Appendix:Garo nouns
This page attempts to uncover nouns and nominals found in Garo, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. Garo lacks classification of nouns (e.g no gender, countability, or animacy). However, they are modified in many ways.
The rules below apply to collective nouns as well.
Casing[edit]
Garo has a rich set of available cases. Nouns can be declined in these cases simply by adding specific suffixes to its nominative form (which is the default form of the word).
| Case | Garo suffix | Example with bol (“tree”) | Translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accusative | -ko | Anga bolko nika. | I see the tree. |
| Genitive | -ni | Bolni bijakrang ga·akenga. | The tree's leaves are falling. |
| Dative | -na | Anga bolna chi on·aha. | I watered the tree. (lit. I gave water to the tree) |
| Locative | -o/-chi (or -cha to prevent ambiguity with the instrumental case) | Bolo/Bolchi makre mangbonga ong·a. | There are five monkeys in the tree. |
| Instrumental | -chi | Na·a bolchi nokni bostu dakna man·a | You can create furniture with trees |
| Comitative | -ming | Anga bolming dongaha. | I lived with the tree. |
| Lative | -ona | Bolona anga re·baenga. | I am going to the tree. |
| Ablative | -oni | Boloni anga re·angaha. | I left the tree. |
Note that suffixes can vary across different dialects. For instance, -o is sometimes interpreted as -no in some dialects.
When the nominative form of a noun ends with a vowel or -wa, the suffixes are most of the time replaced with the intended case suffix to decline. E.g do·o and balwa decline into do·ko and balko respectively.
Plurality[edit]
Plurality of a noun in Garo can be indicated with the suffix -rang. For example, mande (“person”) can be converted into manderang (“people”) when plural. There is hardly any irregularity about pluralising nouns in Garo.
Not adding -rang to a word in Garo does not explicitly state that the noun is singular. When singularity has to be explicit, classifiers have to be used.
Nominalisation[edit]
Garo does not support the use of of adjectives. Instead, verbs are nominalised with the suffix -gipa to indicate modification of a noun. -gipa roughly translates to "the thing that". For instance, "big" can be translated as dal·gipa, because dal·a means "be big".