Thursday is noun class day in my developing routine to post on African indigenous languages throughout the year. I mentioned in my first post on noun classes last week that in many Atlantic languages, nouns are not assigned a gender, but rather, nouns are created from semantically general roots through the combination with multiple noun class markers, and that the meaning carried by noun class marker adds a concrete meaning component that gives rise to a noun. Consider the noun class prefixes bu- and i- in Gujaher, spoken in Southern Senegal. These noun class markers, for the singular and plural respectively, carry the meaning ’round, circular’. When combined with roots designing plant matter, the resulting nouns denote fruit or tubers, as in bu-liimo ‘orange’. Bu-diin, literally ’round-rain’ is the word for well or cistern.

Many spherical objects or entities with a circular diameter are realised in this gender, for instance the sun (bu-nëg), and words for round containers (e.g., bu-dux ‘pot for storing drinking water’). The words denoting other concepts related to the meaning of the root are realised in other genders. The word for orange tree, for instance, is created through the combination of the root liimo that we have seen above with the noun class markers for trees and elongated objects (ci‘- in the singular and mun- in the plural). Medicine is often made from plants, and therefore the root han ‘related to medicine’ turns into the lexeme ‘medicine’ when combined with ci’– and mun-. Bu-han, in the circular gender, means ‘medicine pot’. But who knows, maybe with the advent of pills and tablets bu-han ‘circular medicine’ will extend its meaning to denote them as well!