The Buckets by Greg Cravens for May 30, 2017

I’ve wondered why plurals are the way they are. Louse/Mouse/House vs Lice/Mice/houses for example. Or ox/oxen but not foxen & boxen. And why some people are competent, others incompetent, but while someone might be inept, I’ve never heard of someone who’s ept.

There were a lot more like that in Old English. You can hear the Germanic in “oxen”, the only survivor of that style in English. It was once “shoen” for shoes. (But not “children.” That was a later English invention.) Many, if not most, of them lost out because they didn’t suit the Vikings’ tastes. But directing the development of language is truly like herding cats. People just do what they do.

It’s all about order. Imagine life without alphabetical or numerical order. Chaos!

Why we have “alphabetical order” is actually an interesting question. Maybe it developed in early literate societies as a way to help children memorize all the letters, and maybe those societies made a song out of it to make it easier, just as we still do today.

Apparently the order of the alphabet can be traced back all the way to the Egyptians.

Yes, the answer is yes. that is all.

…because.

If there was a reason, it has been lost to time.

At one time, they used letters for numerals.