Grammar
Hmong is an analytic SVO language in which adjectives and demonstratives follow the noun. Noun phrases can contain the following elements (parentheses indicate optional elements):
(possessive) + (quantifier) + (classifier) + noun + (adjective) + (demonstrative)
The Hmong pronominal system distinguishes between three grammatical persons and three numbers - singular, dual, and plural. They are not marked for case, that is, the same word is used to translate both "I" and "me", "she" and "her", and so forth. These are the personal pronouns of Hmong Daw and Mong Njua:
| Number: | Singular | Dual | Plural |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | kuv | wb | peb |
| Second | koj | neb | nej |
| Third | nws | nkawd | lawv |
| Number: | Singular | Dual | Plural |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | kuv | ib | peb |
| Second | koj | meb | mej |
| Third | nwg | ob tug | puab |
Read more about this topic: Hmong Language
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“The new grammar of race is constructed in a way that George Orwell would have appreciated, because its rules make some ideas impossible to expressunless, of course, one wants to be called a racist.”
—Stephen Carter (b. 1954)
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.”
—Richard Chenevix Trench (18071886)