Plural
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Plural is a form of the noun that shows that there are more than one. The opposite of the plural is the singular, which means there is only one.
In some languages a suffix (word ending) is added to a word to show that the word means many. For example, English usually uses -s to mark the plural. For example, cat is singular, but cats is plural.
All European languages have plurals. Some languages also have duals (2), like Arabic, ancient Hebrew and Inuktitut. Other languages even have:
- nullar (no objects)
- trial (three objects)
- paucal (a few objects)
These different numbers will have different suffixes from the plural suffix.
Some languages do not have plural endings at all. Some of these are the East Asian languages of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. So native speakers of these languages can easily forget to use plural.
