Why is the plural of mouse different from the plural of house? Who thought of one mouse and two mice?

Answer 1

As a matter of fact, in OLD English the plural of "house" was similar to that for mouse. We can still see this in German which has singular "Maus", plural "Maeuser" (mouse/mice) and singular "Haus", plural "Haeuser" (house/houses).

Most of the older forms in English have done as "house" did, adopting the Middle to 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 different 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 many 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 2

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Answer 3

No clue, english can be confusing.

Example: Dwarf- Dwarves- Dwarfs
Shelf - Shelves, but never shelfs