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Usually, in borrowing words from Latin, the endings of the nominative are used: nouns whose nominative singular ends in -a (first declension) have plurals in -ae (anima, animae); nouns whose nominative singular ends in -um (second declension neuter) have plurals in -a (stadium, stadia; datum, data). (For a full treatment, see Latin declensions.)
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 ...
In the latter case, -ya is attached to nouns whose construct state ends in a long vowel or diphthong (e.g. in the sound masculine plural and the dual), while -ī is attached to nouns whose construct state ends in a short vowel, in which case that vowel is elided (e.g. in the sound feminine plural, as well as the singular and broken plural of ...
Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural.When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison.
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)
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).
These nouns in the nominative singular end with the vowels α, ι, υ, ω or with the consonants ν, ρ, ς (ξ, ψ). They form the genitive case with -ος, -ως or -ους. Third-declension nouns have one, two, or three stems, unlike first- and second-declension nouns, which always have only one stem.
A few feminine nouns that end with the soft sign, such as дверь and пыль, also have a locative form that differs from the prepositional in that the stress shifts to the final syllable: на двери́, na dverí ("on the door"), but при две́ри, pri dvéri ("by the door"). These distinct feminine forms are sometimes ...