Discover Top Posts Tagged with #irregular plurals

Popular Recent

I love that there's an unending campaign of pedantry to try to get everyone to pluralize "Lego" as "Lego," rather than "Legos," yet people just know that the plural of "Jedi" is "Jedi" and the plural of "Sith" is "Sith."

#pluralization #language #irregular plurals #plural nouns #lego #jedi #sith #star wars #my point here is that these are all “made-up” words #as opposed to words that evolved and/or got borrowed more naturally #i think the difference is that “jedi” and “sith” were introduced to English in sentences #so we had the “correct” forms modeled to us #by contrast “lego” is/was a nebulous term that people see as describing both a company's name and an object's name #people view a singular lego piece as being a lego #so more than one piece would be “legos”#even though the prescriptivists at the lego company would prefer you not #and i think it's much harder to change people's linguistic habits by TELLING them versus MODELING it #(i don't have data on hand to back that thinking up though; i invite linguists to correct me if i'm wrong)#honestly any time i hear someone say “it's 'lego' not 'legos'” it makes me want to just say “legos” that much louder

“octopodes” but pronounced like “socrates”. this isn’t a joke that’s how it’s pronounced

#linguistics #irregular plurals #me tag

#louse lice #lice #louse #woodlouse #woodlice #word formation #irregular plurals #trolleng #trolledu

#english vocabulary #measuring #irregular plurals #plurals #english grammar #vocabulary #learningenglishpro #english language #english student #learning english #learn english #aprender ingles #English teacher #teacher #student #Word of the day

some of you have never made a wug joke and had your mentions be filled with "wuggi" "wuggen" "wugata" "wugapodes" "wüge" "woge" "wugose" "wuggim" "weese" "wugdem" "wugọ̄" "wuggis" "wugot" "wugwug" "wugites" "wuug" "wuggana" "wugeaux" "wugren" "woog" "wuggak" "wuxen" and it shows

#linguistics #linguistics memes #wugs #wug jokes #linguist humour #plurals #irregular plurals

Could we officially change the plural of “child” to “childs”, the plural of “ox” to “oxes”, and the plural of “moose” to “mooses” or even “meese”?

As a Portuguese speaker with lesser OCD, plurals not ended with S seriously bother me.

#plurals #irregular plurals #meese #look at all these meese #English language #look at all those meese

Things you learn by playing with English speakers:

Plural of deer is deer (not deers)

Plural of fish is fish

Plural of elk is elk

Plural of sheep is sheep

Plural of buffalo is buffalo

It really gets fun when you get into what a group of specific animals is called like:

A herd of elk (rebaño de alces)

A gaggle of geese (pandilla de gansos)

A murder of crows (asesinato de cuervos)

an ostentation of peacocks (ostentación de pavos reales)

a parliament of owls (un parlamento de buhos)

a knot frogs, (una maraña de ranas)

and a skulk of foxes (manda o jauría de zorros)

What’s a murder of crows?

A group of crows is called a “murder.” There are several different explanations for the origin of this term, mostly based on old folk tales and superstitions.For instance, there is a folktale that crows will gather and decide the capital fate of another crow.Many view the appearance of crows as an omen of death because ravens and crows are scavengers and are generally associated with dead bodies, battlefields, and cemeteries, and they’re thought to circle in large numbers above sites where animals or people are expected to soon die.

Then, the question was arisen: Why moose's plural is mooses while goose's one is geese?. Answer: The etymology of them:

Moose – comes from algonquian languages. (native american languages)

Goose - passed down from proto-Indo-European to German to Old English to Middle English to Modern English and likely picked up its spelling patterns along the way.

#english language #playing wg2 last night #english plurals #irregular plurals

IT- Irregular plurals of nouns in Italian

Something I find interesting in Italian is the irregular plurals of nouns. Let's review regular plurals first:

masc. nouns in -o, -a => -i

fem. nouns in -a => -e

masc. & fem. nouns in -e => -i

These are obviously remnants of Latin declensions (-us => -i and -a => -ae), but it's not the matter here. So we first have a few unpredictable ones:

il dio => gli dèi

l'uomo => gli uomini

il bue => i buoi

la mano => le mani

l'ala => le ali

I won't talk about stuff like belga/belgi or medico/medici (should be -ghi and -chi to keep the hard sound), but I'll rather jump to irregular masculine words with a feminine plural in -a. There are 3 sorts:

> Simple plural in -a

il centinaio => le centinaia

il paio => le paia

l'uovo => le uova

il dito =>le dita

> Double plural, reg. masc. in -i & irreg. fem. in -a

il ginocchio => le ginocchia / i ginocchi

il vestigio => le vestigia / i vestigi

> Double plural, like above, but with different meanings (!!!) (my favourite ones and the reason of this post) (yes this makes me happy) (this is cool): generally the fem. plural in -a is the literal meaning, and the masc. plural in -i is the figurative meaning (but sometimes it's the opposite)

il membro => le membra (body limbs) / i membri (group members)

il braccio => le braccia (body's) / i bracci (arm of a river, armchair)

il labbro = le labbra (lips) / i labbri (of a wound)

l'osso => le ossa (man's bones) / gli ossi (animals' bones)

il grido => le grida (man's) / i gridi (animals)

il muro => le mura (city walls, defensive walls) / i muri (house walls)

Obviously this post is not exhaustive, and doesn't cover ALL the irregular plurals in Italian, but rather the most common and important ones (and the coolest ones obv).

#languages #italiano #italian #italian language #irregular plurals #grammar #mine