About English plural 's'

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Pemmican

#81937 Thu, 17 Mar 05 07:08 PM

Hi Guest,

the word is "Princes" Wink [;)]

Cheers
-Pemmican

Pemmican

Joined on Thu, Aug 21 2003

Westphalia, Germany

Regular Member (569)

Wâ mag ich mich nu vinden? wâ mac ich mich nu suochen, wâ? nu bin ich hie und bin ouch dâ und enbin doch weder dâ noch hie. wer wart ouch sus verirret ie?wer wart ie sus...

Plurals

#89160 Tue, 12 Apr 05 10:11 AM

You know I'm writing some kind of research work on the plurality in the English Language, irregular plural forms of nouns. In English some nouns have two plural forms, for example: phenomenon(sing.) - phenomena(reg. pl) - phenomenons(latin pl), antenna - antennas - antennae etc. I need some examples of different cases of using different types of plural forms. May be anyone has already studied this theme and can give at least a hint where I can find the examples.
I need help!!! Huh? [:^)]

Joined on Tue, Apr 12 2005

New Member (01)

Nouns, Plurals

Anonymous

#159557 Thu, 17 Nov 05 12:54 PM

Pemmican wrote:
The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions:

a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples
b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings
c) genitive ending: Jon's house

In my opinion, the -s in b) will certainly disappear sometime, it was already mentioned, that it is very often dropped already. In Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, the inflection endings have vanished completely already and all persons take the same form of the verb.
The -s will also disappear in the function of genitive indicator. There's a tendency to replace it by the preposition of and the following noun in the object case. E.g. Jon's house --> The house of Jon (this will get more common also in these cases with people, not only items).

But the -s will certainly not disappear in its function as a plural indicator, I'd rather say that it will get more common as it already is by now. More and more irregular plural forms will vanish and be replaced by -s instead, also 'sheeps' instead of 'sheep' as the plural form is more probable than keeping the irregular form 'sheep'.

Anonymous

Genitives, Inflections, Nouns, Plurals, Prepositions, Verbs

Forbes

#160878 Mon, 21 Nov 05 01:21 AM

All languages (at least those I have some knowledge of) exhibit some degree of redundancy - they just differ in what those redundancies are. Tolstoy wrote the whole of War and Peace without using a definite or indefinite article, however when using verbs he had to distinguish between whether the action was complete or not. Thai makes no distinction between singular and plural nouns, but as soon as you count something you have to "classify" it, so that you say something like "I saw teachers two people." or "I saw houses three buildings." To an English speaker some aspects of Thai seem to be maddeningly imprecise, while no doubt to a Thai speaker some aspects of English must seem overly complicated. It is rather pointless to ask why a language does something in a particular way. The only relevant question is "How do I say this?" All languages are equally peculiar, but quite normal to the people who speak them.

Forbes

Joined on Thu, Jun 16 2005

Regular Member (834)

Articles, Definite articles, Indefinite articles, Nouns, Plurals, Verbs

Anonymous

#277895 Sun, 08 Oct 06 07:33 PM

I was always curious to know where the "s" for forming the plural came from.

I thought it was a geographical factor, seeing that English, Frensh, Spanish, Portugues,

etc. use this plural form.

Latin, Romanian, Italian do not use "s" to form the plural. Who started it?

The French, the Spanish, or the Portuguese?

Anonymous

Plurals

Cool Breeze

#278413 Mon, 09 Oct 06 09:52 PM

Anonymous wrote:
I was always curious to know where the "s" for forming the plural came from.

I thought it was a geographical factor, seeing that English, Frensh, Spanish, Portugues,

etc. use this plural form.

Latin, Romanian, Italian do not use "s" to form the plural. Who started it?

The French, the Spanish, or the Portuguese?

As far as the English plural s is concerned, it derives from Old English, which is the name given to the early form of English. It was spoken from about 450AD to 1050AD. S was one of the plural endings that some masculine nouns had in those days. It eventually replaced the other plural endings used in Old English. Many Old English plurals are still used (foot, feet, for example) and lots of later loan words from Latin and Greek have preserved their irregular plurals; irregular for English, that is.

I can't answer your question as to 'who started it', but I do know the plural s of English did not come from the languages you have mentioned.

Cheers
CB

Cool Breeze

Joined on Fri, Apr 7 2006

Helsinki, Finland

Senior Member (2,853)

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.- Mark Twain

Nouns, Plurals

Alienvoord

#279201 Wed, 11 Oct 06 06:00 PM

Anonymous wrote:
Latin, Romanian, Italian do not use "s" to form the plural. Who started it?

Latin does use "s" to form the plural of words in some cases other than the nominative. Perhaps this is where the plural "s" in Spanish and French come from.

Alienvoord

Joined on Tue, Jul 25 2006

Toronto

Full Member (315)

I'm a Canadian English speaker

Nominative, Plurals

Tanit

#279317 Wed, 11 Oct 06 11:25 PM

Not a linguist, but I agree with Alienvoord.

Moreover, also in Sardinian (a language spoken in a particular region of Italy, considered to be one of the few still-spoken language closest to Latin) the plural is formed by adding -s, both for masculine and feminine nouns (and adjectives, too):

Manu, manus (hand, hands; M);

Domu, domus (house, houses; F)

Mannu, mannus (big: singular and plural form; M)

Manna, mannas (big: singular and plural form; F).