Introduction to singular and plural nouns

hello grammarians let's talk about singular and plural nouns now nouns as we discussed previously are a type of word they are a part of speech and a noun is any word that is a person a place a thing or an idea and in English we can figure out just by looking at a noun whether or not there is one of something whether it's singular or whether or not there is more than one of something and there's an easy way to tell the difference between singular and plural so if you break the words down singular contains the word single single means there's only one of it plural is maybe a little bit less obvious but it comes to us from Latin it comes to us from this word loose which means more which you know you might recognize Plus as we call it in English from mathematics from arithmetic we usually say it looks like this little plus symbol so whenever you think whenever you see plural just think more just think plus there is more than one singular is one thing plural more than one thing there's more so let's go through it let's let's do some examples and I'll show you how you make the plural in English how do you indicate using your language that there is more of one thing so let's just throw out a couple of words we got dog cat dinosaur and whale and all you need to do to make it plural is very simple you just take an S and you add it onto the end like so dogs cats dinosaurs whales so if you want to make something plural think about plus more all you have to do is add an S like that add an S this is what we call the regular plural this is the regular plural and what that means is it obeys this one rule all you have to do to say that there's more than one dog is throw in an S and we're lucky because most English nouns hey that way most nouns are regular however here's the bad news there are some irregular plurals they are not regular thus irregular not so now we have words like leaf and child and fungus which is like a mushroom mouse and sheep so how would you you know you can't just add an S to these that's unfortunately not how these nouns work in English you can't say Leafs and child and funguses and Mouse's and sheeps this is how you do it each one of these words corresponds to a class of words that has its own unique pluralization standards so leaf becomes leaves child becomes children fungus becomes fungi mouse becomes mice and sheep stays sheep believe it or not so these are the irregular plurals and we'll be covering each of these in turn in later videos but for now I just want you to focus on the regular plural which again we can sum up in this way all you have to do is add an S here's a good example right so we have one elephant here and down here we have two elephants and the only difference between this word and this word is that this one has an S on the end of it so if we wanted to say that this elephant here was not in fact one elephant and was two elephants all we have to do is add an S we're changing it from singular to plural and remember plural comes from plus you add an S so one elephant becomes two elephants doop doop doop do doop doop world's fastest elephant tryingo dananananana all right it's kind of an elephant monkey but you get the vague idea if you're ever in need of more than one thing for the regular plural just add an S you can learn anything Dave it out