Puzzling Plurals and the *Potatoe Incident

Thanks for participating in the Puzzling Plurals survey. In this post, after focusing on potato and other singular nouns that end with the open /o/ sound, I discuss the survey questions. To finish, I provide links to references, articles, and games.

It is evident from the survey results that "we" are perplexed. The English language is  puzzling, and plurals trouble all of us at times. As we know, they can certainly stress former US Vice Presidents--at least, that's the argument I make below.

"Now add one little bit on the end."

Some tricky singular-plural pairs are remnants of Old English, and flow from the Germanic layer of the language. Some are artifacts of Greek and Latin influence. Still others flow from Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, etc.

For example, take potato, a word that apparently traveled from native Haitian, was given a  Spanish spelling, and was adopted into English, from Sp. patata, from Carib (Haiti) batata "sweet potato." (etymology here). Basic English 101 says to make a plural, we add either the inflectional suffix -s or -es to the singular noun, right? But we typically add -es to words that end with hissing sibilant sounds like /s/, /z/, /sh/, /zh/ and /ch/ -- including wish-wishes, fox-foxes, and bus-buses. Now, potato does not end with a hissing sound, so why would the plural of potato be potato + es? We do not add an -es to pinto or pueblo, yet like potato, they came into English via Spanish. And if the plural is potatoes (and it is), then we should be able to figure out how to spell the singular simply by removing the final -s. Thus, we might deduce that the singular of potatoes is *potatoe. After all, someone (a teacher, or so the story goes) spelled it that way on the cue card for the ill-famed spelling bee. (See the *potatoe incident on YouTube.)

One can kinda-sorta see why Quayle's handler approved the cue card, and why the VP himself went along with it, telling the 12-year-old--who knew the correct spelling--to "add one little bit to the end" of his perfectly spelled potato. After all, there are just too many strange spellings to remember, and we never add -es to a noun that ends in a vowel.

Visual Thesaurus map for genie

But we do! Potato+es, echo+es, torpedo+es, tomato+es, and hero+es testify to it, while piano+s, inferno+s, video+s, rodeo+s and bistro+s refute it. Meanwhile, playing it safe, several sit the fence: ghettos or ghettoes, cargoes or cargos, flamingos or flamingoes, halos or haloes, tornadoes or tornados, etc. English is pickled with puzzles, and just when we find a pattern, the language genie attacks--sometimes we tangle with two genies at once--or genii?

I spell potato, you spell *potatoe? Pity the former Vice President, but pity even more the millions of English learners around the world. In fact, be gentle with all. From the survey results, even well-educated adults who use English with confidence all day fall prey to the unpredictable plural.

Below, I briefly discuss the survey questions. I note the percentage of 271 respondents who voted in favor of each phrase, deciding it was correct. Kudos (but not *kudoes) for resisting the dictionary while responding. Refer to the prior post to see the closed survey with graphed results and related comments.

• (82%) lots of data is correct. The singular is datum. 
• (55%) seven thesauri is correct. Thesauruses is listed in some dictionaries, but it only appears once every 1,356,110 pages, on average, according to Vocabulary.com. The singular is thesaurus. 
• (63%) a single bacterium is correct (like datum). The plural is bacteria. 
• (12%) six skinny mooses is not correct. The plural of moose is moose.
• (38%) one essential criteria is not correct. The singular is criterion; the plural is criteria.
• (26%) five octopuses is correct. Read about octopuses, not *octopi, below.
  
• (85%) four strong oxen is correct (like children, brethren, and extinct shoon, like shoe + -en; see shoe etymology). The singular is ox. 
• (63%) two loaded dice is correct. The singular is die (but dice is becoming more accepted as a singular form). Note the plural mice and lice are not expressed in singular as *mie and *lie.
• (89%) four flying fish is correct, but fishes would also be correct. 
• (71%) a strange phenomenon is correct (like criterion). The plural is phenomena. 
• (77%) some differing hypotheses is correct, ending with es. The singular is hypothesis (like crisis, analysis, thesis, parenthesis). 
• (13%) hundreds of hopping head lie is not correct. The plural is lice and the singular louse (like mouse, but not house and *hice)

English words reflect the spelling patterns of the parent language, but not with consistency. This is when we teach dictionary skills, an important aspect of vocabulary instruction. However, it is worthwhile to memorize the spellings of words we use frequently. Many of these words actually do conform to a plural-forming pattern. In Words and Rules, Stephen Pinker (1999, p. 26) theorized:

"The mind analyzes every stretch of language as some mixture of memorized chunks and rule-governed assemblies."

Rule-governed assemblies include spelling patterns. What are the spelling patterns for tricky plurals? Several experts have attempted to explain them, or list them. So, for your browsing pleasure, explore the following links -- there's even a game.

The Old English Plural by The Oxford Times

Tricky Plurals in English: Bacterias, Bacteriae, Bacteriums? Plurals of Loanwords in English, by Oxford Dictionaries-Oxford University Press (not sure if this will open without a membership). Here is an excerpt, explaining why *octopi is not the plural of octopus:

Tangled up in the coils of the language octopus
 X Sea lions are carnivores and eat fish, squid, octopi, crabs, clams, and lobsters. 
As the above example (taken from a US scientific publication) shows, a little knowledge of Latin and Greek can be a dangerous thing and sometimes leads people into error. The writer clearly knows that some Latin plurals are formed by changing the ‘–us’ ending of a singular noun into ‘-i’ for the plural, as in alumnus -> alumni. However, octopus is ultimately borrowed from a Greek word and not a Latin one, so it’s incorrect to form the plural according to the Latin rules. If you wanted to be ultra-correct and conform to ancient Greek, you’d talk about octopodes, but this is very rare: the Anglicized plural, octopuses, is absolutely fine. 

A Reference to Strange Plurals in English, at pipTALK Forums

Irregular Plurals and Nouns, at the University of Victoria Study Zone

One Fish-Two Fish, a game-like quiz at Sporcle (Try it!)

Minimum, Minima, and Other Irregular Plurals  by Bill Wilson, engineering

Strange Plurals at English Forums.com

Strange Plurals, an open list at Worknik

What is the Plural of Mouse? Quick and Dirty Tips by Grammar Girl


References:

Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Cheers,
Susan