More Pants than Pant

So I had a great time on my trip to Naples, Italy (I’ll have to write more about that soon), and after returning to Shanghai I have continued to study Italian through Duolingo and ChatGPT.

One thing that I’ve noticed about Italian is that plural forms require a lot more attention than I’ve ever given them in any of my language study to date. In Spanish plurals take an “s” like in English. Then in Japanese and Chinese, you don’t have a regular plural form, for the most part.

Suddenly in Italian you have “-o” and “-a” turning to “-i” and “-e” and no “s” in sight! So it requires more attention, but it’s interesting.

Meanwhile, studying Italian also brought to my attention another issue that Japanese and Chinese never did: how the word “pants” (e.g. “trousers” for you Brits) is plural. Why is it plural? It’s one piece of clothing like a shirt or a dress. Sure, there are two pant legs in a pair of pants, but there are also two sleeves in a shirt. Italian uses a plural word for “pants” just like English and Spanish.

This got me thinking… what about other languages in Europe? So my buddy ChatGPT helped me create this chart, which seems to be accurate:

Language	Word	Singular/Plural
English	pants	Plural
Spanish	pantalones	Plural
French	pantalon	Singular
Italian	pantaloni	Plural
German	Hose	Singular
Dutch	broek	Singular
Portuguese	calças	Plural
Russian	брюки (bryuki)	Plural
Greek	παντελόνι (panteloni)	Singular
Polish	spodnie	Plural
Swedish	byxor	Plural
Norwegian	bukser	Plural
Danish	bukser	Plural
Finnish	housut	Plural
Hungarian	nadrág	Singular
Czech	kalhoty	Plural
Slovak	nohavice	Plural
Romanian	pantaloni	Plural
Bulgarian	панталони (pantaloni)	Plural
Croatian	hlače	Plural
Serbian	панталоне (pantalone)	Plural
Estonian	püksid	Plural
Latvian	bikses	Plural
Lithuanian	kelnės	Plural

So, only French, German, Dutch, Greek, and Hungarian have a singular take on “pants.” Interesting…