Inflection
What is the plural of euro, the name of the European currency? The answer seems obvious: euros – one euro, two euros, voilà! After all, -s is the productive plural marker in English and is normally used with new coinages, which is just what we do with words like modem or byte (modems, bytes). But spend a little time in Ireland, the only largely English-speaking country in the euro zone, and you will soon discover that a pint of Guinness in the local pub sets you back four euro and not four euros. Why?
The answer lies in the multilingual nature of the euro zone. The name of the currency itself bespeaks such multilingualism: its devisers had to come up with a name that could be both written and pronounced in all of the languages in the zone. Indeed, though it is pronounced differently in each of the languages ([ojro] in German, [œʁo] in French, and [εvro] in Greek, for example), it is pronounceable in all of them. But the plural also must be not only pronounced but also written in each of the languages. Look at a 10-euro bill and you will see the clever solution to this multilingual problem that was found. First, unlike the US 10-dollar bill, where ten dollars is written out in full, or the bilingual Canadian bill, which says dix·ten dollars, the word for ‘ten’ is written in numerals: 10. The reason is simple: 10 can be written identically while still being pronounced differently in each of the languages of the zone, and still mean exactly the same thing. The second problem is that the plural form of euro, which follows the numeral, must also be written uniformly on the bill and, though several major European languages besides English use the plural marker -s (French, German, and Spanish do), not all would tolerate it (Italian, for example, never uses an -s plural). A mathematician might have solved this problem of uniformity by extending the use of symbols to the notation >1, which technically means ‘plural’, but the expression 10 euro >1 is not only silly-looking, but also redundant. The solution, therefore, was to avoid the redundancy and not use any plural marker on euro in writing. The bill reads simply 10 EURO/EYPΩ and the spoken languages have all followed the same practice of not using any plural marker either, making the plural of euro euro in Ireland.
The linguistic point of this story is that even when several languages share the same word, as they do with euro, the inflectional systems of the languages differ, and this difference normally affects the forms of the words. When blue jeans became the rage in the Soviet Union years ago, they were called [dƷinzɨ], with the plural marker [ɨ] added despite the presence of the [s] in the English word, because the -s was not recognized as anything but part of the basic stem. Conversely, when the old-fashioned English term for ‘headlight’, sealed beam, was borrowed into Hebrew as [silbim], the final [im] sequence was interpreted as a Hebrew plural marker, making [silbim] a plural, with the corresponding singular therefore being [silb]. So [silb], the Hebrew word for ‘headlight’, is borrowed directly from English, in the minds of Hebrew speakers who know, to the great surprise of English speakers.
Inflection varies from one language to another more than any other systematic aspect of language. We deal with inflectional systems, showing how they vary across languages widely but still remain quite relentlessly systematic within themselves.
