| Morphological |
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| Pronouns |
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The Yerava speech shares the feature of inclusive and exclusive distinction made by the first person plural pronouns in Malayalam. In the demonstrative pronouns Malayalam makes a five fold distinction. |
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| Mas |
avan |
‘he’ |
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cori |
avar |
‘they’ |
| Fem |
ava |
‘she’ |
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| Neu |
atu |
‘this’ |
ava |
‘those’ |
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But Yerava has only a three-fold distinction |
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| Fem |
ava:u |
‘she’ |
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|
ava:ru |
‘they, those’ |
| Non-Fem |
ave |
‘he, it’ |
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The same phenomenon is reflected in the personal endings of finite verbs in all the three tenses and in the formation of conjugated nouns. |
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Where Malayalam has -a:l, -mu/-ku, -re/-u e and -il as instrumental, dative, genitive and locative case markers, correspondingly Yerava has -li, -gu/-ku, -a and -li respectively. In addition Yerava has -e as the nominative case marker occurring with -a ending human nouns. |
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| Tenses |
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Both Malayalam and Yerava have the three fold tense distinction indicated overtly by tense markers. Malayalam has -u , -um and -i/-tu as present, future and past tense markers respectively. |
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Whereas Yerava has -inj-/yinj-/-kinj; -p/-v-/-Ø,-t-/-nd-/nj- and -c-as the past tense markers. |
