Jdsk wrote:The English language has a plural for sheep. It's sheep. It's not that there's no plural, it's that the plural has the same form as the singular.
Jonathan
And in order to make English consistent I shall draw a parallel with the humble mouse and say there are many hice on my street.
English is a right hodgepodge of a language, beautiful and disordered - which is one of its strengths. Without the order that comes from a prescriptivist linguistic system it can adapt to basically any need.
The English I use here is different from the way I talk at home, both are different from that which I would use on a job application.
You might have two flocks of sheep, which conveys that the two groups are different, but you might have them as one flock most of the years, so is it a mixed flock, rather than multiple sheep(s)?
If you have 50 black and fifty white sheep, then you end up being long winded and descriptive, or you use what I called a “super plural” to suggest that you have multiple groups of things.
That last sentence reveals the true answer though - the “group”img word is what gets the additional plural.
For our next topic, could English do with having explicit clusivity?