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y’ain’t: you are not / you have not / you did not (colloquial) y’all: you all (colloquial/Southern American English) y’all’d’ve: you all would have (colloquial/Southern American English) y’all’dn't’ve: you all would not have (colloquial/Southern American English) y’all’re: you all are (colloquial/Southern American English)
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 ).
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
In most English varieties, there are five non-sibilant voiceless consonants that occur at the end of words: / p /, / t /, / k /, / f /, and / θ /; some varieties also have / x /. When the singular form ends in a voiceless consonant other than a sibilant, the plural is normally formed by adding / s / (a voiceless sibilant).
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of British words not widely used in the United States; List of South African English regionalisms; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: A–L; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z
Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by the ending-s (or -es), whereas possession is always shown by the enclitic-'s or, for plural forms ending in s, by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl.
Old English did not always make a distinction between uppercase and lowercase, and at best had embossed or decorated letters indicating sections. Middle English capitalization in manuscripts remained haphazard, and was often done for visual aesthetics more than grammar; in poetry, the first letter of each line of verse is often capitalized.
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.