The Sema variety of the pidgin
shows that absence of plurality with the Nina class
of nouns and rarely found with the Nanh class of nouns.
The NH class of nouns indicate plurality by the word
/log/’people’ following the nouns concerned. Only the
pronouns take the plural marker regularly, e.g.,
|
suali log ‘girls’
pata ‘leaf/leaves’
kukur ‘dog/dogs’
tay ‘he’
taykhan ‘they’
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The use of the plural marker
with the Kachari and the Liangmei varieties )SP) and the Sangtam (NP)
variety are similar to that of the Angami variety except that the
Liangmei variety uniformly takes/khan/as the plural marker.
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Case:
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The case and the
case markers available are: the nominative (unmarked), the accusative
/k/, the dative /ke/, the instrumental /di/, the locative /te/, and
the genitive /r/. Of these only the locative and the dative cases are
available in all the varieties, e.g.,
|
tay dukante
 se
‘he is in the shop’
moy tayke ekta kitab dise ‘I give him a book’
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The accusative
is absent in the Kachari, the Rongmei and the Sema (SP) the Sangtam,
the Phom and the Konyak (NP) and the Yimchunger (CP) varieties. The
Zemi, the Liangmei and the Mao varieties (SP) show the absence of the
accusative marker with the nouns but show it s presence with the
pronouns by taking /ke/ as the accusative case marker, e.g.,
|
moy suali ekta
dikhise ‘I saw a girl’
moy take dikhise
‘I saw him’
moy taykhanke dikhise ‘I saw them’,
etc.
|
The Chokri, the
Khezha, the Rengma (SP), the Chang (NP), and the Lotha and the Ao (CP0
varieties show the presence of the accusative case only with the NH
class of nouns and the personal pronouns in the singular. It is absent
in the other varieties, but in the case of the Ao variety, zero
alternates with /ke/
|
moy suali ekta
dikhise ‘I saw a girl’
moy take dikhise
‘I saw him’
moy guru ekta dikhise ‘I
saw a cow’
moy taykhanke dikhise
‘I saw them’
|
| But in the Ao
variety (CP) |
moy sualike/suali
dikhise ‘I saw a girl’
|
The instrumental
case is present only with the Angami, the Kachari (SP) and the Lotha
(CP) varieties. In all other varieties the post position/pora/’from’
or /1
got ‘with’ is used,
e.g.,
|
Rita was beaten
with a stick’
rita lathidi marise
rita lathi pora/lgot marise
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The genitive
case is absent with all the varieties except the Angami, the Khezha,
the Chokri, the Sema (SP), the Lotha (CP) and the Konyak (NP). In
these varieties it is available only with the noun/pronoun in the
singular. The usual practice is for with modified noun to follow
immediately the noun/pronoun functioning as the modifier, eg:
|
sualir kitab
‘the girl’s book’
tak kitab ‘this
book’
sualikhan kitab ‘the girl’s book’
|
Gender:
|
Gender is not a
compulsory grammatical category in the Naga pidgin.
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Tenses:
|
At the
morphological level, all the varieties of the Naga Pidgin show only a
two-way opposition in these. These are : a simple past and a non-past,
e.g. :
|
moy jayse
‘I went’
moy jabo ‘I go/I will go’
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The Naga Pidgin
shows a three-way opposition in aspect, namely, progressive,
perfective and habitual aspect. These aspects combine with the tenses.
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The progressive
aspect is expressed through a syntactic construction of a verb base
and an auxiliary. While all the varieties take the same auxiliary for
the present and the future progressive, different auxiliaries are
used the past progressive, e.g.:
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