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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Call it the evolution of language.

I'm sure there's a reason, but I always thought it strange that when the subject in singular, the verb often gets an 's' ending (mirroring the plural ending for most nouns) but when the subject is plural (often ending in an 's') the verb normally doesn't get an 's' ending.

The frogs play in water. The frog plays in water. Why does the 's' effectively swap locations?

Why not, "the frogs plays in water." Or "the frog play in water"?

Or why not drops the singular/plural distinction from verbs altogether?

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What's interesting to me is that we use the same morphological operation (-s suffix) to express two very different concepts. You see this in other places as well, for example the Germanic -en suffix is used in at least 3 different ways in English: as the past participle verb tense (speak -spoken), as a way to transform adjectives into verbs (wide-widen) and (a very old) way to transform nouns into adjectives (gold-golden).

Why not use different morphology for these different grammatical concepts? The language would be cleaner and more consistent. My theory is that, basically, it's hard to learn to pronounce many different sounds, but it's easy for our brains to sort through the ambiguity that the morphological overlap produces.

It's because that's the way English verbs are conjugated. English actually has a very simple way of conjugating (regular) verbs. Most of the complexity of the ancestral Germanic has been lost. Contrast that to other Germanic languages. Swedish present tense, for example, is very simple. German still retains a complex morphology.

The only inflection English retains in the present indicative is the -s suffix for 3rd person singular (frog). Third person plural (frogs) does not have an -s.

The -s suffix for noun plurals, and for possessives (vestigial genitive case), add exceptions that make learning English a little harder.

Edit: grammar :)

What makes you think the -s ending is naturally plural, rather than just being completely arbitrary?

I am pretty sure the etymology of the plural ending -s and the third person present verb ending -s (which used to be -eth in pre-modern forms of English) are unrelated, and they just sound the same by coincidence.

Well at it's core language is sort of completely arbitrary, but that's beside the point I'm making. I'm not debating the origin or why it is the way it is, but simply observing that this is how it is currently and it looks strange and counterintuitive.

I still don't understand what's strange about it. There is nothing inherently plural or singular about "s" or any other combination of sounds.

English evolved a 3rd person singular verb ending. It randomly happened to be "s". It also evolved a plural noun ending. That too randomly happened to be "s". There's nothing deeper going on than that.

I'm not suggesting there's anything deeper nor do I understand why you think I am. I'm just pointing out that as English exists today, an 's' on the end of noun makes it plural while an 's' on the end of a verb makes it singular.

And I think that's strange. That's it.

Plurals evolved to serve a practical role in languages, so that'd be more devolution than evolution :-)

You could also go Indonesian: repeat a noun for plural. "Frog-frog play in water!"

I'm not suggesting plurals be removed from language, merely a different way of representing it. Such as the Indonesian structure you mentioned, I like that.

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