"Overabundant nouns" in Italian: do they exist in other languages?

Question

Under my answer to that question, I talked about a category of nouns that exist in Italian. The italian name is "Nomi sovrabbondanti" or "sostantivi sovrabbondanti", the meaning is roughly "overabundant nouns".

There are three subcategories for this type of nouns. Sometimes the plurals or the singulars are interchangeable, other times they have different meanings:

A - Nouns with 1 singular and 2 plurals:

• Sing. — Braccio (A person's arm)
• Plur. 1 — Bracci (armrests on an armchair, the jibs of a mechanical crane, a prison building's wings, etc.)
• Plur. 2 — Braccia (2 or more people's arms)

B - 2 singulars and 2 plurals:

• Sing. 1 — Orecchio (ear, this is the noun commonly used);
• Sing. 2 — Orecchia (this is less used, I'm not sure but I think it's regional);
• Plur. 1 — Orecchie (Ears, this is the plural commonly used);
• Plur. 2 — Orecchia (it seems to be used in the non literal sense, like "A book full of ears")

C - 2 singulars and 1 plural:

• Sing. 1 — Scudiero (squire, henchman);
• Sing. 2 — Scudiere (Same meaning);
• Plur. — Scudieri (this is the only plural)

My question is: Is this category present in other languages? I noticed English doesn't have one, but maybe I'm wrong, so I figured I would bring up this topic.

Answer 1

There is at least one case I can think of in English similar to this.

For many people (myself included) the plural of "mouse" in the computer sense is "mouses". So we have:

• mouse (sing. 1) the animal or computer peripheral
• mice (plur. 1) the animal
• mouses (plur. 2) the computer peripheral

There are numerous languages that have (or had) a dual vs plural distinction (see this page) which seems to be related to what's going on in the "2 plurals" cases in Italian above.

Corbett's Number is the best reference on issues on number in general.

Another relevant reference is Acquaviva's Lexical Plurals which is specifically about cases like "mouse" and "fish" and "scissors" and "pants".

Answer 2

This category by its name sounds like the opposite of "defective" where one or more usual forms are absent, generally used of verbs.

While I'm not sure whether this category of nouns exists in English I can think of a couple of English nouns that have more than one plural with differing senses (two plurals with the same sense is much more common).

The most commonly discussed example is probably fish.

• Plural 1 is the usual, irregular plural actually taking the same form as the singular fish.
• Plural 2 is the regular plural fishes but is restricted to referring to "several kinds of fish".

Another one I came across through participation in Wiktionary is datum.

• Plural 1 is the irregular plural also alternatively (and sometimes controversially) used as a mass noun data.
• Plural 2 is the quite unexpected regular plural datums, used only the field of cartography to mean "fixed reference points".

Which reminds me of another, also controversial case of multiple singular forms, but not so straightforward:

• Dice is the accepted plural of die but dice is also in common use as a singular in which case it is an invariant noun.

Answer 3

One example that comes into my mind:

• person: A singular human
• persons: Several but distinguishable human beings
• people: A crowd, lots of humans

In German and Spanish it's exactly the same:

• German: Person, Personen and Leute
• Spanish: Persona, Personas and Gente

I guess other languages handle it the same or a least similar

Answer 4

Latin has a pretty large class of nouns like these, which are actually called abundantia in the grammatical tradition. They're second-declension nouns which occur as both masculine and neuter, with no difference in meaning. Examples: baculum/baculus 'staff', cingulum/cingulus 'belt', collum/collus 'neck', pileus/pileum 'cap', vallus/vallum 'palisade'.

Additionally there are third-declension nouns with two different stems, with identical meanings, e.g. femur 'thigh', stem femor- or femin-; iecur 'liver', stem iecor- or iecinor-. Or the meanings can be slightly different: pecus, pecor- 'herd of cattle' vs. pecus, pecud- 'single head of cattle'.

Ancient Greek also has some nouns with multiple stems, e.g. oneiros 'dream', stem oneiro- or oneirat-.

Answer 5

I think it is quite widespread in Russian. The main competition happens between the -а/-я and -и/-ы forms, which were historically derived from PIE dual and plural.

тон "tone" - тона (about colors) - тоны (about sounds)

хлеб "bread" - хлебы (about bakery products) - хлеба (about kinds of grasses)

цех "plant workshop" or "medieval guild" - цеха "plant workshops" - цехи "guilds"

год "year" - года (as in "years passed", "in your years/age") - годы (as "in the 1990s years", "the years of youth", also can replace года everywhere)

Some forms can be used interchangeably:

слесарь - слесари/слесаря

шторм - штормы/шторма

Answer 6

One example I've seen in pre-Modern English is the 2 plurals of "brother":

• "Brothers" with the meaning of "my parent's other offspring"
• "Brethren" meaning "people of my same religion or political affiliation"

English took most of its plurals from a single declension (accusative?). But in this case it preserved a plural from another case (nominative?) and gave it a slightly different meaning - I suspect the overabundant plurals in Italian have the same origin.

Answer 7

I think, traditionally examples like A and B would just be considered homonyms, that is as two separate lexical entries which consequently are also allowed to have different plurals. There are other examples for this in other languages. Somebody mentioned German "Wort" (although in that case the meaning distinction is slowly getting lost, I think), "Bank" (with the plural either 'Banken' or 'Bänke', depending on the meaning) is another example.

C (and part of B) seems to me to just be free or regional variation. I don't see the connection to A.

But of course, theories of lexical semantics differ in many regards and you will find other people using different terminology or analyses.