# English plurals in -(e)s



## merquiades

Hello.  As you all know the normal plural of English words (albeit a few irregulars like _mice_ and _children_) ends in _-(e)s_.  

I recently noticed that in Germanic languages -s seems to be rare, except in loan words. German adds _-e, -en, -er_ to nouns and/or modifies the stressed vowel,  Dutch mostly end in _-en_ or _-e_ too.  I checked and Swedish tends to have highly irregular looking plurals without _-s_.

On the other hand, Western vulgar Latin has a universal _-s_ plural, developing out of the classical Latin accusative plural:  _stellam-stellas, puerum-pueros_.  As such, western Romance (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc.) has a universal _-s_ plural.  

I would like to know if the English plural comes from directly from Vulgar Latin/ French/ Norman French.  Was this structure imposed on Middle English during the Norman years?  Or is this just a coincidence?  If not where does this plural formation come from?  Perhaps plural _-(e)s_ was the original after all?

Thanks for your comments.


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## berndf

The _s_-plural is an innovation in Ingvaeonic Germanic. The fact that it replaced other plural endings in Middle English (except for a very few remnants like _children _and _oxen_) might have been caused by Romance influence but the _s_-plural as such was native in Old English already. Where Ingvaeonic got it from is a different matter.


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## ahvalj

That can be explained from a purely phonetic viewpoint, without any foreign influence. Let's take the two largest types of vocalic stems.

In the _a_-stems, the Late Common Germanic ending of the Nominative Plural was *-_õz_ (from the PIE *-_oes_), which was reflected as -_ōs_ in Gothic (_wulfos: -z>-s,_ trimoraic _õ>ō_), as _-ar_ in Viking Norse (_ulfar: -z>-R>-r; _trimoraic _õ_ shortened to _ō_ and then once more to _a_) and as -_ā_ in Old High German (_wolfā: -z_ dropped in West Germanic, trimoraic _õ>ā_). The Ingaevonic forms with -_s_ (Old English _-as: wulfas_ and Old Saxon -_os: wulfos_) are usually regarded as continuing the former Accusative, where *-_nz_ produced a stronger -_z_>-_s_ that escaped reduction (compare the Acc. Pl. Gothic _wulfans_, Viking Norse _ulfa_ and Old High German _wolfā_). This special development of -_ns_- and -_nf_- is characteristic of the Ingaevonic branch (_Gans/goose_, _fünf/five_).

In the _ō_-stems, the Nominative and Accusative Plural were identical, *_-õz,_ and so we find the same _-ōs_ in Gothic (_gibos_), -_ar_ in Viking Norse (_gjafar_), and _s_-less forms throughout West Germanic (Old English _giefe,_ Old Saxon _geƀa _and Old High German _gebā_), since there was no -_n_- in the Accusative to enforce the -_z _that regularly dropped in West Germanic.


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## Nino83

It was just present in Old English.
Strong nouns:
masculine: stān/stānas (stone)
feminine: giefu/giefa (gift)
neuter: scip/scipu (ship)
Weak nouns: nama/naman (name)

Due to the strong stress accent final unstressed wovel were pronounced [ə], so for feminine and neuter nouns there was no difference between singular and plural, gief/gief, scip/scip, and almost all names passed to the masculine strong declension, so gief/giefs and scip/scips.

Almost all weak -n nouns passed to the first declension too, like name/names, while some remained, like ox/oxen.


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## ahvalj

I'd like to add to #3 that this -_s_ is present in both Old English (which had Romance substrate of some kind) and Old Saxon (which had absolutely nothing comparable since the Saxons were conquered by Charlemagne only in the very end of the 8th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#/media/File:Frankish_Empire_481_to_814-en.svg), so I don't see how the French -_s_ could have even influenced this ending in Old Saxon (not to mention that the French Nom. Pl. ending was zero in the _o_-stems, _li mur_ vs. -_s_ in the _a_-stems, _les roses_, i. e. exactly opposite to the situation in Old Saxon and Old English).


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## Pedro y La Torre

I disagree that Old English had a Romance substrate. Could you flesh this out more? What is this substrate and when did it appear?


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## ahvalj

Pedro y La Torre said:


> I disagree that Old English had a Romance substrate. Could you flesh this out more? What is this substrate and when did it appear?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Latin


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## Nino83

But Romans were in Britain between 43 and 410 AD, when Brittonic (a Celtic language) was spoken.
Then Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived.


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## berndf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> I disagree that Old English had a Romance substrate. Could you flesh this out more? What is this substrate and when did it appear?


All Germanic has a Latin substrate, however small it may be. Evidence of that are Latin loans like_ wine/Wein/vin_ that must has been imported before Latin /w/ changed to /v/.

I agree with you that there isn't much evidence to support that Old English took significantly more Latin influence than other Germanic languages.


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## origumi

berndf said:


> Evidence of that are Latin loans like_ wine/Wein/vin_ that must has been imported


Would you consider terms like wine, rose, rice, as an evidence for substrate? I guess it only shows that these names were as ubiquitous as the things they represent, migrating from place to place and from language to language.


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## Pedro y La Torre

berndf said:


> All Germanic has a Latin substrate, however small it may be. Evidence of that are Latin loans like_ wine/Wein/vin_ that must has been imported before Latin /w/ changed to /v/.
> 
> I agree with you that there isn't much evidence to support that Old English took significantly more Latin influence than other Germanic languages.



I'll need to better understand what we mean by substrate. Old English (like other Germanic languages) certainly had a relatively important number of Latin loan words, usually via the Church. If this is what is referred to by substrate, fair enough, but I sense that ahvalj is going further than this.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> Would you consider terms like wine, rose, rice, as an evidence for substrate? I guess it only shows that these names were as ubiquitous as the things they represent, migrating from place to place and from language to language.





Pedro y La Torre said:


> I'll need to better understand what we mean by substrate. Old English (like other Germanic languages) certainly had a relatively important number of Latin loan words, usually via the Church. If this is what is referred to by substrate, fair enough, but I sense that ahvalj is going further than this.


You are probably both right. Substrate is too big a word.


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## ahvalj

Pedro y La Torre said:


> I'll need to better understand what we mean by substrate. Old English (like other Germanic languages) certainly had a relatively important number of Latin loan words, usually via the Church. If this is what is referred to by substrate, fair enough, but I sense that ahvalj is going further than this.


(1) Ahvalj wrote that "[Old English] had Romance substrate of some kind".

(2) Romans didn't evacuate the entire Latin-speaking population, so that Germanic invaders found in Britain people speaking (a) Celtic, (b) Early Romance (especially in and around the cities), (c) Pictish and (d) any combination of these languages. Anthropology suggests that a very significant portion (some authors speak about the majority) of the modern English population bears facial and cranial characters inherited from these pre-Germanic speakers (except Picts, of course).

(3) The existence of -_s_ in Old Saxon, which obviously escaped any direct Latin or Romance influence or assimilation of any perceptible number of non-Germanic speakers during the 1st millennium, makes the derivation of that feature in English from the Latin/Romance source (as was one of the topic questions) improbable.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> (1) Ahvalj wrote that "[Old English] had Romance substrate of some kind".
> 
> (2) Romans didn't evacuate the entire Latin-speaking population, so that Germanic invaders found in Britain people speaking (a) Celtic, (b) Early Romance (especially in and around the cities), (c) Pictish and (d) any combination of these languages. Anthropology suggests that a very significant portion (some authors speak about the majority) of the modern English population bears facial and cranial characters inherited from these pre-Germanic speakers (except Picts, of course).


Every invader always found some language spoken before. This alone is not sufficient reason for a substratum theory. There is no serious evidence of Latin influence on Old English that exceeds what is normal in other Germanic languages.


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## merquiades

Nino83 said:


> It was just present in Old English.
> Strong nouns:
> masculine: stān/stānas (stone)
> feminine: giefu/giefa (gift)
> neuter: scip/scipu (ship)
> Weak nouns: nama/naman (name)
> 
> Due to the strong stress accent final unstressed wovel were pronounced [ə], so for feminine and neuter nouns there was no difference between singular and plural, gief/gief, scip/scip, and almost all names passed to the masculine strong declension, so gief/giefs and scip/scips.
> 
> Almost all weak -n nouns passed to the first declension too, like name/names, while some remained, like ox/oxen.


  From what you say here the -s plural seems present in Old English but not overwhelming present, kind of like in Dutch and German today, unless of course most words were strong and masculine.



ahvalj said:


> I'd like to add to #3 that this -_s_ is present in both Old English (which had Romance substrate of some kind) and Old Saxon (which had absolutely nothing comparable since the Saxons were conquered by Charlemagne only in the very end of the 8th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#/media/File:Frankish_Empire_481_to_814-en.svg), so I don't see how the French -_s_ could have even influenced this ending in Old Saxon (not to mention that the French Nom. Pl. ending was zero in the _o_-stems, _li mur_ vs. -_s_ in the _a_-stems, _les roses_, i. e. exactly opposite to the situation in Old Saxon and Old English).


  The oblique plural in old French, which was the most commonly used form, derived from the accusative and always had a final -s.  The case system fell out of use in Western areas of Gaul very early but survived a bit longer in the east.  This would mean that -s did come into Britain with the Normans, whether the locals used it or not.  This is not to contradict your theories of an ingaovonic/ common Germanic origin which already had -s.  You examples are rather convincing.



Nino83 said:


> But Romans were in Britain between 43 and 410 AD, when Brittonic (a Celtic language) was spoken.
> Then Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived.


  A Western Romance influence seems rather frequent throughout the years, from before and after Roman times, through church influence between 410-1066, and then massively after Norman conquest.  Given that you found that -s plural was only with strong masculine nouns in Old English perhaps the Norman influence (with all -s plurals) contributed to regularize the plurals in early Middle English, at a slightly later time.
I agree with Berndf that sometimes there can be more than one origin.  There are likely several different sources all reinforcing the -s plural.


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## Pedro y La Torre

merquiades said:


> The oblique plural which was most commonly used derived from the accusative and always had a final -s.  The case system fell out of use in Western areas very early.  This would mean that -s did come into Britain with the Normans.  This is not to contradict your theories of an ingaovonic/ common Germanic origin.



I was recently reading A History of the English Language by Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable. I'll have to dig out the exact passages later but the authors were adamant that the -S development was a native English/Germanic trait that had nothing to do with the Romans, the Normans or the French.


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## merquiades

Pedro y La Torre said:


> I was recently reading A History of the English Language by Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable. I'll have to dig out the exact passages later but the authors were adamant that the -S development was a native English/Germanic trait that had nothing to do with the Romans, the Normans or the French.


From everything I read here, I'm tending to believe there are several origins reinforcing each other: Germanic (Ingaevonic, Old Saxon) and Romance (Roman, Norman, French)
You don't remember why he was adamant about that?


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> From what you say here the -s plural seems present in Old English but not overwhelming present, kind of like in Dutch and German today, unless of course most words were strong and masculine.


It is one of the major paradigms and corresponds to the _-er_ plural in German and Scandinavian.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> From everything I read here, I'm tending to believe there are several origins reinforcing each other: Germanic (Ingaevonic, Old Saxon) and Romance (Roman, Norman, French)


This is maybe so in Middle English when only two paradigms really existed, strong _-(e)s_ and weak _-en_ and the strong paradigm won. In Old English, there is no serious evidence for Latin or Romance influence, not even circumstantial.

The modern (18th century onwards) _s_-plural in High German is without a shadow of a doubt a French loan.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> From what you say here the -s plural seems present in Old English but not overwhelming present, kind of like in Dutch and German today, unless of course most words were strong and masculine.



Almost half of Old English nouns are masculine, about one-third are feminine and the rest are neuter.

A Biography of the English Language Di C.M. Millward,Mary Hayes

So, just in Old English, the majority of nouns are masculine.
Another important fact is that masculine and neuter declension are very similar: 

M: stān stānes stāne stān - stān*as* stāna stānum stān*as*
N: scip scipes scipe scip - scip*u* scipa scipum scip*u
*
F: giefu giefe giefe giefe - giefa giefa giefum giefa
W: nama naman naman naman - naman namena namum naman

The only different thing is the nominative/accusative plural.
When final unstressed vowels were reduced to schwa, it was natural for these neuter nouns to pass to the masculine declension.



> masculine vocalic 35%
> masculine n-stem + 10%
> feminine vocalic 25%
> feminine n-stem 5%
> neuter vocalic 25%



The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1


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## merquiades

Nino83 said:


> Almost half of Old English nouns are masculine, about one-third are feminine and the rest are neuter.
> 
> A Biography of the English Language Di C.M. Millward,Mary Hayes
> 
> So, just in Old English, the majority of nouns are masculine.
> Another important fact is that masculine and neuter declension are very similar:
> 
> M: stān stānes stāne stān - stān*as* stāna stānum stān*as*
> N: scip scipes scipe scip - scip*u* scipa scipum scip*u
> *
> F: giefu giefe giefe giefe - giefa giefa giefum giefa
> W: nama naman naman naman - naman namena namum naman
> 
> The only different thing is the nominative/accusative plural.
> When final unstressed vowels were reduced to schwa, it was natural for these neuter nouns to pass to the masculine declension.
> 
> 
> 
> The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1


I see on page 100 that there are about 10 types of noun declensions and only one has -s as a plural possibility


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## ahvalj

merquiades said:


> From everything I read here, I'm tending to believe there are several origins reinforcing each other: Germanic (Ingaevonic, Old Saxon) and Romance (Roman, Norman, French)


I agree that the Romance influence of the Middle English period must have reinforced this ending, though, anyway, it seems that English had no other solution than to generalize the plural -_s _(or -_n_): with the drop of the final vowels and in the absence of the number distinction in the definite article, the language was at risk of losing the ability to express the plural.


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## ahvalj

By the way, the Scandinavian and German _r_-plurals, mentioned above, are unrelated. The Scandinavian -_r_ is the outcome of *-_z _(Gothic_ dago*s*, _Old Icelandic and Swedish _daga*r*_), which disappeared in High German (Old High German _tagâ_, Modern German _Tage_). This -_r_ is a true ending in the sense that no element could be added after it (except the postpositive article): cp. Old Icelandic Nom. Pl. _daga*r*_ — Gen. Pl. _daga_ — Dat. Pl. _dǫgum_ — Acc. Pl. _daga. _In contrast, the German -_er _is actually a suffix, which can be seen even in the modern language: Nom./Gen./Acc. Pl. _Lämme*r*_ — Dat. Pl. _Lämme*r*n_. The original situation was well preserved in Old Saxon: _Nom. Pl. lamb*ir*u — _Gen. Pl._ lamb*ir*ō — _Dat. Pl. _lamb*ir*um — _Acc. Pl. _lamb*ir*u _(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lamb#Declension_5) and in Old English: _lamb*r*u — lamb*r*a — lamb*r*um — lamb*r*u_ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lamb#Declension_3). Etymologically, this is the suffix of -_es_-stems (like e. g. in Latin _gen*us* — gen*er*a _or in Russian _neb*o* — neb*es*a_). Like the English -_s_, the German -_r _has turned out to be a good grammatical marker in the language with weathered vocalic endings.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> I see on page 100 that there are about 10 types of noun declensions and only one has -s as a plural possibility



Short and long strong neuter declension are the same thing (it change the presence of the final -u in the plural nominative/accusative), the same for short and long strong feminine declension (the difference is the presence of the final -u in the singular nominative/accusative).
The same for the other weak nouns (feminine have -e instead of -a in the singular nominative and neuter have -e in the singular nominative and accusative, but feminine weak nouns are only 5% and neuter -n nouns are very few, these types are residual).
Plurals with -i mutation umlaut, like man/men, are similar to the masculine declension, because they have the genitive in -s (they are diferent because instead of having a final -e in the dative singular, they have a different vowel in the stem of the word). These nouns had in Late Old English a plural in -as, like bōc/bēc > book/books, because umlaut was lost in most nouns in English (it remained in some nouns like man, foot).

About 35% of the nouns are strong masculine and 25% are neuter. These two type of nouns merged very early, like most -i stem and -u stem took the -es genitive just in Old English. If you note, masculine and neuter are equal in the singular. In other words, you just have, in Old English, more than 60% of the nouns which are equal in the singular.
For the plural, as you can see, the "long" neuter nouns don't have any vowel (-u) in the plural nominative/accusative, so they are equal to the singular.
Due that the majority of these nouns are diferent in the plurals (some with -as, other with -u, which in XII century has just become a schwa), they took the -as plural.
60% with the same declension in the singular just in Early Old English and 60% of nouns equal also in the plural in Late Old English is a big percentage.
Note that  all this happens before 1066.
Add that most feminine nouns in Late Old English don't have any difference between singular and plural (because -u and -a merged with -e into schwa), so they have lost all their inflectional differences except in the dative plural (giefə giefə giefə giefə - giefə giefə giefə*n* giefə).

So, we have 60% of masculine/neuter (comprending former umlaut plurals) strong declension, 15% of weak -n declension and 25% feminine nouns, just before 1066.



> In Middle English (see vol. II, chapter 2), this tendency for the as plurals to become dominant increased, and by the end of that period we find a system virtually identical to that in the present-day language. The point to emphasise here is that the developments are not solely post- Conquest. They are very easily observable in Old English, and the development of the present-day system is something which began at the very earliest stage of the emergence of English as a separate language.



The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1, p. 138

In Late Old English, there was also the merger between -m and -n, so weak nouns like "nama naman naman naman - naman namena namum naman" became "namə" nominative singular and "namən" for all other cases, singular and plural.

So only the strong masculine declension (which just had more than 60% of the nouns) had a distinc genitive case and plural marker.



> The a- stem declension had certain built-in advantages. Aside from the stability of the endings, it was the commonest noun type, and was already in Old English the target for analogical modification of other declensions.



The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 2, p. 109

Just in XII century _Ormulum_ genitive singular -es is extended to feminine words, there is also the new analytic form with _of + dative_ (it has a written -e) which becomes the general prepositional case (but it is not mandatory, also unmarked prepositional objects are grammatical).
For the plural -as > -es, most feminine nouns have it but there is some noun which retains the plural -a > -e (-e is pronounced /ə/, former unstressed /a/, /e/ and /u/ are written /e/ and pronounced /ə/).
The dative singular -e can be dropped but the few plural feminine -e can't, so it seems that the difference singular/plural is the most important one (along with the genitive singular).



> In the south there was a stronger tendency to retain the -en type, and even to extend it (see below); the modern standard retains only original weak ox-en (OE nom. sg. oxa, ME oxe) and the hybrid childr-en, but earlier London shows considerable southern influence, and Chaucer, as we will see, has quite a few other weak plurals.



So, it seems that in the South, where I guess the French influence was stronger, the -en type was more used.


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## Forero

I don't have the exact source, but I remember reading something about a man who stops at a farmer's house and asks for _eggys_. The farmer says he speaks no French and asks for a translation. Once the guest makes clear what he is asking for (eggs), the farmer says something like "oh, you mean '_eiyer_'".

Apparently different parts of England had different ways to say "eggs", both native English, but adding French to the mix only made it harder for ordinary people to communicate.


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## Stoggler

Forero said:


> I don't have the exact source, but I remember reading something about a man who stops at a farmer's house and asks for _eggys_. The farmer says he speaks no French and asks for a translation. Once the guest makes clear what he is asking for (eggs), the farmer says something like "oh, you mean '_eiyer_'".
> 
> Apparently different parts of England had different ways to say "eggs", both native English, but adding French to the mix only made it harder for ordinary people to communicate.



That was Chaucer


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## berndf

Stoggler said:


> That was Chaucer


It was William Caxton.

But this of course has nothing to do with French. Both, _ei_ (Of Anglo-Saxon origin used in the South) and _egg_ (Northern of Old Norse origin), are Germanic words and cognate.


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## Stoggler

berndf said:


> It was William Caxton.



Bugger! That'll teach me to post while enjoying a couple of beers and not double checking beforehand!


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## Forero

In the interest of accuracy, I'll quote the original story:





			
				William Caxton said:
			
		

> And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym we.


Interesting that _ei_ took the "double plural" _-ren_ ending, like _children_.





berndf said:


> It was William Caxton.
> 
> But this of course has nothing to do with French. Both, _ei_ (Of Anglo-Saxon origin used in the South) and _egg_ (Northern of Old Norse origin), are Germanic words and cognate.


That makes sense.

So how many _-s_ plurals are of Old Norse origin?


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## ahvalj

Forero said:


> So how many _-s_ plurals are of Old Norse origin?


I guess none since Old Norse didn't have this ending in either the Nominative or Accusative plural.


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## berndf

Forero said:


> So how many _-s_ plurals are of Old Norse origin?


The word appears rather late in ME literature. The oldest quotation in the MED is from 1381. At that point in time the plurals were already "regularized" (i.e. mainly _-(e)s_ and a substantially small number of weak _-en _plurals).


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## Nino83

Forero said:


> So how many _-s_ plurals are of Old Norse origin?



None. Almost all -s plurals are of Old English origin.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> None. Almost all -s plurals are of Old English origin.


Well, _eggs _is an obvious counterexample, another one is _skies_...

There are only a few handful of words left without an _-(e)s_ plural. All the other nouns, including the ones of ON origin, have it by now.


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## Nino83

Other nouns were absorbed by the Old English strong masculine declension. 
In Old Norse nominative and accusative plural were _egg_ and _ský_, without "s".


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> In Old Norse nominative and accusative plural were _egg_ and _ský_, without "s".


Since there is no such thing as a Old Norse _s_-plural, I don't think this was the question, but I may of course be wrong.


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## Nino83

If the question was which nouns of Old Norse origin had plural -s or -en in Late Old English or Early Middle English, the answer is the opposite, i.e "all".


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## francisgranada

berndf said:


> ... Evidence of that are Latin loans like_ wine/Wein/vin_ that must has been imported before Latin /w/ changed to /v/...


 I think this is important when considering the possible early Latin/Romance influence on (some) Germanic languages . An other example may be the German word _Kaiser _comparing with later loanwords in other languages like _císař _(Czech), _császár _(Hung.), _tsar _(Russian), etc ...


ahvalj said:


> I agree that the Romance influence of the Middle English period must have reinforced this ending, though, anyway, it seems that English had no other solution than to generalize the plural -_s _(or -_n_) ...


 I'd like to add that according to my impression (rather _impression _than _opinion ..._) the final _-s_ has survived in English more or less in general, while _-n_ (and probably other endings as well) has rather disappeared (_morrow <> morgen_, _[to] sing <> singen, we sing <> wir singen _ ... but _[he] has < hath <> [er] hat, father's <> Vaters ... _). If true, then the ending _-s_ is _quasi _the only solution (= "utilizable ending") to maintain the formal difference between the singular and the plural in English ...

P.S. The regularization of some grammatical features  - the plural in this case - is nothing exceptional. See e.g. the Italian _-i_ (_amici, libri,.. _ but also the "non Latin"  _padri, madri,_ _spiriti,_ etc ...)


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