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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 "…
So, are German men also called "Germen"? xD
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.)
"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
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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 (…
"People" too - as inconsistently numbered as data.
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> all are caused my german. It's not like German were "at fault". English grew out of a common ancestor with nowadays German.
Sorry, poor english :) and yes that's true, but that common ancestor, west germanic, is they key point here, as it shows us why things are in English.
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 "…
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
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"People" too - as inconsistently numbered as data.
Its uneasy coexistence with the usually-technically-valid-and-occasionally-preferred persons is the real problem. Peoples is pretty rare and only for the specific case where it's referring to a plurality of tribes/nations as peoples...
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"??
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Sorry, poor english :) and yes that's true, but that common ancestor, west germanic, is they key point here, as it shows us why things are in English.
Old High German is not the ancestor of English. Some kind of West Germanic might be called a common ancestor of both English and German.
"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...