"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 31/01/18 (plurals: goose, moose, ignoramus)

I have more strange plurals. I talked about octopuses, octopi, octopodes, yesterday and how difficult it is to grasp plurals in English and how often you need to be careful. Ignoramus, for example, the plural is never going to be ignorami. Because it never started off as a noun in Latin. It was used by grand juries who couldn't convict a felon and ignoramus or ignor-amus means "we do not know" cos they didn't have sufficient evidence so the plural is always ignoramuses there. Why are plurals so strange? I mentioned this yesterday. English is Germanic but than it had huge influences that came over with the Normans. It had a thing for Latin and Greek. It eavesdropped on practically every land that it encountered in its seafaring exploits. It is essentially just a hotchpotch of various influences, various words from different cultures. So it's unsurprising that a language with all of that going on is very, very irregular and a bit of topsy-turvy. It's the same with plurals. I'm going to talk about goose and moose because lots of people will say, "If the plural of goose is geese, why do we not talk about meese?" It's a good question. I'll start with goose. That goes back over a thousand years to the Anglo-Saxon word gos. For them the plural of goose was not geese, but it was ges. So they gave us the beginings of that change of the O to the E. We have pretty much stuck with that today. But moose is a far more recent addition to the language. It is about 400 years old and it was adapted from Algonquin, which is a group of North American native languages. It gave us toboggan, moccasin and quite a few other words as well. So it gave no sense to give moose an old English plural, why would you? So meese has never really made any sense at all. By the time it arrived in our language, we did stick an S onto our words so you would think it might be mooses but in fact for animals, we have always preserved, game animals particularly, we've always preserved that singular plural. Not quite sure why but we have deer, we have elk and so it was with moose, The plural of moose is moose. As for meese, it never really got a look-in because the Anglo-Saxons had no hand in it whatsoever.