English: Plurals I

Saturday, 19 September 2009

This is going to be a multiple piece essay on plurals in English. Plurals in English are very complex, more than most people give them credit for. I have heard that they are complex in Russian, too, but having not studies Russian, I wouldn't know.

In English, plurals are usually simply the singular noun with an 's' appended. E.g.

Car	-->	Cars
Bed	-->	Beds
Bottle	-->	Bottles

This is all very nice, and if all words were like this, things would be simpler for native learners, and much easier, especially, for foreign learners of English. However, as with other word modifications, pluralising in English has many exceptions (irregular forms). There are also some other regular forms, one is simply to have the same word for both plural and singular.

Dice is an interesting case. Most people talk about "1 dice" or "2 dice". At school, I was taught to say "1 die", "2 dice", "3 dice". But from a descriptive perspective, "dice" is both the singular and the plural form. For many words, where this is accepted practice, even by ivory tower academics, e.g.

Sheep	-->	Sheep
Fish	-->	Fish
Won (Korean currency)	-->	Won

Then, of course we have irregular pluralisations like

Ox	-->	Oxen
Die	-->	Dice
Mouse	-->	Mice
Cow	-->	Cattle (but can be regular, cows)
(Wo)man	-->	(Wo)men

And of course, there are a whole lot more ways to pluralise different nouns.

Then of course, there are abstract nouns, which cannot be pluralised, i.e. they are uncountable. E.g.

• Faith
• Love
• Innocence
• Faith

My next post will talk about the different types of nouns (collective, countable, uncountable, proper, concrete, abstract, etc.). Some nouns can fit into more than one category, while others are mutually exclusive.