Talk:Somali grammar

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Somalia

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Trouble from No Sources[edit]

The article, however near to right it may be, in not encyclopedic.
Some such as the examples of focus (strangely involving John) has been moved from WP "Somali language". The definite article ending "-i" is mentioned with no explanation of its use. Verb conjugating is listed repetitively although endings for different persons have a stability. The various conjugations of verbs are hardly mentioned except for a reference to "a very small number" which retain an "archaic" conjugation. Is there evidence that it is archaic? Is the very small number five? A few linguists and thousands of Somalis know and millions of the latter with no formal grammar training could count if asked. Tone, very important grammatically, maybe as Somali was purely a spoken language until a generation ago, is mentioned but not explained, though there are unexplained accents just on two "af"s.--SilasW (talk) 23:08, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have added a short bibliography (section 2). I wrote a M.A. thesis on a topic in Somali syntax about 15 years ago, and these were the principal titles I found at that time, plus a few more recent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.49.128.29 (talk) 00:35, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Linguistics[edit]

As a linguist, I find this article very hard to understand. Some examples: "Thus, the words baa, ayaa, and waxaa unconsciously raise the question of who went out? Therefore the noun." I don't know what it would mean to *unconsciously* raise a question, and the noun would presumably be there anyway--the particle doesn't seem to be responsible for the noun being there.

"Affixes change according to a number of rules." Maybe, but what kind of rule? Phonological? Suppletive allomorphy?

"In this case, the article maintains the vowel -a." I think what it's saying is that the absolutive suffix is -a. BTW, what is the absolutive case used for? Is Somali a nominative-absolutive language?

"Past continuous is formed with the infix -na / -ay and the past tense endings: keen+ay+ey = keenayey" At least in this example, -ay appears to be a suffix (it happens to appear in the slot before the -ey suffix, but that doesn't make it an infix). Also, what determines which of these two affixes a verb takes?

"Gender is not marked in nouns without the definite article.... Nouns have different tonal markings for number, gender (masculine and feminine)..." These appear to be contradictory, unless the latter sentence means they are marked for gender if they have a definite article. This should be clarified. Mcswell (talk) 00:08, 31 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]