Hi everyone, here is the first installment in my Grammar series. Today I'll be talking about nouns and their features. Let's dive in!

3 Types of Compound Nouns

• open compounds: space between nouns, e.g., high school
• hyphenated compounds: hyphen between nouns, e.g., ten-year-old
• closed compounds: no space or hyphen between nouns, e.g., turtledove

How do you know which type of compound to use? Do a Google search and see how reputable sources punctuate the word.

What's the deal with irregular plurals?

• Many words that English borrowed from other languages maintain their original singular and plural forms.
• Moose comes from a Northeastern Algonquian language (indigenous to the Americas). The plural in one of the Northeastern Algonquian languages, Abenaki, is mozak, but English never adopted the plural form. Come to think of it, most animals in the deer family have the same singular and plural forms of their names: deer, elk, caribou.
• Vowel changes such as goose to geese and child to children are often because of Germanic influences.
• This is especially true of words of Latin and Greek origin.

OK, that's nice and all, but what are the rules for Latin singular and plural forms?

• I'm too lazy to explain, so here's a link that does it for me.

Indefinite Nouns

As a Spanish learner, I had completely forgotten about this category of nouns. These nouns have a gender associated with them, but it's ambiguous which gender is being talked about. This is different from neuter nouns that aren't associated with a gender at all. The thing is, Spanish uses indefinite nouns in a completely different way. If you have three brothers and two sisters, it's NOT correct in English to say, "I have five brothers." You need to switch the masculine "brothers" to the indefinite "siblings."

Antecedent, aka Referent

Definition: what or whom a pronoun is referring to

Ante = before

cedent = an assignor of a debt or claim

Indefinite Pronouns

Definition: have general, unstated referents

Famous example: "Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me."1

Footnotes

1 "All Star" by Smash Mouth, featured in the soundtracks of shows and movies like Shrek