Comment on I hate that that happens
pyre@lemmy.world 4 weeks agowell I can’t find a source for it now. maybe I’m misremembering. I read it in the book The Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah. maybe it was referring to some remnant exception, maybe it was about another language. can’t verify it cause the book is not nearby right now. maybe I confused it with four different ways to pluralize in French (s, x, aux, none) idk.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Oh, you mean word endings for plurals, well those depend on the gender and the singular word ending. They can be a bit confusing, because they’re not always regular like local -> locaux, but naval -> navals. You have that in other languages too, even in english, like goose -> geese, but moose -> moose, mouse -> mice, house -> houses, and so on.
pyre@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
yeah that’s my point. language isn’t math, it changes over time organically and therefore is bound to have quirks. some of it is even inorganic, like when English linguists wanted to spell words of Latin origin in a way that reflects it.