Irregular plural nouns |– base plurals | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

hello grammarians I wanted to talk today
about a different kind of a regular
plural so we've been talking about
regular plurals where you take a word
and you add an S so for example the word
dog becomes dogs you add an S and that
this is the regular plural here but I've
been talking about the irregular plural
the plural the multiple form of a verb
that is not regular irregular but today
I figured we talked about something
called the base plural which I will
illustrate for you using our friend the
Sheep now sheep is a very strange word
in that it doesn't matter whether or not
there's more than one of them the the
form of the word always looks the same
whether it's one sheep or two sheep it's
an irregular plural you don't add an S
to this is called a base plural because
the base sheep the thing that you would
normally add this particle s to doesn't
change whether it's singular sheep or
plural sheep so
there was one sheep
on the hill there's a sentence what if
we put another little baby sheep on that
hill little lamb
well now the sentence looks like this
two sheep on the hill now the only
difference between these two sentences
is that there's one sheep and two sheep
and therefore that means that the verb
changes to a plural conjugation so there
was one sheep there were two sheep on
the hill but everything else stays
exactly the same
one sheep two sheep this is very strange
it's a base plural so in standard
English the form is two sheep and not
two sheeps you see now there are more
words that do behave this way so let's
let's go investigate so there are a
small number of words that also behave
this way the way sheep does these weird
sheep plurals these base plurals one of
them is fish so you could say the fish
are plentiful this season but you can
also say you know the fish is delicious
you could say the Bison migrate west or
you could also say the bison migrates
West indicating a single bison you see
bison can be singular or plural fish can
be singular or plural as is so
frequently the case there is a special
exception regarding the word fishes
which you may have heard before and
fishes is a word that we would use when
we're talking about individual species
of fish
and fish is the word that we would use
to refer to individual fish so let's say
your uncle Marty is a prodigious
fisherman and he catches uh he goes
fly-fishing one week and he comes back
he has thirty fish Marty caught 30 fish
but let's say on the other hand your
aunt Marta is a prodigious marine
biologist and she studies 30 different
types of fish
she would say Marta studies 30 fishes
and that doesn't mean that she studies
30 individual fish that means you
studies 30 types of fish that's the
difference fishes is referring to
species fish refers to individuals
that's how you'd use them in the plural
so to review there is this entire class
of words called base plurals where the
word itself the base doesn't take an S
for the plural it's just the same the
singular is the same as the plural so
that gives us words like sheep fish and
bison there aren't a ton of English
words that behave this way where the
plural is the same as the singular I
just wanted to make you aware of some of
the most common ones there are also more
examples in the exercises so I just
wanted you to be aware of them you can
learn anything David out