Comment on 🐙 Octopus is Octopus 🐙

• Viceversa@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You cannot just throw some other languages grammar at english however you please

  … because English would steal said grammar by itself!

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• samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Of course you can, that’s why oxen, fungi, etc. exist.

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  • antonim@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Oxen is historically a 100% English plural, just like child-children, it wasn’t loaned. (I should check, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same -en as in German plurals: das Auge, die Augen.)

    Some of these Latin plurals can survive for technical terminology. But it’s pretty much only Latin ones, due to the historical prestige. Nobody talks of Soviet apparatchiki, it’s apparatchiks.

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