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Masculine, feminine and neuter nouns often have their own special nominative singular endings. For instance, many masculine nouns end in -or (amor, amōris, 'love'). Many feminine nouns end in -īx (phoenīx, phoenīcis, 'phoenix'), and many neuter nouns end in -us with an r stem in the oblique cases (onus, oneris 'burden'; tempus, temporis ...
When the suffix is added to a word ending in the letter y, the y before the suffix is replaced with the letter i, as in happily (from happy). This does not always apply in the case of monosyllabic words; for example, shy becomes shyly (but dry can become dryly or drily , and gay becomes gaily ).
Abstract nouns: deceit, information, cunning, and nouns derived from adjectives, such as honesty, wisdom, intelligence, poverty, stupidity, curiosity, and words ending with "-ness", such as goodness, freshness, laziness, and nouns which are homonyms of adjectives with a similar meaning, such as good, bad (can also use goodness and badness), hot ...
However, some Latin nouns ending in -us are not second declension (cf. Latin grammar). For example, third declension neuter nouns such as opus and corpus have plurals opera and corpora, and fourth declension masculine and feminine nouns such as sinus and tribus have plurals sinūs and tribūs. Some English words derive from Latin idiosyncratically.
Masculine names or nouns may be turned into diminutives with the ending -ot, -on, or -ou (MF -eau), but sometimes, for phonetic reasons, an additional consonant is added (e.g. -on becomes -ton, -ou becomes -nou, etc.): Jeannot (Jonny), from Jean (John); Pierrot (Petey) from Pierre (Peter); chiot (puppy), from chien (dog); fiston (sonny or sonny ...
Though both common nouns and pronouns show number distinction in English, they do so differently: common nouns tend to take an inflectional ending (–s) to mark plurals, but pronouns typically do not. (The pronoun one is an exception, as in I like those ones.) English pronouns are also more limited than common nouns in their ability to take ...
Stems ending in *i or *u such as *men-ti-are consonantic (i.e. athematic) because the *i is just the vocalic form of the glide *y, the full grade of the suffix being *-tey-. [note 2] Post-PIE ā was actually *eh₂ in PIE. Among the most common athematic stems are root stems, i-stems, u-stems, eh₂-stems, n-stems, nt-stems, r-stems and s-stems ...
The definite article takes the form yn before masculine nominative and genitive and feminine nominative nouns. This yn is often reduced to y before consonants or to 'n after grammatical words ending in a vowel. Plural nouns and feminine genitive nouns take the article ny, another archaic form of which is found in some place names as nyn. [3]