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The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of person. The plural form "persons" is often used in philosophical and legal writing.
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. Irishman , Scotswoman ). The French terminations -ois / -ais serve as both the singular and plural masculine ; adding e ( -oise / -aise ) makes them singular feminine; es ( -oises ...
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 ...
The following is a list of adjectival forms of cities in English and their demonymic equivalents, which denote the people or the inhabitants of these cities. 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 English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular) Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French , the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
first-person pronouns normally refer to the speaker, in the case of the singular (as the English I), or to the speaker and others, in the case of the plural (as the English we). second-person pronouns normally refer to the person or persons being addressed (as the English you); in the plural they may also refer to the person or persons being ...
Singular and plural forms are marked from the general form. The general is used when the specific number is deemed irrelevant or unimportant. In this system, the singular is often called the singulative, to distinguish it as derived from a different form. Similarly, the plural derived from the general has been called the plurative. [195]