Why is ‘houses’ the plural of ‘house’, while the plural for ‘mouse’ is ‘mice’?
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Some words are borrowed from other languages or earlier versions of English that had different rules for pluralization. So “mouse-mice,” “foot-feet,” “goose-geese,” all came from some different pluralization system. Interestingly, when the same word is re-introduced into the language, such as a computer mouse, it tends to follow the normal pluralization rule, which is why it’s not uncommon to see or hear “mouses” when referring to the devices.
People have already mentioned good reasons but one additional thing is language is always evolving. As a result words slowly migrate from exceptions to the rule to following the rule. In this case, it is entirely possible in 400 years, “mouses” will be the accepted plural to mouse but the plural to house will almost certainly remain the same. An existing example is the plural of cow used to be kine but now cows is acceptable.
Both these words come from Old English. They were written as “hus” and “mus” back then, and the plurals were “hus” and “mys”. That is, the plural for “hus” was the same as singular, while the plural for “mus” changed the vowel. This difference in plurals is due to the fact that Old English was a gendered language, and while “mus” was a feminine noun (basically like we call a ship “she” today), “hus” was neuter. Nouns of different gender had different plural formation rules. Eventually English invented the new plural formation rule (by adding -s at the end of a word), but didn’t apply it to some feminine nouns like “mus”/“mouse” which retained their old plurals. Then English nouns lost their gender, and the vowels in words changed rather uniformly during the linguistic event called “The Great Vowel Shift”.
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Your exact question has been answered but in general inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation stem from the development of a language. Compare it to a programming language, which is developed over a relatively short time span and must be rigid to facilitate computerized interpretation. Human language is the exact opposite, they develope over a long time and don’t really stop changing. They are processed by the human brain which is capable of much more complex heuristics than most (all for now) computers. Languages diverge into regional dialects, are recombined, mix with foreign words, require new words as technology improves. All of that leads to natural inconsistencies.
English is such a Mish mash. I’ve heard English speakers look unironically in disbelief at Irish words like Éabha (Ava) wondering how can ‘bh’ be pronounced ‘v’ but seem to have no difficulty with ‘ph’ being pronounced ‘f’ … Amongst a thousand other quirky English spelling and pronunciations.
Also goose, geese. Moose, moose. Brush, brushes.
My wife caught me telling our toddler it was goose/goose, moose/meese, brush/breesh the other day. Apparently trying to train the younger generation up to make English better is “bad parenting”. 😛
Why are any of the rules of the English language in existence?
Basically, languages change
If we turn the clock back a couple thousand years, English doesn’t exist
What exists is a language we call “Proto-germanic”. We don’t know what these people called themselves, but we have a pretty good sense of what they called mice
A mouse was called *Mūs (pronounced “moose”)
Many mouse was called *Mūsiz (“moose-eez”)
So mouse, and mouses.
But then Pronounciation quirks came in:
Over time, switching from that “oo” sound to that “ee” sound was a bit tiresome; Hard to do quickly. So it smoothed out.
Over time, that “oo” sound got closer and closer to an “ee”, until it became one. (Technically this took place a lot more gradually, but for ELI5 purposes, it’s fine)
Mūs vs Mūsiz
Became
Mūs vs Mysiz.
This only changed Mūsiz, because Mūs doesn’t have an i sound in the word to trigger the change
Then we dropped the -iz part over time
Mūs vs Mys
Then English changed all “oo” sounds to “ow” sounds, and “y” sounds to “eye” sounds
Mouse vs Mice.
This is how language “evolves”. Small changes create quirks like irregular words. Proto-germanic also became a bunch of other languages, including German, Swedish, and Icelandic.
How about moose and moose, vs goose and geese?
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