Weird plurals in English: Men, geese, sheep, knives and many more 

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."

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

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.

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.

"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.

As a German native speaker I find it remarkable how close English and German once were and still are somehow.

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.

I unapologetically say sheeps, mooses, gooses, deers, fishes, serieses, etc.. I feel it's important on the noun itself to show that plural is different from singular. I love all your videos!

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.

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!

There are two plural forms in Dutch: the "s" and the "en" additions. Also in words like "Wolf" the "F" becomes "V" in the plural "Wolven". There are also peculiarities "Kind" (child) is in German plural "Kinder", but in Dutch it is "Kinderen", the same with "Lied" (song) in German plural "Lieder" but in Dutch plural " Liederen". However we do use the word "Kinder" in combination such as "Kinderboek" (Children's Book) or "Kinderbroek" (Children's pants) etc. In West Flemish, "Kinders" is often used for the plural of "Kind" (Child). In Afrikaans the plural is also "Kinders", as in West Flanders. Plural is also not used for measures of volume, dimensions and the like. For example: "2 cent", "10 meter", "100 kilometer", "60 mijl" and 1.000 liter" etc. Mijn 2 cent uit België, my 2 cents from Belgium.

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!

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” 😊

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

"Octopodes" is my favorite weird plural. Thanks!

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"

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".

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!

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 :)

You are my favorite werd nerd. I took etymology and Latin in college because I loved vocabulary so much. Loved to trace the origin and evolution of words. Thank you for your channel.

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".

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".

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!

I recall my mother talking about recording multiple episodes of the TV show "ALF" as "Alves."

"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.

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.

In American English we usually see stadiums and lately even indexes (but never appendixes).

5:25 Actually, there is a rule in English stating whether to use “fish” or “fishes” as the plural: Say you have caught a clownfish. You have a fish. Now, if you catch another clownfish, you have two “fish”. Add a salmon into the mix, and you have “fishes”

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.

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.

Aah congrats on those wedding pictures man.

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" ...😮

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”

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!

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.

We should start a campaign to officially recognise a singular sheep as a shoop

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.

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.

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

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! ❤

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.

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".

I know that this is an old video, but your grammer is cringe free. I find myself wincing as if I'd hit a pothole whilst listening to some content creators. Bravo, and thank you.

Fascinating, educational, and fun… All rolled up into one. In Chinese, they almost always leave their plural words unchanged, but add a separate word to make it plural, or multiple. For example: 人=man/person-pronounced “rún” (with a rising tone). 人門=men/people- pronounced “rún mǔn” (with two rising tones). Most pronunciations for objects just specify how many, such as: 一個人=one person-pronounced “yī gė rún” 兩個人=two persons-pronounced “lián gė rún” 三個人=three persons-pronounced “sān gė rún” etc. etc. etc… the “rún” sound never changes, and the character always stays the same.

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.

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 used to be pedantic about how people failed to pluralize words "correctly" but I've grown to be a lot more practical. If people understand what you're saying, then you're saying it correctly. Vertices can be vertexes, roofs can be rooves, and moose can be meese. Okay, maybe not that last one since mice are meese. But you get the point. People using words in a way that makes sense to both the speaker and the listener is how languages change over time, which they've always done. There's no need to cement into the foundations of existence the "correct" way to use any language. There's no need to give up our freedom of speech.

I really like the way you speak.Being a non native speaker of English, I can understand you properly.

Great to see you're still making videos. I think these are the most entertaining English language videos on the RU-vid and you most certainly deserve more views.

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.

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.

As a native Dutch speaker these plurals make very much sense! Old English shows many similarities to our common ancestors. For example house and housen - Dutch: huis en huizen. Or raven - Dutch: raaf and raven.

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!

I'm 67 and and love learning things, especially history. Good stuff here.

All of these things exist in Swedish too and to a much larger extent than in English. The plural of "man" is "män" except for when you're talking about the army or the police, where forms like "man" and "mannar" are used. But we've got some other irregular plurals too like gås > gäss (goose > geese), mus > möss (mouse > mice) and lus > löss (louse > lice). Then there is the group of longer umlauted plurals like fot > fötter (foot > feet), hand > händer (hand > hands), rot > rötter (root > roots) and tand > tänder (tooth > teeth). And a lot of neuter nouns have the same form in the singular and the plural, so much that this is actually the most normal way to make a plural out of neuter nouns. But a group of common gender nouns which mostly are words for occupations or ethnicities and nationalities also have the same form in the singular and the plural. Examples of this is "lärare" (teacher > teachers), "magiker" (magician > magicians), "italienare" (Italian > Italians) and "indier" (Indian > Indians).

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.

It always enjoyable to hear someone talk about something they love.

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).

As a Polish speaker I might actually confirm, if you have a collection of 'pieróg' arranged in matrices, a row of singles is in fact 'pierogi' but a row of those rows is a 'pierogowa matryca' constituting something called 'pierogis' - a result of 2d plane pluralisation in both dimensions ;)

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!

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!

You forgot to mention the case of plural words ending with “-ae” such as “algae,” “florae,” “faunae,” “alumnae,” “amoebae,” “amphorae,” “areolae, “antennae,” “agorae,” “abscissae,” “cannulae,” “formulae” “fossae,” “larvae,” “maxillae,” “medullae,” “minutiae,” “nebulae,” “(super)novae,” “papillae,” “personae,” “pleurae,” “primae donae,” “pupae,” “retinae,” “scapulae,” “sclerae,” “sequelae,” “setae,” “spermathecae,” “striae,” “fasciae,” “tibiae,” “tracheae,” “ulnae,” “urethrae,” “uvulae,” “vertebrae,” “vulvae,” etc.

I have no idea why I find this kind of stuff fascinating, but I do. Good explanations too.

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.

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)

My mother was telling me that she saw a family of Foxen in her yard. She paused and asked if that is the right word. We laughed and from then on we always said foxen because we liked it.

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.

As a writer, these videos are so much fun. Giving me an even bigger and more accurate vocabulary. Love it.

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 👍✨🌟

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.

You are amazing man. Doing a really great job educating, especially the history and connections between the languages and things evolve.

I am a Brit living in Sweden, I speak Swedish and this is fascinating, you can see that Swedish and English are historically connected.

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.

English took many forms of plurals from Latin, which makes it even stranger. In Portuguese there are some strange plurals too, like: Glass: Óculos which in the plural becomes óculos Goal: Gol which in the plural becomes gols or golos in European Portuguese Bad: Mal which in the plural becomes males Blue: Azul which in the plural becomes azuis Station: estação which in the plural becomes estações Bread: pão which in the plural becomes pães Pencil: lápis which in the plural become lápis Portuguese: português which in plural becomes portugueses Hand: Mão which in the plural becomes mãos Player: jogador which in the plural becomes jogadores Abajour: Abajur which in the plural becomes abajurs or abajures Paparazzo: paparazzo which in the plural becomes paparazzi Anything: qualquer which in the plural becomes quaisquer Loyal: fiel which in the plural becomes fiéis Stable: estável which in the plural becomes estáveis

I started watching this video thinking "he's probably going to explain a lot of non-standard English plurals without getting to any recent additions to English with non-standard plurals." More specifically, the example I had in my head was the word "pokémon" which has the plural of "pokémon". Lo and behold, the explanation you gave for animals somehow managed to explain it anyway lol.

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.

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.

For Dutch, my native language, I initially thought it's easy, just add -en: kleur -> kleuren (color). But, the more I thought about it, I realized how much of a mess it is, maybe even more so than English. It's not simply adding -en, there are additional rules when doing so, you sometimes also add an extra consonant: vis -> vissen (fish); or drop a vowel: schaap -> schapen (sheep); or change a consonant: glas -> glazen (glass); or combine those: raaf -> raven (raven). Then, there are also cases where you don't add -en at all, but use -s: vlinder -> vlinders (butterfly); or -'s: baby -> baby's (baby). Which one you use (-en, -s or -'s) depends on the ending of the word, but those rules aren't consistent either: natie -> naties (nation), but democratie -> democratieën (democracy); kater -> katers (male cat), but water -> wateren (a water, as in: a lake) There are many one-off irregularities as well: koe -> koeien (cow), ei -> eieren (egg), schip -> schepen (ship). Dutch does the Latin and Greek plurals just inconsistently as English, but the same words pluralize differently: museum -> musea.

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!

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!

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.

Since you asked for weird plurals, I would gladly give you the weirdest one (or at least the easiest from a group of words with the same way of forming plurals) in Bulgarian - the word for Horse. I hope cyrillic won't be an issue.... The word for Horse is "кон" (to anyone who can't read it, think of a con artist, it makes the same sound as the 'con'). In Bulgarian plurals are most often formed with an "-и" at the end, but also sometimes an "-e" instead. "Кон" in plural is "Коне". But Bulgarian also sometimes has a different way of saying a specific number of things, so "two horses" isn't "два (two) коне", it is "два коня" (with a 'ya' at the end). So a horse is 'кон', two horses are (2) 'коня', and many horses are (много) 'коне'. This actually comes from an old letter 'Ѣ', that was used to either signify "я" (a 'ya' sound), and an "е" (an 'e' sound). Anyway, I hope this was mildly interesting....

Actually, Moose has a different plural structure for a whole different reason! Moose is actually a loan word! It was only introduced into the English language in the early 1600s, which was actually too late for even Middle English! Moose is from one of a handful of Eastern Algonquian languages, called Abenaki, one of our many indigenous languages, unfortunately many of the languages in this family are now dead or dying. Their plural indicator, as far I can tell is “ak”. So technically the plural of moz (Moose) is Mozak! Abenaki is also likely the origin of the word skunk, though it’s not certain.

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

The cartoon character (of my childhood): Jinx, the cat, called the plural of "mouse" as "miserable meeses"

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!

Along with panini and biscotti which are often used as singular in English, there's opera, which is the plural of opus. But now it's firmly entrenched as a singular in English, so that's a fun one!

"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.

Another great video among many of your “videos”. Basically if one wants to master English then one should learn French Latin old English, Norse, and German .

Here's more for you, Rob. I'm afraid I've long ago forgotten my sources since I learnt much of this before there was an internet. But you should do a video on the words that have changed their plurals, past tense, etc over the years. I had read that some words have been 'normalised' from their original conjugations/declensions. I can't think of a good example right now, so I'll use 'to drown'. The original past tense was drownded, but eventually became drowned. I also read a hypothesis that proposed that when someone was trying to think of the proper conjugation/declension for a word and couldn't remember it, they were likely to use a "normal" conjugation/declension instead. Usually, this would happen to words not in common usage. If you commonly used irregular verbs (think 'to be'), then you were familiar with the various forms, as odd as they may have seemed. But if it weren't a common word, say "to flarg", to reflect upon one's life at the end of it (yes, that is made up) where the proper past tense would have been "flurg", but you probably hadn't heard that in your lifetime, or if you did, it was so long ago you wouldn't have remembered it, you were likely to say "flarged" instead. And over time, flurg would have become normalised to flarged, like drownded to drowned. I have to wonder now if this explains the original plural for book. In Old English, the plural for bōc (OE book) was bēc (pronounced "beech", btw). I would imagine it wasn't very common for people to be talking about books a thousand years ago, so when the concept of multiple books became common enough that it became a usual part of the language, the bēc had been mostly forgotten, so the plural became "books" instead. I'd like to know your take on this. By the way, I'm sorry I didn't discover your channel until just now. As you can probably tell, I like words, too. Keep up the good work. I'm thoroughly enjoying this.

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!

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.

Thank you for including Easter eggs in all of your videos. It's very satisfying

Have just come across your channel and thoroughly enjoying it. As a mildly dyslexic, native English speaker I have always been perplexed by the spelling of our language, which I had such trouble accepting and learning. Your explanations of the origins of the spelling are great. I speak Polish fairly fluently now and French too, as well as rather passive Dutch, so I have learned to delight in the same grammatical complexities you clearly delight in too. Your presentation style is excellent and extremely engaging! Keep them coming. Richard

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

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.

Now when I watched a video about how well foreigners could understand Dutch without studying it first, one Englishman who studied ancient English got the most Dutch words and sentences correct. This video in particular does shine a view on this. A lot of Dutch words are set to plural by adding -EN Stoel (chair) -> stoelen (chairs) Tand (Tooth) -> tanden (teeth) Adding and -S Tafel (table, as in furniture) -> Tafels (tables) Now one thing confuses Dutch speakers when they have to write in English as in English the practice is forbidden and in Dutch it must be done. Auto (car) -> auto's (cars) The ' must prevent the pronunciation of the o to change, so a lot of words ending on a single vowel in single can be put with -'S in plural Now when it comes to the English Wolf -> Wolves we can see the same in Dutch, but in Dutch it's often better to reason the other way around. Een wolf (a wolf) -> Twee wolven (two wolves) Basically "wolv" should be seen as the single form, but in Dutch words may NEVER end with a 'v' or a 'z'. If you ever see those words in Dutch, very good chance they are words imported from other languages without any spelling adaptions. So if a word ends on a "v" due to grammatical changes, you'll always have to replace it with an "f", and when it comes to the "z" it will become an "s". Een huis (a house) -> Twee huizen (two houses) In Dutch verbs we also see that. The infinitive or "whole verb" in Dutch always recognizable by the present plural form mostly ends on "en" (all Dutch verbs end with an "n" in their infinitve form. A fun fact even most Dutch never realize). In the single form "en" is mostly removed, sometimes due to other rules an extra vowel can be added in the first syllable as a result. Wij leven (we live) -> ik leef (I live) That even effects the past tense of these verbs, as all regular verbs on with the "ik" form ends with either t, k, f, s, ch, p or x have -te in single and -ten in plural and -de and -den otherwise. Ik leefde (I lived) -> Wij leefden (we lived) This to the ik form actually bing "leev" but the being replaced with the f due to the end of the word role. Nice to know that this applies both on nouns and son verbs, eh? Now "child" and "children" is a nice one. In the video I see it used to be "childer" in plural. This is interesting when comparing with both German and Dutch. English: One child -> Two children Old English: 1 child -> 2 childer Dutch: Een kind -> Twee kinderen German: Ein Kind -> Zwei Kinder (remember in German all nouns are written with a capital at the start). I could never put the thought out of my head that this may not be a coincidence, but really points to a relation between the three languages, and although English might have gone much of a different way than the other two languages, English is originally a Germanic language, just like Dutch and German. The word "children" always baffled me due to its strange plural in English, but the Dutch plural form isn't so common either. Now the um -> a and us -> i are very common in Dutch, as well. As a matter of fact, I even used it in my own work as a fantasy writer, in which I created a race called "The Vulpi", which is plural for "Vulpus" in single form, basically just because I always wanted to create my own noun that have this effect. 🤣 The word "data" is funny in Dutch, because "datum" means "date" (as referring to a calendar, not in meeting a love interest), and the plural is "data", however since the English word "data" (although pronounced with Dutch pronunciation rules) for data in a computer, as become pretty prominent, so when seeing "data" you can never tell if it refers to "dates" or "data", unless the context is very very clear. Perhaps this may have contributed to the faulty plural "datums" becoming more and more common.

All this time, Google Stadia was a take on Stadium using a proper Latin plural? A rare win of Stadia.

I really like how his voice is like Brian Cox’s voice. Very calming.

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.