Plural Marking typologyHow languages mark the plural number on nouns. Many Bantu languages use
Plural Marking typologyHow languages mark the plural number on nouns. Many Bantu languages use a prefix system (also with gender).Most Indo-European languages have suffixes, although the Germanic languages, and, to a lesser extent French, have a mixed strategy that involves apophony/umlaut, and in the case of French, many irregular plurals, that totaly change the pronounciation of the word. Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, some Nilo-Saharan languages have this mixed strategy with vowel changes in the middle of the words, and suffixes. Dinka and Nuer (South Sudan) have only a stem change (apophony). A few African languages just change the tone of the word. French, Tibetan, Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Philippines’ languages and many Polynesian languages, and the Mande languages West Africa, use a particle before the noun, usually. In French this is the definite article la/le vs. les, because the final -s of nouns is not pronounced, so the plural is only noun in the spoken language from this particle. Indonesian and Malay have full reduplication (orang - person; orang-orang - people). Many East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai) don’t mark plural at all. -- source link
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