Comments on: Are there singular/plural pairs in english with completely different spellings?

Question: Are there singular/plural pairs in english with completely different spellings?

Crosius — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:41:58 -0800

In French, the singular of eye is "oiel" and the plural is "yeux." Are there any nouns in English that have completely different spellings of the singular and plural like this?

By: tractorfeed

tractorfeed — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:52:31 -0800

This is called "suppletion" and the only cases I can think of off the top of my head in English are in other lexical categories, as in verbs (e.g. "go" and "went") or adjectives (e.g. "good" and "better").

By: booksprite

booksprite — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:00:19 -0800

Cow and kine?

By: hazyjane

hazyjane — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:01:44 -0800

The closest I can think of is mouse and mice.

By: zoomorphic

zoomorphic — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:02:14 -0800

"Oiel" and "yeux" are spelled differently, but they still sound similar , with the swallowed 'y.' One example is "person" and "people," though "persons" is infrequently used.

By: zoomorphic

zoomorphic — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:03:16 -0800

Bugger, those links are redirected to the main page. You can mouse over for the correct URLs.

By: Crosius

Crosius — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:06:53 -0800

With "suppletion" as a clue, I have discovered (been reminded of) a few, like:
cow --> cattle, kine
pig --> swine
But these are not the common plurals (ie. we generally say "pigs" and "cows", these days)

By: Sidhedevil

Sidhedevil — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:08:10 -0800

"Oeil" and "yeux" are lexically regular irregular plurals (if that makes sense): they follow the model of other Latin-derived words like "le ciel/les cieux" or "le travail/les travaux".

The reason they're orthographically dissimilar is because "oeil" begins with an oe digraph, which can't be preserved after the hard "s" of "les"--thus "l'oeil/les yeux."

By: sbutler

sbutler — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:08:21 -0800

How different to be completely different? There are a bunch of animal pairings: goose/geese for example. But those do share a lot of letters in common.

There's also foot/feet and tooth/teeth. But again, they look similar. That's the best I can think of for the moment.

By: mikepop

mikepop — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:12:03 -0800

die and dice (not completely different, but not what you would expect)

By: Dan Brilliant

Dan Brilliant — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:12:03 -0800

Goose and geese. Index and indices.

All of the words where we do the Greek or Latin thing and suffix with -i or -a or -ae. Though I'm not a fan of that. I speak English, not Greek or Latin.

NB It's 'l'oeil' not 'l'oiel'.

By: proj

proj — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:31:23 -0800

Crow and murder.

By: nat

nat — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:34:02 -0800

Foot/feet, tooth/teeth, and goose/geese are just a different form of pluralization. (oo --> ee). The plural is still derived from the singular, it just doesn't involve an s.

Same with index/indices (just latin 3rd declension pluralization), and all of the plurals like antenna/antennae, datum/data, etc, as Dan Brilliant mentions.

Seems to me that's just the effect of where the word came from; commonly pluralized words maintain their original plural, ones you never hear get an s.

So I'd say only the cow/cattle,kine or pig/swine examples really are suppletion.

I'd argue crow/murder is a different phenomenon- it's *one* murder of crows, not multiple crows. If we never used the word crow, but instead used murder to refer to more than one crow, then I'd agree. (Same goes for all the other animal/group of animals pairings).

By: ikkyu2

ikkyu2 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:37:58 -0800

A murder is a singular noun referring to a flock of crows. A murder contains crows, plural; it is not a synonym for "more than one crow." For instance, one might speak of "the feeding habits of crows across the United States;" it is incorrect to replace that with "the feeding habits of murder across the United States."

By: Brodiggitty

Brodiggitty — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:48:04 -0800

There are a few English words that are the same singular and plural: Deer and Moose, Caribou. Although Meriam Webster's lists "deers" as acceptable.

loaf, loaves
half, halves
calf, calves

These are all words that trace their etymology back to Old English and probably follow some obscure rule about adding "s" to words that end in "f."

ox, oxen (again, unusual last letter)

Thanks! Now I'll be spending the rest of the afternoon thumbing though the dictionary.

By: chelseagirl

chelseagirl — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:23:15 -0800

Sidhedevil wrote: The reason they're orthographically dissimilar is because "oeil" begins with an oe digraph, which can't be preserved after the hard "s" of "les"--thus "l'oeil/les yeux."

While I can't attest to why they're orthographically dissimilar, it is not because you can't pronounce the œ after the hard s. The plural of l'œuf is les œufs (incidentally pronounced oeux).

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:29:00 -0800

I and we.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:29:55 -0800

Oh, and he/she/it - they.

By: xo

xo — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:42:19 -0800

Child, children.

By: Solon and Thanks

Solon and Thanks — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:43:36 -0800

Crow and murder.

Multiple crows are still crows. "Look at those crows!" Murder is just the name of the group. Just like there is a lion within a pride of lions.

By: Sidhedevil

Sidhedevil — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:01:53 -0800

While I can't attest to why they're orthographically dissimilar, it is not because you can't pronounce the œ after the hard s. The plural of l'œuf is les œufs (incidentally pronounced oeux).

Sorry, what I should have said was that you can't preserve the oe digraph plus i when you conjugate it like other similar Latinate nouns.

The plural of "ciel" is "cieux," as we discussed before, and the plural of "travail" is "travaux".

So the plural of "oeil" would be "oeiux" but you can't have "oeiux" so it becomes "yeux".

Thanks for the clarification!

By: languagehat

languagehat — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:29:19 -0800

This is called "suppletion"

Suppletion involves different words (as in go/went); oeil/yeux is the same word (derived from Latin oculus), with noticeably different spellings in singular and plural. (In the 11th century it was oil, plural olz; by the 14th century it was oeil/yeulz.) The only suppletive plural in English I'm aware of is person/people.

"Murder"? C'mon, people, try not to be silly.

By: flug

flug — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:38:46 -0800

Irregular forms tend to die out of languages over time unless the words are very commonly used.

It strikes me that the closest parallels to this in English are some of the most commonly used verb forms: be/is/are and (as already mentioned) go/went.

By: atomly

atomly — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:42:04 -0800

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_nouns_with_irregular_plurals

By: tractorfeed

tractorfeed — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:27:15 -0800

Here's a suppletion database with examples from lots of typologically-distinct languages: Surrey Suppletion Database. From the main page, apropos of languagehat's example from English: "Russian čelovek (человек) 'person', which has the plural ljudi (люди), is a typical instance of suppletion."

By: Mephisto

Mephisto — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:10:19 -0800

Whilst you may say "cows" and "pigs", that doesn't make them correct.

Other examples include:

One person, but many people.

One stadium, but many stadia (this is actually true for several latin words, including referendum/referenda etc).

One wharf, but many wharves

There really are quite a few examples out there.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:15:24 -0800

Whilst you may say "cows" and "pigs", that doesn't make them correct.

Yes, those are in fact the correct plurals of cow and pig. Check any dictionary.

Your examples, aside from people/person, do not answer the question ("Are there any nouns in English that have completely different spellings of the singular and plural like this?"), and there really are not "quite a few examples out there."

By: oaf

oaf — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:01:58 -0800

Stadia and wharves are not suppletive in any sense.