gacorley: maxkirin: me: so if the plural of foot is feet...

maxkirin:

me: so if the plural of foot is feet, the plural of hoof is heefs, right??

my wife: um… it’s hooves.

me: … what???

I had to figure out why and you have to go all the way to Proto-West-Germanic.

The PWG root of foot, *fōt, had nominative an accusative plurals ending in -i, which caused umlaut before the suffix was dropped. Some kind of umlaut is generally the case for oo/ee alternation in English forms. It also helps that it’s an incredibly common word, so people kept the irregul...