In Russian, most nouns are countable objects. They can be used in combination with quantitative numbers. Such nouns have the forms of both numbers: both singular and plural: a table - tables, a school desk - desks, a cloud - clouds. These forms have different endings and are combined in different ways with other parts of speech.
The meaning of plural forms of nouns
If the singular is used to denote a single item from a number of similar ones, then the plural means a lot of homogeneous objects.
Pluralization Mechanism
In most cases, plural endings for nouns are –y, –i, and –a, –y, for example, trunk –– trunks, girl –– girls, place –– places, tree –– trees. In some cases, in a production basis, alternation or loss / addition of vowels is observed: friend - friends, wreath - wreaths, piece - pieces.
It should be noted that in the singular, the nouns of each of the three genders have different endings. The plural obscures the gender characteristics, therefore, for example, the nouns wall, night, feminine village and stump, table, masculine knife have identical endings in this situation: walls, nights, villages and stumps, tables, knives. This manifests the saving of language means, since in this case the main thing is to show the number of objects, and not their kind.
Features of the formation of the plural of some words
In Russian, there is a group of nouns in which the presence and formation of the plural depends on the specific meaning of the word (knee, bottom, poker, etc.). For example, in the meaning of “bottom wall of something”, the word plural has a bottom in the form of a dona. In meaning, the bottom of the river, the bottom of the sea does not exist in this word in the plural form.
Plural Nouns
Some nouns indicate plural form of the singular. Similar words in the Russian language do not form the plural. These are nouns
material (milk, cereals, butter, silk, velvet, gold, copper, etc.);
collective (humanity, college students, rags, foliage);
abstract (patience, pressure, girlhood, kindness);
own (Moscow, Carpathians, Naberezhnye Chelny).
There are cases of the use of words from this list in the plural: cheeses, cereals, sausages, etc. But here the plural denotes different varieties rather than quantity, for example: "A dairy plant produces various types of cheeses."
Nouns Used Only in the Plural
In contrast to the noun, not forming the plural, in the language there are words that exist only in the form of the plural. These are nouns
abstract (twilight, vacation);
material (cream, cabbage soup);
the names of some games (hide and seek, chess);
items that include several parts (scissors, trousers, jeans, scales, etc.).