Flocks of Geese and Herds of Moose

The English language is often ribbed for its chaotic and unpredictable rules. With words and grammar thrown in from all over the world, it’s not surprising that the language is teeming with all of the inconsistencies and irregularities of a constantly evolving verbal ecosystem. One such specimen that often leaves English speakers scratching their heads is a pair of words that, at a glance, appear to be very similar: goose and moose.

There are a few cues that might lead a person to expect these words to share linguistic roots and grammar rules. They are both names for animals that you could probably find in similar habitats, and they have nearly identical spelling and pronunciation. When a goose pairs up with another goose, you have a pair of geese. But when a moose pairs up with another moose, you have a pair of… moose.

So why do we say “flock of geese” but not “herd of meese”? The answer lies in the history behind the words.

First, let's look at the word "goose."

Photo of two white geese standing in grass next to a stream — Photo by Nick Fewings via Unsplash

Domesticated as early as 7,000 years ago, these long-necked waterfowl have been a familiar part of English speakers' lives since long before the language existed. English comes from a family of languages called Germanic languages, sharing a common ancestor with German and Dutch. Back in the days before these languages emerged, people of northern Europe spoke a "Proto-Germanic" language. Their word for our honking feathered friend was gans.

Over time, the word evolved with the language. By the time Old English emerged around 1,600 years ago, gans became gōs. This is where the word’s funky plural form originates. Back in Old English, nouns were made plural by shifting vowel sounds towards the front of the mouth in a process called "i-mutation." Many of the words affected by i-mutation retain this shift even in modern English. Tooth becomes teeth, foot becomes feet, and goose becomes geese. All of these words were carried over from Old English.

Now, for the moose.

Photo of a moose with large antlers, lying down on the ground — Photo by Shivam Kumar via Unsplash

The largest species of deer, Alces alces, is found in boreal forests. Their native range used to span most of the northern hemisphere. However, by the time the English language was being spoken, they had largely disappeared from most of Europe. Hunting and habitat loss had pushed their populations far north into Scandinavia and Russia. They had been around enough that the English language did have its own word for these animals: "elk." However, they were so foreign to the typical English speaker that most had never seen one. The word was only understood to mean some kind of really big deer that lived far away.

Now, fast forward to the 1600s. English speakers who had come to colonize North America found themselves surrounded by wildlife they'd never seen before. There were fluffy grey creatures with black masks over their eyes, black and white stripey things that spray putrid cologne from their butts, and white ghostlike critters with scaly tails sniffing their way through the night with babies on their backs. Imagine the English speakers' relief when they saw some kind of really big deer! "Aha!" They must have said. "We have a word for this one: that is an elk!"

The problem is… it wasn't an elk. Not the elk they knew from back in Europe, at least.

Photo of a male wapiti, a large deer with long branching antlers, bugling in a grassy field, surrounded by female wapiti — Photo by Byron Johnson via Unsplash

The big deer that they called "elk" was a very different species: Cervus canadensis, also known as the wapiti, a name which comes from the Shawnee & Cree languages. This big deer is native to North America & eastern Asia, but not found in Europe at all. It is quite different from Alces alces in many ways, including their behavior - the wapiti is social and lives in herds that can number in the hundreds, as opposed to the solitary moose. The wapiti’s piercing high-pitched vocalization, called a “bugle,” can be herd echoing through the mountains and valleys of their range during the fall season.

Since Wikipedia would not launch for another thousand years or so, the English speakers had no idea that this was not the same big deer they'd heard of back home, so the name stuck. When they crossed paths with the true "elk," Alces alces, they now needed a new word for this even bigger deer since they jumped the gun when they saw the wapiti. Thus, the word "moose" entered the language as an anglicized version of words taken from Algonquian languages, like Narragansett moòs & Abenaki moz.

The English version of the word did not, however, retain any of its original plural forms. For example, the Ojibwe word mooz becomes moozoog, Cree môswa becomes môswak, and Western Abenaki moz becomes mozak. This contrasts with the way that English sometimes does integrate the plural forms of words taken from languages like Latin or Greek - for example, cacti, the plural of Latin cactus, or criteria, the plural of Greek criterion. This may be due Latin and Greek being prevalent in Europe during the Proto-Germanic days, so many of their words and the grammar associated with them were incorporated into early English from its conception.

“Moose” isn’t the only word that originated in languages indigenous to the Americas. Many of the English names for other animals in North America come from languages spoken by indigenous people. For instance, the Powhatan words arahkun and opassom became the English words raccoon and opossum. The Nahuatl language spoken in Mexico had words for the coyōtl and ōcēlōtl, which English speakers now call the coyote and ocelot. For these words, however, English makes them plural by adding an “s” to the end. Why the moose was exempt from the -s suffix convention is unclear. Personally, I believe it to be because the moose is a type of deer, and all other members of the deer family (deer, elk, caribou, etc.) have no -s suffix added to their plural forms either, so it is at least taxonomically consistent.

The language that we use to describe nature is often as chaotic and unpredictable as nature itself. By learning about the history of the words that we say and the ways we use them, we better understand ourselves and the generations of people who made our language the living landscape that it is today.

Learn more about the moose on episode 50 of the Just the Zoo of Us podcast.