Why is ‘houses’ the plural of ‘house’, while the plural for ‘mouse’ is ‘mice’?
In: 1039
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.
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