By Plurals, Consonants

Thank you very much CJ, Zerox, and Carson. You all have given me very valuable advices. After reading through all you said carefully, and then watching a couple of English TV programmes, I believe I can now tell the difference! The ending /z/ in most cases are much shorter, voiced but less...

Anonymous wrote: Sadly I made a mistake in my previous posting: the correct phoneme symbol for the s's in 'houses' is indeed /z/, although of course English /z/ can be rather /s/-like. Hi,I am now confused even more than before. House is pronounced ?

Digger36 wrote:But what about the SPECIAL cases of the inflection on the 3-rd person singular; it seems less obvious, as in these cases .. he destroys / destroies sand dunes he trys / tries jumping high he carrys / carries the load he ...

--- There was formerly a respectable tradition (17-19c) of using the apostrophe for noun plurals, especially in loanwords ending in a vowel (as in We do confess Errata's, Leonard Lichfield, 1641, and Comma's are used, Philip Luckcombe, 1771) and in the consonants s, z, ch, sh, (as in waltz's and...

There are three possible pronunciations of the plural ending. (The third person present tense verb forms and the possessive forms follow the same pattern.) 1. /iz/ after a sibilant. This ending creates an extra syllable. The endings for Groups 2 and 3 (below) do not create an extra...

The appropriate pronunciation of the plural ending depends on how the word ends, phonemically. The rules are as follows: * For words ending with a vowel sound or a voiced consonant sound, the correct pronunciation of the plural ending is /z/ * Words ending with a voiceless consonant sound the...

A and an signal that the noun modified is indefinite, referring to any member of a group. These indefinite articles are used with singular nouns when the noun is general; the corresponding indefinite quantity word some is used for plural general nouns. The rule is: a + singular noun...

Here are a few basic grammar rules to pay close attention to: When you write "a" or "an" before a noun, it has to match the noun. This is done simply by using "a" if the word starts with a consonant, and using "an" if the word starts with a vowel. Vowels: a, e, i, o, u. An exception is the...

In pural form it is written as Blackberries If there is a consonant before y, in plural it turns into ie, but if there is a vowel before y, in plural it stays the same. If you have any other queries please feel free to ask me Best regards,Khanum Khatun

Anonymous wrote: I am a Chinese and English is not my native language. A countable noun ends with "f" or "fe" when convering to plural ...... PLUS ves but drop f or fe Can anyone tell me why the plural for giraffe is giraffes and not change to ves. Is there any rules to define when to add...