All the three personal
pronouns mark the number overtly. The third person pronouns heytu/itu
that substitute NanH class of nouns, however, do not take number
marker, as in :
|
| |
| moy |
‘I’ |
moykhian |
‘we’ |
 puni |
‘you (singular) |
punikhian |
‘you (plural)’ |
| tay |
‘he/she’ |
taykhian |
‘they (human)’ |
| itu/heytu |
‘It/they(non-human)’ |
|
|
|
Even those nouns that
otherwise indicate plurality do not take the plural marker when the
context indicates the plurality, as in :
|
| |
suali duy
‘two girls’ (lit.girl two) |
| |
1
2
1 2
|
The plural marker kan does
not have any positional variants.
|
| 3.2.4.2. |
Gender:
|
An extremely limited number
of paired nouns in this language show a two-way opposition in gender,
viz., masculine and feminine, as in:
|
| |
| chiokra |
‘boy’ |
chokri |
‘girl’ |
| ldka |
‘boy’ |
ldki |
‘girl’ |
| murga |
‘cock’ |
murgi |
‘hen’ etc. |
|
Incidentally all these paired
nouns are the results of the process of relexification taking place in
Naga Pidgin. The source language of these paired nouns is Hindi, which
has a grammatical gender showing a two-way opposition between masculine
and feminine genders. Since gender is a compulsory grammatical system
in Hindi, the virb and the variable adjectives in a sentence in Hindi
show concord in gender with the gender of the noun concerned. And in
Hindi, even the nouns referring to inanimate beings are assigned to
either of the two genders, as in:
|
| |
| Hindi : |
pagli l dki
jati hE
pagla lka
jata hE
purani kursi tu i
|
‘the mad
girl is going’
‘the mad boy is going’
‘the old chair broke’ etc.
|
|
Whereas in this language there is no gender concord at all, as
in : |
| |
bura manu
jayse
bura mayki jayse
bura manu jayse
bura mayki jayse |
‘the old
man went’
‘the old women went’
‘the old man is going’
‘the old women is going’ etc.
|
|
A few educated elite, however, use expressions like : |
| |
bura manu
jayse
buri mayki jayse |
‘the old
man went’
‘the old women went’ |
|
The expressions of this
nature, apart from being of extremely low fequency is also limited in
its usage as the number of paired adjectives borrowed from Hindi are
restricted to just three or four pairs only. When the need for
indicating the gender of a noun arises, the normal pattern is to place
the words mota ‘male’ and mayki ‘female’ before the noun concerned, as
in :
|
| |
guru
‘cow’
mota guru ‘ox’
boysi
‘buffalo’
mota boysi ‘he buffalo’
mayki boysi ‘she buffalo’ etc.
|
The pronouns in this
language
are devoid of the grammatical category of gender, i.e., the same
pronoun substitutes nouns referring to both male and female persons,
as in :
|
| |
tay jayse ‘he/she
went’
didi jayse ‘elder sister went’
tay jayse ‘she went’ etc.
|
The first and second person
pronouns, viz., moy ‘I’ and puni
‘you (sg)’, are also indifferent to the category of gender. Therefore
gender as a grammatical category is not up1.
|
| 3.2.4.3. |
Case relations:
|
The grammatical category of
case is the most important inflectional category of the noun and the
pronoun, as tense is the most important inflectional category of the
verb. Although each of the cases of the noun is given a label
suggestive of at least one of the principal semantic functions, (for
instance, the dative case is associated with the notion of giving), it
is impossible to give a satisfactory general definition of the
category of case itself on the basis of the surface structure. Only
seven case ‘relations are set up2 viz.,
nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative, instrumental and
sociative. Of these, while the nominative is unmarked, a post position
marks the sociative and instrumental case relations. The genitive is
marked syntactically by word order. The other three cases are marked
morphologically. A set of sentences showing the case relationships are
given below.
|
| |
| Nom. |
suali girise |
‘the girl fell’ |
| Acc. |
moy sualik dekhiise |
‘I saw the girl’ |
| Dat. |
moy salike ekta lorak
dise |
‘I gave a boy to
the girl’ |
| Gen. |
itu suali gor |
''this is the girl's
house' |
| Loc. |
nodite pani |
‘river water’ |
| |
|
(lit. water in the
river) |
| |
|
3 2
1 |
Instru-
mental |
sualik
mekea lgot bandise |
‘the girl
is tied with a dothi’ |
| |
Sociative
moy suali lgot joyse |
‘I went
with the girl’ |
|
1Please
also see Appendix 2, item 2.1.2.2For
justification, please see Appendix 2, item 2.1.3.
|
