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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 .)
For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
Certain words derived from nouns, specifically those ending in -ing (such as painting), can share features of both nouns and verbs. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language illustrates the gradience from verbal nouns to verbs in their present participle forms, with the earlier examples behaving more like nouns and the later examples ...
The ending carries grammatical information, including case, number, and gender. [1] Gender is an inherent property of a noun but is part of the inflection of an adjective, because it must agree with the gender of the noun it modifies. [2] Thus, the general morphological form of such words is R+S+E:
However the same verb-derived -ing forms are also sometimes used as pure nouns or adjectives. [5] In this case the word does not form a verb phrase; any modifiers it takes will be of a grammatical kind which is appropriate to a noun or adjective respectively. For example: Shouting loudly is rude. (shouting is a gerund, modified by the adverb ...
By examining the plural form of the word, one can generally determine the word's gender and root. Animate plurals end in -g, while inanimate plural nouns (and obviative nouns) end in -n. The underlying form of a root determines the "linking vowel" — the vowel that appears before the plural suffix (-g or -n) but after the root itself.
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 definite article takes the form yn before masculine nominative and genitive and feminine nominative nouns. This yn is often reduced to y before consonants or to 'n after grammatical words ending in a vowel. Plural nouns and feminine genitive nouns take the article ny, another archaic form of which is found in some place names as nyn. [3]