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nña. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
nña, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
nña in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
nña you have here. The definition of the word
nña will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition of
nña, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
Ye'kwana
Etymology
From Proto-Cariban *apina. Compare Trió anja, Wayana emna, Waiwai amna.
Pronunciation
Pronoun
nña
- the first-person exclusive dual pronoun; he and I, she and I, it and I.
- the first-person exclusive plural pronoun; they and I, we (exclusive).
Usage notes
While most personal pronouns are optional in contexts where nouns, verbs, and postpositions already have personal prefixes, nña is obligatory, as there is no such prefix unique to the first-person exclusive dual; it normally uses third-person prefixes instead, but, in portmanteau prefixes indicating both a second-person and first-person(-dual-exclusive) agent and patient, it instead uses prefixes indistinguishable from those used with the first person.
Hall gives this as both the first-person exclusive dual and plural pronoun, whereas Cáceres initially claims that there is no first-person exclusive plural pronoun, but later contrarily provides nña as the first-person exclusive pronoun used with plural verb forms in her conjugation charts.
Verbs agreeing with this pronoun take singular agreement when the pronoun’s meaning is dual and (following the conjugation charts in Cáceres 2011) plural agreement when plural.
Inflection
Ye'kwana personal pronouns
References
- Cáceres, Natalia (2011) “nña”, in Grammaire Fonctionnelle-Typologique du Ye’kwana, Lyon, pages 120–122, 195–196, 330–332
- Hall, Katherine Lee (1988) “”, in The morphosyntax of discourse in De'kwana Carib, volumes I and II, Saint Louis, Missouri: PhD Thesis, Washington University, page 282
- Hall, Katherine (2007) “nɲa”, in Mary Ritchie Key & Bernard Comrie, editors, The Intercontinental Dictionary Series, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, published 2021
- Meira, Sérgio (2002) “A first comparison of pronominal and demonstrative systems in the Cariban language family”, in Mily Crevels, Simon van de Kerke, Sergio Meira and Hein van der Voort, editors, Current Studies on South American Languages, Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and American Studies (CNWS), Leiden University, →ISBN, pages 255–275