Funky Feature Friday: Kiowa Number

[wm.annis]

Once again, here I am today to tell you about some small feature of a natural Human language I found pretty funky.  And once again, I'm picking a Native language of North America, Kiowa.  Kiowa is part of the (slightly) larger Kiowa-Tanoan language family, which has languages in what is now Oklahoma and the pueblos of New Mexico.  The aren't terribly well documented, since the pueblo Tanoan speakers are reluctant — or opposed — to having their language written down and shared with outsiders (unlike, say, the Navajo or Cherokee).

Today's interesting feature is in how this family marks grammatical number (singular, dual and plural).  I'll stick with Kiowa, since it is clearest, but all languages in the family have similar systems.  (Apologies for the transcription — I did my best not to confuse the forum software while producing something readable for non-linguists.)

Every Kiowa noun belongs to one of four noun classes.  Sort of like grammatical gender in European languages, there is no simple semantic pattern in how a word ends up in one class or the other.  A noun must simply be memorized with its class.  What do these classes mean?  Each of the four classes indicates that the base is of a particular number:

• Class I: base noun is singular/dual
  
• Class II: base noun is dual/plural
  
• Class III: base noun is dual
  
• Class IV: base nouns is singular/dual/plural — it won't take other number marking
  

Number marking also happens on the verb, which can clarify the number of the noun.

Where this gets funky is in how you change the number of a noun.  Rather than different markers for singular, dual and plural, Kiowa has a single "inverse" marker, -gáu (with several allophones you'll see below).  So, if you take a class I noun, like tógúl young man, and add the inverse marker, you get tógū-dáu young men.  Similarly, the class II noun aunsó feet, takes the same inverse marker to indicate the singular, auns-ôy foot.  The really funky one for me is class III, which is default dual: álāu is two apples, and the inverse, álāu-bau either apple (singular) or apples (more than two).

For the last tidbit, class III is very small — no more than eight members by one count.  One paper I read gave four: apple, orange, tomato and hair.


Further Reading

The Taos language has a similar system, and the Wikipedia article on it has extensive word lists for each noun class.

[Taronyu]

My apples and tomatoes are remarkably hair like. wait...no.

Thanks! Very cool.

[Tirea Aean]

These FFF posts are fascinating reads. Thanks guys! <found these from following learnnavi on twitter>

[Nyx]

Whoa, this really is funky. The first two classes don't seem all too strange, but I like class III for being so confusing