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Back to Basics 1-2
The Noun
A noun is a name for a person place or thing
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Look at the chart below
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Read the
poem below to help you understand what the first mistake about nouns is
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One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, yet the plural of moose should never
be meese
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If the plural of man is always called men, why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a boot, would a pair be called
beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, why shouldn’t the plural of booth be
called beeth?

The one may be that, and the three would be those, yet hat in the plural would never be
hose, and the plural of cat is cats and not cose
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Though the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, but imagine the feminine: she, shis and
shim
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It seems easy enough with the so called "regular nouns" where all you have to do is
add an "s" or "es"
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The problem with these "irregular nouns" is that for some there appears to be an easy
formula to apply while for others, there isn't
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To further
complicate things, we also have these Greek and Latin terms that have been incorporated
into the English Language
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About the words "datum" and "data", the Oxford English dictionary has this to say:
"In Latin, data is the plural of datum and, historically and in specialized scientific fields , it is
also treated as a plural in English, taking a plural verb, as in the data were collected and
classified
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Instead, it is treated as a mass noun, similar to a word like
information, which cannot normally have a plural and which takes a singular verb
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In any case, please remember, when using the plural form of the noun, be mindful of
irregular nouns and Greek/ Latin terms
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take the singular form
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The army was exhausted after the long battle
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The couple has managed to stay in love through all these years
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British English, on the
other hand, treats collective nouns like these as plural forms Thus you have sentences
constructed this way, "The team are tired and weary"
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Next, uncountable nouns are also tricky
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Examples of these are: dirt, rice,
information, hair, counsel
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Some uncountable nouns are also abstract nouns like advice and knowledge
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We’ll have two coffees (countable)
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Remember, uncountable nouns cannot have “a” and “an” (indefinite determiners) in front
of them
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She showed an integrity
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They were given an information that was useful
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We do this by using a quantity expression before it
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X
She gave us some advice
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X
We bought a few items of furniture
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X
He was convicted on the strength of the pieces of evidence put together
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‘Many’ is used with plural countable nouns and ‘much’
with uncountable nouns:
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How many brothers and sisters do you have?
I do not have much money left?

"Some" and "any" are used with plural countable nouns and uncountable nouns
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We don’t have any eggs
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(uncountable)
Would you like some apples
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A lot of policies were voided by the court
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A lot of questions have been raised
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A lot of advice was wasted by the fool
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But wait, there's more
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Some of the boys are home
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(uncountable, singular)

Finally, some uncountable nouns end in ‘s’
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These nouns look like countable plurals, but they are uncountable and therefore need a
singular verb:
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Linguistics is a very interesting subject
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