The English language is notorious among language learners for its irregularity. Even native English speakers struggle with the quirks of English grammar. You may have come across a poem, presumably written by a native speaker, that begins with these two stanzas:
"We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese."
Why exactly is English so irregular? A lot of it has to do with the colourful history of the language.
Oxen or Oxes?
Children learn from an early age that to pluralise a noun in English, they typically add an '-(e)s' to the back of the word. This is exemplified in the poem above, which raises the example of "box" to "boxes".
However, this 'rule' does not apply to a large number of words. Take 'oxen', the plural of 'ox', for example. Perhaps you might also think of 'children', the plural of 'child'. Both of these words have the irregular '-en' ending.
Before England was conquered by the Norman army in 1066, the language spoken at that time -- Old English -- had a different set of plurals. In fact, a noun's plural ending was not fixed but rather dependent on the position it had in a sentence, as well as whether it was a 'strong' or 'weak' noun. '-an' was the designated ending for weak nouns.
Modern English thankfully has not retained this system of plurality, but nouns that take the '-en' (an evolution of '-an') remind us of this part of English's history.
If Geese, why not Meese?
The Old English system of deciding what form a noun's plural took was partially dependent on whether it was 'strong' or 'weak'. 'Ox' was a weak noun. "Goose" (spelt "gōs" in Old English) was... you guessed it, a strong noun.
Unlike weak nouns, strong nouns changed the sound of their vowels when pluralised. This is why we have pairs like goose~geese, and foot~feet today.
So why is the plural of 'moose' not 'meese'? That is because 'moose' did not come from Old English, but was instead a much later borrowing from Algonquian languages. Thus, the modern method of pluralisation -- adding the '-s' -- was used instead.
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