answersLogoWhite

0


Best Answer

Geese is a very old English word, following a pattern that has always been rare in English but is well-known for its use in some very common words.

Though used by the vast majority of English nouns today, forming the plural of a noun by adding -s was just one of several ways of pluralizing nouns in Old English, and it was used only in the declension of regular masculine strong nouns (of which there were albeit many). One of the other patterns of pluralization, the one used by goose to become geese, was through Umlaut (vowel-shift or mutation), a feature present in various areas of Germanic grammar.

In Old English, the nouns with umlauted plurals (such as feet, geese, teeth, men, lice and mice in Modern English) in the nominative and accusative cases made up a subgroup of mainly masculine and feminine strong nouns. These strong plural forms are of purely Germanic origin (like most everyday core-vocabulary English words) and they usually have similarly umlauting cognates in other Germanic languages. For example, the English pair man and men is exactly equivalent to the German Mann and Männer (pronounced more or less as "MEN-naw").

The Norman invasion of England led by William the Bastard in 1066 and its superimposition of the Norman French language greatly influenced the vocabulary of English, and to a lesser extent its structure and grammar. The prevalence of s-ending plurals in French influenced the gradual decline of other pluralization patterns of Old English, such as the neuter strong ending -u, the feminine strong ending -a, and the weak ending -an (which became -en in such a modern plural as oxen).

Speakers of Old English said gos and ges, fot and fet, and man and men, many times a day but commoners might live a lifetime and never say the words boc and bec, so that the plural of the Germanic English word book today uses the regular (originally masculine) strong form books instead of the Old English form beek. However, the context or frequency of usage of an umlauting-plural word did not seem to have much of an effect on whether or not it kept its vowel-shifting plural, since such everyday "commoner's" words as cow, friend, goat, and nut were originally of the same vowel-shifting ilk as goose and louse.

User Avatar

Wiki User

13y ago
This answer is:
User Avatar
More answers
User Avatar

Wiki User

14y ago

geese is the plural. singular is goose

This answer is:
User Avatar

User Avatar

Wiki User

12y ago

goose

This answer is:
User Avatar

Add your answer:

Earn +20 pts
Q: What is the singular of geese?
Write your answer...
Submit
Still have questions?
magnify glass
imp