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For neuter nouns, the nominative, vocative, and accusative cases are identical. The nominative, vocative, and accusative plural almost always ends in -a. (Both of these features are inherited from Proto-Indo-European, and so no actual syncretism is known to have happened in the historical sense, since these cases of these nouns are not known to have ever been different in the first place.)
For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
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.
Moreover, their plural forms are truly unique: the genitive plural always ends in -ra, which is normally used for adjectives, and the nominative/accusative plural varies between no ending, the adjective ending -e, and the a-stem ending -as. The adjectival endings are a relic of the nd-stems' origin as present participles.
Neuter nouns such as bellum "war" have -a in the nominative plural. In neuter nouns, the vocative and accusative are always the same as the nominative; the genitive, dative, and ablative are the same as the masculine. Most 2nd declension neuter nouns end in -um but vīrus "poison" and vulgus "crowd" end in -us.
The semi mute-stem nouns have stems ending in -ν-(nasal-stem nouns), -λ-, -ρ-(liquid-stem nouns), -σ-(sibilant-stem nouns). Nominative singular -ς and dative plural -σι cause pronunciation or spelling changes, depending on the consonant at the end of the stem.
Many (possibly all) athematic neuter nouns had a special collective form instead of the plural, which inflected with singular endings, but with the ending *-h₂ in the direct cases, and an amphikinetic accent/ablaut pattern (see below). [12]
Singular forms simply remove the final 's' or, in the case of -ese endings, are the same as the plural forms. The ending -men has feminine equivalent -women (e.g. an Irishman and a Scotswoman ). The French terminations -ois / ais serve as both the singular and plural masculine ; adding 'e' ( -oise / aise ) makes them singular feminine; 'es ...