Comments on: Plurals: what a nightmare!

By: serena

serena — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:25:22 +0000

Ciao Roberto, I’m afraid Transparent don’t have bio’s for their bloggers. I sometimes think it would be interesting to have bio’s of my readers!

Saluti da Serena

By: Roberto

Roberto — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:51:38 +0000

Serena,

Is there a brief bio or an “about” link somewhere that I have missed (about you)?

Thank you for continuing this blog. Very interesting, very helpful, very fun! I am having fun navigating my way through your archives.

Roberto

By: serena

serena — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:51:59 +0000

Salve Luis!

I’m not an expert on this subject, and I cannot find any precise information about it. However, a few years ago, whilst teaching Italian in England, one of my students (a former professor of French and Spanish at Nottingham University, and author of several French and Spanish grammar books for Cambridge University Press) made an interesting comment to the effect that “in the plural form, whilst most Romance languages have followed the Latin Accusative (which is used for the direct object and is characterized by the ending in -s), Italian has stuck with the Latin Nominative (which is used for the grammatical subject), e.g. the Latin ‘rosa / rosae’ has become the Italian ‘rosa / rose’ (rose, roses), the Latin ‘lupus / lupi’ has become the Italian ‘lupo / lupi’ (wolf / wolves).

Saluti da Serena

By: Luis

Luis — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 03:13:02 +0000

Can you tell us how the Romance languages divided into two camps–the one with pluralization by s, the other with pluralization not by s?

By: Carol

Carol — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:56:16 +0000

Thank you for the entertaining and informative articles (loved the one on the human torpedo) and the very clearly explained rules for the plurals. It’s great having it all laid out in one place with good examples.