There are a lot of ways this marvelous language of ours, English, doesn't make sense. For example, most of the time when we talk about more than one of something, we put an S on the end. One cat, two cats. But then, there's that handful of words where things work differently. Alone you have a man; if he has company, then you've got men, or probably better for him, women too. Although if there were only one of them, it would be a woman. Or if there's more than one goose, they're geese, but why not lots of mooses, meese? Or if you have two feet, then why don't you read two beek instead of books. The fact is that if you were speaking English before about a thousand years ago, beek is exactly what you would have said for more than one book. If Modern English is strange, Old English needed therapy. Believe it or not, English used to be an even harder language to learn than it is today. Twenty-five hundred years ago, English and German were the same language. They drifted apart slowly, little by little becoming more and more different. That meant that in early English, just like in German, inanimate objects had gender. A fork, gafol, was a woman; a spoon, laefel, was a man; and the table they were on, bord, was neither, also called neuter. Go figure! Being able to use words meant not just knowing their meaning but what gender they were, too. And while today there are only about a dozen plurals that don't make sense, like men and geese, in Old English, it was perfectly normal for countless plurals to be like that. You think it's odd that more than one goose is geese? Well, imagine if more than one goat was a bunch of gat, or if more than one oak tree was a field of ack. To be able to talk about any of these, you just had to know the exact word for their plural rather than just adding the handy S on the end. And it wasn't always an S at the end either. In merry Old English, they could add other sounds to the end. Just like more than one child is children, more than one lamb was lambru, you fried up your eggru, and people talked not about breads, but breadru. Sometimes it was like sheep is today - where, to make a plural, you don't do anything. One sheep, two sheep. In Old English, one house, two house. And just like today, we have oxen instead of oxes. Old English people had toungen instead of tongues, namen instead of names, and if things stayed the way they were, today we would have eyen instead of eyes. So, why didn't things stay the way they were? In a word, Vikings. In the 8th century, Scandinavian marauders started taking over much of England. They didn't speak English, they spoke Norse. Plus, they were grown-ups, and grown-ups aren't as good at learning languages as children. After the age of roughly 15, it's almost impossible to learn a new language without an accent and without slipping up here and there as we all know from what language classes are like. The Vikings were no different, so they had a way of smoothing away the harder parts of how English worked. Part of that was those crazy plurals. Imagine running up against a language with eggru and gat on the one hand, and then with other words, all you have to do is add 's' and get days and stones. Wouldn't it make things easier to just use the 's' for everything? That's how the Vikings felt too. And there were so many of them, and they married so many of the English women, that pretty soon, if you grew up in England, you heard streamlined English as much as the real kind.
Ada berbagai alasan mengapa bahasa Inggris sering tak masuk akal. Umumnya, saat menyebut kata benda dengan jumlah lebih dari satu kita akan menambahkan akhiran S, seperti “one cat, two cats”. Namun, untuk beberapa kata, bentuk jamaknya akan berbeda. Misal “man” yang berjumlah dua disebut “men”. Dua wanita juga disebut “women”. Meskipun jika hanya ada satu wanita, jadinya tinggal “woman”. Lebih dari satu “goose” disebut “geese”. Lalu, kenapa jamaknya “moose”, bukan “meese”? Jika dua kaki adalah “feet”, kenapa dua buku tak jadi “beek” dan malah “books”? Kalau kau penutur bahasa Inggris yang hidup seribu tahun silam, “beek” adalah kata yang tepat untuk menyatakan lebih dari satu buku. Bahasa Inggris Modern memang aneh. Versi kunonya justru lebih memusingkan. Percaya atau tidak, bahasa Inggris dulunya lebih sulit dipahami. Sekitar 2.500 tahun yang lalu, bahasa ini serumpun dengan bahasa Jerman. Keduanya pun perlahan terpisah, sedikit demi sedikit semakin berbeda. Artinya, dalam Inggris Kuno, seperti bahasa Jerman, benda mati juga memiliki gender. “Gafol”, alias garpu, termasuk feminin. “Laefel”, alias sendok, termasuk maskulin. “Bord”, alias meja, tidak memiliki gender atau disebut <i>neuter</i>. Bukan main! Menguasai bahasa ini tak cuma berarti memahami makna kata, tapi juga gendernya. Meski kini hanya tersisa segelintir bentuk jamak yang aneh-aneh, seperti “men” dan “geese”, dalam bahasa Inggris Kuno, bentuk seperti ini wajar-wajar saja. Apa menurutmu aneh jika banyak “goose” disebut “geese”? Bayangkan jika dulunya banyak “goat” disebut “gat” dan banyak “oak tree” disebut “ack”. Untuk menguasai perubahan semacam ini, kau mesti mengingat kata jamak masing-masing benda, ketimbang menambahkan huruf S di belakang. Bahkan, tak melulu S yang ditambah di belakang. Di bahasa Inggris Kuno, akhiran kata bisa ditambah huruf lain. Seperti halnya “child” menjadi “children”, dulu, banyak “lamb” disebut “lambru”; “eggs” disebut “eggru”; dan alih-alih “breads”, orang menyebutnya “breadru”. Ada pula kata seperti “sheep” sekarang yang jamaknya tak perlu ditambah apa-apa. “One sheep”, “two sheep”. Di bahasa Inggris Kuno, ada “one house, two house”. Sama seperti saat ini, kita memakai “oxen”, alih-alih “oxes”, orang Inggris Kuno menyebut “toungen”, alih-alih “tongues”, “namen”, alih-alih “names”. Jika pola ini masih berlaku, kita masih akan menyebut “eyen”, alih-alih “eyes”. Kenapa bentuk-bentuk ini tak lagi berlaku? Singkatnya, karena bangsa Viking. Pada abad ke-8, penyamun Skandinavia mengambil alih daerah Inggris. Mereka tak bicara bahasa Inggris, melainkan Nordik. Mereka juga sudah dewasa. Orang dewasa sulit belajar bahasa baru, tak seperti anak kecil. Setelah kira-kira umur 15 tahun, hampir mustahil menguasai bahasa baru tanpa membawa logat asli dan membuat kesalahan sekali-kali, seperti yang terjadi di kelas bahasa. Bangsa Viking pun demikian. Jadi, mereka menyederhanakan bagian bahasa Inggris yang sulit. Sebagian di antaranya adalah bentuk jamak. Bayangkan kau harus menghadapi bahasa yang punya bentuk jamak “eggru” dan “gat” sekaligus bentuk jamak yang cuma ditambahkan huruf S seperti “days” dan “stones”. Tidakkah lebih mudah bila menambahkan S saja? Itulah yang dipikirkan bangsa Viking. Jumlah mereka banyak, lalu mereka menikahi wanita Inggris. Tak lama kemudian, di Inggris saat itu, bentuk baru ini bercampur dengan bentuk aslinya.
After a while nobody remembered the real kind any more. Nobody remembered that once you said doora instead of doors and handa instead of hands. Plurals made a lot more sense now, except for a few hold-outs like children and teeth that get used so much that it was hard to break the habit. The lesson is that English makes a lot more sense than you think. Thank the ancestors of people in Copenhagen and Oslo for the fact that today we don't ask for a handful of pea-night instead of peanuts. Although, wouldn't it be fun, if for just a week or two, we could?
Lama-kelamaan, tak ada lagi yang mengingat jamak lama. Tak ada yang ingat kalau dulu mereka mengatakan “doora”, alih-alih “doors” dan “handa”, alih-alih “hands”. Bentuk jamak kini lebih masuk akal, kecuali untuk kata “children” dan “teeth” yang sangat sering digunakan hingga mendarah daging. Intinya, bahasa Inggris saat ini lebih masuk akal dari yang kau kira. Semua berkat leluhur penduduk Copenhagen dan Oslo. Karena mereka, kita tak lagi perlu memakai kata “pea-night” yang kini disebut “peanuts”. Meski begitu, boleh juga, sih, kita pakai kata ini sekali-kali.