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

Jan van Steenbergen
>  --- And Rosta wrote:
[...]
> > people:peoples, in the sense of 'ethnos', is clearly a different lexical
> > item. _People_, the putative plural of _person_, is undoubtedly plural:
> > "these people", "those people". Where the analytical problem and
> > scope for argument comes in is whether to say that _person_ has two
> > plurals, one suppletive (people) and one not (persons), or whether
> > plural _people_ has, like _brethren_ and _police_, no singular
> > counterpart. My own vote is for _people_ as plural of _person_:
> > inter alia it gives a better account of alternations like _townsperson:
> > townspeople_.
>
> Okay, I won't stand up lonely against a whole bunch of anglophones :)
You seem to be an anglophone too!

> I guess you must be right, though what I intended to say, was that "people"
> might be the logical plural of "person", it's definitely not its grammatical
> plural. I wouldn't dare to deny that "people" is a plural, that must have
> evolved from a singular.
So of the two positions I outlined above, you were advocating the one
I disprefer.

> But now you say, that "police" is a plural as well? That suprises me! I
> would say, that it corresponds with "politie" (Dutch), Polizei (German),
> la police (French), policja (Polish), etc. All singular! If you ask me
> (which I won't say you should do), "police" should be one of those
> collective singulars (like shit, or, to keep it polite, money) that have
> no plural.
AFAIK, _police_ obligatorily requires plural verb concord in all dialects
of English. Given that fact, it would be hard to argue that it is not
plural (though with a change of sense to 'member of the class of
(national) police forces') we do have the rare forms _a police_,
_polices_). All slang/dialect words for 'police' that I know behave
similarly:

the old bill
the filth
the fuzz

... while there another class of words, _rozzer(s), bizzie(s), pig(s),
cop(s), peeler(s)_ that mean 'police officer' when singular and
when plural either 'police officers' or 'police force'.

--And.

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