2164: Collective Plurals Nov 17, 2020

While English has a number of single-syllable collective nouns that have the same plural and singular forms (sheep; fish; folk), this used to be somewhat more systematic. While some of these patterns are still true for certain regions, weights, measures, and units of time did not use -s. This is mostly retained in more traditional dialects, and would look like “4 pound_ of flour,” “the rope was yard_ long”, or “over 3 year_ ago“. This can also be true of strong nouns such as ‘foot’ but in any case overall this process, starting in the Middle Ages, effected nouns to be treated as plurals of count nouns rather than collectives [mass nouns].