Random Thoughts Thread

[Montmorency]

If the plural of goose is geese, is the plural of moose, meese?

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/...l-moose-meese/

tl;dr version is it entered the English language a few hundred years after the Old English changes of words like goose/geese.

A question I've had for years:

If the plural of mouse is mice, why isn't the plural of house hice?

From the OED:

OE. gós (pl. gés)
Narragansett moos (= Abenaki mus, Penobscot muns)

Moose is not a native English, or even (Indo)European word.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

OE. mús fem. (pl. mýs)
The word for mouse used to sound like modern "moose", before u → ɑʊ.

Same with the word for house: OE. hús

The plural was in OE. hús, in 12th c. husas, huses, from 14th c. houses; also in various writers from c 1550, and still dialectally, housen, which is sometimes collective.

So why don't "mouse" and "house" have the same plural?

Well, in the case of the modern computer peripheral they can.

But actually in Old English the plurals of the two words were different to start, as you see above.

For "mice" it seems to go back to Proto-Germanic:

As a specific instance of this, in prehistoric Old English, a certain class of nouns was marked by an /i/ suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like /muːs/ "mouse", for example, had a plural /muːsi/ "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced [myːsi], where the long back vowel /uː/ was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel [yː], which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final /i/, however, made /yː/ a phoneme and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between /muːs/ "mouse" and /myːs/ "mice". In this case, the lost sound /i/ left a trace in the presence of /yː/; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix /i/, has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front-back distinction of the main vowel. This distinction survives in the modern forms "mouse" /maʊs/ and "mice" /maɪs/, although the specifics have been modified by the Great Vowel Shift.

Then what about house? As you see above, in Old English the singular and plural were identical. It's just that over time people added on the generic "-(e/a)s" English plural to help differentiate.