If the plural of mouse is mice, why isnt the plural of house, hice?

Answer 1

You must put this question in Jokes & riddles section. loser

Answer 2

And the plural of goose is geese and the plural of moose is...?
I also want to know if the plural of mouse, like on your desktop pc, is that mouses or mice?

Answer 3

As a matter of fact, in older English the plural of "house" WAS something very much like "hice". We can still see this in German which has singular "Maus", plural "Maeuser" (mouse/mice) and singular "Haus", plural "Haeuser" (house/houses). German, in fact, preserves many older plural forms that English has done away with.

Most of the older forms in English have done as "house" did, adopting the Modern English way of forming plurals by adding -(e)s.

But there was a group of them -- foot/feet, goose/geese, tooth/teeth, louse/lice, man/men, etc. -- that did not make the change. Then there are those whose older forms may co-exist alongside the new forms, like the somewhat archaic form "brethren" (and if you have a King James Bible, you can find "kine" as the plural of "cow").

(Note that the -(e)n is another remnant of an older, Germanic way of forming the plural. We see it again in plurals like "oxen".)

Some of the older forms survive as "irregular plurals". Many of them do so because of the differnt vowel

Actually, the changed vowel in Old English plural noun forms (and various other parts of the language) was NOT invented as a way to mark the plural. It was an indirect result.


Here's how it happened:

1) In most of the ancient Germanic languages, adding a suffix with an i-vowel in it caused the vowel in the preceding syllable to change to be a bit more like the i-vowel ("vowel harmony" -- a comon, very natural change in human speech). This change is called "i-mutation" or "umlaut".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut

2) Old English had a whole system of case endings Some of these endings had i-vowels in them and caused the change in the preceding vowel noted in #1. (These changes took place in various forms, not just plurals.)

We can see the same sort of change in many other words that took various suffixes: hale/health, long/length, old/elder, eldest, food/feed.
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/pronunciation.html#pronounce:imutation

3) The system of case endings died out amidst the massive changes that gave us Middle English (for which you may blame the Norman French invaders if you like!) But the vowel changes in many of these old noun forms survived.. Without the endings, the changed vowel itself began to function as a marker of the plural form.

4) The "new" system of forming plurals by adding -(e)s was adopted for MOST English nouns. But a number of the most common, familiar words were NOT changed. (This is typical of human language. Note how all our irregular VERBS are COMMON words - have, be, bring, come, go... Rarer words are easily forced into a consistent pattern.)

Answer 4

because- we will begin with box , and the plural is boxes
but the plural of ox is oxen , never oxes;
the one fowl is goose,but two are geese
yet the plural of mouse is never meese.

the one may be that,and three may be those,
yet hat in plural is never hose
and the plural of cat is cays not cose.......
so it's english....where everything is possible

Answer 5

Not much consistent in the english language. I thought of learning spanish but I have enough trouble with my native language.

Answer 6

Houses but the English langauge is a little mess up.

Answer 7

If you must ask questions, why don't you think of something useful to ask ? Silliness is okay at times, but there's way too much of it here.

Answer 8

You can come over my house and eat some rice.

Answer 9

good point! louse is lice. and if you are talking about a group of people, you would say "they are nice". so why wouldn't we talk about 1 person like "she is nouse."

Answer 10

because they come from different root cultures