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The biggest exception is Romanian, where there is a productive class of "neuter" nouns, which include the descendants of many Latin neuter nouns and which behave like masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural, both in the endings used and in the agreement of adjectives and pronouns (e.g. un deget "one finger" vs. două degete "two ...
The two main avenues to attempt classifications are historical and typological criteria: [3] Historical criteria look at the Romance languages' former development. For example, a widely employed model divided the Romance-speaking world between West and East based on whether plural nouns end in -s or in a vowel.
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 ...
If noun phrases can only contain one determinative, the following noun phrases present challenges: all the time; both those cars; The determiner phrase the functions as the determinative in all the time, and those functions as the determinative in both those cars.
Hence one hundred, two million, four score, etc. (The resulting quantitative expressions are treated as numbers, in that they can modify nouns directly: three dozen eggs, although of is used before pronouns or definite noun phrases: three dozen of them/of those eggs.)
In Russian, the form of noun following the numeral is nominative singular if the numeral ends in "one", genitive singular if the numeral ends in "two" to "four", and genitive plural otherwise. As an exception, the form of noun is also genitive plural if the numeral ends in 11 to 14. [24]
A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees, zero calories, one cat, two bananas, 276 dollars). These nouns tend to designate individually identifiable entities, whereas a non-count noun designates a continuum or an undifferentiated mass (air, cheese, lots of gravel some water, enough heat).
A few languages have specific parts of speech that distinguish between two number categories: one or two, and more than two. The former category can be thought of as a single conflated singular-dual number. [257] For example, in the nouns of Kalaw Lagaw Ya: [258] [259] ùmay - "dog(s)" (one or two) ùmayl - "dogs" (plural, three or more)