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Plenty of nouns change the second letter to become plural (man->men, goose->geese) but does anything change its first letter. I've hunted high and low over the internet, and spent ages browsing the questions at Oxford dictionaries but I can't find anything.

tchrist
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Chris H
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  • A related question springs to mind - what's the earliest-positioned consonant that changes on forming the plural? But maybe I should save that for another question if this one is well-received. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 17:43
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    Plural doesn't have anything to do with letters. Plural has to do with sound; spelling is just this rubegoldbergy way we have to represent the words. It looks like it ought to represent the sounds, but it doesn't. – John Lawler Jan 18 '15 at 17:57
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    The phenomenon of the changing initial letter that you are describing is known as mutation. Here's Wikipedia's description of how it works with Welsh (though as far as I can determine, it isn't involved in pluralizing nouns in that language). I don't believe there is any English word where initial-letter mutation occurs in the pluralization process. – Erik Kowal Jan 18 '15 at 18:02
  • You mean like how in Sindarin, the plural of orc is yrch or the plural of adan is edain? – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 18:03
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    @ErikKowal Then what do you call man/men, goose/geese? – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 18:04
  • Very unlikely. Only if there is a word that has been borrowed together with its plural from another language; which hardly ever happens except from Latin and Greek. The kind of word I'm think of is Bantu, which is the plural of Muntu or Umntu (not sure if this is true in any particular Bantu language, or whether this is a reconstruction only). – Colin Fine Jan 18 '15 at 18:04
  • @ColinFine I was assuming it would have to have been imported reasonably recently, yes. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 18:05
  • @ErikKowal: in Germanic languages, the process is known as umlaut, or i-infection. – Colin Fine Jan 18 '15 at 18:05
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    @Colin: I think most Bantu languages pluralize words by changing the first letter (which explains the road sign "Goundabout" seen in Africa by one of my relatives). But I can't imagine English adopting a foreign plural that works like this. – Peter Shor Jan 18 '15 at 18:05
  • @tchrist, I'm no expert in Sindarin, but that's what I mean. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 18:06
  • @PeterShor. No, Bantu languages do not, in general, pluralise words by changing the first letter. They pluralise by replacing the singular prefix by a plural prefix. Some of these pairs of prefixes have the same vowel, but most do not. I had heard that the Swahili for roundabout was kipilefti, and so it was treated as a ki- class word, pluralised as vipilefti. But that may be an urban myth. – Colin Fine Jan 18 '15 at 18:07
  • @JohnLawler, I can't actually disagree with you but it's the end result I'm interested in. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 18:07
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    Only one I could find is cow/kine. However, kine is considered archaic but it is also mentioned as regional. I'm not sure where it is used now. It is related to Scots kye. – ermanen Jan 18 '15 at 18:09
  • @ermanen I've just spotted that on a wikipedia article linked from a question a few clicks away - it's the first candidate for an answer. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 18:10
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    In English, it's /kau ~ kain/. The diff between C and K is just more rubegoldbergeoning, and only exists in our imagination. – John Lawler Jan 18 '15 at 18:12
  • @ColinFine - Gotta stay away from those jokey German linguists and their pesky i-infections! – Erik Kowal Jan 18 '15 at 18:18
  • You’d need to find a word that starts with a vowel if you want ablaut or umlaut in the first sound of the word. So like ago/egi in Latin (present, perfect for a verb) or eald, iealder, iealdest in Old English for old, elder, eldest. – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 18:21
  • @ermanen Though where does that put the singular kow and kowe which have both been found in Modern English? (Though as a language-trivia question about how accepted spelling turned out, I think that's a good answer). – Jon Hanna Jan 18 '15 at 18:43
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    In French, oeil means “eye” but the plural changes it so that yeux means “eyes”. There are also the English suppletive plurals like person/people or pig/swine, but those have regular plurals as well. And the plural of is is are. – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 18:45
  • @JonHanna: Never heard "kow" or "kowe" before. I checked OED and it includes cow|kow as a Scottish word: ‘A hob-goblin; a scare-crow, bugbear’ (Jamieson); cf. worricow n. – ermanen Jan 18 '15 at 18:50
  • @ermanen kow and kowe are obsolete spellings, but related to the fact that kine and kye have a k while cow has a c. – Jon Hanna Jan 18 '15 at 18:55
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    You need to concentrate on sounds, not letters. The plural of woman is women, but the o changes pronunciation even though its letter doesn’t change whereas the a -> e letter change does not change the pronunciation at all. – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 19:10
  • @tchrist there are enough irregular verbs that I restricted the questions to nouns. Person/people was what set me thinking about this - it seems like coincidence that they start with the same letter (as they're from persona&populus). I hadn't considered pig/swine, as you could equally say that the plural of swine is pigs. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 19:13
  • @ColinFine (Re: ‘mutations’) In Germanic languages, the kind of mutation that Erik was talking about doesn’t exist at all. It’s different from what in Germanic is called mutation or umlaut, which in Celtic terms is only ever called affection. The Welsh mutation is what causes the difference between tad ‘dad’, ei dad ‘his dad’, and fy nhad ‘my dad’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 18 '15 at 19:32
  • @ChrisH I don’t know that swine can be used in the singular. I think it’s a plurale tantum like cattle. I may be wrong, though. – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 19:48
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Isn’t that just lenition? – tchrist Jan 18 '15 at 19:49
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    @tchrist "why not, you swine" - OK that's a different usage, but oxforddictionaries.com says "plural same" implying singular use is OK. – Chris H Jan 18 '15 at 19:52
  • @tchrist Ei dad is lenition; fy nhad is nasal mutation. And of course, ei thad ‘her dad’, which I forgot before, is aspiration. (As Erik said, none of these mutations play any part in forming plurals; they are applied based on various phonetic environments that were lost about 1,500 years ago.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 18 '15 at 19:53
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    In Old Icelandic, which has more typographically represented vowel variants than English does, the first letter of some words changes between singular and plural forms—for example, between áss (god) and æsir (gods). We see a reflection of the split in that example in the anglicized proper names Asgard and Æsir (or Aesir), but to my (extremely limited) knowledge, no singular/plural pair of words in English out of Old Norse has retained a split in first-letter spelling. – Sven Yargs Jan 18 '15 at 19:58
  • @tchrist Great thought there about woman/women, but roundedness on /w/ in English is allophonic, so even if we were asking about sounds rather than letters, I don't know if it would count. – curiousdannii Jan 19 '15 at 23:07
  • @ChrisH How would you feel about changing the question to asking about words which change their initial phoneme? It would mean cow/kine wouldn't count, but maybe many more words might. Or it might be too late to change it. – curiousdannii Jan 19 '15 at 23:08
  • @ErikKowal: The Wikipedia article about the general phenomenon of mutation (under its many names), rather than specifically Welsh mutation, is found at Apophony. – Tim Pederick Jan 20 '15 at 06:31
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    @curiousdannii, that would be an interesting question, and quite possibly a better one than this as it stands. I feel it would be too late to change this one - not just because of an accepted answer but because of my intent on asking the question. It would be a harder question to research (as spelling differences are more amenable to text searching) and one that would attract some interest (not least from me). It's yours if you want it. – Chris H Jan 20 '15 at 11:28
  • What did your research so far reveal, or leave unsaid, please? – Robbie Goodwin Jul 05 '18 at 20:50

4 Answers4

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The only one I could find is cow/kine.

However, kine is mentioned as an archaic plural of cow in most dictionaries including OED but Wikipedia and Wiktionary mentions as regional or dialectal also.

Wordsmith does not count it as archaic and includes a contemporary usage:

Kine is one of the very few words in English (other examples: I/we, me/us) that have no letters in common with its singular form, cow. It is pluralized using the -n marker, as in the words children, brethren, and oxen.

"Cows stood belly deep in a ranch pond, doing their impersonation of the kine in John Constable's paintings." Verlyn Klinkenborg; Water and Grasses; The New York Times; Jul 5, 2010.

Interestingly, kine is a double plural also because an extra suffix has been added to Middle English plural form ki (ky) or kie (kye):

The word "cow" came via Anglo-Saxon cū (plural cȳ), from Common Indo-European gʷōus (genitive gʷowés) = "a bovine animal", compare Persian gâv, Sanskrit go-, Welsh buwch. The plural cȳ became ki or kie in Middle English, and an additional plural ending was often added, giving kine, kien, but also kies, kuin and others. This is the origin of the now archaic English plural of "kine". The Scots language singular is coo or cou, and the plural is "kye".

[Wikipedia]

ermanen
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I'm not sure whether pronouns count: "I" versus "We".

There are also some prefixes: e.g. "byte" versus "kilobyte"; and "ester" versus "polyester"; and possibly "pole" versus "dipole".

ChrisW
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The Equatorial Guinean currency, the ekwele, has plural bipkwele.

curiousdannii
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    That's a neat example of a word that has to be used in its original form in English. After comments about (southern/eastern) African languages I trawled through a few lists of words that have entered English from various African sources. None of them appear to have brought their plurals with them, either adopting an English -s (e.g. bwana), behaving as a mass noun (e.g. obeah) or having a plural form the same as the singular (impala, at least as used in Africa). – Chris H Jan 19 '15 at 10:26
  • @ChrisH: Has to? You'd be amazed how many bureau de change cashiers would say ekweles. (deliberately not ? because I'm uncertain what counts as 'correct' in this situation). – Tim Lymington Jan 19 '15 at 18:31
  • @TimLymington, you're right, I did put it rather strongly. But it's as close as anything is likely to get. – Chris H Jan 19 '15 at 18:59
  • (+1) I really like this answer. – Simd Apr 19 '15 at 07:50
  • Another example from the realm of currency: Lesotho has the loti, plural maloti. Since plural prefixes are a common feature of Bantu-speaking peoples like the Sotho, there are also many demonyms that form their plural using prefixes (one Masotho, many Basotho) although dropping the prefix to form the English demonym is also common, as I did earlier in this sentence. – herisson Jan 04 '16 at 07:59
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I guess there are some that only describe plurals, so you'd have to use another word if you wanted to express singular: poultry, livestock, folk(s).

Chuckk Hubbard
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