Re: USAGE: THEORY/USAGE: irregular English plurals (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number of symbols

Tom Wier:
> Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>:
>
> > Jan van Steenbergen:
> > >  --- And Rosta wrote:
> > >
> > > > > man:men, woman:women, foot:feet, goose:geese, tooth:teeth,
> > mouse:mice,
> > > > > child:children, ox:oxen, fish:fish, shrimp:shrimp, deer:deer,
> > sheep:sheep,
> > > > > moose:moose, elk:elk, salmon:salmon, herring:herring, bison:bison,
> > > > > calf:calves, half:halves, hoof:hooves, elf:elves, knife:knives,
> > > > > life:lives, wife:wives, loaf:loaves, self:selves, shelf:shelves,
> > > > > thief:thieves, leaf:leaves, scarf:scarves, wolf:wolves.
> > >
> > > Wouldn't "brethren" belong to this category as well?
> >
> > Yes, actually.
> >
> > My sense is that in contemporary English, _brethren_, like _police_,
> > lacks a singular, and hence does not belong in the above list.  But
> > _brethren_ and __police_ remain irregulars in not taking the -s
> > plural.
>
> That's not my experience.  Inasmuch as I've ever heard the plural
> "brethren" used at all, it has always been used in circumstances,
> often in religious orders, where the singular "brother" was quite
> accessible.  It's just that "brethren" as a plural is very very
> sociolinguistically restricted.
_Brethren_ in general is not as restricted as _brethren_ as plural
of _brother_. In the language in general -- in my experience at
any rate -- it means "one's fellows, people of one's own ilk".
You could try, say, looking it up in a corpus -- e.g.

http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=brethren

and trying to judge from context whether those narrow socio
restrictions apply. I have tried this, and find that the data
pretty clearly bear out my statement.

--And.