Re: USAGE: THEORY/USAGE: irregular English plurals (was: RE: [CONLANG]

John Cowan:
> Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
> > Yep - I've never heard "fox" beng used in a plural sense.  But lion, rhino,
> > widerbeest, zebra are often used in a plural sense.  Zebra & wilderbeest
> > are 'self-herdable', but we don't get herds of lion(s) or rhino(s).
>
> Fair enough.  But do we count "one lion, two lion; one rhino, two rhino"
> in the way we count "one fish, two fish/two fishes"?  I still doubt it.
> One can talk of hunting lion (mass noun) or lions (plural count noun),
> but that is more like the business with eating shark (as opposed to
> catching five shark).
>
> And in any event "deers", "sheeps" are definitely out in all contexts.
As you probably realized after sending that message, analysing these
putative bare plurals as mass singulars runs into difficulties with
"The lion are scarce today", etc.

You cannot even resort to treating them as analogous to collectives
like "The team have been playing well", because whereas "team" is
singular but triggering plural agreement -- cf. *"these team have
been playing well" -- "lion" can be genuinely plural: "These lion
were tracked down yesterday".

--And.

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