Re: Rs

And Rosta wrote:
> John:
>
>>It's not quite clear whether it was a sound change or something else that
>>caused English to dump essentially all its -n inflections, both infinitive
>>and noun plural, at the beginning of the Modern English period.  The
>>"Lyke-Wake Dirge" from the 17th century still speaks of "hosen and shoon",
>>though "hose" has now become a sort of mass noun, and "shoe" has a regular
>>-s plural.  Of course, "children" still survives, with an even older
>>pre-OE "-r" plural buried under the -n plural, and "brethren" and "oxen"
>>are still with us, though "brothers" is the normal plural and And reports
>>"oxes" as increasingly common
>
>
> Increasingly common, that is, in idiolects, rather than in usage. The
> point is that OX is a lexeme many neither hear nor use, & consequently
> has become susceptible to regularization, as evidenced by the
> judgements (of _oxes_ as the plural) by my students, who mostly are
> around 20, have grown up in towns, & do not read much.
Computer geek slang tends to self-consciously go in the other direction,
using -en plurals with just about any word that ends in "x": boxen,
unixen, linuxen, etc.

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