Quoting: meat
why is the plural for "moose" not "meese"
I ask myself this question every day, and I think I found an answer.
“In Old English, the word was
gós, and back in the mists of time its plural would have been
gósiz. By the phenomenon called "i-mutation", the vowel in the second syllable affected the vowel in the first syllable, so by late Anglo-Saxon times, the plural had ceased to be
gósiz and had become
gés - our modern "geese". I-mutation is perhaps the most common cause of our irregular plurals…
… But even if the moose belonged to, say, the cat family, and thus typically had a plural different from its singular, we wouldn't use the plural "meese". This is because, unlike "goose", the word "moose" did not exist in early Anglo-Saxon times, so it couldn't undergo i-mutation. "Moose" was borrowed from Eastern Abenaki in the 1600s. The Abenaki are a native people of Quebec, the Maritimes, and New England, for whom this majestic animal is a
mos.”
-blogspot.com