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2.2. Nouns : |
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2.2.1. The noun in Ao may be defined as a word that can be
followed by gender, number and case markers. The nouns may be
sub-classified into substantives, pronouns, numerals and verbal
nouns. |
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| 2.2.1.1.
Noun Classifier : |
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| Among the substantives, the kinship terms and the names of body
parts take the classificatory prefix /te-/. This prefix is,
however, dropped when these nouns are preceded by genitive. |
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| tepú |
‘father’ |
k pú
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‘my father’ |
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| tení |
‘nose’ |
nní
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‘your nose’ |
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| teka |
‘hand’ |
páteka |
‘his hand’ |
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| tenak |
‘eyes’ |
tanó nak
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‘child’s eyes’ |
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Other substantives and other sub-classes of nouns, pronouns,
numerals and verbal nouns. |
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| 2.2.2.
Gender : |
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The animate nouns in Ao are morphologically marked for masculine
and feminine genders. There are different gender markers for the
human and non-human nouns. On the basis of the morphological
marking, the nouns in Ao may be classified as in the following
diagram. |
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With non-human nouns the masculine and feminine gender markers
are /-tepu / and /-tec /. |
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Non-human
Masculine
Feminine
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(genderless) |
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an ‘fowl’
antepu
‘cock’
antec
‘hen’ |
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áz
‘dog’ áztep
‘male dog’
áztec
‘bitch’ |
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It may be noted that the masculine marker for ‘bull’ is /-puci/
and not /-tepu/. /-puci/
is not used with any other word. |
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nási ‘cattle’
násipuci
‘bull’
násitec
‘cow’ |
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It may be recalled here that the inanimate nouns do not take any
marker to indicate gender. Thus the gender classification in Ao
is based on natural classes. |
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At the syntactic level, however, gender distinction is not
significant for subject-predicate concordance, adjective-noun
agreement, etc. |
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| pá àó
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‘he is coming’ |
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| lá àó
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‘she is coming’ |
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| panok
àó
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‘they are coming’ |
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| tanó
àó
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‘the child is coming’ |
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| kó
àó
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‘the horse is coming’ |
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| nisó
tu?lu |
‘person big, i.e., big person’ |
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| kakét tu?lu |
‘book big, i.e., big book’ etc. |
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However, it is significant for the selection of certain post
postions. For example, there are two post positions each for the
allative and locative cases. One is used with animate nouns and
the other with inanimate nouns. It must be noted that for this
purpose the nouns referring to body parts and house are also
treated as animate in Ao (See Section 2.4). |
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