英语日常语法:不寻常的复数

Everyday Grammar: Unusual Plurals³ 英语日常语法:不寻常的复数

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, goes the Dr. Seuss children’s story. Why isn’t it two fishes? You may think, “Ok, it’s hard to count fish so we group them all together. No problem.”

Life on the farm

It’s easy to understand that farmers would not worry about making plurals when they talk about sheep. After all, they are almost always in a group. When you have one sheep, you can also call it a ram¹ or a ewe, and make those nouns plural² by adding an –s: rams⁴ and ewes.

Let’s look at some other things we can make plural. You’ve got a left foot and a right foot. Put them together and what have you got? Two feet. That doesn’t follow the “add an –s” rule.

Same with mouse and its plural, mice. What happened to our neat rule for making words plural?

The German influence

The answer is in our history. English came from German roots. German grammar changes the vowel⁵ sound in the middle of the word to show it is plural. The plural form of the German word for goose, Gans is G?nse. The vowel with two dots over it is called an umlaut. So goose becomes geese in English.

There are other plurals where the vowel changes like in the German pattern. Man – men and woman – women are examples of different vowel sounds in plural words. Sometimes a consonant⁶ changes, as with words that end in an f sound, such as leaf. The voiceless sound f takes on a voiced quality, or v, and an s sound is added to the word. We have autumn leaves and sharp knives.

Another way to make plurals in English is to add the suffix⁷ –en. We see this in the words brother – brethren; child - children and ox -oxen. These are words that come from Old English.

Words of foreign origin

With words that come from foreign languages, there are some patterns that may help you remember the plural. Many technical words in English came from Latin. Let’s look at the plural of some words from Latin. Words that end in –us- drop that ending and add -–i to become plural, as in fungus⁸ – fungi⁹ and cactus¹⁰ – cacti¹¹.

What is that orange thing on the tree?

     It’s a fungus. There are a lot of different fungi in this forest.

For words that end in –um, the ending changes to –a, as in the words datum¹² – data and medium – media. These two words are more common in their plural forms than the singular forms in our digital life. Listen to how the words medium and media appear in this conversation.

          I heard you got a job at the New York Times.

                Yeah, I’m glad to be working in mass media.

          But newspapers are a dying medium, aren’t they?

                Hey, I hope not. I’m writing a blog for them.

When a word from Latin ends in –-ex or –ix, the plural ending is –ices. This results in index – indices and matrix – matrices. Here is another conversation    

           The financial news is bad. The Dow Jones index is down.

                  Don’t worry, there are other indices, like employment, going up.

Try it yourself

Are you ready to try making plurals with some English words?

Use the Germanic pattern for these words:

       tooth (plural: teeth)

       wolf (plural: wolves)

Use the Latin pattern for these words:

       mémorandum (plural: memoranda)

       focus (plural: foci)

There are many more irregular plural forms in English. We’ll look at those in another episode of Everyday Grammar. For now, we leave you with Frank Sinatra, singing Autumn Leaves,

  But I miss you most of all my darling

  When autumn leaves start to fall

Words in This Story

ram – n. an adult male sheep

ewe – n. a female sheep

umlaut – n. a mark ¨ placed over a vowel (such as a u in German) to indicate a specific pronunciation

voiceless – adj. technical, of a sound made without moving your vocal¹³ cords

voiced – adj. technical, of a sound made by moving your vocal cords

suffix – n. a letter or a group of letters that is added to the end of a word to change its meaning or to form a different word

1 ram   

(random access memory)随机存取存储器

参考例句：

• 512k RAM is recommended and 640k RAM is preferred.推荐配置为512K内存，640K内存则更佳。

2 plural   

n.复数；复数形式；adj.复数的

参考例句：

• Most plural nouns in English end in's '.英语的复数名词多以s结尾。
• Here you should use plural pronoun.这里你应该用复数代词。

3 plurals   

n.复数，复数形式( plural的名词复数 )

参考例句：

4 rams   

n.公羊( ram的名词复数 )；(R-)白羊（星）座；夯；攻城槌v.夯实（土等）( ram的第三人称单数 )；猛撞；猛压；反复灌输

参考例句：

• A couple of rams are butting at each other. 两只羊正在用角互相抵触。 来自辞典例句
• More than anything the rams helped to break what should have been on interminable marriage. 那些牡羊比任何东西都更严重地加速了他们那本该天长地久的婚姻的破裂。 来自辞典例句

5 vowel   

n.元音；元音字母

参考例句：

• A long vowel is a long sound as in the word"shoe ".长元音即如“shoe” 一词中的长音。
• The vowel in words like 'my' and 'thigh' is not very difficult.单词my和thigh中的元音并不难发。

6 consonant   

n.辅音；adj.[音]符合的

参考例句：

• The quality of this suit isn't quite consonant with its price.这套衣服的质量和价钱不相称。
• These are common consonant clusters at the beginning of words.这些单词的开头有相同辅音组合。

7 suffix   

n.后缀；vt.添后缀

参考例句：

• We add the suffix "ly" to make the adjective "quick" into the adverb " quickly ".我们在形容词“ quick”后加“ly” 构成副词“quickly”。
• It described the meaning of suffix array and also how to built it.它描述的含义，后缀数组以及如何建立它。

8 fungus   

n.真菌，真菌类植物

参考例句：

• Mushrooms are a type of fungus.蘑菇是一种真菌。
• This fungus can just be detected by the unaided eye.这种真菌只用肉眼就能检查出。

9 fungi   

n.真菌，霉菌

参考例句：

• Students practice to apply the study of genetics to multicellular plants and fungi.学生们练习把基因学应用到多细胞植物和真菌中。
• The lawn was covered with fungi.草地上到处都是蘑菇。

10 cactus   

n.仙人掌

参考例句：

• It was the first year that the cactus had produced flowers.这是这棵仙人掌第一年开花。
• The giant cactus is the vegetable skycraper.高大的仙人掌是植物界巨人。

11 cacti   

n.（复）仙人掌

参考例句：

• There we could see nothing but cacti.那里除了仙人掌我们什么也看不到。
• Cacti can survive the lack of rainfall in the desert.仙人掌在降水稀少的沙漠中也能生存下去。

12 datum   

n.资料；数据；已知数

参考例句：

• The author has taught foreigners Chinese manyand gathered rich language and datum.作者长期从事对外汉语教学，积累了丰富的语言资料。
• Every theory,datum,or fact is generated by purpose.任何理论，资料、事实都来自于一定的目的。

13 vocal   

adj.直言不讳的；嗓音的；n.[pl.]声乐节目

参考例句：

• The tongue is a vocal organ.舌头是一个发音器官。
• Public opinion at last became vocal.终于舆论哗然。