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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 .)
Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender.Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined (verbs are conjugated), and a given pattern is called a declension.
Abstract nouns: deceit, information, cunning, and nouns derived from adjectives, such as honesty, wisdom, intelligence, poverty, stupidity, curiosity, and words ending with "-ness", such as goodness, freshness, laziness, and nouns which are homonyms of adjectives with a similar meaning, such as good, bad (can also use goodness and badness), hot ...
And even with nouns referring to persons, one could not always determine gender by meaning or form: for example, with two words ending in -mæg, there was the female-specific neuter noun wynmæg, meaning "winsome maid" or attractive woman; as well as the gender-neutral noun meaning "paternal kindred" or member of father's side of the family ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
Most of them had word stems ending in a consonant (called athematic stems) and exhibited a complex pattern of accent shifts and/or vowel changes among the different cases. Two declensions ended in a vowel ( * -o/-e [ note 1 ] ) and are called thematic ; they were more regular and became more common during the history of PIE and its older ...