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The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
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). (For a full treatment, see Latin declensions.)
Romance languages can be broadly divided into two broad groups based on the historical trajectory that the pluralization of nouns, articles, and adjectives took. In the first group, consisting of the Romance languages north or west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line (i.e. Western Romance ), plurals are generally formed by the addition of the plural ...
In Kiowa, by default, Class I nouns are singular-dual, Class II nouns are plural (two or more), Class III nouns are dual, and Class IV nouns are mass nouns with no number. The inverse number marker changes the noun to whatever number(s) the unmarked noun isn't, such as changing Class III nouns from dual to nondual. [ 277 ]
Exceptions include proper nouns, which typically are not translated, and kinship terms, which may be too complex to translate. Proper nouns/names may simply be repeated in the gloss, or may be replaced with a placeholder such as "(name. F)" or "PN(F)" (for a female name). For kinship glosses, see the dedicated section below for a list of ...
These include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns (cer = "sky", cerul = "the sky"), and several more. This phenomenon, called the Balkan language area , may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.
Some nouns have two different diminutives, each with a different meaning: bloem (flower) → bloempje (lit. "small flower") This is the regularly formed diminutive. bloem (flower) → bloemetje (lit. also "small flower", but meaning bouquet). pop (doll) → popje (lit. "small doll", but it is also a term of endearment).
Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by the ending-s (or -es), whereas possession is always shown by the enclitic-'s or, for plural forms ending in s, by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl.