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The Latin word vīrus was a neuter noun of the second declension, but neuter second declension nouns ending in -us (rather than -um) are rare enough that inferring rules is difficult. (One rare attested plural, pelage as a plural of pelagus, is borrowed from Greek, so does not give guidance for virus.)
Some words borrowed from Inuktitut and related languages spoken by the Inuit in Canada, Greenland and Alaska, retain the original plurals. The word Inuit itself is the plural form. Canadian English also borrows Inuktitut singular Inuk, [20] which is uncommon in English outside Canada.
The plural genitive did not use the "-es" inflection, [9] and since many plural forms already consisted of the "-s" or "-es" ending, using the apostrophe in place of the elisioned "e" could lead to singular and plural possessives of a given word having the exact same spelling.
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
For example, the nominative form *léymons 'lake' (composed of the root *ley-in the ablaut form *léy-, the suffix in the form *-mon-and the ending in the form *-s) had the genitive *limnés (root form *li-, [note 2] suffix *-mn-and ending *-és). In this word, the nominative has the ablaut vowels *é–o–Ø while the genitive has the ablaut ...
Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced by the digraphs ae and oe (encyclopaedia, diarrhoea) in British English or just e (encyclopedia, diarrhea) in American English, though both spell some words with only e (economy, ecology) and others with ae and oe (paean, amoeba, oedipal, Caesar).
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱh₂d-. [8] The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall". [9] The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative.
Nope. Latin teacher here. Neuter second declension words that end in -um pluralize by ending in -a, but that's it. There are a ton of neuter words that don't end in -a in the plural. Consider most every word that ends in -or in its nominative singular. And there's no reason why viri can't be both, since a lot of words have more than one meaning.