Irregular singular: narrative -> narratives

[th3james]

This currently incorrectly guesses narratifes as singular

[AdamPflug]

another example is Perspective -> Perspectives (just ran into this with our own project). Maybe there is a more general rule here for words ending in "tive"?

[AdamPflug]

Actually I think the rule is wrong right now. I think right now it turns
ives -> ife when trying to singularize.
I think there are lots of examples where this is the wrong thing:
http://www.scrabblefinder.com/ends-with/ives/

I think the real irregular singulars are
wife -> wives
life -> lives
knife -> knives

[WickedSik]

@AdamPflug It seems like there is indeed a choice to be made for words, whether they are irregular or not.

Would I be correct to say -tives -> -tive and -ives -> -ife ? (going from plural to singular)

[AdamPflug]

I don't think so, the default seems to be to just drop the s:
Explosives -> Explosive
Corrosives -> Corrosive
Nosedives -> Nosedive
Olives -> Olive (this is an interesting one, notice that without the o in front it's lives -> life)

I can't think any other cases where ives -> ife, except things where the above 3 are the end of the word (e.g. housewives -> housewife, jackknives -> jackknife)

[AdamPflug]

Figured I'd also link this here:
http://www.azed.gov/wp-content/uploads/PDF/Irregularnouns-irregularverbs.pdf

The interesting thing here is that it seems like it's much easier to use rules to go form singular to plural than the reverse.

[WickedSik]

In that case, it'd be prudent to add the default of -ives -> -ive, and let the irregulars fill with the exceptions.

I do have to say, we can't add all the different versions of the irregulars (housewives, wives, ...) so we'll have to find some common ground. /(house)?(wives)/ for instance.

About the PDF, I feared as much. I'll have a look into this. Meanwhile, I see no issue with merging it.