Anyone who talks to people from other countries a lot eventually notices that there are some parts of English that are very hard to get the hang of.  (of which to get the hang?) One struck me in particular: no matter what language they spoke originally, hardly anyone gets “a three-hour tour” or “a ten-foot pole” right at first.  Everybody wants to use the plural in phrases like that. “Three hours tour”, “five minutes wait”, and so on.  I heard it from so many people that eventually I came to the conclusion that the foreigners are right, and English got it wrong.

Well, that turns out not to be quite true. While I was supposed to be doing my Old English homework this morning, I discovered a page about “inflectional survivors“: the words that still kept their Anglo-Saxon inflections, through all the Vikings, Frenchmen, and Vowel Shifts.

ten-foot Pole

Eugeniusz Taraciński, the tallest man in Polish history

It turns out that the word “foot” in “ten-foot pole” is just such a survivor. “Ten-foot” takes the genitive plural. In Anglo-Saxon the phrase is “tien fota“. English-speakers being lazy, the ending eventually dropped off. Changing the vowels to make “foot” plural would have been too much work, so “ten-foot pole” it is.

So I was mistaken; English didn’t actually get it wrong.  We do in fact have a little bit of grammar, despite the convictions of everyone in Europe.