From Rhymes With Orange, playing with morphophonology:
Some English nouns ending in voiceless fricatives (especially in /f/) voice these fricatives in the plural. There are three classes of cases:
(1) voicing obligatory in standard English: wife – wives, shelf – shelves;
(2) voicing variable in standard English: wharf – wharves/wharfs, dwarf – dwarves/dwarfs (see the Language Log posting here and the posting in this blog here on the plural of dwarf );
(3) no voicing in standard English: fife – fifes, oaf – oafs.
Nouns in class (1) are subject to regularization; there’s some pressure to move them into class (2). Nouns in class (3) are subject to playful irregularization — yielding things like arves.
December 28, 2010 at 9:23 am |
As Poser notes in the linked post, a party amusement — with certain classes of people only, of course — is to ask people to say out loud the plural of “roof.”
December 28, 2010 at 2:21 pm |
Then there’s the sibilant class with shwa epenthesis, which doesn’t change the spelling but does change the pronunciation: house /haws/ ~ houses /hawzəz/; cf blouses /blawsəz/.
Plus similar voicings in noun – verb alternations: house n. /haws/ ~ house v. /hawz/; teeth n. /tiθ/ ~ teethe v. /tið/; shelf n. /ʃɛlf/ ~ shelve v. /ʃɛlv/.