Kujamaat Jóola Noun Classes

Kujamaat Jóola is like other Atlantic languages – indeed, most languages of the Niger-Congo family – in having a complex gender, or noun class, system. Linguists use the word gender in a different sense from most people, for whom gender is linked to sex and consequently for whom there are generally only two (masculine and feminine) or perhaps three (masculine, feminine, neuter). For linguists, genders are agreement classes of nouns and pronouns, and a language has as many genders as the agreement system of the language distinguishes. While Indo-European languages like English, French, German, Greek, Russian, or Spanish may have two or three genders, Kujamaat Jóola has 19. It is not unusual in this regard. Within West Atlantic we can name Gombe Fula with 25 noun classes, Serer with 16, Wolof with 10, Manjaku with 14, and Balanta with seven (Sapir 1971).

The observations that all words of a language, even borrowings, are assigned to genders and that speakers of languages with genders rarely make mistakes in their use indicate that gender systems are structured (Corbett 1991: 7). It is not wholly arbitrary that one noun belongs to one gender, and a second noun to another.

One way that gender or noun class systems may be organized is semantically. The Dravidian language Tamil, spoken in Sri Lanka and Southeastern India, has a highly regular semantically based gender system. Human nouns are assigned to the so-called male rational and female rational genders, and non-human nouns to the non-rational gender.

Indo-European gender systems are also organized partially on semantic grounds. In French, for example, femme ‘woman’ is feminine and homme ‘man’ is masculine. In English, too, although we find gender only in pronouns, gender distinctions are largely semantic and sex-based: he usually refers to males, she to females, and it is usually used where there is either no sex distinction or it is unimportant.

Describing gender assignment on the basis of semantics will often take us only so far. In describing French, we run into problems when we encounter words like personne ‘person’ and victime ‘victim’, which are always feminine, even when they have a male referent. Words like raisin ‘grape’ (masculine) or chaise ‘chair’ (feminine) have gender that is arbitrary from a semantic point of view.

The same is true of other noun class systems. You might not think of grouping women, fire, and dangerous things together on semantic grounds, but they all belong to a single noun class in the Australian language Dyirbal (Dixon 1972) and inspired the title of a book by linguist George Lakoff. In Algonquian languages, which distinguish between an animate and an inanimate gender, people and animals fall into the animate class as expected, but so do large trees and a number of objects including tobacco, apples, kettles, and snowshoes. Some body parts, such as the calf and stomach, have animate gender, while others, such as the thigh, are inanimate (Bloomfield 1946: 94).

As we go through the Kujamaat Jóola noun class system, you will see that semantic classes play a central role in noun class assignment, but that even so, noun classes can be semantically diverse. Even in English, where gender seems to be perfectly predictable, we run into some peculiarities: ships and cars are often treated as feminine in gender (also neuter, but never masculine): she won’t start; let’s get her under sail. For some (primarily British) varieties of English, the word baby is neuter, but not babies in general, since once the baby is called by name, the baby must be male or female: it kept on crying, so I fed it ~ Lucinda kept on crying, so I fed her/*it.

In order to talk about the gender or noun class systems of a language, linguists give them names or numbers. Each of Kujamaat Jóola’s 19 classes is assigned a number. Speakers of the language do not use such numbers. They are able to use the noun classes correctly without articulating such a system.

Noun class in Kujamaat Jóola is marked by singular and plural prefixes of the shape (C)V-. Every noun generally has a noun class prefix in both singular and plural and is said to belong to both a singular and a plural class. For instance, the singular word asεk ‘one woman’ is in class 1, as indicated by the prefix a-, but its plural, kusεk ‘more than one woman’, is in class 2, as indicated by the prefix ku-. We can say that the lexeme sεk ‘woman (neither singular nor plural)’ falls into one of two classes, depending on whether it is singular or plural. This type of system, in which we speak of a particular singular class and a matching plural class as forming a pair, so that genders are characterized by pairs of classes, is characteristic of the entire Niger-Congo family, including the Bantu languages. Together, classes 1 and 2 form what we might call the personal gender, since they contain most words with human referents. Examples of other class 1/2 nouns are given in (1):

Although personal names bear no class prefix, we know that they belong to class 1 because they trigger class 1 agreement on adjectives, verbs, and so on.

The gender consisting of classes 3 and 4 is semantically diverse. Words for most animals are assigned to this gender, as are terms for various concrete objects. Furthermore, as pointed out by Sapir (1965: 62), “most loan words that are not persons, fruits, trees, containers, or bony objects” are assigned to this pair:

Classes 3 and 4 contain some nouns with human referents, which a priori might have been expected to be assigned to classes 1 and 2. A few plural personal nouns, such as siɲa:y ‘mother’s sisters’, belong to class 4 although, in this case at least, the singular is marked by the class 1 prefix (aiɲa:y). Furthermore, at least two forms that refer to “substandard people” are marked as belonging to classes 3 and 4: εsɔŋ/sisɔŋ ‘fool, psychotic’ and eɡət/siɡət ‘stupid person’. Placing humans in a non-human gender is a standard technique across languages for expressing disrespect or derogation, and is seen, for example, in Grebo (Kru), Tsova-Tush (Caucasian), and Yao (Bantu) (Head 1978: 175–7; Corbett 1991: 322–3). In Kujamaat Jóola the opposite is also possible. A storyteller may endow an animal with human qualities by marking it as belonging to class 1.

A number of class 3 nouns do not take a class marker, or take one only optionally. The former include mbur ‘bread’ and dakar ‘Dakar’. All place names belong to this type. Examples of nouns that take a class marker optionally are (e)jimukor ‘lion’ and (ε)bεkan ‘bicycle’, the latter from French bécane. As with personal names, which belong to class 1, we know that these words belong to class 3 because they consistently trigger class 3 agreement on adjectives, verbs, and other words with which they enter into an agreement relation.

The gender consisting of classes 5 and 6 includes most words for fruit, including borrowings, and most words referring to periods of time or to events involving large crowds (Sapir 1965: 63). As usual, other semantic types are represented as well:

Classes 5 and 6 have a derivational role as well: they may be used to form augmentatives or augmentative plurals of nouns from other classes. So, we have εɡɔl ‘stick’ (class 3) and siɡɔl ‘sticks’ (class 4), but also fuɡɔl ‘big stick’ (class 5) and kuɡɔl ‘big sticks’ (class 6). Likewise, asεk ‘woman’ can be placed into class 5 to produce fusεk ‘big woman’. Note again how the two classes are paired in a single gender, even when a quite different meaning is involved.

The next pair, classes 7 and 8, contains words referring to bones, bony objects (such as a fish’s fin), and limbs of the body. It includes too most words for containers, including borrowings. However, it also contains the word for at least one type of frog and for language:

“[W]ords for trees and for objects hollowed out from tree trunks and large limbs” are remarkably consistent in mapping onto the 9/8 pair, with only one recorded exception (Sapir 1965: 63). This is not to say that the 9/8 pair is semantically homogenous. As seen below, it contains words meaning ‘road’, ‘spitting cobra’, ‘corpse’, and ‘fertilizer’:

The fact that two singular classes, 7 and 9, both make their plural in class 8 shows the necessity of putting singular and plural nouns of the same apparent gender in separate classes in languages like Kujamaat Jóola. In Indo-European languages there is generally a one-to-one mapping between singular and plural noun classes, with one plural type for every singular type, and vice versa.

We turn now to the pair of classes 10 and 11. A number of nouns, especially those that denote small animals, consistently appear with marking for classes 10 and 11. But these classes serve to form diminutives as well, corresponding to the way in which the 5/6 class pair is used to form augmentatives in addition to having a more specific use. Stems that typically appear in other classes, such as -ko ‘head’ (5/6) and -ɲil ‘child’ (1/2), form singular and plural diminutives by taking class 10 and 11 prefixes. Which familiar nineteenth-century novel might you translate into Kujamaat Jóola as mu-sεk?

Taking the same two stems, -ko ‘head’ (5/6) and -ɲil ‘child’ (1/2), with which we formed diminutives above, we can form augmentatives by placing them into the pairs 9 and 12 and 5 and 12 respectively. These examples show that a single class, 5 in this instance, can be basic for some nouns (here -ko ‘head’), but form an augmentative for others (here -ɲil ‘child’):

No nouns belong specifically to the 9/12 or 5/12 pairs.

Mass nouns are generally assigned to class 11. Class 11 is otherwise a plural and it may seem odd to English speakers that mass nouns should be placed in a class that is normally plural. We should keep in mind that what truly sets off mass nouns semantically is that they do not distinguish between singular and plural, so whether we use an otherwise singular or plural class is not material, and indeed diminutives of mass nouns fall into class 10, which is normally singular:

Sapir observes that there are also a few recorded instances of other class prefixes, including ε- (class 3), si- (class 4), bu- (class 9), or fa- (class 14), marking mass nouns. Some examples are given below:

Kujamaat Jóola also has a diminutive collective, which means ‘little bunch of, little collection of’. This is formed by assigning a noun stem from just about any class to class 13:

So far we have encountered very few abstract nouns. These are scattered over a number of classes, some of which we have already seen.

Many of them, including all color words, fall into class 15. Among the forms in (11), note the borrowing -bulore ‘blue’, from French bleu. It has been assigned to class 15 because of the important role of semantics in the organization of the Kujamaat Jóola noun class system:

Some abstract nouns occur in classes 12, 13, or 14. As we have learned to expect, exceptions are possible, and thus we find ɲikul meaning ‘funeral’:

Classes 16 (ja-), 17 (wa-), 18 (ti-), and 19 (ri-) are rare, and no examples are presented here.

Infinitives, like nouns, take a noun class prefix. The class prefix is generally predictable and depends on the number of syllables in the stem. We have seen a rough correspondence between noun classes and semantics, with each noun class having an association, admittedly not consistent, with some semantic class. Here we see a purely phonological criterion at work. Though not common, this sort of phonological conditioning is fairly widespread throughout the languages of the world. In Latin, for example, though the genders are correlated to some extent with sex, some nouns are assigned to genders purely on phonological grounds. Returning to our Kujamaat Jóola infinitives, we see that the phonological conditioning of the noun class membership of infinitives is highly regular: monosyllabic stems take the class 3 prefix e-, while stems of more than one syllable take the class 7 prefix ka-:

Taking a monosyllabic verb and making it polysyllabic by adding a derivational affix results in a class 7 infinitive, as seen in the following pairs:

Noun class systems can be powerful inflectional and derivational mechanisms. We have seen that by changing a noun’s class marker, not only can Kujamaat Jóola speakers make important number distinctions – singular, plural, mass, or collective – but they can also create diminutives or augmentatives, personify non-humans, or dehumanize humans. Two examples of stems that take on a variety of meanings by moving from one noun class to another are given below:

The facts seen suggest a possible analysis of the Kujamaat Jóola noun class system. It is plausible that some noun stems, such as -sεk ‘woman’ (1/2), -munɡun ‘hyena’ (3/4), -manɡ ‘mango’ (5/6), and -bik ‘large pot with wide mouth’ (7/8), are not marked for any noun class in the lexicon, and are assigned to the appropriate classes by semantic rules. For example, nouns with human referents are automatically assigned to class 1 in the singular and class 2 in the plural, nouns referring to animals to classes 3 and 4, nouns referring to fruits to classes 5 and 6, and containers to classes 7 and 8. Other nouns must be lexically marked for a particular noun class. For example, we would expect -tunɡuɲ ‘taciturn person’ to be assigned to the 1/2 pair since it has a human referent. The fact that it belongs to class 13 is due to its being marked as belonging to class 13 in the lexicon. Lexical specification for noun class overrides assignment by semantic rule.

The behavior of loanwords, or words borrowed from other languages, in Kujamaat Jóola suggests that in the absence of lexical specification or an appropriate semantic rule, nouns are assigned to a default gender, which appears to be the gender consisting of class 3 in the singular and class 4 in the plural. As shown below, most loanwords are assigned to these two classes, with the exception of words that refer to persons, fruits, trees (no examples available), containers, or bony objects:

Because the 3/4 pair is the default gender, it is also the most semantically diverse. Historically it is possible that because 3/4 happened to be the largest or most diverse gender pair, it became the default gender.

Three types of noun class assignment – default assignment to classes 3 and 4, lexical specification, and semantic rule – can all be overridden by the derivational mechanism illustrated by some of the nouns in (15). Almost any noun can be assigned to class 10 (ji-) to form a diminutive or to class 5 (fu-) to form an augmentative.

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

The noun channel

The noun channel

Nouns and verbs The first layer: nouns

Incorporation

Nominalization

Noun classes and pronouns Summary

Classifier systems

Noun classes and pronouns Noun classes and gender