Words-combining

German is famous for its compounds. I'm not sure this is fair, really, because as far as I can tell it just doesn't write the spaces (I'm being facetious - but there is a conceptual issue here). No matter. It is famous for them. I said to my first years the other day that while English can't have plurals within compounds (eg it's toothbrush, not teethbrush, even though it's a brush for your teeth), German can. And this is true: bookshelf in German is Bücherregal, literally booksshelf. But it's not that simple. This is language we're talking about, after all.

German and English can both have irregular plurals in compounds, as well as singulars. English can have teethmarks, for instance (although personally I would prefer toothmarks). But neither language can have regular plurals in compounds, so we have mice eater but not rats eater and Bücherregal but not Autosberg ('cars heap'). (Links go to articles testing this idea.) The difference is that German has many more irregular plurals: their default (=regular) plural is the -s suffix that I mentioned in my Euros post. All the others, which put together are way more common, are in effect irregular.

Oversuds

I saw the verb oversuds used recently. Clearly it's derived from the noun suds, which became a verb in its own right first. The OED has an entry for suds (v.) dating it back to 1834:

1834   ‘C. Packard’ Recoll. Housekeeper 12   Ma'am Bridge was sudsing the clothes in a tub before her.

It doesn't list over-suds even in the derivatives of suds, though. The prefix over- is attached to suds to give the verb meaning (I presume) to lather up too vigorously or cover in too many soap suds (perhaps giving a surfeit of bubbles, or causing too much mess, or whatever). So far so boring. But I was quite taken with the fact that suds is plural. This is the case when the verb is transitive, as above, or intransitive:

1972   Fortune Jan. 73/1   Detergent foam first became a matter of national concern in the early 1960's, when Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, among others, pointed out that detergents were persisting, and sometimes sudsing, in the environment.

Normally, when you form a verb from a noun by simple conversion (as opposed to using a verbal suffix or some other process), it's the singular form of the word that's used. Take the verb bubble. It may actually pre-date the noun bubble, but even if it does, for the purposes of demonstration that doesn't matter. What's important is that there are two words, one a noun and the other a verb, and the verb is homophonous with the singular form of the noun, despite the fact that bubbles, like suds, tend not to occur singularly (in this meaning). A pan of water that's boiling has many bubbles in it, but you still wouldn't say that the water was *bubblesing. Any morphological process is like this, in fact - it's a mousetrap, even if it's used to catch lots of mice, and tights can be footless, even though they lack both feet. It's even a bubble machine, not a bubbles machine, even though it makes millions of bubbles.

Perhaps it's because it's hard to identify a single sud. We can talk about a sud, but it's not generally used in the singular. It is still a count noun, not a mass noun that happens to look like a plural or a pseudo-plural like linguistics. We use it with plural agreement, for instance (though the OED says 'usually'). But we almost always use it in the plural, and I suppose that's influenced the verb formation process. It's very unusual, though.

Sweet tooths

I heard an interesting example of how irregular plurals can become regular when they're part of an exocentric compound idiom: sweet tooths.

In case you don't know, the idiom 'to have a sweet tooth' means that you like to eat sweet things. It's not very often used in the plural, because you're usually either saying that you (singular) have one or asking/telling someone else (singular) (if) they have one.

But of course it can be, if for instance you were talking about your two children and saying that they've both got a sweet tooth. You might say it as I just did, or you might say they've got sweet tooths. It sounds a bit weird, but it sounds even weirder to say they've got sweet teeth - the idiomatic meaning is completely lost and it becomes just an odd fact about their teeth.

The same thing happens with Walkman, the personal music player Sony makes (MP3 these days, but used for cassettes, CDs and minidiscs at various times in the past). The plural is notoriously variable. Some people will adhere to the 'man' part and say Walkmen, but most will go for Walkmans.

It's because, as I said, it's both exocentric and idiomatic. Exocentric means that it's not a type of tooth or a type of man - the 'head' of the compound doesn't match what the whole term describes. The opposite would be an endocentric compound like blackbird, which is a type of bird. And idiomatic means that it has a meaning that can't be readily deduced from its parts - so you couldn't predict the meaning if you didn't know it (because it's not a man that walks or a tooth that's sweet - it goes hand in hand with the exocentricity). These two fact together lead to a pretty opaque term, and the irregularity (which tends to erode over time anyway, as evidenced by all the irregular forms we've lost over the centuries) doesn't seem to apply any more, so we apply the default regular plural.