1391: Why Man Becomes Men Oct 2, 2018

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English has a lot of features that don't maybe make immediate sense, but understanding the history can help. 'Man' pluralizing to 'men' doesn't make immediate sense, and moreover it doesn't necessarily help even to look at related strong nouns like these but looking at German can help. In German there is essentially the same vowel-shift from 'Mann' to 'Männer' (pronounced with a roughly similar vowel as in 'men'), however in German this change is a lot more consistent. Not all vowels are changed in this way, but the ones that do usually morph regularly. This is a lucky coincidence in some ways, but historically Germanic languages only indicated change in things like pluralization or tense by changing the vowels, so this would have been the norm. For more on this, see: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc

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