linguistics question about english plurals

So, why 'deer' and 'fish'?

I've looked them up etymologically, and they're both credited as coming down from proto-germanic. But I looked up proto-germanic and there is a plural form that is different-sounding than the singular. Looking them up individually I saw that there is "deers" as a plural, but it's considered archaic.

I know that it's possible and acceptable to say "deers" and "fishes", but I'm just curious why the more normal plural form sounds the same as the singular form. When I tried googling the reason the only answers I saw were "Because that's the nature of the language, duh." Which is a boring-ass explanation. What do you think, /lang/?

I think it's related to animals that were "hunted" in some way.

You must tell me first why the plural is also "djur" in Swedish.

>>3
It seems to be an ett word, and as far as I know, ett words don't take plural endings. I don't know much about this, though.

There are some weird remnants of English inflection still left over from when we used to concern ourselves with such things, and there are also some examples of internal vowel mutations to indicate the plural (ablauting). The latter is seen in languages like Old Icelandic/Norse and does come from PG, so examples from North Germanic languages are relevant. If you want to hear about internal vowel changes, you can umlaut-gasm in your nearest Germanic language department to your heart's content, I promise.

Ox - oxen
Brother - brethren
Child - children
Goose - geese

The first example is just a straight-up old fashioned plural. The second two are actually words with two plural morphemes one of which (the 'r' part)has its vowel syncoped out. So, oddly enough, the standard has become the use of a stacked plural and, in the case of 'children', the Black English equivalent (chillins) actually has three plural morphemes lol.

There are some other things out there, but the plural <s> is basically our only productive plural morpheme left. In the case of deer and sheep, however, there is typically no change.

What do we linguistics call that? We don't call it anything, actually. The popular line of thinking is that the plural became the standard singular since the words are often used in a hunting context... they are a goofy sort of mass noun group. We do the same thing with aircraft and a couple of other things.

So, the first reply was correct. There are trends for using the regular plural to indicate that the animals are in separate species (a tank with fishes of both the guppy and goldfish ilk), but I have the feeling that this was just a prescriptivist decree that got just enough airtime to gain popularity.

Awesome, thanks for the information, that's just what i was looking for.