Noun classes

In this post, we will attempt the most novel bit of Giriama grammar, as far as English speakers are concerned: the Bantu Noun Class System.

This post is long on explanations and short on Giriama examples. Those will come later - this was long enough already!

Grammatical gender

English almost entirely lacks grammatical gender - gender is only required in pronouns (he/she, him/her, his/hers) and some occupations (waiter, waitress), and corresponds to male and female. If it's a man, it's male gender; if it's a woman, it's female gender; and if it's a cow, you might use 'she', but 'it' is also fine. The vast majority of English sentences just don't care about gender.

Moving on to languages like French and Spanish, every single noun is either 'masculine' or 'feminine'. This applies to tables as much as people. 

What difference does this make? Anything related to the noun has to agree with the noun; for example, the small cat in Spanish is él gato pequeño for a male cat, but la gata pequeña for a female one.

Effectively, grammatical gender divides the whole language into two arbitrary groups. And they are arbitrary, as we see from the fact that bridge is 'male' in French but 'female' in German. (For a longer essay on that subject, see Mark Twain's thoughts.)

But since they are arbitrary, why stop at two? In Greek, Latin and German, we see three genders appearing: masculine, feminine and neuter. Surely no language needs more than three categories of nouns? Well...

Noun classifiers

In English, we have collective nouns for groups of things:

a herd of cows, a herd of horses, a herd of elephants

a flock of sheep, a flock of goats

a bunch of flowers, a bunch of rods

and so on.

In Chinese and Japanese classifier groups like these are used for counting. Effectively, you say "2 (of a bunch of) flowers", "5 (of a flock of) sheep". The classifiers are based on concepts like "long and thin" or "flat" or "animal" or "mechanical".

So we now have a) the concept of gender, which spreads out from the noun to the rest of the sentence and b) the idea of classifying objects using a large number of groups, based loosely on what kind of object they are.

Put them together, and we get...

Bantu noun classes

All Bantu languages (as far as I know) have the Bantu noun class system in one form or another. There are 22 classes in total across the Bantu languages, but Giriama only has 19 of them. Much easier! ... Don't panic yet. 

Each class is either a singular or plural class, which brings the total number of arbitrary divisions closer to 10. And as with East Asian classifiers, each class tends to have a unifying concept, a rule to decide which class a noun belongs to based on its meaning.

You should be able to recognise the class from the first syllable of the noun: ki-class start with ki, lu-class start with lu-, and so on.

But as in every language, these 'rules' have many exceptions. You must learn every noun together with its noun class.

Now you may panic.

...

Ok, done? Here come the Giriama noun classes.

Giriama noun classes

Have a quick look at this table, but don't try to learn it yet! Explanations are below.

Class number	Noun Prefix	Subject Prefix	Concept	Examples 1		Examples 2
1	mu-/mw-	a-	People	mut'u	person	musichana	girl
2	a-	ma-		at'u	people	asichana	girls
3	mu-	u-	Plants (and other things)			muhi	tree
4	mi-	mi-				miti	trees
5	Ø-	ri-	Fruit (and other things)			chungwa	orange
6	ma-	ga-				machungwa	oranges
7	ki-/ch-	ki-	?	kit'u	thing	kithabu	book
8	vi-/zh-	vi-		vit'u	things	vithabu	books
9	N-	i-	?			nyumba	house
10	N-	zi-				nyumba	houses
11	lu-	lu-	Long thin objects			lugwe	rope
12	ka-	ka-	Diminuitive (small)			kahoho	small child
13	u-	u-				uhoho	small children
14	u-	u-	Abstract and mass nouns			wari	ugali
15	ku-	ku-	-ing (gerund)			kushoma	reading
16	ha-	ha-	Place	hat'u	place (specific)
17	ku-	ku-		kut'u	place (general)
18	mu-	mu-		mut'u	place (inside)
22	ri-	ri-	Augmentative (big)			rikumba	big fish

Class number

The class number is mostly helpful if you speak another Bantu language - just like calling them "masculine" and "feminine" in European languages, it's useful to have labels. Even if you don't speak another Bantu language, you may end up using them to distinguish 1, 3 and 18 from each other, for example.

Noun prefix

Most (all?) nouns in a given class will start with the noun prefix. This is also the sound which gets attached to numbers, adjectives and other words in the sentence. This is equivalent to the -o/-a endings of Spanish, for example.

Subject prefix

This is the bit which gets attached to the beginning of a verb. We have already seen the subject prefixes for classes 1 and 2. Do they look familiar?

For most noun classes, the subject and noun prefixes are the same.

Coming up

We will work through each class in turn, looking at example words and sentences. Today's post was just to introduce the general concept - you don't have to learn all 19 classes today!

Next time, we will look at some examples from Class 1 and Class 2, and get a better feel for how this works in practice.