Irregular nouns don’t follow the standard forms of a language, often due to being borrowed from another language. They can have unique patterns of changes, such as in English where “datum” becomes “data” in the plural. Irregularity can also arise from fusion of dialects or difficulty in pronunciation. Latin has irregular nouns that don’t fit into the five declension categories, and some have no fixed gender. Hungarian irregular nouns change based on the suffix applied.
An irregular noun is a noun that does not follow the generally accepted forms for nouns within that language. The most common form that irregularity takes in English is the plural form, but in other languages irregularity can include morphological changes such as gender, peculiar forms of the noun stem, and irregular declensions. Each irregular noun can follow its own pattern of changes or can have morphological changes unique to that word.
The most common reason for a noun to take on an irregular form is because it has been incorporated into one language by another. In such cases, instead of adapting the noun to the forms of the language, the word was allowed to keep its original forms. A good example of this is the noun ‘datum’. Datum is a singular word meaning “information” from the Latin. The plural form of ‘datum’ is not ‘datums’ in the normal English way, but ‘data’, which is the regular Latin plural form.
Related to this idea is the fusion of dialects to form a national language. Taking English again as an example, the plural “s” has become the plural of choice for nouns, but other plurals such as “en” and “eth” have been used in the past, leaving irregular nouns such as “child”, which has the plural form “children”. These occur when, for whatever reason, the language does not change the plural form of a word from one to another.
Another reason for irregularity is that regular changing of the noun form, whether in terms of gender or number, changes the word into a form that doesn’t sound right or makes the word difficult to say. This may explain why there are one sheep and two sheep instead of two sheep.
Another irregularity in English nouns is the possessive. The regular possessive adds an apostrophe and an ‘s’ to the noun. For example, this creates “conductor’s baton”. When the word ends with an “s” like “census” and when plural nouns are involved, there is an irregularity in the way the word is treated. Some people just add an apostrophe to the final “s”, while others follow the regular form and add both the apostrophe and the “s”. This means that Charles’ possession of something could make it Charles’s or Charles’s depending on the writer.
An irregular noun in Latin is one in which the irregularity of nouns is not limited to number and, for one reason or another, does not fall into the five existing declension categories. These five original categories are divided by the verbal ending of the original stem. There are a number of reasons this could occur. Some words, for example, will decrease only in the singular or only in the plural. These are irregular because some forms of the word simply don’t exist.
Latin also has six nouns that don’t decline at all. The first three are “fas” which means destiny, “instar” which means likeness and “mane” which means morning. “Nefas,” meaning abomination, “nihil,” meaning nothing, and “secus,” meaning coitus, are the other three. Each is an irregular noun because it is only available in the nominative and accusative singular.
In Latin it is also possible for a word to become an irregular noun because it is heterogeneous. This means that the noun has no fixed grammatical gender and that the ending of the noun stem will change. This, therefore, changes the declension of the noun depending on the gender attributed to it. Some nouns also change gender when moved from singular to plural, while others will change meaning when put in plural.
Irregular nouns in Hungarian change because some nouns have stems that alter the suffixes given to them when inflected. Other stems will change depending on the applied suffix. For example, the Hungarian word for strawberry is “eper”. If the attached suffix begins with a consonant, then the stem remains unchanged, but if the suffix begins with a vowel, the final vowel of the stem is dropped. The plural form of “eper” is, therefore, “eprek” rather than “eperek”.
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