Five thousand or Five thousands?

Five thousand

 

The trend is toward simplification

No S. Two explanations.

1. The trend toward simplification is an important part of English grammar. Our language casts off suffixes that don't mean anything. It's been doing that since the Angles and Saxons brought their Germanic language to Great Britain. That's the reason that English grammar is so much less complicated than German.

German has nine verb endings, English has three. Five noun endings to English's two. Two adjective endings to our zero. Six forms of "a" and "the" to our two and one, respectively.

Putting the S on "thousand" or "hundred" doesn't change the meaning. Therefore over the centuries it's been dropped.

2. If we put the S on "thousand" then we'd be treating it like a noun instead of a number so we'd have to use it like a noun. We'd have to say "five thousands of pencils," just the same way we say "five pounds of tomatoes."

Some languages do that with the larger numbers. For example, in Spanish "thousand" is a number but "million" is a noun. You can say "dos mil pollos," "two thousand chickens," but you have to say "dos millones de pollos," "two millions of chickens."

Eventually English will become as simplified as Chinese and it will be even easier to learn and use. Chinese has no endings at all.

 

Why not? No problem.

Sure it can:

Today I go to market.
Yesterday I go to market.

Verb tenses are unnecessary because the time word is much more precise. We've also both omitted the definite article. I believe that the only purpose of "the" and "a" is to confuse foreigners trying to learn our language. The words have almost no meaning at all.

In Chinese it's actually:

Jin tian wo dao cai pu qu.
Current day I direction vegetable store go.

-- or --

Zuo tian wo dao cai pu qu.
Last day I direction vegetable store go.

 

Exactly. We can still use big numbers as nouns. Millions of people. Billions of stars. Hundreds of books. The grammatical construction is still allowable, it's not totally obsolete. But it's awkward for enumeration. So we evolved an alternative, a grammatical simplification with no endings and no prepositions.

Eventually all of our grammar will become simplified. We won't have all those endings and the little "noise words," prepositions, conjunctions, articles, that don't really mean anything.

 

Thousands of stars
Hundreds of people
Dozens of eggs
Tens of years
Fives of fingers ?
A full house made up of 3 sevens and 2 twos.
...

 

James:
Your intuition is correct. "Fives" is not in use. "Tens" is awkward and very uncommon.

Saint:
(1)I saw him walking across the road.
(2) I saw him walk across the road.

Both are correct, but they don't have the same meaning.

(1) means that I saw him while he was walking, but I did not observe the entire journey. He might have changed his mind and returned to where he started, he might have been knocked down by a truck, or he might have fallen into a manhole.

(2) means that I watched him make the complete journey across the road.

 

Yes. Although we most commonly use "thousand" as a number, it can also be used as a noun. The same goes for all the large numbers, down to a hundred. "Hundreds" of different ways to cook chicken. But we seldom say "tens" except as a multiplier for the bigger numbers: tens of thousands of people received their welfare checks late due to a computer error.

Or as a denomination of money. I've got two fifties, three tens and several fives in my wallet.

Other than that, the small numbers don't even get that kind of usage. About the only time we'd say "twos" or "sevens" is when we're talking about the pure number. 1776 has two sevens. Last time I played dice I threw four sixes in a row. The soldiers are marching by twos. I can't write my nines very well in Chinese.