To be fair to him, he acknowledges that dwarfs would be the accepted version and justifies it by saying that if we talked about dwarfs or dwarves more often in regular English, we might have had a nonstandard plural for them as we do with many other common subjects. Elves also pre-dates him significantly, though I don’t doubt that he was a significant factor in it becoming the standard version. It seems there are even some examples of singular elve
“dwarves” and “elves” are consistent with things like “wolves” instead of “wolfs”, “lives” instead of “lifes”.
Fun fact: this never got applied to dwarf stars, which are still “dwarfs”.
“Dwarfs” is just short for “Dwarf S(tars)”. The plural is on star, not dwarf, and hidden in the shortened version.
(Source: my ass, pleasedon’tquotemeonthis)
Nah, I think for titles,. it’s an exception.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, for example, are not the Maple Leaves.
Except the etymology of elf/elfs would disagree, and Tolkien was just wrong.
To be fair to him, he acknowledges that dwarfs would be the accepted version and justifies it by saying that if we talked about dwarfs or dwarves more often in regular English, we might have had a nonstandard plural for them as we do with many other common subjects. Elves also pre-dates him significantly, though I don’t doubt that he was a significant factor in it becoming the standard version. It seems there are even some examples of singular elve