On Nov 16, 3:40*am, "Michael Kuettner" >
wrote:
> "A Moose In Love" schrieb :
> > On Nov 14, 10:53 pm, Lil Abner > wrote:
> >> On 11/14/2010 10:15 PM, learnspeakingenglish wrote:
> >> BOX and the plural is BOXES.
> >> > But the plural OX should be OXEN and not OXES.

A late northern Old English or Middle English plural in -s and a
traditional Old English weak plural in -n. And MEN/MEN is an example
of a traditional Old English strong plural. All this will be familiar
to German-speakers, speaking of whom. . . .

> >> How about French where Potatoes are apples of or from the earth.
> >> English evolved from Germanic languages.
> > The German word for potato is Kartoffel. *However in my German dialect
> > potatoes are referred to as: *Erd Aepffel. *Erd = Earth, Aepfell(the
> > way we pronounce it) = Appels.
>
> Erdapfel. Erdaepfel is the plural.

Ah, yes. My Berlin-learned German raised some eyebrows in Vienna.

And speaking of potatoes, the English name, too, is peculiar beause it
comes from the Taino word for the sweet potato, "batata". Somehow the
vegetables became confused - did sweet potatoes, being from the
Caribbean, get to Europe before the Andean potato? I wonder what our
word for a potato would be if it had been derived from the Qechua word
for the vegetable.

Here in Polynesia the sweet potato is the "kumara", also derived from
some American language.

LW