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31-464: Mundukumo consonants are: Mundukumo vowels are: Some examples showing Mundukomo nouns and their irregular plural forms: Similar patterns of complex nominal plural allomorphy are also found in the Lower Sepik-Ramu languages . Lower Sepik-Ramu languages The Ramu–Lower Sepik a.k.a. Lower Sepik–Ramu languages are a proposed family of about 35 Papuan languages spoken in

62-743: A massive plural and a numerative plural , the first implying a large mass and the second implying division. For example, "the waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of [each of] the Great Lakes". Ghil'ad Zuckermann uses the term superplural to refer to massive plural. He argues that the Australian Aboriginal Barngarla language has four grammatical numbers: singular, dual, plural and superplural . For example: A given language may make plural forms of nouns by various types of inflection , including

93-415: A lesser extent) dual are extremely rare. Languages with numerical classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all, though they are likely to have plural personal pronouns . Some languages (like Mele-Fila ) distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for the object of discussion. The distinction between

124-544: A plural form can pull double duty as the singular form (or vice versa), as has happened with the word "data" . The plural is used, as a rule, for quantities other than one (and other than those quantities represented by other grammatical numbers, such as dual, which a language may possess). Thus it is frequently used with numbers higher than one ( two cats , 101 dogs , four and a half hours ) and for unspecified amounts of countable things ( some men , several cakes , how many lumps? , birds have feathers ). The precise rules for

155-556: A plural is the English word boys , which corresponds to the singular boy . Words of other types, such as verbs , adjectives and pronouns , also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns. Some languages also have a dual (denoting exactly two of something) or other systems of number categories. However, in English and many other languages, singular and plural are

186-631: A plural sense, as in the government are agreed . The reverse is also possible: the United States is a powerful country . See synesis , and also English plural § Singulars as plural and plurals as singular . In part-of-speech tagging notation, tags are used to distinguish different types of plurals based on their grammatical and semantic context. Resolution varies, for example the Penn-Treebank tagset (~36 tags) has two tags: NNS - noun, plural, and NPS - Proper noun, plural , while

217-439: A plural when it means water from a particular source ( different waters make for different beers ) and in expressions like by the waters of Babylon . Certain collective nouns do not have a singular form and exist only in the plural, such as " clothes ". There are also nouns found exclusively or almost exclusively in the plural, such as the English scissors . These are referred to with the term plurale tantum . Occasionally,

248-408: A word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case , person and gender , as well as marking of categories belonging to the word itself (such as tense of verbs, degree of comparison of adjectives, etc.) Verbs often agree with their subject in number (as well as in person and sometimes gender). Examples of plural forms are

279-457: Is one of the values of the grammatical category of number . The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one (a form that represents this default quantity of one is said to be of singular number). Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of

310-579: Is used after zéro . English also tends to use the plural with decimal fractions , even if less than one, as in 0.3 metres , 0.9 children . Common fractions less than one tend to be used with singular expressions: half (of) a loaf , two-thirds of a mile . Negative numbers are usually treated the same as the corresponding positive ones: minus one degree , minus two degrees . Again, rules on such matters differ between languages. In some languages, including English, expressions that appear to be singular in form may be treated as plural if they are used with

341-597: The French mangeons, mangez, mangent – respectively the first-, second- and third-person plural of the present tense of the verb manger . In English a distinction is made in the third person between forms such as eats (singular) and eat (plural). Adjectives may agree with the noun they modify; examples of plural forms are the French petits and petites (the masculine plural and feminine plural respectively of petit ). The same applies to some determiners – examples are

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372-563: The Lower Sepik and Ramu groups are related, Ramu is morphologically much simpler than Lower Sepik due to differing historical contact scenarios. The Ndu , Yuat , and Ramu groups all have relatively simple morphology, while the Lower Sepik family has some of the most complex morphology seen among Papuan languages. Foley posits that morphological simplification among these disparate languages families had occurred due to creolization through widespread language contact . He notes that

403-701: The Ramu and Sepik river basins of northern Papua New Guinea . These languages tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones. Two primary branches are typically accepted: However, Foley (2018) also considers the possibility of Grass being a third primary branch. Usher classifies some of the Grass languages (the Keram languages ) as being coordinate with Ramu, and some (the Porapora languages ) as being part of Ramu. The relatedness of

434-434: The French plural definite article les , and the English demonstratives these and those . It is common for pronouns , particularly personal pronouns , to have distinct plural forms. Examples in English are we ( us , etc.) and they ( them etc.; see English personal pronouns ), and again these and those (when used as demonstrative pronouns ). In Welsh, a number of common prepositions also inflect to agree with

465-719: The Lower Sepik peoples, which record that Yimas is spoken near their homeland, as well as the conservative nature of Yimas itself, Ross suggests that the speakers of Proto–Ramu – Lower Sepik may have lived in the northern foothills of the New Guinea highlands and moved into the Sepik Basin as the inland Sepik Sea started to recede six thousand years ago. The Ramu-Lower Sepik family is not accepted by Søren Wichmann (2013), who splits it into 4-5 separate groups. Foley (2018) accepts that Ramu and Lower Sepik are related on

496-605: The Ramu languages have *ŋgo ‘ 1sg ’ and *nu ‘ 2sg ’, the Lower Sepik languages have *ama ‘ 1sg ’ and *mi ‘ 2sg ’. Reconstructions of proto- Lower Sepik and proto- Ottilien (proto-Watam-Awar-Gamay, a Lower Ramu branch) from Foley (2005) are as follows. Uncertain reconstructions are marked by question marks following the forms. Lexical resemblances are few. The most likely lexical cognates are ‘tongue’, ‘ear’, ‘lime’, and ‘eat’. Plural The plural (sometimes abbreviated as pl. , pl , or PL ), in many languages,

527-501: The addition of affixes , like the English -(e)s and -ies suffixes , or ablaut , as in the derivation of the plural geese from goose , or a combination of the two. Some languages may also form plurals by reduplication , but not as productively. It may be that some nouns are not marked for plural at all, like sheep and series in English. In languages which also have a case system, such as Latin and Russian , nouns can have not just one plural form but several, corresponding to

558-485: The basis of morphological evidence, although they are typologically still very different from each other. It is also accepted by Glottolog. Grass languages are lexically divergent, sharing very few cognates with the other Ramu languages. Foley (2018: 205) leaves open the possibility of Grass being a third branch of the Lower Sepik-Ramu family, with Lower Sepik and Ramu being sister branches . Although

589-558: The dual and paucal can be found in some Slavic and Baltic languages (apart from those that preserve the dual number, such as Slovene ). These are known as "pseudo-dual" and "pseudo-paucal" grammatical numbers. For example, Polish and Russian use different forms of nouns with the numerals 2, 3, or 4 (and higher numbers ending with these ) than with the numerals 5, 6, etc. (genitive singular in Russian and nominative plural in Polish in

620-430: The former case, genitive plural in the latter case). Also some nouns may follow different declension patterns when denoting objects which are typically referred to in pairs. For example, in Polish, the noun " oko ", among other meanings, may refer to a human or animal eye or to a drop of oil on water. The plural of " oko " in the first meaning is " oczy " (even if actually referring to more than two eyes), while in

651-708: The lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel. (In French, however, this plural suffix is often not pronounced.) This construction is also found in German and Dutch, but only in some nouns. Suffixing is cross-linguistically the most common method of forming plurals. In Welsh , the reference form, or default quantity, of some nouns is plural, and the singular form is formed from it, e.g., llygod , mice -> llygoden , mouse; erfin , turnips -> erfinen , turnip. In many languages, words other than nouns may take plural forms, these being used by way of grammatical agreement with plural nouns (or noun phrases ). Such

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682-400: The most spread-out languages with wide geographical distributions are also the ones with the simplest morphologies: Abau , Iwam , Kwanga , Ambulas , Boiken , Iatmul , Ap Ma , Mikarew , Adjora , and Rao (these are all Sepik and Ramu languages). The internal coherence of the two branches, Ramu and Lower Sepik, is based on similar pronoun paradigms , which however do not connect

713-411: The number, person, and sometimes gender of the noun or pronoun they govern. Certain nouns do not form plurals. A large class of such nouns in many languages is that of uncountable nouns , representing mass or abstract concepts such as air , information , physics . However, many nouns of this type also have countable meanings or other contexts in which a plural can be used; for example water can take

744-502: The only grammatical numbers, except for possible remnants of dual number in pronouns such as both and either . In many languages, there is also a dual number (used for indicating two objects). Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include trial (for three objects) and paucal (for an imprecise but small number of objects). In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those. However, numbers besides singular, plural, and (to

775-451: The paucal, the plural, and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, in discussing oranges, the paucal number might imply fewer than ten, whereas for the population of a country, it might be used for a few hundred thousand. The Austronesian languages of Sursurunga and Lihir have extremely complex grammatical number systems, with singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural. Traces of

806-483: The pseudo-dual as plural of "eyes" עין / עינים ‎ ʿạyin / ʿēnạyim "eye / eyes" as well as "hands", "legs" and several other words are retained. For further information, see Dual (grammatical number) § Hebrew . Certain nouns in some languages have the unmarked form referring to multiple items, with an inflected form referring to a single item. These cases are described with the terms collective number and singulative number . Some languages may possess

837-573: The second it is " oka " (even if actually referring to exactly two drops). Traces of dual can also be found in Modern Hebrew . Biblical Hebrew had grammatical dual via the suffix -ạyim as opposed to ־ים ‎ -īm for masculine words . Contemporary use of a true dual number in Hebrew is chiefly used in words regarding time and numbers. However, in Biblical and Modern Hebrew,

868-426: The three branches are held together by morphological evidence, as very few lexical cognates are shared among them. The family was proposed by William A. Foley and accepted by Malcolm Ross . Its two branches, Ramu and Lower Sepik , had belonged to Donald Laycock 's now-defunct 1973 Sepik–Ramu proposal. If related, they are not close. The connection is not accepted by Timothy Usher. Based on oral histories of

899-605: The two branches to each other. Foley was able to connect them lexically, but the primary evidence for a Ramu – Lower Sepik family is a number of irregular plural markers shared by the Lower Sepik languages and the Ramu languages Watam and Bosman . The pronouns themselves have little in common except for 3sg *man (proto-Ramu) ~ *mɨn (proto–Lower Sepik) and the non-singular affix *-ŋk- ( dual in Ramu and paucal in Lower Sepik: See Ramu languages#Pronouns and Lower Sepik languages#Pronouns for details). Whereas

930-399: The use of plurals, however, depends on the language – for example Russian uses the genitive singular rather than the plural after certain numbers (see above). Treatments differ in expressions of zero quantity: English often uses the plural in such expressions as no injuries and zero points , although no (and zero in some contexts) may also take a singular. In French, the singular form

961-481: The various cases. The inflection might affect multiple words, not just the noun; the noun itself need not become plural as such, with other parts of the expression indicating the plurality. In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an - s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals .) Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to

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