Men, babies and Noun Classes

Got your attention? hehe

Its raining here...again. And the sky sounds like its hungry. Its been grumbling for hours.

I know you are dying to know how my language lesson went today... so I'll cut the suspense. Im proud to announce that after 2 hours of brain pain, according to my 'word log' I am now familar with 16 nouns and 4 verbs.

This is a man. This is a baby. This is a goat.

Where is the goat? (I point to my drawing of a goat) Where is the man? (again, I point)

The baby is sleeping. The man is walking....

which all sounds really easy doesn't it? Until I tell you that the first line actually sounds (well looks- for your benefit) like:

Awa jwamule. Aju mwanache. Aji mbusi.

notice something horrid? Of course you do- you notice that the 'this is' part of the sentence (first bit) changes for each noun! AAAAAHH

After 2 rather enjoyable hours of pointing at pictures with Mama Swabila, I watched an introduction to Yawo grammar DVD and discovered something very ... daunting :)

the Yawo people (surprise!) order their reality differently to the english language. They have over 10 differnt noun classes that have their own set of prefixes, suffixes and ways of being morphed into plurals.

Its like walking into Kmart. As department store shoppers, we know that you have to walk through the mens wear section to get to the 'fun' electrical gadgets, and through the womens wear section to get to the 'housey' electrical gadgets. They are all gadgets- but we have a standard way of spiltting them up. Same with every object/thing in the Yawo language. It belongs to a group. Its got friends. So, all the peopley relational nouns are together (like chief and uncle) and all the abstract ones in another group (like ignorance and life), then you get a group that seems to be comprised of things that have length (like rope, river and neck)...the other ones...are a bit beyond me- like goat chicken and bicycle...and you go ahah- thats things that move! but the next category has birds, trees and toilets in it?!!! Guess I'll know Im Yawo when I intuitively 'get it'. Until then...where is the goat?