Video transcript
- [David] Hello, grammarians. Today, we're going to be talkingabout the irregular plural. Previously, I had said thatif you take any English word, any noun, say the word dog, and you tack an S ontothe end of it like so, boop, you get the word dogs. And that's how you formthe plural in all cases. I was lying, sorry. It turns out that English isa little bit more complicated than that. While adding an S to things is the way you usually make things plural, sometimes there are other changes. And sometimes you don't even pluralize using an S at the end, but we're not gonna talk about that now. That's for another time. What I wanna talk about today is the most basic kindof irregular plural. So we have the difference in English between regular and irregular plurals. And remember, a plural is when there'smore than one of something. It comes from the Latinplus, which means "more." As opposed to the singular when there is just one of something. You know, one dog, two dogs. So there's a handful of words in English, and it really is a handful, that don't pluralize regularly. Words like "leaf" and "loaf" and "calf," that's a baby cow. If you try to pluralize these as though they were regular plurals, you're gonna return somethingthat is not correct, or at least is not conventional within modern standardAmerican English, right? So "leafs," for example, unless you're talking aboutthe Toronto hockey team, is not correct. In fact, the proper term, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, is in fact "leaves." It is not "loafs," but "loaves." Tasty loaves of bread. It is not "calfs," but "calves." So there are several differentkinds of irregular plurals. That's why this video is called Part I, but I'm only going to cover onesuch irregular plural today, and that is the change fromsingular f to plural ve An important caveat, animportant exception here is double-f. Words like "cliff" or"sheriff" or "sniff," do not change to ve or ves in the plural. They become "cliffs,""sheriffs," "sniffs." There are exceptions to that too, right? Like "staff" to "staves." But for the most part,double-f doesn't change to ve. Single f mostly does, right? That's the general rule. Singular word, ends in f, the plur will be ves. "Leaf" to "leaves," "loaf" to"loaves," "calf" to "calves." Generally, for the most part. English, ah, so silly. Who's driving thisthing? We love it though. You can learn anything. David out.
