Why do we pluralize house as houses and mouse as mice?

Question

My nephew is at that age where we are correcting his speech for situations like above. I know the English language is a wonky language, but never really thought about why. For fun, Brian Regan has a whole bit about the subject like ox, oxen, box, boxen.

In: 0

Answer 1

Old English changed the inner vowels of a lot of words to change their tense or meanings. Sometimes this was because the ending made it harder to say in some ways or because noises blended together.

Here’s a good longer article on this
https://dannybate.com/2022/03/17/of-mouses-and-mans-the-origins-of-englishs-vowel-swapping-nouns-and-verbs/