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In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. [1] For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones").
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...
Noun class 1 refers to mass nouns, collective nouns, and abstract nouns. examples: вода 'water', любовь 'love' Noun class 2 refers to items with which the eye can focus on and must be non-active examples: дом 'house', школа 'school' Noun class 3 refers to non-humans that are active. examples: рыба 'fish', чайка 'seagull'
The word data is most often used as a singular collective mass noun in educated everyday usage. [1] [2] However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.
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 ...
For example, with collective nouns such as committee, which denote a unit composed of multiple individuals, agreement can either be singular because the noun is morphologically singular (e.g., The committee has not yet come to a decision) or plural because it is semantically plural (e.g.,The committee have not yet come to a decision). [26]
A name is a label for any noun: names can identify a class or category of things; or a single thing, either uniquely or within a given context. Names are given, for example, to humans or any other organisms, places, products—as in brand names—and even to ideas or concepts. It is names as nouns that are the building blocks of nomenclature.
For instance, in Swahili the word rafiki 'friend' belongs to the class 9 and its "plural form" is marafiki of the class 6, even if most nouns of the 9 class have the plural of the class 10. For this reason, noun classes are often referred to by combining their singular and plural forms, e.g., rafiki would be classified as "9/6", indicating that ...