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