what do you call words that can't be plural?

[underground]

i'm sure that's a badly-worded question. what i meant was words such as fish, sheep, poetry, etc. also, what are other common words that can't be plural?

[miss tenderness]

uncountable??........

[muhsin]

uncountable??........

Are you not sure Miss T. I'm puzzeled 'cuz so I thought are called:idea:

[miss tenderness]

not sure:(

[Shannanigan]

....deleted....read below....

[Shannanigan]

Well, now that I've looked, Wikipedia says that they are simply called "Irregular Plurals":

Irregular plurals
There are many other less regular ways of forming plurals, usually stemming from older forms of English or from foreign borrowings.


[edit] Nouns with identical singular and plural
Some nouns spell their singular and plural exactly alike; these are regarded by some linguists as regular plurals. Many of these are the names of animals:

deer
fish (and many individual fish names: cod, mackerel, trout, etc.)
moose
sheep
Fish does have a regular plural form, but it differs in meaning from the unmarked plural; fishes refers to several species or other taxonomic types, while fish (plural) is used to describe multiple individual animals: one would say "the order of fishes," but "five fish in an aquarium." The plural fishes is found in the King James Bible, in the parable of the loaves and fishes, for example, and is also sometimes used for rhetorical emphasis, as in phrases like sleep with the fishes.

Other nouns that have identical singular and plural forms include:

aircraft
blues3
cannon (sometimes cannons)
head4
Note 3: Referring to individual songs in the blues musical style: "play me a blues"; "he sang three blues and a calypso"
Note 4: Referring, in the plural, to animals in a herd: "fifty head of cattle"

link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural

[cuppajoe_9]

"Poetry" does have a plural. I would accept 'poetries' to mean forms of poetry, kinds of poetry, schools of poetry, &c.

[bazarov]

In my language we call it addition, aggregate or total noun. Like sheeps, leaves, that thing on trees(like arms:D ) etc.
Miss tenderness wrote uncountable; thats also in use.

[underground]

hrmmm...well, just so you know, "fishes" is now considered the grammatically correct plural of "fish." (Don't stone me, look it up! :p) I think "sheep" is differen than "poetry," because you can have more than one sheep but not more than one poetry...? I know what you mean by "can't be plural," you mean that there is no spelling change when the word becomes plural (because "sheep" is its own plural)...but I'm sorry to say I can't think of the word for it...

i heard you get to say "fishes" only if you're in marine biology (something about the divisions in the fish world?). you still say "fish" if there's more than one fish.

as for "poetry": ah, yes. i think i was also wondering about words don't need the particle "a" even if it's singular. i keep saying things like "a poetry," which makes sense to me but which native speakers apparently just don't do.

[underground]

uncountable??........

it actually sounds familiar.

[Shannanigan]

i heard you get to say "fishes" only if you're in marine biology (something about the divisions in the fish world?). you still say "fish" if there's more than one fish.

as for "poetry": ah, yes. i think i was also wondering about words don't need the particle "a" even if it's singular. i keep saying things like "a poetry," which makes sense to me but which native speakers apparently just don't do.

yeah, check the wikipedia article I copy and pasted, it gives the specifics, "fishes" is like if you are talking about the many species of fish, and "fish" is the plural for the rest of us who think that anything with scales and fins in the ocean is the same :p (kidding!)

[SummerSolstice]

I've never heard that kind of construction... but do you use "a poetry" to refer to a genre of poetry, or an item of poetry? Because in the latter case... that would be "a poem." :D

Anyway, "A fish/multiple fish", "a sheep/multiple sheep" are one kind of thing. "Poetry" is something different. (Nobody had mentioned that in so many words, yet, although that may have been realized but unspoken.) Just as you wouldn't (normally) say "a poetry," you wouldn't (normally) say "multiple poetries." THOSE are the uncountable nouns--or as I learned it, "noncount" nouns. It applies to cases where you'd say "much" instead of "many." For example, "many apples," but "much coffee." "Many poems," but "much poetry." Some words, wierdly enough, are one or the other in different situations: "Many cakes," or "much cake."

I love it when people talk about grammar for fun!! :D

[Stanislaw]

well...I call it: English is a rotten language...with too many @#$%$^& exceptions.:D

[SheykAbdullah]

Fish, sheep, deer, most animal words by association and some other nouns are irregular, but historically they were highly regular plurals. In Old English there were seven seperate noun groups, each of which pluralized in a different way (which is why today some nouns pluralize with an 's' and some have internal, 'broken' as the Arabs say, plurals such as 'foot' - 'feet.' In English and other Germanic languages all words that are affected by internal vowel change like 'foot' and feet' or 'sink' and 'sunk' are referred to as 'strong' words, and all words that are pluralized and conjugated by flexions, or endings, like 's' or '(e)d', are referred to as 'weak'). The class of nouns referred to here lost their plurals terminations as English lost its use of terminal endings and we were left with unchanging forms of the word for both the singular and plural.

What Bazarov referes to is something different, which we have in English and call a 'collective noun.' These nouns are words like 'group' that while referring to more than one thing are treated as singular items for gramatical purposes. They are not like fish or sheep.

We also have what Miss Tenderness refered to, countable and uncountable nouns. Countable nouns are nouns that can be modified by the use of a numeral. They may or may not have irregular plurals, and may or may not be collective nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be modified by a number. For example, a countable noun would be 'sheep' (three sheep) while an uncountable noun would be 'ice' (the point may be made that one can count 'ice cubes' but in such a linguistic construction 'ice' acts as and adjective to modify 'cubes' and therefore you are not counting 'ice' but 'cubes').

As for the irregularity of English, it's not too bad. Languages like Arabic are much worse. While there are no irregular nouns, really, there are nearly tens of ways to pluralize nouns, most of which rely on changing the basic vowel structure of the word (kitab to kutub, qarib to aqriba, sanduq to sinadiq etc). Sometimes you can have one word pluralize in multiple ways, like 'ibn' or son which can be pluralized 'ibna' or 'binun', or words like 'bayt' which can mean either a verse of poetry or house, but are pluralized differently depending on what context they are used ('bayt' for verse pluralized 'abyat' and 'bayt' for house 'buyut').

[underground]

I've never heard that kind of construction... but do you use "a poetry" to refer to a genre of poetry, or an item of poetry? Because in the latter case... that would be "a poem." :D

Anyway, "A fish/multiple fish", "a sheep/multiple sheep" are one kind of thing. "Poetry" is something different. (Nobody had mentioned that in so many words, yet, although that may have been realized but unspoken.) Just as you wouldn't (normally) say "a poetry," you wouldn't (normally) say "multiple poetries." THOSE are the uncountable nouns--or as I learned it, "noncount" nouns. It applies to cases where you'd say "much" instead of "many." For example, "many apples," but "much coffee." "Many poems," but "much poetry." Some words, wierdly enough, are one or the other in different situations: "Many cakes," or "much cake."

I love it when people talk about grammar for fun!! :D

oh, it's not like we bookworms have better things to do other than discussing grammar.