Grammar
Nama has a subject–object–verb word order and has three gender classes: male, female and neuter. Male and female nouns have a singular, dual and plural; while neuter nouns only have singular and plural number.
| singular | dual | plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female | piris | pirira | piridi | goat |
| Male | arib | arikha | arigu | dog |
| Neuter | khoe-i | n/a | khoen | people |
Khoekhoe distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive 1st person plural pronouns. Sida is the exclusive form for we, it only includes a specific group; as opposed to sada, which is inclusive and refers to all.
Read more about this topic: Khoekhoe Language
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble or centuple use and meaning.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)