A language game: Learning Nouns
Birgit Hellwig, Anne Wiesner
In the video below, you see a language game: One child takes the lead, looks around for suitable objects in the environment and inserts their names into the frame “oh, my X” – for example, “oh, my dog”, “oh, my brother”, “oh, my betelnut” etc., and the other child repeats.
In Qaqet, a noun cannot occur by itself. For example, dang means ‘dog’ – but the child cannot just say dang. Instead, dang has to be preceded and followed by other elements, e.g.:
| Qaqet word | English translation |
|---|---|
| gu-dang-ka | my (one male) dog |
| gi-dang-ka | your (one male) dog |
| gu-dang-ki | my (one female) dog |
| gu-dang-ini | my (one little) dog |
| gu-dang-iram | my (two little) dogs |
| gu-dang-irang | my (more than two little) dogs |
The box above shows us the word dang 'dog', surrounded by other elements: gu-, gi-, -ka, -ki, -ini, -iram, -irang.
Can you guess what they mean? Click here for the answer.
| gu- | my |
| gi- | your |
| -ka | one male |
| -ki | one female |
| -ini | one little |
| -iram | two little |
| -irang | more than two little |
More on nouns in Qaqet:
Nouns have to be preceded by an element, for example, by a possessive pronoun such as gu- ‘my’ or gi- ‘your’. And they have to be followed by a noun class marker, which tells us something about the sex (male, female) or the shape (little, short, flat, long, extended, cut off) of a person or a thing. At the same time, each marker tells us something about the number: one (singular), two (dual), or more than two (plural). The forms are given here:
| noun classes | singular (one) | dual (two) | plural (more than two) |
|---|---|---|---|
| male | -ka | -iam | – |
| female | -ki | -im | – |
| little | -ini | -iram | -irang |
| short | -em | -am | -ap |
| flat | -es | -ivim | -iving |
| long | -it | -isim | -ising |
| extended | -it | -itnem | -itnek |
| cut off | -igel | -igrlim | -igrling |