Every noun has a singular and a plural
form. So by singular we mean that there's
just one of this kind of noun, and by
plural we mean that there are multiple.
An example
would be, if we look at the picture here,
"gannet," so a gannet is a kind of bird.
This is a picture of a gannet colony. And
if there's one, then we write it "gannet,"
and if there are multiple, then we add an
"s" to form the plural, so instead of one
gannet we now have gannets. And we can
do this with other nouns as well. So
we can say this is a "cliff," and in the
plural it becomes "cliffs," if we add the "s."
I won't bore you with all kinds of
other examples--I think you can see the
pattern here.
The normal thing to do if you want to
form the plural is add an "s." But of
course there are some irregular nouns as
well, and we'll zoom into those little bit
just to see how they work. There are quite
a few irregular nouns, and it's not
necessary to memorize all of them, but
we're just going to look at a few
patterns here of how irregular
nouns are sometimes formed, and we're
going to go fairly quickly.
So we have "beach," and to form the
plural we add an "es." So that's one way to
form the plural for a select number of
nouns. In another case if we end with
a "y," sometimes the plural is formed by
adding "ies." This becomes "colonies." We're
going to strike out the "y." Some
some plurals are simply the same as the
singular form. So if there's one haiku, it
ends like that. If there are two haiku,
it's still exactly the same, even though
lots of people mess that one up. "Sheep" is
the same in the singular and the plural.
And a tricky one that fits into
this category would be "fish" because most
of the time the plural of "fish" is
simply "fish," but sometimes you can write
"fishes," which is a bit rarer.
And an instance where you would write
"fishes" is if you're talking in
scientific terms about species of fish.
So if you're thinking, for instance, about
salmon and trout and so on, and you're
talking about these two fishes, then
you'd be talking about the species.
So that's a fairly subtle
distinction, but most of the time you can
ignore "fishes" and just use "fish" as the
plural.
We also have nouns that change to
the plural by changing the
vowel sound. So instead of "mouse," we have
"mice." There are very few of these, just a
few left in the English language, but
watch out for those. Ones that end in "o"
can change to "oes." So instead of "potato,"
we have
"potatoes" with "oes" at the end. We also
have nouns that change from an "f"
to "ves." So we'll cross out the "f" and we
have "leaves" in the plural. "Child" becomes
"children," and there we go ... that looks
quite different. And "index" becomes
"indices." That's a very strange one. "Crisis"
becomes "crises," and we have this "es"
ending -- "ices" ending for index. So as you
can start to see here, there are lots and
lots of different ways to form irregular
nouns. Don't get the impression, though, that
there are that many that you're going to
run into trouble--most nouns simply
follow the regular pattern of adding an
"s." Our last two nouns and our final
category here is a little bit different
in that these nouns seem to follow the
model of Latin nouns. So Latin has
its own declensions as they are
called--each noun follows a certain
pattern. And we see that that some
nouns in English still seem to
follow these particular patterns. So we
have an ending in "um," and if you were to
make the plural here, you would say this
is a bunch of
memoranda, so the "da"
ending is new. And "syllabus"--
this is a funny one--it seems to be a
Latin word. And many people form the
plural of "syllabus" in a kind of Latin
way, so they would write,
"syllabi." But there is one other form as
well that's allowed.
So we can have "syllabuses," which
I think looks a bit ugly, but the Oxford
English Dictionary says that that is
allowed. The whole thing is a bit funny
anyway because syllabus is not a
classical Latin word--it's modern Latin,
and it seems to be it a bit of a
corruption from the Greek anyway. So if
you think about this word "syllabus," if
you were to make it truly Latin, the
plural should probably be the same--it
should be "syllabus" if it is a fourth
declension noun. But that's probably too
pedantic, and let's not worry too much
about that. The main thing is that if you
look at these nouns, all of these
irregular nouns, you can see that
there are lots of different patterns.
I wouldn't worry too much about knowing
exactly how each one is formed--this is
stuff that you typically learn in
elementary school--
the biggest thing is that you can
recognize a noun in a sentence. And to
work on that we will continue with some
other videos as well.