A brief history of plural word...s - John McWhorter

All it takes is a simple S to make most English words plural. But it hasn't always worked that way (and there are, of course, exceptions). John McWhorter looks back to the good old days when English was newly split from German -- and books, names and eggs were beek, namen and eggru!

Lesson by John McWhorter, animation by Lippy.

[tomasdominguez]

"If new english is weird, old english needed therapy"
Guys, That's it.
THAT'S MY SENIOR QUOTE.

[StrikaAmaru]

"If new English is strange, Old English needs therapy" <-- Best. Quote. Ever.

[quinnencrawford]

"doora" the "exploora"

[nathanieltheartist]

I laughed at the "lambru, eggru, breadru" part.

[Fredreegz]

"These things just don't make sense!"

In linguistics, changing 'goose' to 'geese', 'man' to 'men' or even things like 'sing' to 'sung' is an example of 'ABLAUT'.
Adding noises onto the end of words like 'inform' + 'a-tion' = 'information' or 'book' + 's' = 'books' is called 'SUFFIX-ATION'.
These are just two processes that are used to change the exact meaning of a word; making a verb a noun, showing ownership, showing that it happened in the past, showing that there are two of them. Historical languages were full of these kinds of things.

Try looking at another language not related to English (such as Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish etc.) and you'll see that they handle things in very different ways altogether.

[lesorciercalifornien]

given the amount of beer consumed, EVERY night at a baseball game is Pee Night.

[TEDEd]

Good news! Prof. McWhorter is doing two more lessons with us. One is on the origins of past tense, and the other is on Conlangs (i.e.: Elvish, Klingon & Dothraki). John has an excellent TED Talk on text messaging, too.

[norcofreerider]

One Ox, two Oxen.

One Box, two Boxen.

This is easy.

[EricELT]

"If modern English is strange, old English needed therapy." - Great summary!

[stinahinderson]

As a Swede it’s a bit strange to hear that the vikings drove the change since we still conjugate many of our nouns like that. A lot of the examples are even really similar to current Swedish. For example for book it is bok -> böcker. Sounds ironic that it was the vikings that changed that

[ynntari]

"if modern english is strange, old english needed therapy"
true!
I loved this phrase!

[lemonlemon]

"English is hard to learn"
*laughs in Russian*

[andrewbesso]

"Singulars and plurals are so different, bless my soul.
Has it ever occurred to you that the plural of 'half' is 'whole'?"
- Allan Sherman ("One Hippopotami")

[Katrin]

Ok but I speak Icelandic which is the closest to Norse of the Nordic languages spoken today and we have 3 genders and the plurals are complicated. We do for example say one hús (house), many hús, one gaffall (fork), many gafflar, one auga (eye), many augu, one nótt (night), many nætur and one maður (man), many menn. So I have hard time believing that Norse was the language that simplified English so much since they already understood complicated grammar rules from their own language that weren't so different from the ones in old English. Also... when I read old English it is not that hard for me to understand since it has so much in common with modern Icelandic which means the former must have had even more in common with old Norse.

[mtuulikki]

Have your eggru! I took it from the lambru, and instead, make more breadru with those eggru!

[avariceseven]

So, this explains our weird superstition. When a spoon falls from the table a man will visit the house, if fork, a woman.

[hedleypanama]

I just point out that -s, as the video mentions; is something new. I am impressed that in Spanish (not related to Germanic languages and not invaded by vikings as far I know), we also use the -s or -es for plurals.

[fsolda]

It’s a surprise to know that vikings have something to do with this, I thought it was due to the latin influence. Spanish, Portuguese and French make the plural in the same way, just adding an “s” (and sometimes “x” in case of French).

[haibigboy]

Wait, I thought suffix 'S' came from French (L'homme - les hommes; La fille - les filles)... and why does 's came from the Vikings' make sense since the Vikings spoke the language that was related to German, which also used Augen instead of Auges (from das Auge - the eye)?

[blablibliblu]

Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets.