17 Jul
2009
17 Jul
'09
2:17 p.m.
2009/7/17 Roger Holmes <roger.holmes at microspot.co.uk>:
So are photocopiers of a certain brand Xeroxen? Are helmsmen coxen? If I
receive one fax then another are they faxen? If I apply one fix to my
program and then another are they fixen? How about a dog fox and a vixen,
are they foxen? One mix plus another are mixen? Small pox and chicken pox
are poxen? One sax plus another saxen? Male and female sexen? Do your pay
your taxes or your taxen? Surely in 90% of cases the norm is to add es.
Adding en sometimes makes a noun in to an adjective, flaxen, waxen for
example. Apart form oxen (a.k.a. bullocks), I could not think of one other
example of plural xen. There may well be more but it was quite easy to come
up my list which should all be xes.
The -en ending is a feature from Anglo-Saxon Old English. The -x
ending is a red herring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English
In OE, nouns were divided into strong and weak. Strong nouns formed a
regular plural - book/books, frog/frogs - weak ones had an irregular
plural: cow/kine. Sometimes it was an ablaut, where just the vowel
changes: mouse/mice, goose/geese. German does something similar:
vogel/v?gel ("bird"/"birds").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_morphology#Nouns
One of the irregular plurals is -en: ox/oxen, child/children, man/men,
brother/brethren.
The hackish use of it for VAX, box, etc. is just intentional
overgeneralisation: knowingly applying a specific rule in a
non-specific case.
http://dictionary.die.net/overgeneralization
A possible origin, hints Wikipedia, is that it's a bunch of unrelated
vaxes, but a cluster of vaxen.
The Jargon File suggests this is by extension from "vixen", but not
why... "Vixen" being a female fox; "fox" is a strong noun: fox/foxes.
http://www.jargondb.org/glossary/vaxen
But perhaps it's to denote interchangeability:
http://foldoc.org/boxen
--
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oh ya...
and why are they "VAXen"?
Ox/Oxen -> VAX/VAXen is the straight answer (there are a few joke
answers from back in the day like "why isn't it box/boxen?")
http://dictionary.babylon.com/VAXen
?Are there "PDP 11/44en" too? I've
got a couple Rainbowen here...
Not in English you don't. ?At issue is the plural of English words
ending in 'x' (which I'm sure goes back to Anglo-Saxon or something.
The rule from Latin would be something like the plurals ending in 'es'
since that's typical of third declension nouns).