this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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kinda bullshit that English is the only language that gives a fuck about words origins and forces original grammar... but somehow only for European sourced words.
Why don't we use Arabic plurals with Arabic words? no one says One chemist, two chemistayim, three chemistim. I have a free ~~guitars~~ guitarat.
Why not Japanese plurals for Japanese words? many emoji are still spelled the same as one emoji.
African words? one zombie, many minzombi?
...
We're barely smart enough to get what we've got right. Half of our population can't remember how punctuation works. Hell half of our population still thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Modern English picks and chooses to be sure (see, for example: octopodes (correctly conforms), octopi (overcorrection), octopuses (arguably most common)), but to say English only considers this for words of European origin is obviously bullshit. If I said "I have two bok choys on my cutting board", most English speakers who regularly use that noun would think it sounds wrong; it sounds wrong because it never got pluralized, and it's of Chinese origin where there aren't really plurals. On the other hand, most people wouldn't take issue with you saying "I've got two ketchups" in reference to different bottles or types of ketchup – despite again being of Chinese origin and not having an original plural.
I don't understand why you're taking an argument about prescriptivism and descriptivism and turning it into a weird, easily debunkable argument about Eurocentrism.