Some classifiers occur independently as nouns and some of these take the bound numeral
forms even without being added to another noun.
be
‘piece’
ita ichi
‘one brick (full)’
ita ibe
‘one brick (as apiece)’
i-be
‘one piece’
be-ni
‘two pieces’
nut
‘alone’
rico i-nut
‘one king’
(monit) i-nut
‘one man, person’
ba
‘body’
monit baphli
‘four men’
ro
‘stem of tree’
(thepi)
ropho
‘five trees’
rika
iro
‘one big creeper’
rika
iro
‘one big creeper’
dop
‘small box’
chigaret e-dop
‘one packet of cigarettes’
i-dop
‘one small box’
dop-ni
‘two small boxes’
There are nouns which
take more than one classifier. The meaning could be same or different. When the
meaning is different the shape or size of the object mentioned
by the noun is indicated differently by the different
classifiers.
him dum-ni
‘two ball-shaped cakes’
him pla-ni
‘two flat cakes’
lek jir-thom
‘three necklaces’
lek chathom
‘three necklaces’
tomo ijir
‘one story’
tomo etha
‘one story’
As already noted the
basic numerals ichi ‘one’, hini ‘two’ and
kethom ‘three’ have bound allomorphs which occur only with
the classifiers. But the human classifier baoccurs with the basic numerals hini and kethom.
All the enumerated
classifiers in Karbi are presented below.
1) Human: The
human nouns including ‘God’ take two classifiers, viz., -nut
which is used with the numeral ‘one’ and ba-
which is used with other numerals.
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