From: Anne Lambert
Message: 10683
Date: 2001-10-27
>>> And while the question is being considered, how about
>>>
>>> goose geese
>>> mouse mice
>>> louse lice
>>
>> That one's rather older: Germanic i-umlaut before the consonant stem
>> plural ending *-iz (< PIE *-es).
>
> I'm comfortable with my understanding of umlaut, but it took a while.
> MCV's remark is correct of course, but it does not answer the basic
> native-speaker's question of *why* English has these bizarre fossil
> plural forms.
>
> Umlaut is not something that is easily explained to monolingual
> native-speakers of English, particularly the AmE variety. Umlaut
> describes a phonological process which is now 100% dead in English,
> and, so I am told, is just barely alive, and only via analogy, in
> German.
>
> This question, "why 'feet' as the plural of 'foot'?", is at some point
> asked by every native-speaker; most of us put it aside, never
> receiving an adequate answer. Even our teachers don't understand.
>
> If you learn Turkish, of course, you'll experience a great awakening.
> Vowel Harmony! But once again, no monolingual native-speaker of AmE
> will ever understand vowel harmony, except in an abstract sense. You
> accept on faith the explanation that Turkish-speakers do bizarre
> things with their vowels, making the first vowel in a word 'harmonize'
> with that word's second vowel, i.e., the first vowel ignores it's
> etymological vowel and substitutes the second vowel.
>
> It's (approximately) the Old English plural of 'foot', being logically
> formed as 'footies' (at least to our modern native-speaker
> sensibilities), and then becoming 'feeties' because the first vowel
> must take on the value of the second, and then shortening itself to
> 'feet' because the internal grammar of Old English says this is
> *right*, 'it feels good'. Because English dropped almost all
> inflection altogether, some -- lots of -- grammatically logical stuff
> got lost, and 'feet' got fossilized, its singular being a *very*
> common word. 'Feet' is now inexplicable, except via a long and not
> very good explanation like this.
>
> For myself, I'm still left somewhat in the dark. I gather that only
> certain classes of OE nouns did this, and of those that did, just
> about all of them regularized themselves (via the magic of analogy) to
> normal plurals in -s.
>
> So. The short answer is that English was, once upon a time, a highly
> inflected language, but has in the meantime lost just about all of its
> inflections, and as a consequence, has lost any internal explanation
> to a native-speaker of why the plural of 'foot' is 'feet'.
>
> Umlaut is a feature of all the Germanic languages, and would seem to
> go back, if not to PIE itself, to something just afterwards.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>