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Masculine, feminine and neuter nouns often have their own special nominative singular endings. For instance, many masculine nouns end in -or (amor, amōris, 'love'). Many feminine nouns end in -īx (phoenīx, phoenīcis, 'phoenix'), and many neuter nouns end in -us with an r stem in the oblique cases (onus, oneris 'burden'; tempus, temporis ...
2nd declension nouns in -us are usually masculine, but those referring to trees (e.g. pīnus "pine tree") and some place names (e.g. Aegyptus "Egypt") are feminine. A few 2nd declension nouns, such as vir "man" and puer "boy", lack endings in the nominative and vocative singular.
Masculine nouns which form their plural by palatalization of their final consonant can change gender in their plural form, as a palatalized final consonant is often a marker of a feminine noun, e.g. balach beag ("small boy"), but balaich bheaga ("small boys"), with the adjective showing agreement for both feminine gender (lenition of initial ...
Latin has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). Pronouns, adjectives, participles, and the numbers one to three have to agree in gender and number with the noun they refer to: Masculine : hic est fīlius meus: [25] 'this is my son' Feminine : haec est fīlia mea : 'this is my daughter'
There are isolated situations where certain nouns may be modified to reflect gender, though not in a systematic fashion. Loan words from other languages, particularly Latin and the Romance languages, often preserve their gender-specific forms in English, e.g. alumnus (masculine singular) and alumna (feminine singular).
A few Greek nouns in -os, mostly geographical, belong to the second declension, and sometimes have an accusative in -on such as Dēlos, Acc. Dēlon (but Dēlum in prose). In the genitive singular, names in -ēs, parisyllabic, take -ī as well as -is. Some feminine nouns in -ô have the genitive in -ūs.
In particular, these nouns are thematic, with an original o in most of their forms. [1] In Classical Latin, the short o of the nominative and accusative singular became u. Both Latin and Greek have two basic classes of second-declension nouns: masculine or feminine in one class, neuter in another.
Such nouns arose because of the identity of the Latin neuter singular -um with the masculine singular, and the identity of the Latin neuter plural -a with the feminine singular. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive (e.g. il dito "the finger" vs. le dita "the fingers", l'uovo "the egg" vs. le uova "the eggs").