Noun classes, a brief introduction

For more clearer reference, I'll label posts by language. It may be easier to write about grammar, vocabulary, and syntax in a single tongue, rather than reflecting on the differences between the three. So this post is specifically about Bemba.

Noun Classes and Concord

Bantu languages are described as noun-centered, the noun occupying the primary focus of the sentence or phrase. Because there is no verb conjugation, but instead verb construction, the noun classes tend to be the most difficult part of the language. I still struggle with them.

A class is a group of nouns which share a common prefix and are related in some ways, with significant exceptions. Different authors will disagree in how nouns are grouped, as well. Whereas verbs have agreement, nouns have concord - in the case of Bantu languages, all words related to the noun will adopt a prefix in agreement (or concord). For some in-depth linguistic analysis of this, see Multiple Agreement, Concord and Case Checking in Bantu by Brent Henderson.

An example of concord:

Umuntu mutali uleya ku mushi.
The tall man (umuntu) is going to the village.

Compare with:

Iconi citali cileya ku mushi.
The tall bird (iconi) is going to the village.

I like to think of noun classes and concord as endowing Bantu languages with a type of reverse rhyming system - the entire sentence is changed with the simple change of the noun (a change which would be simple in English, but is demonstrably more significant in Bemba).

Different grammar analyses have different approaches to grouping and categorizing the noun classes. I'll adopt Mann's because it is perhaps the most straightforward, grouping classes by their plurals (each class has a distinct plural form). In this system, there are 9 noun classes. The format I learnt involved 18 noun classes, but included the annoying feature of referencing other classes for plural (for example all ci- nouns become fi- in plural, while li-, ku-, and bu- all turn into ma-, while n- has no separate plural).

Here's the always daunting noun class. I'll attempt to break it down in future posts.

Please note noun prefixes add a vowel when at the beginning of the sentence (mu- becomes umu-, ka- becomes aka-, with the exception of n-, which stays the same). For brevity's sake, I'll keep the prefixes in their short form.

Class	Singular	Plural
1	mu	ba
2	mu	mi
3	n, lu	n
4	ci	fi
5	li, ku, bu, lu	ma
6	ka	tu
7	bu	bu
8	ku	ku
9	ku, mu, pa	ku, mu, pa

Overwhelming of course, and it gets worse, when adjective and verb concords are added, with the very hazy  definitions of what words belong in each noun class. But this is a brief introduction, and I'll leave it at that.

Sources
Mann, Michael. An Outline of Icibemba Grammar. Lusaka, Zambia: Bookworld Publishers. 1977.