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Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".
This is a list of words that occur in both the English language and the Spanish language, but which have different meanings and/or pronunciations in each language. Such words are called interlingual homographs. [1] [2] Homographs are two or more words that have the same written form.
dogs (plural, two or more) To mark number, English has different singular and plural forms for nouns and verbs (in the third person): "my dog watches television" (singular) and "my dogs watch television" (plural). [7] This is not universal: Wambaya marks number on nouns but not verbs, [8] and Onondaga marks number on verbs but not nouns. [9]
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 .
Demonyms ending in -ese are the same in the singular and plural forms. The ending -man has feminine equivalent -woman (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' ( -oises / aises ) makes them plural feminine.
Clusivity is nonetheless a very common language feature overall. Some languages with more than one plural number make the clusivity distinction only in, for example, the dual but not in the greater plural, but other languages make it in all numbers. In the table below, the plural forms are the ones preferentially listed.
Some languages may possess a massive plural and a numerative plural, the first implying a large mass and the second implying division (like the English modifer "respective[ly]"). For example, "the [combined] waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of [each of] the Great Lakes [respectively]".
In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree. However, when a speaker wishes to emphasize that the individuals are acting separately, a plural pronoun may be employed with a singular or plural verb: the team takes their seats, rather than the team takes its seats.