The Papuan language Burmeso has what is possibly the most perverse system of noun classes I have ever seen (
Donohue 2001, Foley 2018). To start us off, there are six classes:
I: Masculine and general animate; largest class (‘contains almost half of all nouns’)
II: Feminine
III: Miscellaneous (‘containing nouns for body parts, insects and lizards, many aspects of material culture like axes and canoes, some foods, and many natural phenomena’)
IV: Body parts, mass nouns (including e.g. ‘head’, ‘sun’)
V: Sago trees and bananas only
VI: Arrows, coconuts and rice only
You may think that this system might be just a
teensy bit on the lopsided side. Yet this is just the beginning! To continue, the verb agrees in noun class with its absolutive argument. Matching the six noun classes, there are six agreement markers:
j-,
g-,
s-,
b-,
n-,
t-. Now, at this point, you might be tempted into thinking that each noun class is marked with one of these prefixes. Do not be fooled! Such a crude system is clearly not nearly suitable enough for the refined linguistic tastes of the Burmeso people. Instead, they use the following rather more linguistically interesting system:
- burmeso agreement.png (11.71 KiB) Viewed 13809 times
…yep, Burmeso halves its effective agreement marker inventory by separating verbs into two classes, then makes those three agreement markers stretch to six noun classes! The verbal classes, you will no doubt be pleased to hear, are lexically determined, with no particular regularity. Thankfully, the two sets at least have the same patterns, with
j-,
g-,
s- in A corresponding to
b-,
n-,
t- with B. Oh, and I should probably mention that pronouns agree using
exactly the same markers; as Foley says, ‘first person is treated like a feminine noun, while second person like a masculine one’. Possessive prefixes, too, use the same markers:
g- for first person singular,
j- for second and third person singular, and
s- for non-singular.
Ah, but this is not the end of the story! For Burmeso also has a cross-cutting
gender system, marked on adjectives (except for the ones which don’t agree at all, and the ones which agree in number only, and the three which agree in both gender and noun class, as well as attributive verbs, which also agree in both gender and noun class). There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. ‘A-ha!’, I hear you cry, ‘but surely masculine and feminine genders line up with noun classes I and II!’. I am sorry to say, but this is not so, though there is a tendency to correlation. Additionally, each gender is divided into two sub-classes, so Burmeso actually has six genders: M1, M2, F1, F2, N1 and N2. Gender agreement on adjectives is via seven suffixes:
-ab,
-an,
-o(ra),
-od,
-od(o),
-or,
-or(o). Yet, despite having more suffixes than genders, the system somehow
still manages to be underspecified. In the singular, the sub-groups are merged:
M1/2:
-ab
F1/2:
-an
N1/2:
-o(ra)
And in the plural, the main groups are merged, except for neuter:
M/F1:
-od(o)
M/F2:
-or
N1:
-od
N2:
-or(o)
.