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Comment by stevula | Hacker News Reader

Old English had [a plural ending in S](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Nouns#Strong_Nouns) that predates Norman invasion.

You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.

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Would have to guess the Norsemen being referred to here at the people who came in the 800s and 900s, not the Normans who came later

OP seemed to be referring to Normans. The whole cow (English) -> beef (French) is a classic linguistic example to cite with regard to them.

How come the same situation is present in other languages(e.g. French, Serbocroatian)? Improbable that it were always the Normans.

Which situation specifically? Serbo-Croatian doesn't have that differentiation between the name of the animal and of its meat. There are others (regional "astal" being my favourite example), but the similar pattern can happen in any language.

Yes that makes more sense actually. But now I am still confused.

> but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.

Not always check Spanish for example they took a lot from Arabic, like 'EL'.

LOL, what? Spanish "el" is etymologically derived from Latin ille/illa/illud, which became el/la/lo in Spanish.

Why do you believe Spanish took "el" from Arabic?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/el#Spanish

Do you mean the sound combination "el", or the fact of having a definite article?

Latin did not have articles. The use of articles is a grammatical feature that has been borrowed between languages. But yes: that kind of borrowing is a lot less frequent than borrowing of vocabulary.

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