Surprisingly, Greenberg does not consider the English plural morpheme -s to be automatic. Indeed, the alternation between the phonetic realizations -s, -z and -ez is automatic, but there are other, although rare, cases when the plural morpheme is -en, -∅ etc. See Denning et al. (1990), page 20.
The division is attributed to Humboldt in Luschützky (2003), p. 17. The dating comes from Michael Losonsky (ed): Wilhelm von Humboldt: on language, p. xxxvi (available through googlebooks).
The first twelve examples are taken from Fromkin et al. (2007) p. 110, with the following adjustments: I changed sentences, which were originally in present perfect tense (with marker -me-) to sentences in past simple tense (-li); I also changed the subject of the last four sentences from -kapu 'basket' to tabu 'book', which falls into the same class. The final two examples are taken from Benji Wald: Swahili and the Bantu Languages, p. 1002 in Comrie (1990). For the class 7 prefixes, see the Mwana SimbaArchived 4 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Chapter 16Archived 26 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine. For the past tense, see Chapter 32Archived 7 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine and the verb generatorArchived 21 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
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The first twelve examples are taken from Fromkin et al. (2007) p. 110, with the following adjustments: I changed sentences, which were originally in present perfect tense (with marker -me-) to sentences in past simple tense (-li); I also changed the subject of the last four sentences from -kapu 'basket' to tabu 'book', which falls into the same class. The final two examples are taken from Benji Wald: Swahili and the Bantu Languages, p. 1002 in Comrie (1990). For the class 7 prefixes, see the Mwana SimbaArchived 4 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Chapter 16Archived 26 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine. For the past tense, see Chapter 32Archived 7 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine and the verb generatorArchived 21 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
