Qaqet plural: How to talk about more than one thing
Henrike Frye, Anne Wiesner; illustrations by Lena Pointner
Usually, when plurality is expressed in a language, something is added to the noun or the noun is changed internally (see the World Atlas of Language Structures for the possibilities).
This makes sense even intuitively: If something is there MORE OFTEN in the world, you would expect that you also need MORE LANGUAGE to talk about this thing. In English, e.g., you have ONE thing, but MANY thing-s.
However, some languages are different, and Qaqet is one of them. So let’s take a closer look: How do you talk about more than one thing in Qaqet?
The following examples contain some nouns (the Qaqet words for 'basket', 'baskets', 'fruit', 'fruits') – Can you find out from the examples how Qaqet forms its singular and plural nouns? The solutions can be found in the slider.
How to read linguistic examples
- In the first line, the Qaqet text is split up into its single meaningful parts (“morphemes”).
- In the second line, the meaning of those morphemes is written.
- In the third line, you find the English translation.
Going further
As you can see, some of the meaningful parts are connected with '=' while others are connected with '-'. To the linguist there is a slight difference between the two, but you don't need to know it in order to find the answer to the question. If you want to know more, you can check out the definitions of 'affix' (linked by a dash) and 'clitic' (linked by an equal sign) on LIDO.
Example 1)
| ke= mnyim | maqat | n= ama= gata |
| he= looks | around | among= the= basket |
| he looks around among the baskets. | ||
Example 2)
| kua | qa= rar | ama= gam -ga |
| QUESTION | he= takes | the= fruit -singular.masculine |
| should he take one fruit… | ||
Example 3)
| de= qua | qa= rar | ama= gata -qi | se= nas |
| and= QUESTION | he= takes | the= basket -singular.feminine | with= self |
| …or should he take the whole basket? | |||
Example 4)
| de= qa= rar | ama= gam | ama= depguas | na= nget |
| and= he= takes | the= fruit | the= three | from= them |
| and he takes fruits, three of them | |||
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What are the Qaqet words for 'basket', 'baskets', 'fruit' and 'fruits'?
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Conclusion
… so it seems, instead of adding MORE language when there are MORE fruits or baskets, Qaqet is doing the exact opposite. This is a very rare feature in the languages of the world and makes Qaqet very special.