herd of giraffes but Brits say a herd of giraffe, but apparently those aren't hard and fast rules, going by examples online.
I speak Spanish, as a second language. I’ve always appreciated how easy it is to make plurals in Spanish. If the noun ends in a vowel, add an ‘s.’ If the noun ends in a consonant, add ‘es.’ Off the top of my head I can’t think of any exceptions.
It seems simple, but really there are many more rules and exceptions. Not all words ending in a consonant are pluralized with -es (“chips”, “tórax”, “cactus”, “clics”, “polisíndeton”…) and not all words ending in vowels form the plural with -s (“yoes”, “noes”, “bisturíes”, “tabúes”…).
@@Scivolemulo Interesting. Thinking on it I have seen ‘clic s’ before. Many of the words you mentioned, as taking s rather than es are foreign words, mostly English, and use the foreign plural. Other foreign words I have heard in conversation using the Spanish version. I have also heard “nos” (not to be confused with ‘nos.’) ‘Yos’ and ‘tabus.’ Without the es. But this common speech rather correct grammar. It’s been a long time since I studied Spanish, so I’ve probably forgotten such exceptions. I mostly hear common speech patterns now, common conversations, which sometimes doesn’t use correct, and obscure grammar. Ied
@@RicktheCrofter As a native Spanish speaker allow me to point out that you are most wrong or to be more accurate, estás haciendo un papelón inventando reglas que no existen en para idioma que no entendés, gringo al pedo.
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.
New subscriber here, this is exactly the kind of word nerd content I was craving. My native language is Italian, where MOST plurals are fairly straightforward: in a vast majority of cases, a masculine noun ending in -o turns into -i, and a feminine noun ending in -a becomes -e. However, there are a handful of cases in which not only is the ending irregular, but the noun switches gender when it's pluralized. Example: l'uovo, the egg (masculine) --> le uova, the eggs (feminine). My understanding of it is this: Italian is still gendered, but as mentioned in the video, Latin had three genders, while Italian only retains two, masculine and feminine, and has lost the neuter. Hence, some nouns have preserved the old Latin neuter ending, but because an -a is largely perceived as feminine, the plural becomes feminine, even if the singular is masculine. And don't even get me started on the cases in which both plurals are acceptable, one regular, one mimicking the Latin neuter, but they may have somewhat different connotations... yeah, we're a little complicated, especially if you're coming from a language with little to no indication of gender.
I've always enjoyed the fact that the plural of "schema" is "schemata", just for the aesthetics of it - though it is a pretty niche word. For the record, I use "data" as a plural, but I still don't ever use "datum". Anyway, a fun video, as always!
@@pierrefley5000 Same for Dutch. The plural can be 'data' or 'datums'. As a reviewer, I make sure that 'datums' is used, to avoid confusion with 'data' (same meaning as in English, but used as a plural). And for 'data', I prefer 'gegevens', which is a literal translation from Latin. The German word 'Daten' for data makes sense here.
Datum commonly gets used as a bit of jargon in surveying and geographic information systems. Any measurement of location will be associated with a horizontal datum and a vertical datum which define what you're treating as zero. So, for example, Earth bulges around the equator; if you used a perfect sphere as your vertical datum for measuring elevation, you would have the ocean's surface well above 0 altitude at the equator and far below it at the poles. Instead, there are several standard models of the Earth's oblateness that are used as the vertical datum when measuring elevations.
Having been deformed by a classical (Dutch) education I instinctively pluralise a words like paradigm as 'paradigmata' which of course is totally wrong in English :-(
I still remember my fascination at overhearing my 3rd-grade teacher (1960) telling another teacher that it was now correct to use "data" as either singular or plural. Later on, I would occasionally be informed by a pedant that "this data" was incorrect as "data are plural." So this was a relatively recent change in English.
What’s interesting about the origin of umlaut is that originally way back in Proto-Germanic these forms were in fact very regular plurals that ended in -iz, which was just a different declension class form of -oz which eventually became our familiar ‘s’ plurals. What happened over time though was that the /i/ vowel in this -iz suffix started to bleed into the vowel in the previous syllable, i.e. in the stem of the noun, causing them to be shifted higher and more front in the mouth, so /u/ would have shifted to /y/ (the ü vowel in German), /o/ shifted to /ø/ (the ö vowel) and /a/ shifted to /æ/ (the vowel in ‘cat’). Initially this effect would have been perceived as very minor, it was “allophonic” and therefore it didn’t really matter all that much as it wasn’t capable of changing one word into another. But because Proto-Germanic (as with most Germanic languages today) had a very prominent word-initial stress, this -iz suffix gradually weakened until it was no longer pronounced at all, and thus what used to be considered a very “minor” effect on the stem vowel was now all of a sudden much more important, as it was the only way to distinguish singulars from plurals, and thus what had been “allophonic” was now “phonemic” in the sense that it was now capable of being contrastive. (Presumably the -oz endings did not meet the same fate either because the /o/ vowel is inherently more salient and therefore more resilient against weakening, or because it did not affect the preceding vowel and so the only way to preserve the singular-plural contrast was to keep the suffix). Note that this happened way back in Proto-Germanic, long before it broke off into the separate languages that eventually became English, Dutch, German etc. which is why some form of umlaut is found in all Germanic languages.
Thank you! I can't believe he didn't bring this up. Mice, men, geese... these are all examples of vowel harmony from the suffix -iz. Eventually the plural suffix was dropped but it resulted in a shifted (raised/fronted) vowel.
And then there is Gothic, which branched off so early (maybe the mid 2nd century AD), that it missed the i-umlaut that was happening in Proto-North-West Germanic.
In Arabic we have: singular masculine and feminine Dual masculine and feminine 3+ masculine and feminine for people And a different form of plurals for non-people The nice thing about it is that the vast majority of nouns are regular and follow a standard form. I know it’s hard to believe it but Arabic has little irregularities in grammar and follows a rigid structure so it makes easy to foreign learners; except of course you need to write from right to left, learn a whole new alphabet and phonetics, and then the 20+ dialects
It is just funny that both of my native language dont have complicated pluralization of words, it's as simple as english adds "s", infact we never even bother to rigidly state the plural form,as it has zero effect on the verb, except in semantic of course. In indonesia we just need to double the word to pluralize words, like mobil-mobil for cars
Arabic has a free form of making sentences , you can have the sentence in SVO, VSO, OVS, VOS etc, and they are all grammatically correct IF, and only if, you get the end-inflection on the words correctly
As an Arabic student, I feel like 90% of the words have a specific plural and not the general one, far worse than English! Also there's this thing that any plural which isn't human will be referred to as a single female. Gets me every time 🥲
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.
"Irregular plurals" in English is what we could almost call "regular" in modern German. Many people struggle with the genders in German, but as a native speaker, I'd rather say the German plurals are the true challenge. You have to learn the plural with every new word. German has seven forms of plural, as partly shown, with -e, with -(e)n, both with/without umlaut, -er, -s (for foreign words or abbreviations), and null plural (unchanged). Unlike in English, in German you can easily see how the umlaut plural is created: 1 Fuß, 2 Füße; 1 Stock, 2 Stöcke, 1 Hand, 2 Hände. But this also explains the English "oo" - >"ee" change: In German, "u" (similar to English "oo") becomes "ü" as umlaut, which sounds like an English "ee" with rounded lips. Or, in the other way, the English "ee" may be an unrounded version of the "ü". Hence, since the Anglosaxons forgot how to say rounded vowels, the ü all became ee, and so you have "foot" -> "feet". The "f" - > "v" change could be explained by (reverse) coda devoicing, an effect we have in German. In German, consonants at the end of the word usually become voiceless (so we have trouble pronouncing English words like "bad", which we usually say as "bat"). So when you take the word "wolf", it ends with an f, which is voiceless. The same is true for "wife" (you don't hear the ending e). When you put them in plural, an s is added, and the former coda consonant moves into the middle, getting its voice back.
I'd actually say that oo>ee is more like the o>ö umlaut; the u>ü is more similar to the ou>i change (mouse>mice; louse>lice) Sie have to remember that those spellings are codified before the great vowel shift, so everything is spelt like it was once pronounced, not like the modern pronunciation (so "oo" is like german "oo" or "oh", "ee" is the same as "ee/eh", and "ou" is the french- and thus, anglo-norman- way of spelling "uh)
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!
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.
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.
Interesting to note the shift in meaning when forming plurals for animals. 'I like dogs' implies a fondness for the animal as a living creature. Same for just about any animal I can think of. Yet, remove the 's' and the implication is that you now enjoy eating the beast.
I would hazard that it's because you're using the noun like it's uncountable. Uncountable nouns are typically material or mass. In the case of "I like dog," "dog" would have the meaning of "meat from a dog," in just the same way as "beef" or "pork."
It is less about the single vs plural distinction and more about a totum pro parte metonymy where the word "dog" is an adjectival noun modifying another noun that has undergone ellipsis, as in "I like dog (meat)." Here "dog" is not used to signify the entirety of "dogness" and all those characteristics that people might like but only the edible material of the canine species....that people might like. This can better be illustrated with an irregular noun. For example, the utterance "I like deer" out of any sort of context is entirely ambiguous. People generally qualify the statement as "I like deer meat" to avoid confusion as to whether they want to pet Bambi or eat him.
Reminded me of a neighbour who we feel had 'hot dog' for lunch every day. They changed dogs every month, the dog would arrive, get fattened, and then disappear. It makes you wonder... especially as they hailed from a country where dog-eating is a cultural thing.
@@uiscepreston Great points. In general we would say, "I like deer", or if we liked to eat Bambi, it would be, "I like venison". I don't know what the descriptive noun for actual dog meat is.
I think you might have had a moment of singular/plural perplexity yourself when you said, "the only criteria to end your plural perplexity is..". This is because "criteria" (plural) should have been "criterion" (singular) as there is just one of them, namely, to watch to the end of the video. I enjoyed your presentation, though, which was engaging and informative. Well done!
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.
One cute one that I learned recently is the regular form for plural noums in Indonesian. To make a plural, you just repeat the noum. So a book is a "buku", and books are "buku buku". Shoes are "sepatu sepatu" while shoe is "sepatu", you get the gist. I find it really charming (I don't speak the language at all, I just know some trivia).
That's called "reduplication" and it's indeed very cute! :D In Japanese you sometimes use this strategy as well. A person is "hito" and people are "hitobito", time is "toki" and sometimes is "tokidoki". There is even a character exclusively for reduplication: 々
I was so amazed when I found your channel - you're often on the television here in Australia on the DW news which is played by one of our government channels every morning. That opening monologue must have taken a thousand takes to get it right! Well done. Hello from Australia, mate :)
Regarding Italian plurals I quite often hear the opposite when it comes to a type of pasta called lasagne. It is quite often referred to in English as lasagna which for any Italian would mean a single piece of pasta, not the dish. And thanks for bringing up pierogi! The singular is pieróg by the way.
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.
I'm Aussie and married to a lady from Mindanao Philippines. Having lived for most of the last five and a half years there, I've learned a lot of the local language, Bisaya (Mindanao Cebuano). To form a plural, you simply precede the noun with the particle "mga" ("mung-ah"). However, it is also possible to form collective nouns equivalent to plurals. For example, if you want to say "birds" you can say either "mga langgam" or make a collective noun by adding the prefix "ka-" and the suffix "-an", so "kalanggaman". I commonly use the collective nouns "kalanggaman" and "kabulakan" ("flowers"). "Person" is "tawo", and "people" can be "mga tawo" or "katawhan". Note in that case you drop the final vowel and add the suffix "-han".Another word I like is "natawhan" ("birthplace, birth") which literally means "(be) person place"), again formed from the word "tawo". Languages are wonderful, Rob!
Another interesting and still unanswered question I have about "mga" is how did it end up like that. How did m-g-a ended up being pronounced as such and if it was originally spelled as manga and was just shortened. Then there's the question of where did it came from. Are there other SEAn languages that has the same way of pluralizing words. "Mga", afaik, is how a lot of dialects make something plural while the one you mentioned about collective nouns is often used in the Visayas and Mindanao areas.
@@avariceseven9443 Yes, I can confirm for example that in my wife's tribal language, Higaonon Binukid, the original spelling of the plural particle was indeed "manga", but it was shortened there to "mga" in line with the standard spelling in Filipino languages in general. Higaonon language shares some words with Tagalog and Bisaya, but is not mutually intelligible. My wife is a true polyglot. She speaks excellent English, and is fluent in Higaonon, Bisaya, Tagalog, Hiligaynon and Boholano, but less so in the Arabic influenced languages of Mindanao, and Waray. Because I'm in Australia at present, often when we chat online in the morning, I will say "Maayad hu hasulom pinalangga ku. Musta kad on asawa ku?" (Higaonon for "Good morning my darling. How are you my wife?" and she might reply "Maayad tungay ku" ("I'm very good" in Higaonon). Often she says in Bisaya "Gikan sa akong kabulakan ko karun langga ko" ("I'm from my flowers now my dear" in Bisaya, meaning she has been in the garden and has just gone back to her house). Higaonon and other Binukid languages are about 80% mutually intelligible, and they are all Manobo languages. Genetics show the Manobo people migrated from Southeast Asia to what is now Mindanao at a time when the sea levels were lower and it was possible to walk most of the way. "Manga" was the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian form, and apparently the shortening to "mga" occurred during the Spanish Colonial times due to the Spaniards writing the word in that form with a tilde over the top, similar to what is done in Spanish for the sound "nya".
![[#2024MAMA] ROSÉ (로제), Bruno Mars - APT. | Mnet 241122 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dgGqD28J6aQ/mqdefault.jpg)
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” 😂
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.
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.
Many years ago I started teaching myself Ancient Egyptian, which is a Semitic language. It was the first time I encountered a language with not only singular and plural, but also dual, for referring to two of something. Other Semitic languages like Arabic also have duals. So cool!
We do something similar in Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) where the plural form is a semi-different word from the singular, but the dual is the aspirated form of the singluar.
eg. The word for dog is cù, and "one, two, three" is "aon, dhà, trì". Counting dogs is:
- Aon cù
- Dhà chù
- Trì coin
There are exceptions, and words beginning with vowels and un-aspiratable consonants (such as R) use the singular for the dual
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.
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.”
@@tiermacgirl English borrowed from Latin, who borrowed from Greek, who borrowed from Hebrew.
@@tiermacgirl It depends what was used as a source for the translation, especially in biblical translations. Vulgate used LXX (Septuaginta, a greek translation of the hebrew bible done by 70 scholars), so all translations that use Vulgate or LXX as a basis will use the latinised / graecianised forms. Starting with Luther's Old Testament, he took the Hebrew Old Testament as a source. And it gets REALLY interesting if it went something like "Greek/Sanskrit -> Arabic -> Latin -> English".
"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.
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!
@jorgensigvardsson9749 a channel called @langfocus has many interesting videos on the history of swedish and swedish grammer
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.
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
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
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 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
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.
@@amoswittenbergsmusings 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.
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
Yes, a group of fish is fish, multiple types/groups of fish can be referred to as fishes for a double plural. Same with peoples.
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! ❤
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!
"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
@@Neo_Chenthat’s just a bit of glober propagandum.
Mathematics also gives us "indices," "vertices," and "matrices," which are some of my personal favorite plurals.
Yeah, though I consider "data" and "datum" to be different words. Data IMO is uncountable, with the singular being "a data point" or "a piece of data", much like "a drop of water". A datum is a physical location or surface on a physical object which measurements are taken from.
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.
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"
Actually it's Stadia.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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!
@@SmallBobby*sounden
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."
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".
I could listen to you talk about words all day. You have a soothing voice.
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?
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 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 have autism and love learning about words and languages. This is one of my favorite youtube channels.
Me too! Love things like this.
Great to see you're still making videos. I think these are the most entertaining English language videos on the RUclips and you most certainly deserve more views.
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!
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".
@@jeannebouwman1970 That goes to show that we all have our own "feeling" about words, a bit like an emotional connection
As a writer, these videos are so much fun. Giving me an even bigger and more accurate vocabulary. Love it.
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.
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 ".
It always enjoyable to hear someone talk about something they love.
great lesson. We non native english speakers always admire English for just adding the famous "s" at the end. But, as you explain here, there are some loop holes even in English.
Excellent work, as always!
Georg (German teacher and happy to be one)
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
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".
ruclips.net/video/aJvVKzbMBk4/видео.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'm 67 and and love learning things, especially history. Good stuff here.
You are amazing man. Doing a really great job educating, especially the history and connections between the languages and things evolve.
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")
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.
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'm not an English native speaker, yet I am fascinated by Rob's explanations. I will recommend this video to all my English teaching acquaintances. Thanks a lot Rob!
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.
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)
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 recall my mother talking about recording multiple episodes of the TV show "ALF" as "Alves."
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Fascinating. As a native English speaker it’s great to learn stuff we take for granted. 👍🏼
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
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!
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.
Just discovered this channel a few days ago and was disappointed to see the lack of uploads, so glad you came back :)
You are easily one of the best presenters on here and on any other platform including TV. I love your content and hope that one day you delve into Esperanto.
My favourite example of multiple plurals at the end of the same word is "blinis". The Russian singular is "blin", the Russian plural is "bliny", and the -s is added in Western European languages. Now when someone says blinises or similar, they're using three plurals at the same time.
The same is with Polish pierogis 😊
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.
As an English teacher in a Chinese university these videos are great. I have to spend time subtitling them because my freshers aren't the best listeners/understanders yet, but they are really useful. (I've learnt a few things myself too BTW) The main ESL problems from (Chinese professors to high school students) are plurals, tenses, articles, collocation and prepositions. Thats the big five. Added bonus, my name is Rob too 🙂
Collocation?
@@amybee40
In the English language, collocation refers to a natural combination of words that are closely affiliated with each other. Some examples are "pay attention", "fast food", "make an effort", and "powerful engine".
Misplaced modifier.
In Portuguese generally we just put a S for plural: casa -> casas; but there are a lot of exceptions...
dog: cão -> cães
man: homem -> homens
easy: fácil -> fáceis
civil: civil -> civis
cannon: canhão -> canhões
german: alemão -> alemães
hand: mão -> mãos
Some words accept two or three different plurals:
* ancião: anciãos, anciães, anciões (elder, ancient, old person etc)
* guardião: guardiões, guardiães (guardian)
And there is the weirdest word:
Qualquer -> Quaisquer
The plural is in the middle of the word wft
Sorry my bad english. I'm lazy.
Alejandro, it just clears up our understanding of Portuguese.
Countrified English could say: "Ya done good, Alex."
Well, qualquer is basically the two words 'qual quer' ('which + want' = whichever you want = any) and the plural just turns the 'which' into plural: 'quais quer'
And while there are some different plurals, they at least all end with an s.
You just simply have to remember that ão becomes õe + s, em becomes en + s and il becomes is
Never apologize for the quality of your English! You must have worked very hard to have the command of the language that you do. But here’s one thing I learned many years ago from a Music Teacher: Language, like Music, must be practiced in order to maintain your grip on it. It’s a “use it or lose it” proposition!
Not to be rude, but "easy" is not a noun, but an adjective.
How is Órgãos not the weirdest plural???
Have to say having zero interest in languages when young, I find myself really enjoying learning from your channel. 👍🏻
There's a particular noun whose plural is sometimes confused with its singular form, to the point that they are swapped.
Those cube-shaped things with dots that are often used in board games.
The proper singular form is "die", and the plural form is "dice".
However, I've heard most people use "dice" for the singular form, such as "Throw the dice". But what's weird, is that I've heard people use "die" as the plural form, as in "I have three die"
Also, here are some weird plurals, some of which are archaic, and some of which are just more examples of the types featured in the video:
stamen -> stamina*
colon -> cola
cow -> kine
mythos -> mythoi
But by far, the weirdest plural in the English language, is one of the most common words in the English language. It is so weird, that the only part that remains the same, is the first letter.
person -> people**
*Possibly fun fact, stamina in this sense, and stamina in the sense of "being able to do something for a long time", are related, as they both come from the Latin meaning "to stand", related to words such as "stay", "status", "state", and words that come from the Latin "sisto" meaning "I place", such as "insist", "consist", "assist", "exist", "persist", and so on.
**person comes from the Latin "persona" meaning "character, mask, role, individuality, a lord, dignity, etc" hence also the words "persona" and "parson"
people on the other hand, comes from the Latin "populus" meaning "a nation", which is also related to the Latin "publicus" meaning "of or belonging to the people" (from which "public" comes from), and the Latin "plebs" meaning "common people" which, of course, is where we get "pleb" from, which is usually used in a derogatory manner for a member of the lower class.
Australia held a public plebiscite. I don't know if those two words should go together since plebiscite is sufficient.
Interesting, as Polish also has completely different forms for the singular and plural of person, człowiek and ludzie.
The plural of “person” is “persons”, not “people”. I am a lawyer and in legal writing we say “two persons”. “People” means the group of persons but not a specific number. It is common but incorrect to use people for a specified number of persons.
@@allanburton9385 ... Hmmm! Isn't that legalise, and so more formal? "People" is more common (as in community) and therefore more acceptable, and thus, correct in common use.
@@freyatilly I don't think it's necessarily legalese, just correct English, but I agree with you that it's not common usage and that our language is evolving that direction. I, like everyone else, say "people" for "persons" all the time. Thanks for your comment! Language is fun.
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!
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!
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".
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.
It's true that for a long time, the 3 words "Octopus", "Fish" and "Cactus" have always intrigued me by their plural forms, so thank you so much for the video and just every other video in general! I'm glad you came back!
I'm pretty confident the plural of octopus is octopuses (in English at least). For the longest time I'd say "I saw an octopus; in fact I saw two" to avoid a plural.
Fish can be pluralised as fishes when referring to more than one species. The first time I heard otopodes spoken it was pronounced
octo-po-days.
Not sure which is correct.
It gets even more weird with virus and viruses, as in Latin, virus, meaning something like slime or toxin, has no plural at all. So all plural forms of virus you can come up with are late inventions anyway.
@@stegra5960 alga algae, vertebra vertebrae. And when do you use es or s on a word ending in o? Tomatoes, yes, but Eskimoes, no. Americans say a herd of giraffes but Brits say a herd of giraffe, but apparently those aren't hard and fast rules, going by examples online.
@@cpnlsn88 nope it's not, but you could get away with saying there were many octopus, but never octopuses.
I am a Brit living in Sweden, I speak Swedish and this is fascinating, you can see that Swedish and English are historically connected.
Think about all the connections through history of both nations
I speak Spanish, as a second language. I’ve always appreciated how easy it is to make plurals in Spanish. If the noun ends in a vowel, add an ‘s.’ If the noun ends in a consonant, add ‘es.’ Off the top of my head I can’t think of any exceptions.
It seems simple, but really there are many more rules and exceptions.
Not all words ending in a consonant are pluralized with -es (“chips”, “tórax”, “cactus”, “clics”, “polisíndeton”…) and not all words ending in vowels form the plural with -s (“yoes”, “noes”, “bisturíes”, “tabúes”…).
@@Scivolemulo Interesting. Thinking on it I have seen ‘clic s’ before. Many of the words you mentioned, as taking s rather than es are foreign words, mostly English, and use the foreign plural. Other foreign words I have heard in conversation using the Spanish version. I have also heard “nos” (not to be confused with ‘nos.’) ‘Yos’ and ‘tabus.’ Without the es. But this common speech rather correct grammar. It’s been a long time since I studied Spanish, so I’ve probably forgotten such exceptions. I mostly hear common speech patterns now, common conversations, which sometimes doesn’t use correct, and obscure grammar.
Ied
@@RicktheCrofter As a native Spanish speaker allow me to point out that you are most wrong or to be more accurate, estás haciendo un papelón inventando reglas que no existen en para idioma que no entendés, gringo al pedo.
@@eleSDSU No estoy inventando reglas, solo estoy reportando lo que he oido. Y no veo razon usar tantos vulgares.
Actriz - actrices (actress)
Lunes - lunes (monday)
"Octopodes" is my favorite weird plural. 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.
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.
New subscriber here, this is exactly the kind of word nerd content I was craving.
My native language is Italian, where MOST plurals are fairly straightforward: in a vast majority of cases, a masculine noun ending in -o turns into -i, and a feminine noun ending in -a becomes -e.
However, there are a handful of cases in which not only is the ending irregular, but the noun switches gender when it's pluralized.
Example: l'uovo, the egg (masculine) --> le uova, the eggs (feminine).
My understanding of it is this: Italian is still gendered, but as mentioned in the video, Latin had three genders, while Italian only retains two, masculine and feminine, and has lost the neuter. Hence, some nouns have preserved the old Latin neuter ending, but because an -a is largely perceived as feminine, the plural becomes feminine, even if the singular is masculine.
And don't even get me started on the cases in which both plurals are acceptable, one regular, one mimicking the Latin neuter, but they may have somewhat different connotations... yeah, we're a little complicated, especially if you're coming from a language with little to no indication of gender.
The same happened to Romanian.
I like the Scandinavian languages' spellings of the word _nerd,_ rendered with their modified O -- nørd replicates its English pronunciation.
I've always enjoyed the fact that the plural of "schema" is "schemata", just for the aesthetics of it - though it is a pretty niche word. For the record, I use "data" as a plural, but I still don't ever use "datum". Anyway, a fun video, as always!
Fun fact, modern German uses "datum" to mean "date" (i.e. a specific day, as in "what is today's date?").
@@pierrefley5000 Same for Dutch. The plural can be 'data' or 'datums'. As a reviewer, I make sure that 'datums' is used, to avoid confusion with 'data' (same meaning as in English, but used as a plural). And for 'data', I prefer 'gegevens', which is a literal translation from Latin. The German word 'Daten' for data makes sense here.
Datum commonly gets used as a bit of jargon in surveying and geographic information systems. Any measurement of location will be associated with a horizontal datum and a vertical datum which define what you're treating as zero. So, for example, Earth bulges around the equator; if you used a perfect sphere as your vertical datum for measuring elevation, you would have the ocean's surface well above 0 altitude at the equator and far below it at the poles. Instead, there are several standard models of the Earth's oblateness that are used as the vertical datum when measuring elevations.
Having been deformed by a classical (Dutch) education I instinctively pluralise a words like paradigm as 'paradigmata' which of course is totally wrong in English :-(
I still remember my fascination at overhearing my 3rd-grade teacher (1960) telling another teacher that it was now correct to use "data" as either singular or plural. Later on, I would occasionally be informed by a pedant that "this data" was incorrect as "data are plural." So this was a relatively recent change in English.
What’s interesting about the origin of umlaut is that originally way back in Proto-Germanic these forms were in fact very regular plurals that ended in -iz, which was just a different declension class form of -oz which eventually became our familiar ‘s’ plurals. What happened over time though was that the /i/ vowel in this -iz suffix started to bleed into the vowel in the previous syllable, i.e. in the stem of the noun, causing them to be shifted higher and more front in the mouth, so /u/ would have shifted to /y/ (the ü vowel in German), /o/ shifted to /ø/ (the ö vowel) and /a/ shifted to /æ/ (the vowel in ‘cat’). Initially this effect would have been perceived as very minor, it was “allophonic” and therefore it didn’t really matter all that much as it wasn’t capable of changing one word into another. But because Proto-Germanic (as with most Germanic languages today) had a very prominent word-initial stress, this -iz suffix gradually weakened until it was no longer pronounced at all, and thus what used to be considered a very “minor” effect on the stem vowel was now all of a sudden much more important, as it was the only way to distinguish singulars from plurals, and thus what had been “allophonic” was now “phonemic” in the sense that it was now capable of being contrastive. (Presumably the -oz endings did not meet the same fate either because the /o/ vowel is inherently more salient and therefore more resilient against weakening, or because it did not affect the preceding vowel and so the only way to preserve the singular-plural contrast was to keep the suffix). Note that this happened way back in Proto-Germanic, long before it broke off into the separate languages that eventually became English, Dutch, German etc. which is why some form of umlaut is found in all Germanic languages.
Thank you! I can't believe he didn't bring this up. Mice, men, geese... these are all examples of vowel harmony from the suffix -iz. Eventually the plural suffix was dropped but it resulted in a shifted (raised/fronted) vowel.
I’m guessing you’re a linguist! ☺️
Yes!!! I was so disappointed that he didn't bring up the actually interesting reason why we had umlaut in the first place :(
And then there is Gothic, which branched off so early (maybe the mid 2nd century AD), that it missed the i-umlaut that was happening in Proto-North-West Germanic.
Your videos are SO good. So much perfectly digestible information presented in a drawing and entertaining way. 10/10
In Arabic we have:
singular masculine and feminine
Dual masculine and feminine
3+ masculine and feminine for people
And a different form of plurals for non-people
The nice thing about it is that the vast majority of nouns are regular and follow a standard form. I know it’s hard to believe it but Arabic has little irregularities in grammar and follows a rigid structure so it makes easy to foreign learners; except of course you need to write from right to left, learn a whole new alphabet and phonetics, and then the 20+ dialects
Me: internally screaming after 10 yrs of learning these.
It is just funny that both of my native language dont have complicated pluralization of words, it's as simple as english adds "s", infact we never even bother to rigidly state the plural form,as it has zero effect on the verb, except in semantic of course. In indonesia we just need to double the word to pluralize words, like mobil-mobil for cars
And then during my middle school to my highschool i have to learn the rigidly structured arab plurals which is insanee
Arabic has a free form of making sentences , you can have the sentence in SVO, VSO, OVS, VOS etc, and they are all grammatically correct IF, and only if, you get the end-inflection on the words correctly
As an Arabic student, I feel like 90% of the words have a specific plural and not the general one, far worse than English!
Also there's this thing that any plural which isn't human will be referred to as a single female. Gets me every time 🥲
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"!
"Irregular plurals" in English is what we could almost call "regular" in modern German. Many people struggle with the genders in German, but as a native speaker, I'd rather say the German plurals are the true challenge. You have to learn the plural with every new word.
German has seven forms of plural, as partly shown, with -e, with -(e)n, both with/without umlaut, -er, -s (for foreign words or abbreviations), and null plural (unchanged). Unlike in English, in German you can easily see how the umlaut plural is created: 1 Fuß, 2 Füße; 1 Stock, 2 Stöcke, 1 Hand, 2 Hände.
But this also explains the English "oo" - >"ee" change: In German, "u" (similar to English "oo") becomes "ü" as umlaut, which sounds like an English "ee" with rounded lips. Or, in the other way, the English "ee" may be an unrounded version of the "ü". Hence, since the Anglosaxons forgot how to say rounded vowels, the ü all became ee, and so you have "foot" -> "feet".
The "f" - > "v" change could be explained by (reverse) coda devoicing, an effect we have in German. In German, consonants at the end of the word usually become voiceless (so we have trouble pronouncing English words like "bad", which we usually say as "bat"). So when you take the word "wolf", it ends with an f, which is voiceless. The same is true for "wife" (you don't hear the ending e). When you put them in plural, an s is added, and the former coda consonant moves into the middle, getting its voice back.
I'd actually say that oo>ee is more like the o>ö umlaut; the u>ü is more similar to the ou>i change (mouse>mice; louse>lice)
Sie have to remember that those spellings are codified before the great vowel shift, so everything is spelt like it was once pronounced, not like the modern pronunciation (so "oo" is like german "oo" or "oh", "ee" is the same as "ee/eh", and "ou" is the french- and thus, anglo-norman- way of spelling "uh)
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!
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.
Yes could always hear these s sounds in the ABBA vocals.
Interesting to note the shift in meaning when forming plurals for animals. 'I like dogs' implies a fondness for the animal as a living creature. Same for just about any animal I can think of. Yet, remove the 's' and the implication is that you now enjoy eating the beast.
oof O.O
I would hazard that it's because you're using the noun like it's uncountable. Uncountable nouns are typically material or mass. In the case of "I like dog," "dog" would have the meaning of "meat from a dog," in just the same way as "beef" or "pork."
It is less about the single vs plural distinction and more about a totum pro parte metonymy where the word "dog" is an adjectival noun modifying another noun that has undergone ellipsis, as in "I like dog (meat)." Here "dog" is not used to signify the entirety of "dogness" and all those characteristics that people might like but only the edible material of the canine species....that people might like.
This can better be illustrated with an irregular noun. For example, the utterance "I like deer" out of any sort of context is entirely ambiguous. People generally qualify the statement as "I like deer meat" to avoid confusion as to whether they want to pet Bambi or eat him.
Reminded me of a neighbour who we feel had 'hot dog' for lunch every day. They changed dogs every month, the dog would arrive, get fattened, and then disappear. It makes you wonder... especially as they hailed from a country where dog-eating is a cultural thing.
@@uiscepreston Great points. In general we would say, "I like deer", or if we liked to eat Bambi, it would be, "I like venison". I don't know what the descriptive noun for actual dog meat is.
I think you might have had a moment of singular/plural perplexity yourself when you said, "the only criteria to end your plural perplexity is..". This is because "criteria" (plural) should have been "criterion" (singular) as there is just one of them, namely, to watch to the end of the video. I enjoyed your presentation, though, which was engaging and informative. Well done!
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.
One cute one that I learned recently is the regular form for plural noums in Indonesian. To make a plural, you just repeat the noum. So a book is a "buku", and books are "buku buku". Shoes are "sepatu sepatu" while shoe is "sepatu", you get the gist. I find it really charming (I don't speak the language at all, I just know some trivia).
That's called "reduplication" and it's indeed very cute! :D In Japanese you sometimes use this strategy as well. A person is "hito" and people are "hitobito", time is "toki" and sometimes is "tokidoki". There is even a character exclusively for reduplication: 々
I was so amazed when I found your channel - you're often on the television here in Australia on the DW news which is played by one of our government channels every morning. That opening monologue must have taken a thousand takes to get it right! Well done. Hello from Australia, mate :)
Regarding Italian plurals I quite often hear the opposite when it comes to a type of pasta called lasagne. It is quite often referred to in English as lasagna which for any Italian would mean a single piece of pasta, not the dish.
And thanks for bringing up pierogi! The singular is pieróg by the way.
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!
I'm Aussie and married to a lady from Mindanao Philippines. Having lived for most of the last five and a half years there, I've learned a lot of the local language, Bisaya (Mindanao Cebuano). To form a plural, you simply precede the noun with the particle "mga" ("mung-ah"). However, it is also possible to form collective nouns equivalent to plurals. For example, if you want to say "birds" you can say either "mga langgam" or make a collective noun by adding the prefix "ka-" and the suffix "-an", so "kalanggaman". I commonly use the collective nouns "kalanggaman" and "kabulakan" ("flowers"). "Person" is "tawo", and "people" can be "mga tawo" or "katawhan". Note in that case you drop the final vowel and add the suffix "-han".Another word I like is "natawhan" ("birthplace, birth") which literally means "(be) person place"), again formed from the word "tawo". Languages are wonderful, Rob!
Another interesting and still unanswered question I have about "mga" is how did it end up like that. How did m-g-a ended up being pronounced as such and if it was originally spelled as manga and was just shortened. Then there's the question of where did it came from. Are there other SEAn languages that has the same way of pluralizing words. "Mga", afaik, is how a lot of dialects make something plural while the one you mentioned about collective nouns is often used in the Visayas and Mindanao areas.
@@avariceseven9443 Yes, I can confirm for example that in my wife's tribal language, Higaonon Binukid, the original spelling of the plural particle was indeed "manga", but it was shortened there to "mga" in line with the standard spelling in Filipino languages in general. Higaonon language shares some words with Tagalog and Bisaya, but is not mutually intelligible. My wife is a true polyglot. She speaks excellent English, and is fluent in Higaonon, Bisaya, Tagalog, Hiligaynon and Boholano, but less so in the Arabic influenced languages of Mindanao, and Waray. Because I'm in Australia at present, often when we chat online in the morning, I will say "Maayad hu hasulom pinalangga ku. Musta kad on asawa ku?" (Higaonon for "Good morning my darling. How are you my wife?" and she might reply "Maayad tungay ku" ("I'm very good" in Higaonon). Often she says in Bisaya "Gikan sa akong kabulakan ko karun langga ko" ("I'm from my flowers now my dear" in Bisaya, meaning she has been in the garden and has just gone back to her house). Higaonon and other Binukid languages are about 80% mutually intelligible, and they are all Manobo languages. Genetics show the Manobo people migrated from Southeast Asia to what is now Mindanao at a time when the sea levels were lower and it was possible to walk most of the way. "Manga" was the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian form, and apparently the shortening to "mga" occurred during the Spanish Colonial times due to the Spaniards writing the word in that form with a tilde over the top, similar to what is done in Spanish for the sound "nya".