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In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as the Berber languages. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form.
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 ...
Singular and plural forms are marked from the general form. The general is used when the specific number is deemed irrelevant or unimportant. In this system, the singular is often called the singulative, to distinguish it as derived from a different form. Similarly, the plural derived from the general has been called the plurative. [195]
Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for 'dog', which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ('two'), and coin for plural. In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation [1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
For example, German teachers used to use the former construct with upper-secondary students, while Italian teachers typically use the latter (switching to a full V-form with university students). This can lead to constructions denoting an intermediate level of formality in T–V-distinct languages that sound awkward to English-speakers.
The singular form is used when talking to friends, family, animals and children, and the plural form is used to talk to a group of people, or when being especially polite to one person. In Breton the second person plural c'hwi is used as a polite form when addressing a single person and the singular te is reserved for informal situations.
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.
At the end of verbs it is used to form verbal participle in the masculine. ^2 If ۍ ends a word it always indicates that the word it occurs in is feminine. ^3 If ئ occurs at the end of a verb, it indicates the verb is in second person plural form. ^4 If ې appears at end of nouns and adjectives it indicates that those are feminine.