Plural forms which end in -x such as tableaux
Words borrowed from French and ending in -eau originally had plural forms which appended an -x rather than an -s. For e.g., the plurals of tableau, beau, and plateau were tableaux, beaux, and plateaux respectively. While the use of plateaux and beaux has petered out in favour of plateaus and beaus, tableaux has not.
My questions:
- How are these
-xplural forms pronounced? - Is there any particular reason why tableaux is still the preferred plural form unlike plateaux, beaux, and portmanteaux?
Solution 1:
The OED attests as occurring in English texts the following irregular -x noun plurals:
- aboideau > aboideaux
- bandeau > bandeaux
- bateau > bateaux
- bayou > bayoux
- beau > beaux
- bijou > bijoux
- bordereau > bordereaux
- bureau > bureaux
- château > châteaux
- chou > choux
- damoiseau > damoiseaux
- fabliau > fabliaux
- fricandeau > fricandeaux
- jeu > jeux
- lambeau > lambeaux
- maquereau > maquereaux
- morceau > morceaux
- Pineau > Pineaux
- plateau > plateaux
- portmanteau > portmanteaux
- procès verbal > procès verbaux
- réseau > réseaux
- rouleau > rouleaux
- seau > seaux
- tableau > tableaux
- taureau > taureaux
- torteau > torteaux
- Tourangeau > Tourangeaux
- trumeau > trumeaux
- vœu > vœux
Most of those are far too rare to be considered anything other than unassimilated, but of those that aren’t, the Ngrams do not bear out the OP’s assertion that the -x forms have fallen by the wayside. In fact, only the very oldest ones have been superseded by -s forms.
Divination by Ngram
In the following Ngrams, the -x spelling is in blue and the -s spelling is in red. Notice how the blue nearly always dominates.
bateaux vs bateaus
beaux vs beaus
bijoux vs bijous
bureaux vs bureaus
châteaux vs châteaus
jeux vs jeus
morceaux vs morceaus
plateaux vs plateaus
That one is interesting because it is one of the few that shows a distinct difference depending on whether the “British” or “American” corpus has been selected.
British plateaux vs plateaus
American plateaux vs plateaus
portmanteaux vs portmanteaus
tableaux vs tableaus
vœux vs vœus
Summary
Only the French loanwords that have been around longest, and used the most, have lost their irregular inflection. Indeed, one of the very oldest, chapeau is even unattested in the chapeaux form.
On the other hand, words that require special treatment, like châteaux or nouveaux arrivés, can be expected to retain their imported forms longer. It may also be that people who know to use the import as an import, also know to import its irregularity: notice how vœux, voeux, and voues all occur, but never vœus. In the same way, there are no instances of châteaus, since if they know enough to hat the a, they surely know enough to -x the plural.
Solution 2:
In American English, none of those words are regularly pluralized in -x, not even tableaus. (Nor bureaus, nor chateaus.) Of course, I'd also say that none of those words are "regularly" pluralized to begin with. One doesn't often need to refer to multiple tableaus or bureaus in print.
In other -x neux, American crossworders may be familiar with EAUX ("Vichy waters?"), but that's definitely a French word, not an English one. Flambeaux is borderline. Beaux appears as an adjective in Beaux-Arts, but that's a borrowed French phrase.
Basically, the "Frenchier" the word, the more likely I'd be to consider it pluralized in -x. For example, I would consider ski chateaux to be humorously pretentious*, but chapeaus to be a solecism. (If you're going to go that far out of your way to use a French word in place of hats, you should spell the French word correctly.)
* FWIW, Google disagrees with my personal intuition about "ski chateaus"; neither phrase is common, but "ski chateaux" is more prevalent in that tiny sample.
In all of these cases, I would expect an American-English speaker to pronounce the final -x as /-z/, regardless of its French pronunciation. See also this Wikipedia talk page.