Question about plural endings
I am really struggling with lesson 3 on this - when it comes to adding the plural ending AND the definitive article ending. So I was reading the tips and notes.
It says that if an en word ends in e then the plural becomes ar and then plural definite becomes arna. But the example it gives in the table is hund, which doesn't end in e.
Further down the page it says that words that end in a consonant and are ett words don't change - eg hus and barn.
But what about en words that end in a consonant? Are they treated, as the table would suggest, as if they end in an e? Because the table would also suggest that the ending becomes er (sak - saker - sakerna). Why is hund not treated in the same way as sak?
6 Comments
The Swedish plural endings are complicated and there is no general rule for which one to use. There are some rules, or almost rules, for special cases though. You can read about them here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Plural_forms for example
There are, in fact, a lot of rules and tendencies to help you out when you wanna know the plural form of a noun.
Well, I know about some. But don't you think that the n-nouns are rather tricky? There might be rules that I don't know of, but to me it is not obvious that it is "en hund - flera hundar" but "en katt - flera katter" for example. And "katt" rhymes with "hatt" and still it is "en hatt - flera hattar".
En-words that consist of one syllable, and end in a consonant, such as hund and sak, can take either -ar or -er in the plural. Usually they take -ar, but this isn't general enough to be considered a rule.
En-words ending in -e always take -ar, but that's another rule!
Thanks. Odd then that they give hund as the example of what happens to words ending in e!
Are you talking about the Tips and Notes for the Plural lesson? Because I don't see where this is claimed. In the table the possible endings are shown, and below them are the actual rules, and there 'pojke' is the example word for -e > -ar. But maybe we are looking at different Notes?
