Irregular Plurals

Plurals, the Silliness of them All

Hi all,

Busy, busy times at the end of the semester. I thought I would write something extensive about irregular plurals in nouns -- you know, we don't say mouses but mice or we don't say mooses but moose. Many animals (mouse, moose, goose, sheep, fish, deer, and so on as well as man, woman) don't form their plurals by adding an -s or -es.
Even in the image on the left, the word corn is unchangeable in the plural -- it's actually a non-count noun since we say some corn* or change the word to a count noun corncob.

Some plurals even come from different languages, whose words we have borrowed verbatim or nearly directly from other languages (like the above word verbatim from Latin). This is different from a cognate, where the word is either the same or very similar between two languages: English man and German Mann; English experience and French expérience; English verandah, Portuguese varanda and Hindi बरामदा or baraṇḍā. Some similar words:

1 analysis => 2 analyses
1 crisis => 2 crises
1 hypothesis => 2 hypotheses
1 lexicon => 2 lexica
1 criterion => 2 criteria

You should turn to a good dictionary with pronunciation assistance in order to find out how we pronounce the plurals of these words.

However, why should I bother with all of this with such good resources available on the web already? The University of Victoria on Victoria Island in Canada has an outstanding page on this subject, whose explanations are accompanied by exercises that you can find at the bottom of the page. Click here to check it out.
And enjoy!

*Never corns as in this picture taken from a less accurate source than this on the internet.

Comments

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