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The French terminations -ois / -ais serve as both the singular and plural masculine; adding e (-oise / -aise) makes them singular feminine; es (-oises / -aises) makes them plural feminine. The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine, and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a.
The Italian hard and soft C and G phenomenon leads to certain peculiarities in spelling and pronunciation: Words in -cio and -gio form plurals in -ci and -gi, e.g. bacio / baci ('kiss(es)') Words in -cia and -gia have been a point of contention. According to a commonly employed rule, [4] they:
On the contrary, masculine plural is generally derived from Latin second declension nominative -i; this suffix eventually drops or gives rise to palatalisation or metaphonesis; some concrete realisations are: -li > -lj > -gl > -j-ni > -nj > -gn-ti > -tj > -cc; Metaphonesis (in regression) : orti > öört; Neutralisation: -i > -∅
Italian verbs have a high degree of inflection, the majority of which follows one of three common patterns of conjugation. Italian conjugation is affected by mood, person, tense, number, aspect and occasionally gender. The three classes of verbs (patterns of conjugation) are distinguished by the endings of the infinitive form of the verb:
French nouns whose spoken plural forms are distinguished from the singular include most of those ending in -al, whose plural form is -aux (cf. cheval [ʃəval] > chevaux [ʃəvo] 'horses'), as well as a few nouns ending in -ail that also follow this pattern (cf. travail [tʁavaj] > travaux [tʁavo] 'works').
The collective presents similar issues as the distributive in its potential classification as grammatical number, including the fact that some languages allow both collective and plural markers on the same words. Adding a collective to a plural word does not change the number of referents, only how those referents are conceptualized. [315]
The nominative theory suggests that -i as the plural of nouns in -o and -e as the plural of nouns in -a are derived straightforwardly from nominative -Ī and -AE, respectively (it is known that AE > e in all Romance languages), and that the plural -i for nouns in -e is derived by analogy with the plural of nouns in -o. (The corresponding ...
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.