A single goose is a goose, but you get a group together and it becomes geese. A single moose is a moose, you get two plus and it’s still moose?
In: Other
[removed]
[removed]
[removed]
Probably because the word is derived from a Native American Algonquin language. Goose comes from Indo-European languages. Basically it has to do with the language in which the word originated.
The words have two different roots. They have different plural words because they don’t originate from the same language. It’s just a coincidence that they’re both “oose” words.
Since it’s English we’re speaking now, we could just say mooses and gooses and call it a day.
Put simply the reason is they come from different language families with different values, moose is a translation and simplified version of an Native American word for the same animal and the word goose comes from Europe. Now if the word moose also came from the same Europe roots as goose and geese then the plural for moose would most likely be meese.
A more in-depth answer than some of the other ones:
Pronounce the sounds “eee” and “ooo”. Both of them are high in the mouth, but one is at the front and one is at the back and also rounds the lips. One of the ways of forming plurals in pre-Old English times involved a suffix with that “eee” sound in it. Sometimes languages take features of later vowels and move them “up” in a word to a previous syllable, especially in a language with very strong word-initial stress like Germanic languages had and many still have. In a word like *goose*, you would have a plural *goose-eez*, with one of the vowels at the back of the mouth followed by one at the front. This cause the first vowel to move to the front as well, and so you ended up with a vowel that’s at the front of the mouth like “eee” *and* rounded like “ooo,” sounding a bit like a mix of both. This is more or less identical to the French vowel *u* or the German vowel *üh*, and the German one came about by effectively the same set of processes (singular-plural pairs like Fuß-Füße are identical in origin to foot-feet).
Dropping off of non-initial syllables is incredibly common in languages with strong initial stress. And because the information marking “this word is plural” was now found entirely in the first syllable, that could happen without information loss. These types of vowels, front-of-the-mouth and rounded, frequently lose their rounding and just become identical to their unrounded counterparts like “eee” or “eey” that are pronounced at the same place in the mouth. So you end up, in English, with goose-geese, along with other pairs like foot-feet, mouse-mice, man-men, and tooth-teeth. Other words, like theoretical book-beek, turf-tirf, stud-stid (the thing in your wall, not a male horse), furrow/firrow, nut-nit, cow-kie, and goat-gait, that existed as vowel-changing plurals in Old English, instead regularized to use the s-plural most other nouns used.
You can see other traces of this process elsewhere – older/elder, for example, and brother/brethren, and probably the word night instead of the expected form naight (rhymes with straight), with night being a form used in common phrases like “at night” (inflected for dative case).
(I’m glossing over something called the [Great Vowel Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift), in reality it was mouse-mice that sounded like “ooo” and “eee,” while goose-geese was “ooh” and “eey.” The vowels later shifted their exact positions around in the mouth, which explains why English vowel spellings are so off compared to most other European languages – German eh, French e, Basque e, Polish e, and Finnish e all sound about the same, and English ee used to as well.)
Hundreds of years *after* this process happened, and was no longer applying to words because the plural suffix that originated it had stopped being used, the word “moose” with borrowed into English from words like *moos* and *mos* from Algonquian languages in the New England area. As a result, the same process that gave us goose-geese wasn’t applied to moose. It’s not *impossible* for some patterns like this to crop up even when they “shouldn’t”: in addition to humorous things like moose-meese, a handful of formerly-regular verbs like sneak-sneaked, dive-dived and dig-digged have gained irregular forms as sneak-snuck, dive-dove, and dig-dug, the last being completely accepted and the first two being extremely common in North America. They don’t in general, though, and didn’t to moose.
**Please read this entire message**
Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
Questions about a business or a group’s motivation are not allowed on ELI5. These are usually either straightforward, or known only to the organisations involved, leading to speculation (Rule 2).
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ol874t/eli5_is_there_a_reason_the_plural_for_moose_isnt/%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20Link%20to%20the%20search%20you%20did%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20the%20ELI5%20subreddit:%0A%0A3.%20How%20is%20this%20post%20unique:) and we will review your submission.
I’m gunna be real atleast from what I’ve gathered as someone with probably slightly below average intelligence, everything Is made up lol at sometpoint some guy said it’s moose not meese or moooses and thats basically what it is lol you have to accept it thats why I stopped asking questions to teachers at school you can go and try to give an educated guess as to why things are the way they are but it’s really just because someone else told you thats the way it is and enough other people agreed with that so it’s just the way it is but is it really how do we know really know what’s what lol I need awners people help my feeble mind comprehend this world we live in.
Latest Answers