The Browns have one child; the Smiths have two children. Ah, that one is weird. This is an example of an irregular plural form. These nouns are still called variable nouns, they are just irregular. There are only a few hundred nouns like this, but they are the most interesting.

There are some nouns that are more ambiguous. Take wheat versus oats, for example. Wheat seems singular, but you could talk about a wheat field – many wheat plants – and that seems to be plural, no? Or what about oats? Oats is a plural, but it seems to be used interchangeably with the word wheat.

Here are some irregular patterns (oxymoron!):

• Adding -en to the end of a noun to make it plural. Child, children; ox, oxen; brother, brethren (this can also be brothers). This is a remnant from Old English; <-n> used to be a case marker for plural. Chaucer used daughtren for daughters.
• Changing the vowel in the middle of the word. Man, men; woman, women; foot, feet; goose, geese; tooth, teeth; louse, lice; mouse, mice. This is called mutation or umlaut. More on this in a later post.
• Changing <f> to <v> and adding an -es or -s. Calf, calves; elf, elves; half, halves; hoof, hooves; knife, knives; leaf, leaves; life, lives; loaf, loaves; scarf, scarves; self, selves; shelf, shelves; wharf, wharves; wife, wives; wolf, wolves. Some of these are starting to become regular, though: scarfs, leafs, wharfs, etc… are becoming more and more popular. I’m not sure why this happens.
• Just plain weird.  Cow, kine (more commonly cows); die, dice.

And here is a fun spelling poem I found. I’m not sure who it’s by, but I wish I had written it!

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

I thought it was enjoyable.

The earliest written texts we have of English were in Anglo-Saxon runes (a rune is a letter from an ancient alphabet). These runes were called the futhorc. It looked like this:

Let’s look at the first rune. Each rune stood for a sound, like <f>, but it also had a meaning in and of itself – wealth. The futhorc was used by various Germanic (ex: English, German, Frisian, Dutch, Scandinavian, Gothic) tribes at least as early as 200AD.

The Ruthwell Cross, a relatively famous preaching cross, was inscribed with runes from the futhorc.

It was from about 750AD. Obviously what was written using the futhorc was not the English of today; it was Old English.

Then came Insular Script, which was developed in Ireland. This was at first used solely in Ireland and Britain, but then it spread throughout Europe due to religion (Celtic Christianity).

These are the opening lines of Beowolf (~900AD). Again, this is Old English. Insular Script retained some of the runes from the futhorc, like ‘thorn’ (þ) and the barred d (ð).

After the Norman Conquest (1066AD invasion of England by Normandy), the Insular Script was replaced by the Carolingian Miniscule.

And over time, this transformed through Gothic (like the New York Times header) and others into what we have today…

It’s so interesting to see the alterations of our writing system all laid out. At one time I could kind of read Middle and Old English, but I’ve forgotten – definitely something I want to relearn. It’s almost like speaking another language.

Throughout history, it was been in fashion to borrow aspects of language and culture from other admired countries. In Renaissance times, it because modish to borrow Latin spellings for otherwise perfectly normal words. A good example of this is the word DEBT. Debt used to be spelled dette, but the <b> was added to match the Latin word debitum.

Another example is the word DOUBT. Doubt was a loan-word (borrowed) from French (douter), but was given new spelling based on the Latin dubitare.

This convention is called Etymological Spelling. It’s a system of spelling that relies on a traditional spelling rules, and not on pronunciation or changes in pronunciation. Some other words that were etymologically spelled are indict (Latin indictare), receipt (Latin recepta), subtle (Latin subtilis), and victuals (Latin victualia; still pronounced vittles).

Sometimes when the spelling was changed, the pronunciation changed as well. For example, throne used to be pronounced and spelled trone… but when Latin spelling was reintroduced, an <h> was added after the <t> and the pronunciation changed. A word that was respelled this way (<th>) but retained its pronunciation was the word thyme. Another word that this happened to is cognizance. Cognizance used to be spelled and pronounced conysance… but again, the spelling changed to match the Latin word (cognoscere = to recognize) and subsequently the pronunciation changed.

Another example of this change in spelling and pronunciation is fault. It is borrowed from French (faute) but then respelled with an <l> based on the Latin words falsus and fallere. A similar thing happened with the English words assault and vault.

Even the word bankrupt fell victim to this practice. Originally the <p> was silent, as in Italian banca rotta (“broken bank”). The word was respelled based on the Latin rupta, and the <p> became pronounced. Baptism used to be bapteme (from French), but an <s> was added to match the Latin baptismus.

We don’t know why some words retained their old pronunciation and some didn’t. It’s just another mystery of language.

Are there any words that you think have nonsensical spelling? Maybe they’re spelled that way because of this phenomenon.