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

Jan van Steenbergen writes:
 >  --- And Rosta wrote:
 >
 > > [...]
 > >
 > > As for the rest of the list, _oxen_ is obsolescent, being replaced
 > > by _oxes_, which leaves just man:men, woman:women, foot:feet, goose:geese,
 > > tooth:teeth, mouse:mice, child:children, and, arguably, person:people,
 > > as the utter irregulars among the indigenes...
 >
 > Arguably, indeed. I'm not a native speaker of English, but looking at this
 > discussion from the sidelines I don't think "people" can be considered a plural
 > form of "person", even if it's often used that way.
 > "Person" has only one plural: "persons".
 > I would argue that "people" is a singular form (plural: "peoples"), with a
 > meaning that with the centuries shifted in the direction of a plural. Thus,
 > "the people are..." can be compared with "the government are..."
 > Which means, that "people" used as a plural does not have a singular form; if
 > one wishes to explicitly express a singular meaning, "person" comes closest,
 > but it's not the same thing.
 >
Now, I know nothing of the etymology, but as for how it's perceived by
native speakers today, "people" is most definitely a plural of
"person".  2 reasons for this - 1st, Americans say "people are", while
in US English "the government are" is ungrammatical.  2ndly, "people"
used as a plural is semantically identical to "persons" (at least in
what it refers to - "persons" sounds more formal and "beurocratic"),
while used as a collective singular it means something quite
different, along the lines of "race" or "citizenry".

You may be correct as to how this state of affairs arose, but 'a
singular form [...] with a meaning that with the centuries shifted in
the direction of a plural' can only be viewed as a historical factor -
number is mandatory in English to the extent that in any instance a
noun is either singular or plural (or mass, to the extent that that's
seperate from singular) regardless of semantics.  I can't think of any
exceptions to this, apart from the British usage of things like "the
government are" and there we're still pretty clear that the government
is singular.  Certainly I would differentiate within myself between
"the people are ..."/"the people are ..." where one is plural (a
number of humans previously mentioned) and the other is singular
(maybe the electorate).

This is all really drawn from my perceptions as an L1 (British)
English speaker - my knowledge of formal grammar and linguistic theory
is quite limited.