The plural of nouns in Russian

In Russian, most nouns are items that can be counted. They can be used in combination with quantitative numbers. Such nouns have the forms of both numbers: both single and multiple: table - tables, desk - desks, cloud - clouds. These forms have different endings and are differently combined with other parts of speech.

The meaning of plural forms of nouns

If a single number is used to denote a single item from a series of similar ones, the plural denotes a set of homogeneous objects.

The mechanism of plural education

In most cases, the endings of plural nouns are -y, -and -a, -ya, for example, trunk-trunks, girl-girls, place-places, tree-trees. In some cases, alternating or falling out / adding vowels is observed in the producing basis: friend - friends, wreath - wreaths, piece - pieces.

It should be noted that in the singular, the nouns of each of the three genera have different endings. The plural number obscures the birth signs, therefore, for example, the noun wall, the night, the village of the feminine gender and the stump, the table, the masculine knife have identical endings in this situation: walls, nights, villages and stumps, tables, knives. This is the saving of language facilities, since in this case the main thing is to show the number of objects, not their kind.

Features of the plural of certain words

In Russian there is a group of nouns in which the presence and formation of the plural depends on the specific meaning of the word (knee, bottom, poker, etc.). For example, in the meaning of the "bottom wall of something" for the word bottom, the plural has the form dongya. In meaning, the bottom of the river, the bottom of the sea for this word does not exist in the plural form.

Nouns that do not have plural

Some nouns denote plurality by the singular form. Such words do not have a plural in Russian. These are nouns

• Real (milk, groats, oil, silk, velvet, gold, copper, etc.);

• Collective (humanity, students, rags, foliage);

• Abstract (patience, pressure, girlhood, kindness);

• Own (Moscow, Carpathians, Naberezhnye Chelny).

There are cases when words from this list are used in the plural: cheeses, cereals, sausages, etc. But here the plural means more varieties than quantity, for example: "The dairy produces different kinds of cheeses."

Nouns used only in the plural

In contrast to nouns that do not form a plural, there are words in the language that exist only in the plural form. These are nouns

• Abstract (twilight, vacation);

• Real (cream, soup);

• The names of some games (hide and seek, chess);

• Items that include several parts (scissors, trousers, jeans, scales, etc.).