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by cgriswald
3777 days ago
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Mother-in-laws is incorrect because it makes the wrong word plural. There are two ways to look at it. The first is that "-in-law" is essentially an adjective, and unlike in other languages (e.g., Spanish), adjectives are not pluralized if describing plural nouns. (This is also why it is Attorneys General and not Attorney Generals.) Second, that it are the mothers, not the laws, that is being pluralized. This may be a common mistake, but it is a mistake nonetheless. Edit: Grammar. :) |
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That seems prescriptivist.
If people take "Mother-in-law" to be a single word, then it is a single word. And if they take "Mother-in-laws" to be the plural of this word, then it is the plural of that word.
Language is determined by usage. People do not say "s-in-law" , they say "in-laws".
I don't mean that you can't have a preference that usage be a particular way. I might even encourage it. If you prefer people using "mothers-in-law" over "mother-in-laws" for the reasons you gave, that's fair. Go ahead and try to convince people to say it that way. Maybe they will agree with you, that doing it only that way has advantages. I can certainly see doing it that way having advantages in some cases.
But for it to be "wrong", there has to be some standard for it to be "wrong" by.
When speaking about english as it is spoken, the standard is pretty much the ways in which people speak it.
[/overconfident(?) comment by someone who has taken exactly one (1) linguistics class]