- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians.
Today we're going to be discussing more irregular plurals.
So, this is the irregular plural part II, the two-ening.
Because we really want to focus on this en particle.
I'll explain in a minute.
So, previously we discussed the idea that there's one
regular plural.
And then, there are a couple of different kinds
of irregular plurals.
So, we have the word dog.
Then it becomes dogs.
We have the word leaf.
Then it becomes leaves.
I'd like to introduce something else too, the word child
is also an irregular plural because its plural form
is not childs, but in fact, you ready,
say it with me, children.
Wow.
That's weird.
What is that about?
Like I said, English is not a predictable language.
Few languages are.
When we think of English as one solid block of wood,
what we're actually seeing is this lashed together raft
made of spit, hope, and history.
So, it's your job as a writer and a speaker of English
to make of this crooked timber something straight,
to borrow a phrase and then mangle it.
So, the question is what is the deal?
Right.
And the answer is that it has to do with English language
history and heritage.
English comes to us from Old English,
which, if you look at it now, it kinda looks like German
because English is a Germanic language.
That's the term linguists use.
So, in Old English, there were a bunch of different ways
to make something plural.
Some nouns would become plural by adding an e n.
Some you could add an s.
Some you would add an r.
And part of this depended on what part of England you lived
in at the time.
There were a bunch of different regional variations.
Today, this e n ending only applies to basically three
or four words.
These are all you need to remember for this one weird
e n thing.
So, the e n ending plural only applies to
child,
ox,
brother, or sister.
And even those, these are really rare.
I bet you don't even know what I'm talking about.
The plural of brother originally was brethren.
The plural of sister is sistren, or sistren.
But these are so rare, and brothers and sisters is
so common that we don't even need to consider them.
So, really, the only weird e n plurals that are gonna be
in common usage are children, and oxen.
And unless your family raises musk oxen or you're
an ox driver, you're probably not gonna be using the word
ox very often, and if oxen are a big part of your life,
you probably knew how to pluralize them already
just from hearing people talk about them your
entire childhood.
So, I'm going to cross that off too.
The only thing you need to worry about is the e n
in children.
Child becomes children.
Now, you're probably wondering David if there's the word ox,
and ox becomes oxen.
What about box?
Why is the plural of box boxes and not boxen?
To borrow a gag from Brian Regan.
The simple truth is that it has to do with
this word's origin.
Ox is a native Old English word.
Box comes to us originally from Greek, and then Latin.
And then French.
That's how it came to English.
I'm sorry if that's not a very satisfying answer, but that's
how English works.
English is this language that is composed of a bunch
of different puzzle pieces all mashed together by time,
history, and repeated invasions, which are totally metal.
But I'm getting away from myself.
The important thing to remember is that for this
irregular plural, this e n ending, really, unless you work
with oxen, or unless you are leading some sort of old-timey
folk revival where you have to refer to brethren
and sistren, child to children is really the only
change you need concern yourself with.
All this can be summed up just like that.
You can learn anything.
David out.
Now, if you're still with me, I would like to relate
a humorous, historical anecdote that comes to us from
the 15th century English printer William Caxton.
Now, this story comes to us from about the year 1490.
And I just want to use this story to illustrate just
how different, how dependent on what part of the country
you were living in was on the language that you spoke.
Because before mass transit, and mass communication
media, which William Caxton was a part of because he was
one of the first English language printers.
Before any of this technology allowed us all to communicate
with each other, we basically just had letters, and most
people were illiterate.
And talking to each other.
And since it wasn't really easy to get from place to place
to place before the advent of cars most people didn't
really go very far.
So, here is the story, which I will translate for you
from Middle English.
It goes like this.
So, these merchants were traveling from the Thames river,
which flows through London, and they're trying to get
to Zeeland, here, which is in the modern day Netherlands.
This is, incidentally, this is England.
This is the southern southeast coast of England.
They're trying to get to Zeeland, and this is a distance
of about 160 miles.
Give or take.
But they can't make it there because of bad winds.
They stop here at Foreland to refresh their stores.
They stop for groceries basically.
And then, they realize that their London English and the
English of the place where they are,
which is maybe 60 miles out of London, maybe,
is mutually incomprehensible.
A man goes into a house.
Asks the woman of the house for eggs.
She doesn't understand the word eggs because the word
she uses for eggs is eyren.
The word egg is Norse.
And he says I would like some egges.
And she says I don't have any egges.
I don't speak French.
And he gets angry because he's like I don't speak
French either.
I'm English.
He says do you have any eggs.
She says I don't know what that is.
And finally, someone says I think he means eyren.
Do you have any eyren?
And she said oh eyren.
Of course, here.
Buy some.
And it just goes to show you that before the advent
of mass communication, we could have had variations
from, as Caxton put it, shire to shire to shire.
Each little town had its own variant of language, and it
wasn't until everything was united by this technology
that Caxton worked with, the printing press, that people
started to become literate and converge toward what
we would consider a more unified standard of English.
Alright.
That was just a little bonus, silly video.
You can learn anything.
David out.