Nouns
Like all western Romance languages, Portuguese does not inflect nouns to indicate their grammatical function, relying instead on the use of more prepositions (including an accusative preposition), phrasal prepositions, pleonastic objects, or on the context or word order. It has fairly regular noun inflection rules to indicate number (singular or plural), and many semi-regular ones to express biological sex or social gender, size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Nouns are classified into two grammatical genders, and adjectives, articles and demonstratives must be inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number.
There are two genders, masculine and feminine, and two numbers, singular and plural. Articles and adjectives are usually inflected to agree in gender and number with the nouns or pronouns they refer to. There are no cases; only personal pronouns are still declined. Diminutive and augmentative forms exist for nouns.
Read more about this topic: Portuguese Grammar
Famous quotes containing the word nouns:
“Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble or centuple use and meaning.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)