Main content
Grammar
Course: Grammar > Unit 1
Lesson 5: Irregular plural nouns: mutant and foreign pluralsBONUS VIDEO – Origin of the mutant plural
Why does "goose" become "geese" and "foot" become "feet"? David the Grammarian and Jake the Linguist explain.
Want to join the conversation?
- at, jakob says the plural had a "e" sound at the end. why did he write "footi" and not "foote"? 2:13(20 votes)
- Most languages pronounce "i" as "e" and it was an "e" sound, not an "e".(9 votes)
- Hi there David, I'm really enjoying your grammar lessons! Thank you! I am learning heaps :) I have a question regarding the bonus video on mutant plurals, I wonder if the words Person /People might also be included? In which case we could stretch the list from 7 to 8? Or not?(16 votes)
- The plural of "person" is "persons", not "people". "People" is not a singular, but is a collective noun.(16 votes)
- what was that noise at4:20(11 votes)
- It is David erasing the i in föti. In the end, because of the long o sound, föti became foot in English but is probably still föt in German these days.(14 votes)
- what is feesan, close cousin of English?(9 votes)
- Frisian. It's a language from somewhere in the Netherlands, I think.(10 votes)
- Hello! I'm not a native English speaker. Could you please explain to me, what does that "David out" and "Jake out" phrase mean? In what situation would you use a person's name along with the word "out", like David does in his vids? Thank you.(6 votes)
- atjake said a word Proto-German 2:02
What does that mean?(4 votes)- There's a group of languages called the Germanic Languages, which includes German, Dutch, and English. When Jake says "Proto-Germanic", he's referring to a mystery language that would have been an ancestor of German, Dutch, and English, and would have been the cause of their shared qualities.(11 votes)
- Is there any video for other parts of speech?(5 votes)
- no, but David is going to have a new part of the unit in a month or so(6 votes)
- You mess with the honk, You gonna get the bonk!(7 votes)
- David... can we use Mutant Plural in a paraghaph(4 votes)
- is meese the plural of moose?(1 vote)
- To quote David from his answer three days ago on a similar question:
"Moose is an Algonquian word; it's a Native American word, so it doesn't have to play by the same rules as the Germanic mouse, goose, or foot. The plural of moose is moose."
Hope I could help through David's voice! :)(11 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello, grammarians! I wanted to talk to you
again about mutant plurals. So to review a mutant plural is, there are only seven of them in English, and they all change sound
when they pluralize. You don't add an -s, you don't add an -en, you don't change the ending,
you change the vowel, and there are only seven to go like this. There's man, woman, tooth, foot, mouse, louse, and goose. And these words become in the plural men, women, teeth, feet, mice, lice, and geese. Now the reason that we have
these seven weird mutant plurals in English is kind of
complicated, but I'm lucky enough to be able to work with
an actual linguist. Hello, Jake! - [Voiceover] Hey, grammarians! - [Voiceover] Jake, is it
true that you're a linguist? - [Voiceover] Yep, it's true. - [Voiceover] All right,
so Jake, what is the deal with feet? Where do these mutant plurals come from? If we take the word foot and
we drag it through history, how do we get to the plural as feet? What's the deal with that? - [Voiceover] So if you look
at a lot of Germanic languages that are around today, you
find similar words to the word, the English word foot. In German we have the word Fuss, in Dutch we have the word voet. And when you have a lot
of different languages with slight variations of a word, it means there is some
old, old word out there that all these words are coming from. So we can pretty much be sure that there's some Proto-Germanic word that sounds something like foot. Now back in those days there was a different
way to form the plural, and that was to add an i
sound at the end of a word. So if the word was foot, then
the plural was maybe footi. That means many foots. Now there's a tendency in language that you have to understand here. It's called vowel harmony. Basically it means that
vowels within a given word, they like to sound like each other. So if you have two syllables
those syllables will start, the vowels in those syllables
will start to converge. And in Germanic languages especially, there's one typical kind of vowel harmony which is--
- [Voiceover] Okay. - [Voiceover] When you
have two vowels in a word, the first vowel will try to sound more like the second vowel, if that second vowel is the i sound, just like in the plural
formation of nouns. - [Voiceover] So you're
saying that the suffix -i at the end of this proposed word footi, the u sound tried to sound
more like the i sound. - [Voiceover] Right. - [Voiceover] This is just
a pattern that we find in Germanic languages. - [Voiceover] Exactly. It's very prevalent in Germanic languages, also exists in some Romance languages, some tiny Romance languages. - [Voiceover] So what happens
when you combine the u sound with the i sound? What sound do you get? - [Voiceover] Well, strangely
you get the ü sound. - [Voiceover] Are you, what is that? - [Voiceover] The ü sound. - [Voiceover] Are you okay? - [Voiceover] I think I am okay. You know, we linguists have to deal with this kind of thing all the time. - [Voiceover] (laughs) Sorry. - [Voiceover] We have
very strong stomachs. - [Voiceover] Uh-huh. - [Voiceover] You still
get this sound in languages like German and Dutch. - [Voiceover] So then that's
what this ü is, right? So this sound, or I guess, so the plural of German Fuss is what you said? Füsse? Okay, so bring this home for me. So at some point in the
development of English, or of all these Germanic languages, we had this word foot and
then it turned into footi, and then it turned into what? It turned into füti? - [Voiceover] Something like füti, right. - [Voiceover] Okay. - [Voiceover] Now eventually that ü sound dropped out of English, which is why it's so
hard for us to pronounce, and it was replaced in
pretty much all cases with the ii sound. So we get the word feeti
and then the i drops off, and we're left with foot as the singular and feet as the plural. - [Voiceover] Cool. So it goes from foot to feeti. - [Voiceover] Now the
same exact thing happened with the word mouse, which
probably used to be moos, because in Frisian, which is
the closest cousin to English, the word for mouse still is Muus. - [Voiceover] Moos? - [Voiceover] And you find similar things in a lot of Germanic languages like muis in Dutch and Maus in German. The plural became muusi,
and then eventually meesi, then you get mees. Then a few hundred year later, during the Great Vowel Shift
that mees becomes mice. A lot of ii vowels in
the Great Vowel Shift about 500 years ago became ai vowels. - [Voiceover] So this is
sort of a broad pattern these mutant words all take. It's this umlaut mutation, right? Because these little, these
double dots that go over a, oh it looks like a smiley face, that go over a vowel
change its color, right? They change its meaning. - [Voiceover] And that process is called either umlaut mutation or i-mutation, not eye like the sight organ,
i like the letter in English. - [Voiceover] Cool. Well, I hope that cleared
some things up for you. You can learn anything. David out. - [Voiceover] Jake out. (clap) - [Voiceover] That was
a high five, not a slap.