I've just started learning German, and what strikes me about their plurals is that a word in its plural form can change not only at the end but in the middle as well (die Kopf / die Köpfe, der Stuhl / die Stühle, der Wald / die Wälde).
And then I realized that in Russian, we have, for instance, forms like:
- десна / дёсны
- весна / вёсны
- ведро / вёдра
- бедро / бёдра
My question is whether there's any rule one can memorize for when this is the case in Russian? If not, is there a more or less exhaustive list of such words?
UPD: For those who claim that this is due to the "ѣ"/"e" change, can you please be more specific? For instance, words that evolved from рѣпа, пѣна, лѣто do not follow this pattern. On the other hand, the word жена, which came from жєна, does follow this pattern.
UPD: I just realized that this phenomenon extends further than just "ё"/"е". As Dmitry mentioned, we have "ё"/"е" and we actually also have "a"/"о" (заря/зори).
чёрт - черти
,счёт - счета
, однако для этого есть правило: Буквы о-ё-е в корнях слов после шипящих. Вот еще заумный материал, может поможет.