How Not to Assassinate the English Language

(4) Parts of Speech II: Nouns (Plurals)

“Politics: (noun) From Greek, poly, meaning many, and ticks, meaning ‘bloodsucking creatures’.” ~ Unknown

 

It is to my great sadness that I don’t know the wit who came up with that one, because seeing the politics in my country sometimes, that kind of sums it up.  Unlike last time, I have no deep meaning for choosing this quote and no point to make with it, other than that I find it entertaining and it contains a plural noun – and, interestingly enough, a noun that is only ever found in the plural.  If you see “politic” floating around, it’s the adjective rather than the noun.  There are various nouns which are only ever found in the plural, and if you can’t think of at least one, you clearly don’t watch enough TV.

Hopefully, if you’re a native English speaker, you will know, even if you can’t state all the rules offhand, everything in this chapter.  Hopefully, if you’re not a native English speaker, you’ll know this all anyway too, but everything in here is more likely to be useful to somebody learning English as a foreign language.  By and large, pluralising nouns in English isn’t too bad.  There are standardised exceptions to the rule when the noun ends in –consonant + y, or s or z or x or sh or j or ch and sometimes f, and some ending in vowels (usually an –o) will add an –e before the -s, and the rules that govern these various exceptions are, of course, broken, because pretty much every rule of the English language has an exception to the rule, and that makes up the majority of our nouns.  Then you get the really irregular ones and the ones that are imported from foreign languages, and the ones that are complicated by hyphens, and that’s about it.

It’s probably best to do this by process of elimination to work out what’s likely to be regular and what’s not, so let’s start with the largest group of irregulars that follows a regular pattern: nouns ending in –y where the penultimate letter is a consonant lose the –y and go to -ies.

I was rather disappointed that the New Oxford Style Manual says that this is the case, and I quote, “unless the ending is –ey”.  Personally, I can’t recall the last time I wrote about the seven daies of the week or the ploies you can use to turn a situation to your advantage.  A simple search on the website in the external link will return multiple nouns ending in –ay, -ey, -oy (which, yes, are mostly compounds of “boy”) which all end with vowel+y+s in the plural.  In fact, the only exception to this exception to the rule appears to be nouns ending –uy, which are temperamental.  “Guy”, which is an extremely common noun often used colloquially, slaps that –s on the end like any other obliging regular noun, but then you have Latin-based words like soliloquy, which nix the –y in favour of the –ies plural ending.  They aren’t as common, but there are more of them than there are of the regular –uy nouns.  That said, NOSM did better than Chicago, which appears not to mention this at all, unless it’s lurking somewhere within those 1000+ pages without being properly referenced in the index, and I don’t particularly want to read through that again.  Fun fact: there are no words in the English language that end –iy.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, if it ends –ay (like today), -ey (like valley), -oy (like toy), or sometimes –uy, you don’t change anything.  You just add –s.  If it ends in anything else, that –y goes and you get –ies in its place.  Like babies.  Or parties.

And now for the second exception to that exception to the rule: if the noun ending in –y is a proper noun (as in, a name), then it doesn’t matter what precedes the –y: you just add –s.  No –ies.  And no apostrophe.  If you have two friends called Mary, then they are the Marys, not the Maries (different name, and French) and not the Mary’s (the Mary’s what? which belonging?).