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.
As the conversions outgo by far the extent of mutations caused by the Germanic umlaut that is evidenced to be caused by inflectional suffixes, the sheer multiplicity of shapes corresponds to multiplex attempts at historical explanation ranging from proposals of transphonologizations and multiple accentual changes to switches between the categories of collectives, abstracta and plurals or noun class switches.
In Arabic, the regular way of making a plural for a masculine noun is adding the suffix -ūn[a] (for the nominative) or -īn[a] (for the accusative and genitive) at the end.
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.
Broken plurals can also be found in languages that have borrowed words from Arabic, for instance Persian, Pashto, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Sindhi, and Urdu.
), though such alternations do not operate according to general templates accommodating root consonants, and so are not usually considered to be true broken plurals by linguists.