2707: Singular Words People Thought Were Plural May 19, 2024

Plenty of singular words ends in -s (e.g. ‘lens’), and even more end in -se (e.g. ‘house’), but in a few cases, this was assured to be plural. For instance, the word ‘pea’ used to be written out as ‘pease’ the plural of which was ‘peasen’, from Old English ‘pisa’, ultimately from Ancient Greek πίσον (píson). This changed in Modern English, joined by ‘cherry’, the root of which is “cherise”, though this had changed earlier, already “cherry” in Middle English. Of course, the opposite happens too wherein a plural word is assumed to be singular. This is typical especially of foreign words with plural forms other than -s, like ‘cannoli’ (singular ‘cannolo’) or ‘bacteria’ (singular ‘bacterium’), or ‘caper’ losing its perceived plural ‘-S’ from the French ‘câpres’.

2261: Yiddish Masculine for Feminine Hebrew Loanwords Feb 23, 2021

Yiddish, a Germanic language, contains many Hebrew words with Hebrew plural forms, though it does not treat these the same as in actual Hebrew. For instance, the Yiddish form for both שבת (Shabbos) i.e. 'sabbath' and טלית‎ (tallis) '[prayer] shawl' use the masculine plural ending ־ים (-im) even though in Hebrew they both pluralize with the feminine ending ־ות (Modern -ot, or Yiddish -os). In truth, these actually are masculine, and just take usually-feminine endings due to phonological reasons and a little bit of chance. Thus there is the Yiddish שבתים (Shabbossim) but Hebrew שבתות (Shabbatot). Notably perhaps, שבת clearly shows up as masculine in the Bible but only in the singular.

שבת שבתון הוא לכם

"It [masc.] is a sabbath of complete rest for you all".

2190: Plural as the Default Dec 13, 2020

Usually, plurals are formed from the singular, but this is not always the case. Exceptionally, in Welsh for instance there are words for which the plural is the base and singulars are formed off of that. This is on top of the fact Welsh has plurals where no non-affixed form exists: ‘merlen’ (a pony) and ‘merlod’ (ponies), but no *merl. Now, take the examples of

Llygod (mice, pl.) but llygoden (mouse, sg.)

Erfin (turnips, pl.) but erfinen (turnip sg.)

These have the same singular ending as with ‘merlen’ but the plural form is indistinguishable from a root, lacking any additional morphology. Keep in mind this is unlike languages like Latin or Finnish where endings indicate not only singular–plural, but also case. There is no particular reason why the singular will resemble the root if one would have to, but looking at how exceptional this is, it could be said to make intuitive sense. Celtic languages did once historically have cases which one could try to explain this with, but so did English, French, and many other such Indo-European languages where this does not happen.

2188: Paucal, Trial, and Greater Plurals Dec 11, 2020

In addition to the dual number, another number besides simply singular and plural is the paucal, which crops up in a number of different languages such as many Oceanic languages, Serbo-Croatian, some Cushitic languages, and Hopi. This is used specifically for a small but unspecified number; in English one would have to use other words like ‘a few’ rather than using morphology. In other languages too there is the trial, used for specifically three objects. There are however, some languages that rather than distinguishing between small numbers distinguish between greater ones. The greater plural—though all grammatical numbers are equally good ☺—is a syntactic category of some languages including Mele-Fila, a Polynesian language, that distinguishes large quantities, relative how much would be expected. This does allow some room for subjective understanding how much is 'a lot' for a given word, but for instance it might be used when discussing thousands of flowers in a park, or just a handful of luxury cars all together. Of course, this distinguishes from the paucal which is just as subjective. Moreover, Mele-Fila and these other languages with a greater plural will generally still use the plural for exact numbers. It should be noted that while this is a general overview, each language will treat these differently, such as Sursurunga which has a ‘lesser-plural’ in its pronoun system, once thought to be a trial number, but actually it can refer to either 3 or 4 people. Indeed Sursurunga has some of the most complicated numerical system for its grammar, distinguishing between singular, dual, (aforementioned) paucal, greater paucal, and plural.