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58-426: Yimas is a polysynthetic language with (somewhat) free word order , and is an ergative-absolutive language morphologically but not syntactically , although it has several other case-like relations encoded on its verbs. It has ten main noun classes (genders), and a unique number system. Four of the noun classes are semantically determined (male humans, female humans, higher animals, plants and plantmaterial) whereas

116-685: A class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects. Among Northwest Caucasian languages, only Abkhaz and Abaza have noun class, making use of a human male/human female/non-human distinction. In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and postpositions or prepositions. Atlantic–Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes, defined according to non-sexual criteria. Certain nominal classes are reserved for humans. The Fula language has about 26 noun classes (the exact number varies slightly by dialect). According to Carl Meinhof ,

174-427: A class share sets of agreement affixes with adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. The adjectival, pronominal, and verbal agreement affixes are appended to adjectives, pronouns, and verbs respectively, depending on the number and noun class of the noun they are associated with. The adjective must have an affix that agrees with the noun the adjective describes, and pronouns are made possessive by appending affixes that agree with

232-411: A classificatory verb system and (b) a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem -tonh is used for enclosed objects. When -tonh is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in daaltonh which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or etltonh which refers to objects enclosed in bags. The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along

290-544: A corresponding plural class (apart from one class which has no singular–plural distinction; also some plural classes correspond to more than one singular class) and there are no exceptions as there are in Swahili. For this reason Ganda linguists use the orthogonal numbering system when discussing Ganda grammar (other than in the context of Bantu comparative linguistics ), giving the 10 traditional noun classes of that language. The distinction between genders and nominal classes

348-561: A defining feature of all indigenous languages of the Americas . This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas , Australia , Siberia , and New Guinea ; however, there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with

406-539: A fierce headache.' From Classical Ainu of Japan, another polysynthetic, incorporating, and agglutinating language: ウサオプㇲペ Usaopuspe アエヤィコツ゚ィマシラㇺスィパ aeyaykotuymasiramsuypa ウサオプㇲペ アエヤィコツ゚ィマシラㇺスィパ Usaopuspe aeyaykotuymasiramsuypa Noun class In linguistics , a noun class is a particular category of nouns . A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent , such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use

464-752: A form of agreement with a semantic noun class. A few nouns also exhibit vestigial noun classes, such as stewardess , where the suffix -ess added to steward denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English , but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender , including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs. In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers . Common criteria that define noun classes include: The Ojibwe language and other members of

522-426: A given class may require: Modern English expresses noun classes through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. Countable and uncountable nouns are distinguished by the choice of many / much . The choice between the relative pronoun who (persons) and which (non-persons) may also be considered

580-589: A high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes , including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages , and

638-453: A noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa , which has 16 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect,

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696-484: A palatal stop. /ʎ/ is in free variation between [ʎ] and [lʲ] . r varies in pronunciation between [l] and [ɾ] . The Yimas vowel inventory contains six phonemes in total, consisting of four monophthongs and two diphthongs : The two diphthongs in Yimas are /aj/ and /aw/. The most frequent vowels by far are /a/ and /ɨ/. ɨ also appears as an epenthetic vowel to break up otherwise illicit consonant clusters. In

754-542: A second person singular object). Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of

812-413: A voiceless fricative: ipwa [iˈβa] . When /k/ appears before two vowels, if the second vowel is unstressed, then the /k/ is realized as a voiced fricative: amanakn [ʌmʌˈnaɣɨn] 'mine'. Intervocally /c/ has age-based allophony , with older speakers preferring the stop realization and younger ones the dental sibilant [s], as in acak [ˈasʌk] 'to send'. After another consonant, /c/ is always realized as

870-509: Is pamki 'legs'. The same is true when plosives appear before nasals at the ends of words or syllables. In this case, the nasal is syllabic, for example watn [ˈwatn̩] (a hardwood tree species). Plosives are generally voiced after nasals, with /p/ becoming voiced also before u . At word onsets and before stressed vowels, they are aspirated and voiceless. For example: ɲct [ˈɪɲɟɪt] 'urine', pamki [ˈpʰamgi] 'legs', tkay [tʰəˈkʰaɪ̯] 'nose', kput [kʰɞˈbut] 'rain'. /p/ and /w/ weaken to

928-481: Is a clear difference between genders (such as known from Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European ) and nominal classes (such as known from Niger–Congo). Languages with nominal classes divide nouns formally on the base of hyperonymic meanings. The category of nominal class replaces not only the category of gender, but also the categories of number and case . Critics of Meinhof's approach notice that his numbering system of nominal classes counts singular and plural numbers of

986-498: Is a plural class for more than one singular class. For example, Proto-Bantu class 10 contains plurals of class 9 nouns and class 11 nouns, while class 6 contains plurals of class 5 nouns and class 15 nouns. Classes 6 and 10 are inherited as polyplural classes by most surviving Bantu languages, but many languages have developed new polyplural classes that are not widely shared by other languages. Specialists in Bantu emphasize that there

1044-845: Is blurred still further by Indo-European languages that have nouns that behave like Swahili's rafiki . Italian , for example, has a group of nouns deriving from Latin neuter nouns that acts as masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural: il braccio / le braccia ; l'uovo / le uova . (These nouns are still placed in a neuter gender of their own by some grammarians.) "Ø-" means no prefix . Some classes are homonymous (esp. 9 and 10). The Proto-Bantu class 12 disappeared in Swahili, class 13 merged with 7, and 14 with 11. Class prefixes appear also on adjectives and verbs, e.g.: Ki tabu CL7 -book ki kubwa CL7 -big ki naanguka. CL7 - PRS -fall Ki tabu ki kubwa ki naanguka. CL7-book CL7-big CL7-PRS-fall 'The big book falls.' The class markers which appear on

1102-573: Is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages ). Many polysynthetic languages display complex evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs . The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau , who considered polysynthesis, as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation,

1160-524: Is composed of the Greek roots poly meaning "many" and synthesis meaning "placing together". In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes . In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have

1218-581: Is formed; /ama/ is the bound first person singular pronoun, and /-kn/ is the class I possessive agreement suffix: apwi father.I. SG ama- na - kn Polysynthetic language In linguistic typology , polysynthetic languages , formerly holophrastic languages , are highly synthetic languages , i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as

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1276-421: Is inanimate. In Navajo ( Southern Athabaskan ) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. Morphologically , however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence Shi’éé’ tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah siłtsooz "My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb siłtsooz "lies"

1334-493: Is located in the word. In other words, only certain consonant phonemes can begin a word, end a word, or appear in the middle of a word. The iterative variable n allows the medial consonant cluster to be repeated many times. A Yimas word can consist of only a single vowel. An example is the verb stem /i-/, which means 'say.' Some of the longest roots are five or six syllables, like /mamantakarman/, which means 'land crab.' Yimas has predictable rules with regard to syllabification. In

1392-464: Is never the distinguishing factor between two words; i.e., two words cannot differ in meaning if they only differ in which syllable carries stress (as opposed to English, which distinguishes between the noun 'désert' and the verb 'desért'). There are ten basic noun classes in Yimas, and about six additional minor classes with only a few nouns in each one. Noun classes are either categorized by their semantic similarity or their phonological similarity. Of

1450-670: Is used because the subject shi’éé’ "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence Siziiz tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah silá "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb silá "lies" is used because the subject siziiz "my belt" is a slender, flexible object. Koyukon ( Northern Athabaskan ) has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition to these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called "gender prefixes" that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: (a)

1508-464: Is usually only marked for agreement with the subject (e.g. Spanish hablo "I speak" where the -o ending marks agreement with the first person singular subject), but in many languages verbs also agree with the object (e.g. the Kiswahili word nakupenda "I love you" where the n- prefix marks agreement with the first person singular subject and the ku- prefix marks agreement with

1566-556: The Ethnologue endangerment scale, with a rating of 6b. Yimas has a total of 18 phonemes . Below are the vowel and consonant inventories, which are represented using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. The consonant phoneme inventory of Yimas is typical for the languages of Papua New Guinea. Like many languages of the region, Yimas has no fricative phonemes, although fricatives do sometimes appear in pronunciation as variants of plosives . The following table contains

1624-515: The Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. Living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth, are considered powerful and belong to the animate class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as " raspberry " is animate, but " strawberry "

1682-482: The Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun classes called nominal classes (this notion was introduced by W. H. I. Bleek ). While no single language is known to express all of them, most of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering, Shona has 20 classes, Swahili has 15, Sotho has 18 and Ganda has 17. Additionally, there are polyplural noun classes . A polyplural noun class

1740-423: The Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq . tuntu reindeer -ssur -hunt -qatar - FUT -ni -say -ksaite - NEG -ngqiggte -again -uq - 3SG . IND tuntu -ssur -qatar -ni -ksaite -ngqiggte -uq reindeer -hunt -FUT -say -NEG -again -3SG.IND "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of

1798-788: The 12 consonant phonemes of the language: The phonemic status of the palatal consonants /c/, /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ is not entirely clear. In general their appearance is predictable; they arise primarily through palatalization of the alveolar consonants /t/, /n/, and /r/. However, there are a few words in which these consonants must be regarded as underlyingly palatal. Examples include akulɨm 'wrist', ɨɲcɨt 'urine', and other words, though these historically go back to alveolar consonants, as can be seen in their cognates in Karawari ( awku ri m 'wrist' and sɨ ndi 'urine'). Adjacent nasals and plosives are usually homorganic . Other combinations such as mt , mk , np , ŋt , etc., are rare or unattested; an example

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1856-454: The Yimas word (in terms of consonants C and vowels V) is the following: Consonants are organized into three basic clusters in Yimas: the initial cluster [(C 1 )(C 2 )], the medial cluster [(C 3 )C 4 (C 5 )] and the final cluster [(C 6 )(C 7 )]. Parentheses indicate that the consonant is optional. There are specific phonological constraints placed on the cluster depending on where it

1914-413: The absolutive case form of the word if it ends in a vowel. For example, the noun ume "child" has the singular ablative form umearengandik or umeagandik "from the child", the plural ablative form umeengandik "from the children", and the indefinite ablative form umerengandik or umegandik (cf. the genitive forms umearen , umeen , and umeren and the absolutive forms umea , umeak , and ume ). In

1972-405: The adjectives and verbs may differ from the noun prefixes: M toto CL1 -child wa ngu CL1 -my a linunua CL1 - PST - CL7 -buy ki tabu. CL7 -book M toto wa ngu a linunua ki tabu. CL1-child CL1-my CL1-PST-CL7-buy CL7-book 'My child bought a book.' In this example, the verbal prefix a- and the pronominal prefix wa- are in concordance with

2030-428: The classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men. Basque has two classes, animate and inanimate; however, the only difference is in the declension of locative cases (inessive, ablative, allative, terminal allative, and directional allative). For inanimate nouns, the locative case endings are attached directly if

2088-419: The first consonant: (VC 1 .C 2 C 3 V). In Yimas, the primary accent lies in general on the first syllable of a word. In words with more than three syllables, the third syllable carries secondary stress. Below are some examples (where ´ represents primary stress, and ` represents secondary stress): kwálcan kwálcan 'arise' námarawt námarawt 'person' wánkanàwi wánkanàwi 'insect' If

2146-434: The first syllable contains an epenthetic vowel but the second does not, then the second syllable is stressed. When the first as well as the second syllable contain epenthetic vowels, then the stress lies on the first syllable. Below are more examples, including words with stress on epenthetic vowels: The genitive suffix -na , which is used on personal pronouns, takes primary stress: ama-na-kn [ʌmʌˈnaɣɨn] 'mine'. Stress

2204-470: The following semantic lines: The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. (This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things .) The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines and hunting weapons. The Anindilyakwa language has

2262-586: The head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words. An example from Chukchi , a polysynthetic, incorporating , and agglutinating language of Russia which also has grammatical cases unlike the majority of incorporating polysynthetic languages: t- 1S . SUBJ meyŋ- great levt- head pəγt- hurt rkən 1S . PRES t- meyŋ- levt- pəγt- rkən 1S.SUBJ great head hurt 1S.PRES 'I have

2320-433: The houses", and the indefinite ablative form etxetatik (the indefinite form is mainly used with determiners that precede the noun: zenbat etxetatik "from how many houses"). For animate nouns, on the other hand, the locative case endings are attached (with some phonetic adjustments) to the suffix -gan- , which is itself attached to the singular, plural, or indefinite genitive case ending. Alternatively, -gan- may attach to

2378-782: The inessive case, the case suffix is replaced entirely by -gan for animate nouns (compare etxean "in/at the house" and umearengan / umeagan "in/at the child"). Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages , manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgian , Udi , and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, whereas Bats has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes: male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally

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2436-422: The middle of a word, if a consonant is between two vowels, the syllable boundary precedes the consonant: (V.CV). If two consonants are between two vowels, the syllable boundary falls between the consonants: (VC 1 .C 2 V). However, if C 1 is a stop and C 2 is /r/, the syllable boundary precedes C 1 : (V.C 1 C 2 V). Whenever three consonants are between two vowels, the syllable boundary comes after

2494-428: The morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into

2552-439: The noun is singular, and plural and indefinite number are marked by the suffixes -eta- and -(e)ta- , respectively, before the case ending (this is in contrast to the non-locative cases, which follow a different system of number marking where the indefinite form of the ending is the most basic). For example, the noun etxe "house" has the singular ablative form etxetik "from the house", the plural ablative form etxeetatik "from

2610-413: The noun of the possessor as well. Agreement affixes for verbs are used to indicate that a noun is its subject if the verb is intransitive, or that a noun is its object if the verb is transitive. As an example, the following table contains the set of agreement affixes for class I nouns: Below is an example of the class I singular adjectival agreement suffix /-n/ applied to the adjective meaning 'good.' Here,

2668-435: The other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement , although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque , Hungarian and Georgian , also have it. Some authors apply

2726-410: The rest are assigned on phonological bases. It is an endangered language , being widely replaced by Tok Pisin , and to a lesser extent, English. It is unclear if any children are native Yimas speakers. However, a Yimas pidgin was once used as a contact language with speakers of Alamblak and Arafundi . Although it is still used in face-to-face conversation, it is considered a threatened language on

2784-644: The same noun as belonging to separate classes. This seems to them to be inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (according to the critics, a Meinhof-style analysis would give Ancient Greek 9 genders). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes, Sotho has 11 and Ganda has 10. The Meinhof numbering tends to be used in scientific works dealing with comparisons of different Bantu languages. For instance, in Swahili

2842-441: The same phonetic properties as words in one of the later classes, but will only be placed in one class. By far, class V is the largest noun class, with nearly half of all Yimas words assigned to this class. Many of the nouns formerly in class VIII have become members of class V as the language has evolved. Additionally, the rounded vowel that terminates nouns in class X have a distinctive autosegmental rounding feature. Nouns within

2900-436: The suffix is used to show that the adjective is describing a class I, singular noun: kalakn child.I. SG yua- n good.I. SG kalakn yua- n child.I.SG good.I.SG 'a good child' In general, appending the possessive marker /-na/ to a pronoun, along with the appropriate possessive agreement affix, creates a possessive pronoun in Yimas. The following is an example of how a class I singular possessive pronoun

2958-437: The ten major noun classes, four are identified based on semantic properties, and six are identified based on phonological properties. The ten major noun classes are distinguished by the following properties: Although some classes are similar in category, no two classes overlap; i.e., no noun is associated with more than one noun class. So there may be words that fall into the semantic categories specified by class I-IV that have

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3016-421: The term " grammatical gender " as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers . There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes: Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent. Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement . A noun in

3074-422: The term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking , or those that frequently use noun incorporation . Polysynthetic languages can be agglutinative or fusional depending on whether they encode one or multiple grammatical categories per affix . At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic

3132-441: The verb word, as baby is incorporated in the English verb babysit . Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking

3190-552: The vicinity of u and also occasionally in other contexts, an u is sometimes inserted instead: mml [məmɪʎ] 'a kind of snake', ŋmkŋn [ŋəmgəŋɨn] 'underneath', maŋkuml [maŋgɯmuʎ] 'two veins'. The appearance of /ɨ/ is often predictable from the surrounding consonant environment and as a result it can typically be treated as an epenthetic vowel even within lexical roots. Adopting this analysis results in whole words with no underlying vowels. The vowel phonemes are involved in numerous phonological changes. The basic structure of

3248-490: The word rafiki 'friend' belongs to the class 9 and its "plural form" is marafiki of the class 6, even if most nouns of the 9 class have the plural of the class 10. For this reason, noun classes are often referred to by combining their singular and plural forms, e.g., rafiki would be classified as "9/6", indicating that it takes class 9 in the singular, and class 6 in the plural. However not all Bantu languages have these exceptions. In Ganda each singular class has

3306-406: The word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words". Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb

3364-489: The work of Edward Sapir , who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently, Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky 's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common. The word "polysynthesis"

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