It a single ship is called ship and the plural of ship is ships and single sheep is called a sheep why isnt?

Question

the plural of sheep, sheeps?

Answer 1

It is not simply "illogical" as if someone decided willy-nilly to create one type of plural for one word, a second type for others.

Rather, if you look back at the HISTORY of the language you will find that there are basically a handful of TYPES of words that follow a small number of patterns for forming plurals (or not using them at all), that accounts for MOST English nouns.

Below is a quick overview - if you're not interested in the other parts, note #4 (esp a-c) , which covers "sheep".

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Ways of Forming Plurals in English

1) OLD English had a complex system of noun endings to mark not just number (singular, plural) but case (function of the word in a sentence) and gender ('masculine', 'feminine', possibly 'neuter' --for ALL nouns, not just for human beings or animals).

MOST of these forms disappeared in Middle English as the "case" system died out. (The only case forms we still use are found in pronouns I vs. me, he vs. him, etc). But a number of COMMON words 'hung onto' some of these forms for their plurals, esp. words in which there was a change in the vowel between the singular and plural (called i-umlaut, that is, adding an i/e vowel to the main syllable), and a few with the Germanic -en plural. (man/men, goose/geese, mouse/mice --note the i/e vowel in the plural

2) Middle English (the shift marked by the Norman Conquest and infusion of Norman French into the language) brought a NEW way of forming plurals, by simply adding -(e)s. These were adopted for the vast majority of nouns, the major exception being those "common everyday words" mentioned above --the very sorts of words for which speakers of ANY language, people are least likely to accept 'new rules'.

3) As with other European languages, English scholars for centuries wrote in LATIN, and borrowed many words from Latin when they did not find them in their own language. And they often used the Latin plural forms as well. This accounts for a set of English words from Latin that STILL use Latin plural endings (though gradually MOST of these have ended up either allowing English type plurals or discarding the Latin form entirely). Not surprisingly, these words tend to be 'academic' words, e.g., words related to math and science (alumnus/alumni, radius/radii)

4) Certain words have long had the SAME form for singular and plural... or might be said to have NO plural form.

These tend to fall in certain groups. What many or all seem to share is that the particular items are commonly dealt with "collectively", particularly the animals (which is a LARGE part of these group).

Note that a-c are all types of animals... and that this practice goes back to OLD English. (Newer words are more likely to adopt the standard Modern English plural forms.)

a) many HERD animals (though not cows, pigs, goats)
sheep, swine, moose, deer, reindeer, caribou, elk, antelope, buffalo, bison

related to this is "head", when used to mean "animals in a herd"; fifty head of cattle

b) '"fish" and many types of FISH:
bass, cod, salmon, trout,tuna, halibut, perch, pike
shrimp

c) certain sorts of BIRDS - quail, grouse

For animals, note that many of these ALSO have regular plurals, and that these and the 'singular = plural' forms are often used in DIFFERENT ways. Generally, plurals refer to several species or kinds of animal, while the unmarked plural is used to describe multiple individual animals. So, for instance, one would say the order [classification] of fishes, but five fish in an aquarium.

d) certain people groups, ESPECIALLY those ending with -ese, and native American groups (For the first of these, it is clear that the awkwardness of adding an additional -s ending is a major factor--try to say "Chineses" as it is also with "Swiss" and "Quebecois".) Not sure of this, but I note that these words are typically ALSO used as adjectives, and adjectival forms do NOT take a plural form. (Compare "Spanish", "English", etc. for which we may use the adjective-based form for a collective -- The Spanish were more powerful. The English love their tea. The French supported the Americans.-- but a different form for singular or countable-plurals - Englishman/-men, Spaniard(s).)

e) others -- offspring, aircraft, cannon... all of which apparently are also treated as "collective"

5) words with ONLY plural forms, often for things that tend to come 'only in pairs' or at least go back to an earlier form that functioned that way (pants, from pantaloons, spectacles, scissors)

Answer 2

Plural For Ship

Answer 3

The difference is analogous to the difference between the Dutch a and aa. It's "length," like you said. English speakers have a hard time telling the difference between the "short" European "a" (which sounds something like a short American "u") and the "long" one, but native speakers can easily tell the difference. I once read that the ability to distinguish between very close sounds is developed at a very young age, and if you don't hear those sounds spoken to you when you are very young, you will have a very difficult time trying to learn them. One very hard thing about English is that it's only semi-phonetic (you already knew that). Often, letters and vowels have peculiar sounds depending on the word. It's almost so bad that we might as well omit short vowels in writing, like they do in Semitic languages. Actually, I think most of the time it is easy to tell from context, as in the example you gave.

Answer 4

In the study of noun pluralization, there are a number of rules. Most common is simply adding an -s or -es to the word; others, there is a change in spelling (like mouse-mice) while others retain their spelling (like sheep-sheep).There are rules and rules and rules!

Answer 5

Except their pronunciation, there's nothing similar between "ship" and "sheep". It's just the law of English that the plural of sheep is still ship. What can I say?

Answer 6

The plural of Mouse is Mice; the plural of Louse is Lice but the plural of House isn't Hice.

Answer 7

English is made up of a number of different root languages, mainly Saxon, Latin, and old German. The root word is the main factor in the determination of the plural.

Answer 8

Unfortunately Nobody can answer that,
In English there are many complications that you just have to accept
For Eg. Why is the past tense of Swim = swam
" " " " " " " " Break = Broke

In English, Irish, German and all other languages around the world there are many of these unacceptable rules
But Unfortunately you just have to learn them.
Most of the time they are refereed to as Irregular Verbs

Hope this is the answer you are looking for

Daniel Bride

Answer 9

No particular reason - there's no grammatical law that says it has to be. The most likely explanation is that "sheep" was the collective term, like "cattle". Then, one day, someone used it as a singular.

Answer 10

English is weird. For example, the plural of fish is fish, but fishes is also correct in some cases.

Answer 11

This is because English, as with any language was not devised by a single person or group. It grew and evolved from several other languages. It is almost a lifeform or even a culture that exists in our minds, in our literature, and in our technology.