| 5.2.2. Adjectives From Adverbs |
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ninne: |
‘yesterday’ |
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ninne:-ta: pa: a: |
‘yesterday’s song’ |
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munne: |
‘first’ |
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mune:-ta: ma:ne: |
‘the man in front or the front man’ |
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narka: |
‘night’ |
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narka:-ta: ga:to: |
‘the food prepared at at night or night-food’ |
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pirine: |
‘last year’ |
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pirne:-ta: musur |
‘last year’s rain’ |
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| 5.2.3. Adjectives From Postpositions |
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parro: |
‘above’ |
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parro:ta: |
‘the thing which is above or the above object’ |
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a i: |
‘down’ |
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ai:-ta: |
‘the thing which is down or the down object’ |
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gure: |
‘near’ |
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gure:ta: |
‘the thing which is nearer or nearer object’ |
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lo:pa: |
‘in, inside’ |
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lo:pa:-ta: |
‘the thing which is inside or inside object’ |
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The suffix -ta: could alternatively be analyzed as oblique -t plus genitive suffix -a:. For example, bane:k-ta: pe:ki: could be described as ‘the girl who possesses beauty’, i.e., the beautiful girl’.
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There are also instances like the following where the first constituent, a noun, describes the quality or indicates the species.
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marka: mara: |
‘mango tree’ |
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ne:li: mara: |
‘haula tree’ |
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ne:n mara: |
‘jamun tree’, etc. |
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| 5.3. Adjectival Concord |
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Scholars hold the view that the adjectives in Dravidian languages are indeclinable. It is one of the characteristic feature of the Dravidian languages family that distinguishes it from the Indo-Aryan family that distinguishes it from the Indo-Aryan family of languages (Subrahmanyam, 1970 : 105).
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In Abujhmaria, the adjectives in attributive position are inflected to number or gender or both accoring to the noun which they qualify. That is to say that there is a concord or agreement between adjectives and nouns. If an adjective is followed by masculine noun then it takes the masculine suffix and when followed by a non-masculine noun the adjectives take the non-masculine suffix. It also agrees with the number of the following noun (Natarajan, 1977 : 160).
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