
Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016) - warent
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/03/en-plural.html
======
noobermin
I can't believe they discussed plurals in English and missed the most
interesting piece!

The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of
it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in
English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were
nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals
since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who
slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their
ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for
the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows,
chicken, sheep).

~~~
stevula
Old English had [a plural ending in
S]([https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Nouns#Strong_Nouns](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Nouns#Strong_Nouns))
that predates Norman invasion.

You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards
plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to
borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.

~~~
afroboy
> but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features
> wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.

Not always check Spanish for example they took a lot from Arabic, like 'EL'.

~~~
_ak
LOL, what? Spanish "el" is etymologically derived from Latin ille/illa/illud,
which became el/la/lo in Spanish.

------
justinpombrio
The book The Unfolding of Language[1] describes the forces that shape how
language evolves. One is extending the use of a pattern (e.g. "en" for
plural), even in cases like this one where it wasn't technically appropriate.
Another is the use of metaphor. E.g. "discover" used to mean "to remove the
cover of", but now its meaning is purely metaphorical and the literal meaning
has been mostly lost. Another is laziness: slurring long compound phrases
together until they're effectively one word. A lot of conjugations/declentions
are a result of this. I recommend this book if you're interested in how
languages change over time; it's very well written.

EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact
opposite_. For example, "wicked" used to mean "evil", but in England (and
elsewhere, but especially England) it's started to mean "sweet".

And there's always the great consonant shift:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-
Manki...](https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Mankinds-
Invention/dp/0805080120)

~~~
LeoPanthera
I was amazed to discover that oranges used to be called "noranges" but "a
norange" was corrupted into "an orange".

~~~
yosito
Oh! That suddenly makes the Spanish "naranja" seem way more connected!

~~~
dingo_bat
I don't know the connection but it is called narangi in Hindi, which is
suspiciously close to not be connected.

~~~
landtuna
Makes sense. It's borrowed from Sanskrit through Arabic:
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/naranja](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/naranja)

------
Aardwolf
Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single
object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar
parts. Most objects are made of multiple parts though and they get a singular
name just fine.

That and the "double u", why not "we"??

~~~
weinzierl
I can live with "glasses", "pants", "pliers" and "scissors", but "data" drives
me crazy because even native speakers seem to be completely inconsistent when
it comes to its number.

EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even
it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas
(plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data,
it's Visum (singular) and Visa (plural).

~~~
toast0
Data is a plural of datum, if you're considering the individual pieces, but
it's more commonly used (in my experience as a US native) as a collection
singular like sand. Ex the sand has formed a hill, the data has filled the
hard drive.

~~~
timthorn
And in the UK, Lego.

~~~
bovine3dom
Lego is the brand name; "let's play with Lego" is short for "let's play with
the Lego bricks". I think it's much closer to a group noun :)

See also: Meccano, Duplo, Brio, Scalextric.

~~~
weinzierl
In Germany we even stopped pretending that it's just a bunch of bricks and use
the word as if it were the name of the game. We say "Let's play Lego". Does
this sound strange in English?

------
dctoedt
It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even
encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and
make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent:

\+ The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca.

\+ For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the
logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as a global
lingua franca, but "misspellings" should be tolerated as well as discussed at
length in the comments here.)

\+ We should accept usages such as "childs," vice children, and "it's" as a
possessive, as being proper English and not mistakes. (English as a Second
Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such
"mistakes.")

Such an approach to achieving a common global tongue would be more likely to
succeed than was seen with Esperanto.

~~~
elboru
Can I make a wish? As a non-native speaker it would be great to have a
consistent alphabet, it wouldn't matter the order of the letters, a letter
would always correspond to a single sound, specially with vocals. If the Latin
alphabet is not suitable for this then it would be great to have a new
alphabet or maybe just the Latin one but with some letters added.

~~~
brainwad
This is basically impossible for English, since for many vowels, the various
dialects map the diaphonemes of English into mutually incompatible sets of
phonemes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects#Chart)
(and even that chart is underestimating the differences - tour and moor
definitely have different phonemes in en-AU, even though they are allegedly
from the same diaphoneme.

If you had a conservative spelling system, where each diaphoneme was mapped to
a single letter, speakers of dialects with many merges (e.g. American English)
would struggle to spell correctly, since they would be unable to distinguish
several letters apart. If you had a simplified system, then most speakers
would get confused by merges that existed in the spelling system but not in
their own dialects; and speakers of more conservative dialects wouldn't be
able to write sounds that are to them different.

------
konart
In Russian it's "ребёнок" (child) and "дети" (children). "Дети" is actually a
plural form of now archaic "дитя" and used because... "ребёнок" does not have
a plural form.

The funny thing here is that "ребёнок" while not being archic comes from an
anchient-russian "робя", which has plural form "робята", which is actually
used in modern language too, but meaning can be anything from "boys" to "guys"
or any other generalisation of a group of young people (both boys and girls).

PS: at the same time you can actually invent a plural for "ребенок" if you
want to, but it may be considered as something similar to cockney, but used on
purpose in otherwise normal speech.

~~~
dennisgorelik
> "ребёнок" does not have a plural form

"Ребята" is the plural form for singular "ребёнок". However the meaning of
"ребята" is migrating from "children" to "young guys".

~~~
konart
this is what I've wrote

------
jpmattia
A bit OT, but there is a wonderful PBS/BBC series on the history of English on
youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7REAOG1kc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7REAOG1kc)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cZR1EXGapc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cZR1EXGapc)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kg63k5JDH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kg63k5JDH8)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqlVl0K9tw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqlVl0K9tw)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVH6LdoEDNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVH6LdoEDNs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJLDvP-N0zQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJLDvP-N0zQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej60L8xLLdo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej60L8xLLdo)

------
amaccuish
This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in
German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in
the dative plural must use -n.

So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men

(Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some
really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a
"church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "kirker". Or in old dialects in
Ireland, "children" is sometimes spoken as "childer".

EDIT: I retract my theory on the relationship between children and kindern :)

~~~
kmm
Curiously, Kinder and children are completely unrelated. Child comes from the
Proto-Germanic kelþaz which further came from the Proto-Indo-European stem
gel-. On the other hand, "Kind" comes from Proto-Germanic kinþa, which comes
from a Proto-Indo-European stem ǵenh₁- meaning "to produce, to give birth",
whence also "genesis", "genealogy" and "gonad".

German definitely did not cause those curious plurals. We know for sure Old
English had them itself from Proto-Germanic, and it makes a lot more sense for
a language to retain irregular forms for words that are used very often, than
to loan grammar, which is a relatively rare occurrence.

EDIT: How do you type asterisks here? Escaping with a backslash doesn't work,
nor does using three in a row

~~~
posterboy
For the uninitiated: That's highly speculative

for reference

cold [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
Eur...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
European/gel-)

call, cry, (yell?) [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
Eur...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
European/g%CA%B0el-)

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/child](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/child)
from PIE g(')elt- (“womb”)

from Proto-Indo-European gel- (“to ball up, amass”). according to the PGmc
page [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
Germanic...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
Germanic/kel%C3%BEaz)

but

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolphin](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolphin)

says from δελφύς (delphús, “womb”), which says from

From Proto-Indo-European gʷelbʰ- (“womb”)

I'd offer German "Quälgeister" as modified reflex of the latter. Also "Quell"
is synonym for off-spring. Well, spring is a direct translation of "Quelle",
i.e. source. Coincidence? Cry fits in, too.

I do not believe the dolphin theory, though. I guess tail-fish is more likely.
they have a penis after all, which is way funnier in general, perhaps to funny
for low brow scribe type doctors. Ancient Greek δελφίς (delphís) lends itself
for φίς (phís) > fish. cf.
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fin](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fin) IMHO

any questions?

------
gvx
In Dutch, child/children is kind/kinderen, which is the same double plural. We
also have that construction with ei/eieren for egg/eggs.

(Regular plural suffixes are -en and -s.)

~~~
personlurking
In the chicken post, which they link to in the article in question, it says:

"The OED notes versions in such Germanic languages as Dutch (kieken,
kuiken)..."

But chicken is kip in Dutch. Maybe they're talking about older versions of the
word.

Also interesting, perhaps, is the other '-en' that comes to mind: boy/boys,
which is jongen/jongens

~~~
kmm
"kuiken" is Dutch for a chick, a young chicken (curious that in English, the
form with the diminutive became the one used for the adult), whilst "kieken"
is dialectical Dutch for "chicken". "kieken" and "kuiken" come from the same
root, it's just that one of them got mutated by a sound change that never
quite spread over the entire language.

"jongen" is another story. It used to be "jonge", which is the substantivized
version of the adjective "jong" (young). The -n was later added by analogy
from the other cases. This is why the plural is pronounced "jonges" (written
"jongens"), and the diminutive is "jongetje" even in the standard language.

------
russellbeattie
Huh... I wonder if the the "eng" from England and English related to the
Middle English englen and Old English englas for "angels"? Is England the land
of angels?

Edit: Ah, no. It's from the Angles:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles)

~~~
mrec
According to the Venerable Bede, Pope Gregory I drew the same parallel in
~595: " _Non Angli, sed angeli – They are not Angles, but angels. Well named,
for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in
heaven._ ".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I#Famous_quotes_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I#Famous_quotes_and_anecdotes)

------
nvahalik
So you mean to tell me that all those years of calling them "linux boxen"
_actually_ wasn't crazy?

------
NelsonMinar
I love all the replies here uninformed by reading the fine article.

------
1ris
"childs" is, and always was uncommon, but seems to exists. Also saw it source
code written by non-native speakers.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Children%2C+Ch...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Children%2C+Childs)

~~~
politelemon
Appears even less - looking at the results, those slight bumps correspond to
authors named Child, rather than its usage as plural.

------
ekianjo
The article fails to explain why English moved from en to s for plural forms
around 1400, though.

~~~
empath75
If you’re interested in that sort of minutia, there’s a History of English
podcast that goes into it in mind numbing detail.

The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse, and the -en plural
is from the more complex system inherited from Anglo Saxon languages.

English is like a creole or a pidgin language in a lot of ways and a lot of
its features are due to various foreign invaders imposing their grammatical
rules on the local vocabulary.

~~~
phamilton
> The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse

Which is interesting, because modern Swedish has an -n plural (among other
plurals) and no -s plural. Compare ögon (eyes) and öron (ears) with their old
english eyen and earen. I guess it would follow that Swedish had a lot of
Angle Saxon influence in its evolution.

~~~
empath75
It’s actually more that the Old Norse and Old English had different endings
and the Vikings didn’t bother to figure out the English system. I don’t think
they know whether the -s is from a Norse ending or whether the Norse settled
on -s for other reasons.

The simplified version eventually spread because England was a mixture of
various ethnicities for centuries and you’d have different variants of English
from one town to the next— and after the Vikings you had the normans.

I think it’s the equivalent of the guy I was eating with at a restaurant in
Nicaragua who yelled to the waitress ‘honey, el forko por favor?’ Like, there
was an attempt at Spanish.

~~~
phamilton
> I don’t think they know whether the -s is from a Norse ending or whether the
> Norse settled on -s for other reasons

I think you misunderstood... Modern Swedish doesn't have the -s ending at all
for plurals. My point is that somehow that got lost.

------
smcl
"... and the archaic eyen come from." \- weirdly this isn't so archaic in the
corner of Scotland I'm from. In our dialect we have "een" (which confusingly
has a homonym "een" for "one"). Example usage:

    
    
        Ma cowkin made ma een waater
    

Explanation of that and more fun words and phrases here:
[http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13140464.Word_up__20_of_t...](http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13140464.Word_up__20_of_the_best_Doric_terms/)

------
kazinator
Article misses the broader context. This is from the Germanic roots; existing
Germanic languages still have this as a predominant pluralization pattern.
German: auge (eye), augen (eyes).

------
diehunde
If you want to learn more about these curious facts about English I recommend
reading "The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way".

------
DoreenMichele
Makes me think of how Mädchen ("girl" or "maiden" in German) is neuter/neutral
instead of feminine:

[https://blog.assarbad.net/20090810/das-madchen-why-is-it-
gra...](https://blog.assarbad.net/20090810/das-madchen-why-is-it-
grammatically-neutral/)

~~~
baxtr
Same with “Frauchen” (diminutive of “Frau” i.e. women) by the way...

~~~
DoreenMichele
Und auch _Fräulein._

~~~
baxtr
Gnädige Frau :)

------
jammi
So how about the plurals of some words ending with "us", like fungus-fungi,
but virus-viruses-not-virii and how about dingus-dingii-or-dinguses, doofus-
doofii-or-doofuses and so forth?

~~~
s3m4j
Bad understanding and appropriation of latin and greek to seem smarter than
one really is.

------
Markoff
pff, what we really need it's Chinese language written in pinyin lacking
tones, that's as primitive grammar as you can get, it doesn't even have plural

people think Chinese it's complicated language, but the opposite it's truth,
the characters and tones are making it scary, but once you get rid off
characters and tones it's one of the simplest languages, much more logical
than English

English itself it's extremely illogical languag with way too many exceptions
not following general rule, heck even Slavic languages (again more difficult
at first sight) are more logical than English

------
cletus
The evolution of language fascinates me. English has a fascinating history.
1000 years ago Old English and Althochdeutch (Old High German) were almost
interchangeable (AFAIK). The really fascinating part was the period after 1066
for several centuries where English wasn't the court language of England.

Now this period and lack of centralization is probably responsible for the
many dialects (which now are mostly just different accents for other reasons).
But the language changed so much over this period. Middle English is largely
readable (but weird) to the modern reader. Old English is basically a
different language.

In this period English lost of what I like to call the bullshit like gender of
(non-person) nouns. Case of nouns (other than pronouns) also basically
disappeared. It still had the formal/informal distinction of the second person
that so many other European languages had (but we lost that later). Verbs and
nouns became way more regular.

None of this happened with German (although Germany as a country didn't really
exist until the 19th century and was at best a collection of city-states prior
to that) but German in its various forms was still the ruling language
(although Latin always had a certain preeminence what with the Holy Roman
Empire and the Electors and all).

Compare modern German grammar (where nouns and adjectives have to agree with
case, number, gender and article). It strongly suggests that the ruling class
seems to embody conservatism and traditions, which is unsurprising given that
the status quo is pretty good if you're the ruling class.

You see this in England where the precursor to modern French was the court
language of England for hundreds of years. This has the effect of keeping
commoners out (even more than they already are by virtue of hereditary title).

It's almost like without central control English became more _democratized_.

Obviously the printing press had a massive effect in standardizing spelling
(other posters have mentioned that u and v were largely interchangeable).

Radio (and later TV) had a massive effect on standardizing pronunciation.

But still English has rapidly changed. One example I remember is if you go
back and listen to early speeches by Churchill you'll here him say "nazi" not
as "natsi" but as "nazzi" (much like the non-American ss in "aussie"). But by
later in the war (IIRC) the "ts" phenom had pretty much been imported into
English.

Another thing I read was the mathematical model for how verbs become regular
[1]. Basically, the less a verb is used, the sooner it becomes regular but how
long it takes is quite predictable. Apparently "to wed" is the next verb to
become regular. "To be" should take about 44,000 years.

It makes you realize just how rapidly language changes and how grammar really
is descriptive not prescriptive and why it's completely pointless to get your
pedantic about "literally", less vs fewer, "very unique" and so on.

[1]
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/2...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/29/the-
evolution-of-the-past-tense-how-verbs-change-over-time/)

~~~
jcranmer
There's a lot of misonceptions in here, some major, some minor.

English derives from a more coastal dialect of Germany, and is closest to
Frisian and Dutch (the latter more by convergent evolution). Modern German
comes from a High German dialect, which is much more different (although still
West Germanic). In 1000, English and Frisian would likely have been mutually
intelligible--particularly since they would have been visiting the same
markets as traders--but the same would not be true for English and Dutch or
English and Germanic.

Old English lost its inflection and became highly synthetic. This is primarily
due to the influence of Old Norse, a North Germanic language, and the process
would have begun some time before the Norman invasion in 1066. Note that a
large Danish population settled in England in the 800s (the Great Dane Army
invaded, and Alfred the Great ultimately let the settlers they brought with
them stay), and they eventually brought Swein Forkbeard into England in
response to Æthelred the Unready, which eventually leads to William's conquest
in 1066 after several successive kings find themselves dead with no sons. The
loss of inflection made it easier for North Germanic and West Germanic
speakers to understand each other, since the roots were largely the same but
the inflectional bits were different.

Your characterization of the Holy Roman Empire is wildly inaccurate. While
there were several independent cities of the Holy Roman Empire, there were
several large duchies and kingdoms--most notably Brandenburg, Bohemia, Saxony,
the Palatinate (the four secular electors), as well as Bavaria and Austria. It
was by no means "at best a collection of city-states."

Regularization is not an inherent process of language evolution. Actually,
English isn't really systematically regularizing: American English has
transformed the past participle of "dive" from "dived" to "dove", and there is
effectively a movement to make the plural of "octopus" into "octopi" as
opposed to the correct, regular "octopuses" (or the actual Greek plural
"octopodes").

------
jameshart
For the same reason it's Unixen, not Unices, of course.

------
ebzzry
That is one of the reasons why I support Esperanto.

------
ssijak
Because some dude or gal somewhere some time ago thought it would be funny
that generations to come would need to learn irregular forms of some random
words! Why would grammar rules apply all the same to all the words, not that
logical is it? /s

~~~
wtetzner
English is made up of words from many other languages. It only got a set of
rules after the fact, which is why there are so many exceptions.

~~~
konart
> so many exceptions.

You know nothing, Jonh Snow (seriously though, from a russian point of view
English has very few of them)

