Plural

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Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world.

In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers.

In English, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives inflect for plurality. (See English plural.) In many other languages, for example German and the various Romance languages, articles and adjectives also inflect for plurality. For example, in the English sentence "the brown cats run," only the noun and verb are inflected; but in the French sentence "les chats bruns courent," every word (article, noun, adjective, and verb) is inflected.

In languages such as Sanskrit, Icelandic, Biblical Hebrew and Inuktitut there is also a dual grammatical number (two objects). Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include nullar (no objects), trial (three objects) and paucal (a few objects). In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those (i.e. more than two, more than three, or many.)

Some languages distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for what we are discussing. It should also be noted that the distinction between the paucal and the plural and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, for oranges a few might mean less than ten, whereas for the population of a country a few might mean a few hundred thousand.

The Austronesian language Sursurunga has singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural. Lihir, another Austronesian language, has singular, dual, trial, paucal, and plural. These are probably languages with the most complex number. Reports on existence of quadral (four) are considered false.

However, numbers besides singular, plural, and to a lesser extent dual, are extremely rare. Furthermore, languages with noun classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all. They are likely to have plural personal pronouns though.

Languages having only a singular and plural form may still differ in their treatment of zero. For example, in English, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the plural form is used for zero or more than one, and the singular for one thing only. By contrast, in French and Brazilian Portuguese, the singular form is used for zero. Some languages, such as Latvian, have a special form--the nullar--for zero, as well as the singular and plural, as discussed above.

Also, an interesting difference from Romance/Germanic languages is found in some Slavic and Baltic languages. Here, the final digits of the number determine its form. For example, Polish has singular and plural, and a special form for numbers where the last digit is 2,3 or 4, and the second last digit is not 1. Slovenian has one form for numbers congruent to 1 modulo 100, another for numbers congruent to 2 modulo 100, another for numbers congruent to either 3 or 4 modulo 100, and another form for all other numbers. In Croatian (in addition to the Polish 2,3,4), there is a plural for counting and a plural for not-counting. For example, there are two ways to say leaves: "lišće" is used in "Leaves are falling from the trees", but "listovi" is used in "Those are some beautiful leaves". The first plural is the more commonly used, and in general the two plurals are used with natural objects.

Sources

cs:Množné číslo de:Plural es:Plural eo:Pluralo hr:Množina is:Fleirtala nl:Meervoud (taal) nn:Pluralis simple:Plural sl:Množina sv:Pluralis

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