Talk:Broken plural

Old talk

This needs translations of the example forms, and a merger with Broken plurals - AnonMoos 03:08, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Semitic vs. non-Semitic

Shrieking Sheiks

It would be better to replace the "sheikh ~ shriek" example with another, clearer one. For example in my dialect (a variant of Northern English English (sic)), whilst "shriek" is pronounced "shreek", "sheikh" is pronounced "shake". My suggestion would be "through ~ trough".

--Twenex 01:58, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. In fact this whole paragraph reads a bit oddly.

"Full knowledge of these plurals comes with extended exposure to the language. Much like spelling in English, this system has so many special cases that can be known only by reading a lot of Arabic texts. (An example from English spelling: sheik is spelled with "-eik" and shriek with "-iek.")"

The way it's worded seems to suggest that the English spelling system has "so many special cases that" they "can only be known by reading a lot of Arabic texts."

--Dependent Variable

Why is the umlaut totally irrelevant?

(See the articles source for that comment.) Granted, the Germanic umlaut is a vowel colouring but who is to say that the IE-Ablaut wasn't precisely that, and who is to say that broken plurals weren't that originally. On first inspection, the only difference is the age of the phenomena.

All the best 157.157.230.175 (talk) 18:15, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

As an example of a broken plural, you might take a look at Icelandic sumar (summer) plural sumur. This is not an example of umlaut but a later intrusion of the vowel u in the plural. If we didn't know that, this would no doubt be classified as a broken plural of sorts. Another example could be hérað (shire) plural héruð where we don't even have an intrusion - the -uð ending has been there since time immemorial. And to take further examples: Bróðir - bræður (brother) irregular with umlaut and systir - systur (sister) also irregular with umlaut. One more example, and I'll be done: sonur - synir (son), two umlauts operating in sequence. If we didn't have the information to analyze these and a great number of other examples, say if Icelandic were discovered today with few speakers left, the analyzing linguist might very well assign a category of broken plurals to Icelandic and explain the rest otherwise - perhaps by settting up a special category, perhaps by trying to find out the underlying reasons, and good luck to him then, assuming Icelandic were the only Germanic language alive. The evidence would largely be gone. Cheers 157.157.230.175 (talk) 15:12, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Why aren't there English and German examples of broken plurals? If I understand correctly, both German and English have these, inherited from proto-west germanic.

en singular	en plural	de singular	de plural
foot	feet	fuß	füße
man	men	Mann	Männer
tooth	teeth	Zahn	Zähne
child	children
brother	bretheren

In all German cases, the umlaut certainly has an effect on the pronounciation, making it more long-E like, so the German plurals above sound similar to the English plurals. In fact ä, ö and ü sound more like each other than they sound like the unaccented forms. They are different vowels with different sounds just like é is different from e in French. Although americans tend to blow off all accents. OsamaBinLogin (talk) 20:08, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Broken plurals require a language with word roots consisting of only consonants. In English and German, word roots consist of both consonants and vowels, so broken plurals are not possible in these languages.

Broken plurals and umlauted plurals are similar in that they both change the vowels in a word to create a plural, but they are different in that umlaut changes a vowel to make it similar to the vowel in a suffix (which in the modern Germanic languages is lost), whereas broken plurals change vowels through no obvious phonological motivation. Because of this difference, and because these ways of forming plurals occur in two different families of languages, it doesn't make sense to call them the same thing. — Eru·tuon 05:13, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

It is only natural that somebody who stumbles upon this article will wonder such English words as "feet" and "women" are examples of broken plurals, or if it isn't then what the name for this phenomenon is called. On this basis, I argue that the fact that there exists this distinct process is relevant. — Smjg (talk) 21:45, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

See comment of "09:01, 14 June 2010" directly below... AnonMoos (talk) 22:18, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Just noting that "children" is not an example of a vowel change nor of an addition of a vowel re these topics. The "-ren" in "children" (as well as "-en" and "-an" in other English plural words) is an old suffix marking the plural. The plural-marking suffix "-s" (and "-es") is now the primary plural marker in English, with "-ren,-en,-an" now being non-productive. — al-Shimoni (talk) 14:30, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Broken plural vs. Apophony

In a true broken plural, the consonants of the abstract consonantal root which the singular form is derived from are placed in a completely new "template" or derivational frame, with very little (or no) phonological carryover from singular to plural other than the root consonants themselves. More ordinary stem changes (including many English irregular plurals) are generally referred to as "apophony", and not "broken plural". AnonMoos (talk) 09:01, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Source Replacement?

The link to the first external source (a .pdf) is broken. I've found another source with the same title, but I'm not sure it's the same paper. The link is here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.92.9938&rep=rep1&type=pdf Is this the same source? If so, that url seems to work... 76.93.41.50 (talk) 04:42, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Broken plural in Hebrew

In the traditional mainstream view, the only real case of broken plural in Hebrew is that of segholate nouns, where historically there was a stem CVCC in the singular and CVCaC in the plural, so that we have malki מלכי "my king" vs. melakhim מלכים "kings". The other examples are cases of historical sound changes affecting different forms in the noun paradigm differently for various reasons, but are not really broken plurals in the comparative or etymological Semitic linguistic sense... AnonMoos (talk) 03:40, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

This doesn't make much sense to me. What is the broken plural in this example exactly? Why is "my king" set against "kings"? And what are those "other examples" which are cases of historical sound changes etc.? A clarification of this section in the article is in order.--84.108.213.97 (talk) 21:59, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Not sure what you're asking about -- stem shape alternation between CVCC in singular and CVCaC in the plural is what would be called "breaking" in other Semitic languages. Hebrew has many other examples of stem allomorphy, but they're due to accumulated phonological changes, not morphological "breaking"... AnonMoos (talk) 20:29, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

The cource cited for Hebrew is Gragg's article on Ge'ez! Surely we can find something written in greater detail about Hebrew itself. -- 20:33, 10 December 2012‎ User:Pete unseth

---

I strongly doubt that the alterations like this has anything to do with broken plurals. They look much more like protheses to avoid a two-consonant cluster. So it is only natural that once a suffix has been added this vowel is no longer needed. Apart from this, there are two more reasons why such alterations can't possibly be cases of broken plurals. Firstly, the formation of broken plurals in the languages where they exist are never accompanied by the addition of a plural suffix. Secondly, broken plurals are always formed by additions or replacments and never by elisions of vowels.--89.191.241.225 (talk) 10:59, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

First off, the word you're looking for is "epenthesis", not "prothesis". Secondly, there's no "elision" in the change of singular CVCC to plural CVCaC, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

And the idea that the epenthetic vowel of the singular absolute form was extended to become the middle vowel of the plural form may sound good, but there are many problems if you try to work it out in detail. In the pronunciation of the B.C. period, segholate epenthesis only applied to limited classes of CVCC nouns, while "breaking" to a CVCaC stem in the plural applied to most or all CVCC nouns. And the epenthesis occurs because of the difficulty of pronouncing a consonant cluster at the end of a word, so why would the epenthetic vowel be extended to forms where there is no such difficult word-final consonant cluster? This certainly didn't happen in the singular, so why would it happen in the plural only? If you look at malki מלכי "my king" vs. malkhey מלכי "kings of" (plural construct state), the k consonant is pronounced as a stop [k] in the first case (reflecting a CVCC stem, where the "k" consonant is not preceded by a basic vowel, and so does not become a fricative), but as a fricative "kh" or IPA [x] in the second case (reflecting a CVCaC stem, where the "k" consonant is preceded by a basic vowel, and so becomes a fricative). These and other considerations have persuaded some scholars that the CVCC/CVCaC stem-shape variation is best accounted for as a remnant or not fully-developed form of broken plural... AnonMoos (talk) 20:29, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Origins?

If I've not misread, I believe I remember that the "broken plural" is in fact a derivation to a collective noun, and that a hypothetical plural of the inanimate masculines mentioned are disused. Consider "dissolving a crowd" versus "dissolving persons" (not a pleasant thought), where the crowd is regarded as a unit of persons. Then the broken plural would (my speculation) be the result of speach habits of stressing the inanimateness and lack of purpose for those nouns where "broken plural" is applied. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 10:17, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

either; or?

Sometimes in these languages the same noun has both a broken plural Arabic form and a local plural. E.g. in Pashto the word for "purpose" (مطلب) matlab can be pluralised in either its Arabic form مطالب matālib for more formal, High Pashto.

And what is the alternative? —Tamfang (talk) 13:58, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Presumably the regular plural endings of the language added to the singular. There are similar examples in Persian. AnonMoos (talk) 21:44, 10 August 2023 (UTC)