ANSWERS: 4
  • Don't know why you got down-rated for this. I've seen dumber questions on here. A +4 innoculation against trolls is just the ticket. Oh, to answer your question; I don't know how often in my life I've had to use the plural of "booth." I think you just filled a niche! Congratulations!
  • That is one of the curiosities of the English language. As a linguist, I would suspect that the reason has to do with the mother language of all European (and Indo-Iranian) languages, known as Indo-European. Indo-European had many more forms of nouns than English does. IT is probably that these two words come from different noun forms originally, so form their plurals differently. If you know German, you can see evidence of this. eg der Mann (man; masculine noun) but die Frau (woman; feminine noun) but das Maedchen (girl; neuter noun). If we make these plural they become Die Maenner; die Frauen and die Maedchen. There is an article change, a sound change and an ending change to form men, an ending change to form women and an article change to form girls. Since we, in English, have largely lost our articles, it is impossible for us to know what form our words once were. I hope this explains it.
  • Here's something that you should enjoy. Ode to Plurals We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen? If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth? Then one may be that, and three would be those, Yet hat in the plural would never be hose, And the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren. Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim! Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. We have noses that run and feet that smell. We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on. And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?
  • A lot of strange English plurals such as tooth-teeth and foot-feet can be explained by looking at the German word it is similar to. "Foot" is simplest. In German, one foos, two fuissi (I'm trying to spell phonetically). "Foos" is pronounced at the back of the throat, but the short "i's" in "fuissi" are pronounced near the front of the tongue, and the reason the "i" got in the first syllable is because it's easier to pronounce two front vowels in a word than a back and a front. (The whole Turkish language is based on this principle.) In modern German "fuissi" is almost pronounced "feesi", so you can see how one foot became two feet. Something similar happened when the Ukrainian one zoob (one tooth) became two zoobi (two teeth). I don't know exactly which language it went through. Exactly the same thing happened when one goose became two geese. But in Ukrainian the word for booth is not bood, it is booda. When that was brought over into English it would be boodas, and change by the natural laws of consonant drift into one booth, two booths. There is usually a logical answer for the silly grammar of English, and it's usually located somewhere in Europe.

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