英语小知识｜不规则复数

英语小知识｜不规则复数——你写对了吗？

2018-07-30 21:01 来源:英语世界 英语 /意大利语 /语法

原标题：英语小知识｜不规则复数——你写对了吗？

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Irregular Plurals in English

英语的不规则复数

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By Catherine Soanes

Bacterias, bacteriae, bacterium: which of the three plurals of bacterium is the correct one? Read on, I’ll enlighten you soon as to the correct irregular plural.

bacterias、bacteriae、bacterium：这三种复数形式哪一种是正确的呢？请继续看下去，我会很快给你讲解正确的不规则复数。

With English spelling and grammar setting a fair few traps for the unwary, it’s a reason for a heartfelt ‘phew’ of relief that many plurals of nouns are straightforward to form. In most cases, all you need to do is to tack an ‘s’ on to the end of the singular:

英语的拼写和语法规则颇有一些小陷阱需要注意，不过令人欣慰的是许多名词的复数形式还是简单明确的。大多数情况下，你只要在单数名词后面加上个s就行。

SINGULAR

PLURAL

shop

shops

donkey

donkeys

roof

roofs

patio

patios

epoch

epochs

pizza

pizzas

Although some other English plurals can be slightly more tricky, there are a few basic rules which are easy to follow: if you’d like a quick refresher course, why not visit our online ?

不过，有些英语单词的复数形式相对复杂，但有一些基本的规则：要是想快速复习一下语法课程，可以访问我们的。

Women, geese, teeth, and children: the Old English survivors

古英语的幸存者：women, geese, teeth, children

There are a handful of exceptions to these rules, mainly plurals of words that come from Old English. So instead of ‘a flock of gooses’ we say ‘a flock of geese’, we brush our teeth(not ‘our tooths’), my sister has three children, not ‘three childs’, and police arrested four menrather than ‘four mans’. The proportion of such plurals compared with the more usual formations is very small, so it’s easy to learn them. If you’re not sure, all good dictionaries will give the standard plural forms.

这些规则之外的少数例外主要来自于古英语单词的复数形式。所以，我们会说a flock of geese（一群鹅），我们刷teeth（牙），我的姐姐有三个children（孩子），警察逮捕了四名men（男子）。与大多数常见的复数形式相比，这种不规则的复数比例微乎其微，所以很容易掌握。如果还是不确定，那就查查词典吧。

Unfortunately, the singularforms of some of these common English words now seem to be causing difficulty. There’s a recent trend to use the plural spelling ‘women’ as a singular noun. This mistake crops up in all types of writing, from news articles and academic journals to blogs:

不幸的是，一些常见英语单词的单数形式现在似乎造成了困难。最近出现一种将复数拼写的women作为单数名词使用的趋势。这种错误在各种类型的写作中大量出现，从新闻报道、学术期刊到博客文章：

✘Eileen was a lovely women, who went about her daily duties in a very refined way.

✘A single womencan have a child now, but not without facing some human complications.

Although ‘men’, the plural of ‘man’, works in just the same way as the plural of ‘woman’, with the change of ‘a’ to ‘e’, for some reason the erroneous use of the plural spelling ‘men’ to refer to a man is much more rare… for now.

虽然man的复数形式是men，一如women也是woman的复数形式，但出于某些原因，将复数的men错误用作单数名词还是很罕见的……到目前为止很罕见。

Old Norse eggs and Italian pianos

古斯堪的纳维亚语的eggs和意大利语的pianos