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OXES AND OXEN

12/25/2017

3 Comments

 
I just got a very interesting question submitted: why is the plural of ox not oxes, but oxen (as contrasted to examples such as foxes, boxes, or poxes)? There are a couple other surviving -en words, like children, as the submitter pointed out, but for the most part our plurals are with an s. The reason lies in the competing influences from Anglo-Saxon and Proto-Germanic in the Middle English language. The Romantic, French, Anglo-Saxon plural was to add on an s, and the Germanic way was to add an n onto the ends of words. For a time, these suffixes coexisted peacefully, but eventually the s ending began to be more fashionable, and almost every word used it. However, language isn't uniform, and that's how we got these aberrations. It also helps that, in Old English, ox was spelled oxa, and it simply sounded better to keep on the n from the previous Proto-Germanic word ukhson (ultimately from Proto-Indo-Europan uksen, meaning "any male animal" in general)
3 Comments
ellen
12/26/2017 10:41:36 am

Thanks for the quick response! I wonder if there are other examples of "en" as plural still in use today? Chicken? :)

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Adam Aleksic link
12/26/2017 06:30:32 pm

I went through the list at https://www.morewords.com/ends-with/en/ and my search was fruitless. It seems that "chicken" and "oxen" are Old English oddities, unless you count certain others exceptions.

"Men" and "women" are plurals, and uncountable nouns like "estrogen", "pollen", "ramen", or "nitrogen" work too. I don't think any of these really fit our parameters, however.

"Mujahideen" is an -en plural, but that's a non-Indo-European borrowing, so it doesn't really pertain to the underlying question either.

I know that Jenny Lawson and a few other authors support the use of "foxen"instead of "foxes", and have used it in their novels, so perhaps with enough time, the word will evolve to be correct... who knows?

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Adam Aleksic link
12/26/2017 06:40:41 pm

Moreover:

"Brethren" is a plural of "brother", but since the singular has died out, we don't look at it so weirdly.

Some computer geeks call their computers "boxen", which is an archaic plural of "boxes". If it's in some dictionaries, it should work, no?

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history. 

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