James Tauber

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Dwarves vs Dwarfs

I've long known that Tolkien favoured dwarves to dwarfs as the plural of dwarf but, living post-Tolkien, it's easy to forget that dwarfs was ever the preferred spelling. Then it was pointed out that the Disney film (which came out the same year as The Hobbit) is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I don't think I ever noticed that before.

It was pointed out by Aardy R. DeVarque's Sources of D&D page which is an interesting study of the origins of many terms in the original D&D (hint: they weren't all from Tolkien!)

UPDATE (2007-12-09): Mark Liberman talked about /-fs/ vs /-vz/ plurals back in 2004 in The Theology of Phonology with a followup specifically on Dwarves vs Dwarfs.

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Comments (7)

Joe Smith on Dec. 6, 2007:

Wow, that's really ironic. I was just looking at a few D&D websites to see about getting back in. Thanks for the link, I'll see if I can look some of these up. :)

Eric Florenzano on Dec. 7, 2007:

Ok, so I read this post on the 5th. Between then and now you wouldn't believe how many times I've seen "Dwarfs" and not "Dwarves". It's haunting me! That, or since you blogged about it, it became noticeable.

Dave on Dec. 7, 2007:

Strong and irregular constructions tend to regularize once their use drops below a certain frequency, so it makes sense that Tolkien, who often had reason to talk about them, would use an irregular plural, while film title editors, who might never have had an occasion to pluralize dwarf before, would use a regular one. (I wonder if there's a certain amount of inherent complexity that natural languages tend towards. English, having had many of the corners of its parent languages rubbed off, is simple in some ways -- but then we make up for that with our orthography)

James Tauber on Dec. 7, 2007:

Yes, I am aware of frequency effects of regularization (they are, in fact, relevant to my doctoral research)
but hadn't thought of their application in this case. Excellent point!

Caity Taylor on Dec. 9, 2007:

Apparently, words ending in fricatives were pluralised as -fs, with the pronunciation -/fs/, e.g dwarfs, roofs, hoofs etc.. Then a rule was introduced so that the fricative became voiced in the plural, with the pronunciation -/vs/, but the spelling remained unchanged. Now, that rule has been forgotten about, so the pronunciation is often reflected in the spelling: rooves, hooves and, of course, dwarves.

I was told that by a respected morphologist :)

James Tauber on Dec. 9, 2007:

In that case, Caity, I respectfully disagree with our mutually respected morphologist :)

There are plenty of /-f/ words that still form plurals in /-fs/ including chief, belief, cliff, proof, etc.

Some go either way, such as roof, although I've never seen it spelt (or spelled) "rooves" before.

Mark Liberman has a nice post on this at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000288.html with a followup specifically on dwarf vs dwarves at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000293.html

Caity Taylor on Dec. 11, 2007:

I have to admit that "rooves" looked a bit odd at the time of writing and "roofs" looks far better. If I'm speaking, I'd still pronounce it /v/; if I were reading it, I'd pronounce it as /f/, but think it sounded funny. :)

I suppose the rule was never applied to completion, as sociolinguists might say, hence the variability. Who knows? It's interesting to note that the related verbs, where applicable, are in /v/.

Anyway, there's also other cases than /f/~/v/, such as "th" (unvoiced~voiced) and the rare /s/~/z/. Only one word does that, our RM told me; it would please me no end to come up with another!
Created: Dec. 5, 2007
Last Modified: Dec. 9, 2007
Author: jtauber