It’s Professor Dave, let’s talk about plural nouns.
We already know that a noun can be singular or plural.
One apple, two apples.
One person, ten people.
Singular means one, plural means more than one.
In English, pluralizing nouns is typically easy.
We just add an S at the end of the word, although sometimes things are trickier than that.
But in Italian, there are lots of rules, and lots of exceptions, so let’s learn these now.
If a noun ends in O, the plural will end in I.
These are typically masculine nouns.
If a noun ends in A, the plural will end in E. These are usually feminine nouns.
Then there were the nouns ending in E. These are tricky because they can be either masculine
or feminine.
But don’t worry, when pluralized these will always end in I.
Let’s practice now.
See if you can write the correct plural form of each of these nouns.
You may have noticed at this point that there are some words which Americans take from Italian
and regularly use them as though they are singular, when they are actually plural.
These are words like biscotti, cannoli, and panini.
Even though you might get a weird look when you’re out to lunch, for the sake of grammar,
I encourage you to order a panino, rather than a panini, and to ask for a biscotto with
your coffee rather than a biscotti.
After all, if you ask for a biscotti, what you’re actually saying is “can I have
a cookies”, and that does sound pretty ridiculous.
Now it would be great if pluralizing words could always be this simple, but alas, there
are exceptions.
However, some of these exceptions follow other rules that are also easy to remember.
For example, there are a lot of words in Italian where the singular and plural forms are identical.
All words with an accent on the final syllable work like this.
Città can refer to one city, or many cities.
Same goes for università, or caffe`.
All foreign words that end in a consonant, which are typically masculine, will also do this.
These are words like:
Monosyllabic words also do not change.
This includes re, and te`.
Lastly, when words are abbreviations of longer words, these won’t change either.
Fotografia becomes fotografie, but foto will remain foto, no matter how many of them you take.
Auto and moto can refer to one car and one motorcycle, or all the cars and motorcycles
on the busy highway.
And with money, whether it’s un euro or un milione di euro, the word is always the same.
There are just a couple more rules to add to the list, and they are a little annoying,
but they’re not difficult.
Feminine words ending in CA and GA will add an H in the plural form to maintain a hard
consonant sound.
With pesca, if we just changed the A to an E, it would become pesce, but that means fish,
so we make it pesche, and that does mean multiple peaches.
Masculine words ending in GO will add an H in a similar manner.
Lago becomes laghi, and albergo becomes alberghi.
This will not be the case if the words ends in LOGO and describes a person.
Biologo will just become biologi as we would normally expect.
Words ending in CO act differently according to the syllable receiving the stress.
If the penultimate, we add the H.
But if the syllable prior, there will be no H.
Words that end in IA also need to watch the stress.
If the IA is stressed, the word behaves regularly.
But if the IA is unstressed, in the plural form the letter I will be dropped.
Words ending in IO will also drop the I if the last syllable is unstressed, while the
O will turn into an I as expected.
But zio, because of the stress, beomes zii.
Lastly, just a couple notable irregularities.
So that may seem like a lot, but that really is all of it.
We should now be able to pluralize any noun, so let’s check comprehension.