Episode 53: The End of Endings
The History of English Podcast
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Old English - The Plural and Plural Forms of Words
The plural of book was once bh but overtime it was converted to a regular noun with an s ending, and it became books. The same rule basically applies to words like sheep, swine and deer which don't change at all in their plural forms. Once again, they didn't have inflectional endings in old english, so they weren't really affected by the shift to the e s and e n endings. They were fine just as they were.
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