One little, two little, three little... um... children named Amy

[pne]

I was thinking about the name "Amy" and how it's inflected in other languages and thought that in Greek, the plural would probably be οι Έϊμες, των Εϊμών, τις Έϊμες (unless it goes like δύναμη, in which case it'd be οι Έϊμεις, των Έϊμεων, τις Έϊμεις) and in Verdurian it'd be Eymĭ, Eymië, Eymem, Eymin.

But what is it in English? What goes in the blank in the sentence "How many ______ do you know?"?

I'd guess it'd be "Amys"… even though by the normal rules of English morphology it'd have to be "Amies". But somehow, inflecting proper nouns seems strange to me.

What is the correct plural of a name such as "Amy"?

(And I wonder how "Eimi", or whatever the name would be to correspond with Finnish morphology, would inflect in Finnish.)

Comments

[swelegant.livejournal.com]

You know, I say Amies/Amys/Amy's a lot and I wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to spell the pluralisation :D

Amys seems wrong to me though, because when I see "Amys" I instinctively pronounce it as "a-miss".

Meh. Hopefully someone will post the solution to this little mystery :D

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

It would be "Amys" - names don't conform to normal grammar rules - you cannot pluralise Amy into Amies, as it doesn't work the other way around (the singular of the name Amies is Amie). I guess this is as much to do with the fact that you can call a child whatever you like, and "mutations" of traditional names (such as Amy->Amie) are quite common in younger generations and especially, in my experience, in America. So yeah, Singular: Amy, Plural: Amys, Possessive: Amy's, Plural Possessive: Amys'.

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

Agreed.
(you beat me to it :))