Grammar
Pronouns in Bahamian are generally the same as in Standard English. However, the second person plural can take one of three forms:
- yinna,
- y'all or
- all a ya
Possessive pronouns in Bahamian often differ from Standard English with:
- your becoming or ya
- his or hers becoming he or she
and
- their becoming dey.
For example, das ya book? means 'is that your book?'
In addition, the possessive pronouns differ from Standard English:
| English | Bahamian |
|---|---|
| mine | mines |
| yours | yawnz (s.) or yawz (s.) |
| yinnas (pl.) | |
| his | he own |
| hers | she own |
| ours | ah own |
| theirs | dey own/des |
When describing actions done alone or by a single group, only..one is used, as in only me one sing ('I'm the only one who sang') and only Mary one gern Nassau ('Mary was the only one who went to Nassau')
Read more about this topic: Bahamian Creole
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)