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The ending -men was inspired by Provençal and spoken French (which does not pronounce the t in -ment) and chosen over -mente to avoid clashing with the noun ending -ment and other nouns in the language derived from the past tense in -t. [17] [18] Adjectives may be used as adverbs when the sense is clear: [1] [19]
Masculine, feminine and neuter nouns often have their own special nominative singular endings. For instance, many masculine nouns end in -or (amor, amōris, 'love'). Many feminine nouns end in -īx (phoenīx, phoenīcis, 'phoenix'), and many neuter nouns end in -us with an r stem in the oblique cases (onus, oneris 'burden'; tempus, temporis ...
The latter class, i.e. the neuter nominative/accusative singular, usually ends with -um in Latin and -ον (-on) in Greek, matching the accusative of the former. In Latin, the masculine words of the second declension that end with -us in the nominative case are differently declined from the latter in the vocative case: such words end with -e.
Exceptions include singular non-neuter second-declension nouns that end in -us in the nominative case. An example would be the famous line from Shakespeare, "Et tu, Brute?" (commonly translated as "And you, Brutus?"): Brute is the vocative case and Brutus would be the nominative. Nouns that end in -ius end with -ī instead of the expected -ie.
i: the general adjectival ending, similar to -e in usage. a: nouns that end in e formed from an -ar verb are often written with the -a ending if one wishes to emphasize the verbal (active) aspect. The a ending also makes nouns feminine: anglese (English person), angleso (Englishman), anglesa (English woman). This does not apply to nouns that on ...
Thematic nominals, which became more and more common during the times of later PIE and its younger daughter languages, have a stem ending in a thematic vowel, *-o-in almost all grammatical cases, sometimes ablauting to *-e-. Since all roots end in a consonant, all thematic nominals have suffixes ending in a vowel, and none are root nouns.
Rules other than phonetic can be used when the meaning of the noun is known or at least its semantic group is recognized. In this category obvious examples are proper names of people, or nouns designating nationality, profession, etc. Nouns referring to animals and birds are always specific to their biological gender, and often occur in pairs the same way as we have cow and bull in English.
External modifiers can also be realized by prepositional phrases (e.g., by far the greatest ally) and noun phrases (e.g., every bit a philosopher). External modifiers can only attach to the beginnings or ends of noun phrases. When positioned at the beginning, they occur before any predeterminative, determinative, or internal modifier. [44]