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In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as Berber. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form. They contrast with sound plurals (or external plurals), which are formed by adding a suffix. It is distinct from Germanic umlaut, a form of vowel mutation found in Germanic languages. There have been a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding these processes and varied attempts to produce systems or rules that can systematize these plural forms.〔Robert R. Ratcliffe. 1998. ''The “Broken” Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic: Allomorphy and analogy in non-concatenative morphology.'' John Benjamins.〕 While the phenomenon is known from several Semitic languages, nowhere has it become as productive as in Arabic. ==Arabic== In Arabic, the regular way of making a plural for a masculine noun is adding the suffix ''-ūn'' (for the nominative) or ''-īn'' (for the accusative and genitive) at the end. For feminine nouns, the regular way is to add the suffix ''-āt''. However, not all plurals follow these simple rules. One class of nouns in both spoken and written Arabic produce plurals by changing the pattern of vowels inside the word, sometimes also with the addition of a prefix or suffix. This system is not fully regular, and it is used mainly for masculine non-human nouns. Human nouns are pluralized regularly or irregularly. Broken plurals are known as ''jam‘ taksīr'' (جَمع تَكسير, literally "plural of breaking") in Arabic grammar. These plurals constitute one of the most unusual aspects of the language, given the very strong and highly detailed grammar and derivation rules that govern the written language. Broken plurals can also be found in languages that have borrowed many words from Arabic, for instance Persian, Pashto, Turkish, Kurdish, Azerbaijani and Urdu, and sometimes exist in both a broken plural Arabic form and a local, adapted plural, e.g. in Pashto where the word for purpose (مطلب) can be pluralised in either its Arabic form مطالب for more formal, High Pashto, or the according to Pashto rules of plural as مطلبونه in everyday speech. In Persian this kind of plural is called ''jameh mokassar'' (جَمِع مُکَسَر, literally "broken plural"). Full knowledge of these plurals can come only with extended exposure to the language, though a few rules can be noted. A statistical analysis of a list of the 3000 most frequent Arabic words shows that 978 (59%) of the 1670 most frequent nominal forms take a sound plural, while the remaining 692 (41%) take a broken plural. Another estimate of all existing nominal forms gives over 90,000 forms with a sounds plural and just 9540 with a broken one.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Broken plural」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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