object in the
sentence. Nominals further can be subclassified on the basis of their
common syntactic occurrence into: Nouns and Pronouns.
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Postpositions occur with the oblique forms of nominals so they are also
dealt herewith.
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Nouns are those forms which show the distinction of gender, number and
case.
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3.1.1.1. |
Gender |
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Every noun belongs to one of the two genders-masculine or feminine.
Animate nouns can be distinguished on the basis of the natural sex
distinctions as all male nouns belong to masculine gender and all female
nouns belong to feminine gender. Other nouns pose problem so the listing
of the gender of the nouns help. Such as /p ttr/
‘leaf’, /kr/
‘home’ are masculine and /ktab/
is feminine. But still some observations are helpful to determine the
gender of the nouns. A few generalisations are made here to determine the
gender of the nouns.
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(a) All the nouns ending in {-o} are masculine.
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Examples are :
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bu o
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‘tree’
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gUttho
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‘bag’
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bnno
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‘muddy path in between the fields’
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crxo
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‘spinning wheel’
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tàgo
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‘thread’
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payo
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‘foot of the cot’ |
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ţerno
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‘an instrument thread’
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r sto
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‘passage,way’
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chvk o
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‘truck’
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(b) The nouns ending mostly with /- /
and /u/ are masculine.
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Examples are:
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thrũ
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‘tear’
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pkherũ
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‘bird’
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cţţu
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‘a mass made of wood used for
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grinding’
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tkku
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‘spindle’
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(c) Nouns mostly ending with
or 
are masculine in gender.
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A few examples are :
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pò
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‘hay’
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kà
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‘grass’
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kì
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‘ghee’
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rá
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‘path’
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(d) Nouns mostly ending nin {-i} are feminine in gender.
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kIsti
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‘boat’
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lari
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‘bus’
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g i
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‘bus’
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  i
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‘palanquin’
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gi
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‘street, the passage betweenthe
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hills’
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kahi
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‘saddle’
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For gender determination one has to depend upon the listing of the
native speaker and the context. So gender is a difficult problem to
generalize. Morphologically gender is marked by certain suffixes like
masculine is marked by /-o/ and feminine is marked by
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