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Common nouns may be divided into count nouns and non-count nouns. English nouns typically have both count and non-count senses, though for a given noun one sense typically dominates. For example, apple is usually countable (two apples), but it also has a non-count sense (e.g., this pie is full of apple).
Rules other than phonetic can be used when the meaning of the noun is known or at least its semantic group is recognized. In this category obvious examples are proper names of people, or nouns designating nationality, profession, etc. Nouns referring to animals and birds are always specific to their biological gender, and often occur in pairs the same way as we have cow and bull in English.
For words ending in n, p, t, the regularities are basically similar, but there is wide variance. Words ending in -at/-et (a suffix), however, usually take the variant without -j. The majority of words ending in b, d use the -j suffix (e.g. darabja, családja "his/her/its piece, family" but lába, térde "his/her leg, knee").
The Latin word vīrus was a neuter noun of the second declension, but neuter second declension nouns ending in -us (rather than -um) are rare enough that inferring rules is difficult. (One rare attested plural, pelage as a plural of pelagus , is borrowed from Greek, so does not give guidance for virus .)
A noun (without an article) which ends in a consonant or the inherent vowel, অ ô, is inflected by adding – ের -er to the end of the word (and deleting the inherent vowel if applicable). An example of this would be the genitive of মাংস mangshô "meat" being মাং সের mangsh er "of meat" or "(the) meat's".
In French, nouns ending in -e tend to be feminine, whereas others tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions to this (e.g. cadre, arbre, signe, meuble, nuage are masculine as façon, chanson, voix, main, eau are feminine), note the many masculine nouns ending in -e preceded by double consonants.
Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine.
In the singular definite, common-gender nouns always take the ending -en, while neuter nouns always take -et. Plural definite adds -ene to the indefinite if it has no suffix [note 9] or a borrowed suffix, [note 10] otherwise -ne (exception: mennesker "human beings, people" → menneske(r)ne). Nouns that end in unstressed -e lose the -e when ...