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Usually, in borrowing words from Latin, the endings of the nominative are used: nouns whose nominative singular ends in -a (first declension) have plurals in -ae (anima, animae); nouns whose nominative singular ends in -um (second declension neuter) have plurals in -a (stadium, stadia; datum, data).
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
The apostrophe is also used to mark the genitive for words that end in an -s sound: words ending in -s, -x, and -z, some speakers also including words ending in the sound . As Norwegian does not form the plural with -s, there is no need to distinguish between an -s forming the possessive and the -s forming the plural.
The plural morpheme for regular nouns in English is typically realized by adding an -s or -es to the end of the noun. However, the plural morpheme actually has three different allomorphs: [-s], [-z], and [-əz]. The specific pronunciation that a plural morpheme takes on is determined by a set of morphological rules such as the following: [2]
Only animate nouns can take a plural form. These include most animate living beings, but also words like tepētl — tepēmeh ("mountain, mountains"), citlālin — cīcitlāltin ("star, stars"), and some other phenomena. The plural is not totally stable and in many cases several different forms are attested.
The weak feminines with the -a ending vary greatly in the genitive plural, but most fall into a few groups: Nouns with -na as ending; nouns with no genitive plural; nouns that form the genitive plural by attaching the definite article's genitive plural to the nominative singular; nouns whose genitive singular is used collectively. [cv 17]
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 .)
Moreover, their plural forms are truly unique: the genitive plural always ends in -ra, which is normally used for adjectives, and the nominative/accusative plural varies between no ending, the adjective ending -e, and the a-stem ending -as. The adjectival endings are a relic of the nd-stems' origin as present participles.