Timeline for Why is the plural form of "house" not "hice"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
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| Jan 25, 2017 at 12:51 | history | edited | Janus Bahs Jacquet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 23, 2016 at 6:02 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @tchrist The Italian state of affairs are actually more satisfactorily explained by assuming that their plural endings also come from the accusative (albeit with some interplay from lingering nominatives). I've heard that the same is true for Romanian, but I left it out because I don't know nearly enough about Romanian to be able to say. | |
| Jul 23, 2016 at 1:51 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @JanusBahsJacquet Don’t forget to also exclude Italian from the set of Romance languages that prefer the Latin accusative plurals’ -s as their plural marker. Figuring out the underlying patterns or reasons in the various irregulars is half the fun. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 22:23 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @PeterShor I’ve heard people say it both ways. My gut instinct would be that spouzes is more common in BrE than AmE, but I don’t have anything to back it up with. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 22:16 | history | edited | Janus Bahs Jacquet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 22, 2016 at 22:11 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @TonyK That varies from speaker to speaker. Some say houzes, some say housez; some say spouzes, some say spousez. It’s true that that particular variation is not quite regular, but the plural ending itself is the most regular one available, and it was added on to make the plural regular. The dissimilative metathesis (if it really is dissimilative… not sure there) most likely came later than the addition of the plural marker. Added comment. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 22:01 | comment | added | TonyK | But the plural of house is not regular! Unlike spouses, the s becomes voiced in the plural: houzes. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 21:23 | history | edited | Janus Bahs Jacquet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:49 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Mitch Also, in Latin, the -s is found in all five declensions in the accusative, which was after all the case that won out in all the Romance languages. So for Romance (at least if we leave Romanian out of it), it’s almost inevitable that -s should end up being the plural marker of choice. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:35 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Mitch The Nordic -er (and I believe also the German -er) is actually the same as the English -(e)s. In German and Dutch, -en has become the most common, but in English and the Mainland Scandinavian languages, the old -as plural has won out. It’s not impossible that the English -(e)s plural was helped along by French, but it’s also not really necessary—it was already one of the commonest endings before French influence, and its encroachment upon other endings is not unlike that seen in Mainland Scandinavia, though more complete in English. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:29 | comment | added | Mitch | @JanusBahsJacquet General Germanic (including Old English) has lots of different plural endings beyond /-iz/. And in fact that is the least common in most other Germanic languages. There's '-er' and '-en'. The modern English plural of mostly just '-s' could easily be encouraged by Old French plural '-s' coming from Latin 2nd declension. Weird I know, but sometimes intermixing langauge influence works like that. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:26 | vote | accept | wythagoras | ||
| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:09 | comment | added | user180089 | @Janus Bahs Jacquet ~ oh ok. I'm still learning as I go along and Wiktionary has been a great help, along with Wikipedia's sound samples | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:07 | history | edited | Janus Bahs Jacquet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:07 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @V0ight Oops, good point. I don’t think there’s any doubt or lack of consensus that these words has plurals in -iz in Proto-Germanic—I just changed my mind halfway through about whether I wanted to give simple nominative plural forms (like I ended up doing for hūsō), or abstract plural stems (like mūsi-). Fixing now! | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 20:04 | comment | added | user180089 | Well done. One thing that I don't understand: in the proto-Germanic why does Wiktionary say that plurals ended in -iz while you're omitting the -z? Is the '-z' something that phoneticians can't agree upon, in the sense that sometimes plurals ended in '-i' while other times they ended in '-iz'? | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 19:37 | history | edited | Janus Bahs Jacquet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 22, 2016 at 19:37 | comment | added | Mitch | Noyce answer!!! | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 19:30 | history | answered | Janus Bahs Jacquet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |