Tsez Language - Morphology - Nouns - Noun Classes

Noun Classes

Tsez distinguishes 4 noun classes in the singular and 2 in the plural. They are prefixes that are attached to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, several postpositions like -oƛƛʼo ("between") or -iłe ("like") and the emphatic particle -uy to show agreement with the noun. Agreement is only possible on vowel-initial words or words that begin with a pharyngealized vowel, but there are also a few words beginning with a vowel that do not take these prefixes.

Class Singular Plural Attribution
I ∅- b- for male persons only
II y- r- for female persons and inanimate objects (e.g. "book")
III b- for animals and inanimate objects (e.g. "sun")
IV r- for inanimate objects only (e.g. "water")

As inanimate objects cover the classes II, III and IV, it's not transparent into which class an inanimate object belongs. However, there are certain tendencies based on the semantic field of the nouns. Nouns that are able to move (like sun, moon, star, lightning, car, train) usually belong to class III, while products that traditionally have to do with the work of women (like clothes or berries and also milk) often belong to class II. Clothes made from leather are — as the word for leather itself — usually assigned to class III, due to their relation to animals.

Class IV originally included abstract words, collective and mass nouns, such as water, salt, sky or wind. Materials also often seem to trigger noun classes: "chair" and "wood" are both class IV nouns. Also shape seems to have an influence (flat things are associated with class II, round things with class III and long things with class IV). In the same manner, proper names are assigned the classes of the nouns they denote. Thus, Patʼi ("Fatima") is assigned class II, because it's a female name, and Asaq (a Tsez village) belongs to class III, because "village" (ʕaƛʼ) is also in this group. Likewise, new loan words are assigned the noun class of a semantically similar existing Tsez word.

It may be worth noting that experiments have shown that Tsez speakers do not assign any noun classes to new words for objects they do not know or where they do not know what they look like.

Certain derivational endings also require a specific noun class, see the section about derivation below.

Verbs and adverbs always agree with the absolutive argument of the phrase, regardless of the clause's transitivity.
If more than one absolutive argument is linked by the conjunction -n(o) ("and") and one of them is of the first noun class, then class I plural triggers the agreement for the clause; otherwise, it is class II/III/IV plural. Compare:

kid-no uži-n b-ay-si
girland boyand Icome
"A girl and a boy arrived."

and

kid-no meši-n r-ay-si
girland calfand IIcome
"A girl and a calf arrived."

Read more about this topic:  Tsez Language, Morphology, Nouns

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