ÜNİTE BİR The Chuvash noun; gender; plural.

UNIT ONE
The Chuvash noun; gender; plural.


The Chuvash Noun

A Chuvash noun or nominal may be used in different functions, that is, at the same time belong to several subclasses, as adjective, adverb, and so on. Let us begin by learning some Chuvash nominals, which, like all illustrative vocabulary items, the student should memorize and review as necessary.

tinĕş	sea
atte	father
pichche	brother
yvăl	son
văkăr	bull
taka	ram
chăvash	Chuvash
epir	we
pürt	house
ikkĕ	two
anne	mother
akka	sister
hĕr	girl, daughter
arăm	woman, lady
ĕne	cow
lasha	horse
etem	man, mankind
kartă	map

As one can see, these few words include many kinds of objects, persons, animals, things. In fact, just because nominals denote persons or places does not place them in any special subclass, for instance

 Atăl  Volga
 chăvash  Chuvash
 Kavkaz  Caucasus
 Shupashkar Cheboxary
 Petĕr  Peter
 Mars  Mars
 ujăx  moon, Moon
 oktjabr" October 
 husan  Kazan
 Ivan  Ivan, John

Later, we shall find it convenient to put into subclasses such collections of forms as pronominals (epĕ, I; esĕ, you, etc.), kam who, mĕn what; numerals, adjectives, and others. Although all these are essentially nominals, they have small differences which set them apart from nouns of the sort above.



Gender

Unlike some European languages, Chuvash does not assign a real or arbitrary gender to its nominals (including pronouns, adjectives, etc.). All such words exist in one unvarying form, a fact which makes the learning of Chuvash easier.

The only gender possessed by the word is that inherent in its meaning, if it denotes a specific kind of male or female being. No particular changes or endings are required because of the gender of any word in the sentence. Thus the question of gender is really nonexistent.

If it is necessary to denote a male being as opposed to a female being, morphemes like aşa "male" or ama "female" are added, for animals, and for humans, words like ar "man" or hĕr "girl".

 ar  man, male  arăm  woman
 aşa sysna  boar   ama sysna  sow
 aşa hur  gander    ama hur  goose
 văkăr   bull    ĕne   cow



 yvăl acha  son, "boy-child"
 xĕracha   daughter, "girl-child"
 arşin (< ar + şyn) man, male person
 patsha   king, czar
 xĕrarăm patsha  queen, princess ("lady-king")

Terms of relationship have inherent gender, as do some animal names.

 atte father  anne mother
 pichche brother  akka sister

Plural

In contrast to some other languages in which there are a number of ways to form the plural, and which cannot be predicted but must be learned, Chuvash has only one way to form the plural, which is good for all nominals at all times and places. What is more, the plural is little used in those places where the student might expect. Chuvash once had many plural forms, and a discussion of them may be found elsewhere (0. Pritsak, “Tschuwassische Pluralsuffixe,“ Studia Altaica, Wiesbaden, 1957, pp. 137-155).

The singular number in Chuvash means not only one item from that class, it also means the entire class of that item. The plural is used only for denoting a collection of individual items from the class. Chuvash never expresses the plural in general statements (as “Children are a joy; flowers are beautiful; applies are good to eat,“ etc.). The sense for the plural is highly developed in English and European languages, so that we feel that to say “ten man, three mouse, two door“ is quite impossible, and only in a few expressions of measure do we find “a two-man raft, a ten-foot pole, a Live mile trip.“ In Chuvash, however, the plural is never, or at least rarely, used after a numeral, or quantity word hence:

 şirĕm sĕtel twenty table twenty tables
 numaj şyn many man many a man, many people
 pilĕk pürt five house five houses

The presence of the number or quantity word is sufficient to indicate plurality to a Chuvash speaker.

The plural in Chuvash is mostly used to indicate the presence of a number of items in the class of things denoted by the word involved, but not the entire class itself. The plural morpheme in Chuvash is /-sem/, and it is added directly to the preceding morpheme.

 ulma  apple
 ulmisem  ‘their different apples‘ (actually a
   possessive here, but the prin ciple is unchanged),
   that is, those apples which each person has in
   his or her hand just now, but not apples in general

 vută  firewood, kindling
 vuttisem the pieces of firewood, taken as  individual objects,
   not as a whole (also possessive)

 şem"je  family
 şem"jisem the members of one‘s family
 pürt  house, hut
 pürtsem  houses, a number of individual houses somewhere,
   but not houses as a class
 shuhăshsem thoughts (on different subjects)
 Ivanovsem the Ivanoffs, members of the   Ivanoff family
 kahalsem the lazybones‘ and his family  (folktales)

As in English and some other languages, some Chuvash words do not have logical plurals (the so-called ‘mass nouns,‘ like water, milk, love), or are but rarely used in plural form.

 telei  happiness
 shyv  water
 shyvsem  waters (of the earth), rivers and lakes

In Russian, a few words of foreign origin ending in a vowel do not take any declensional endings. When these words occur as loanwords into Chuvash, however, they become subject to Chuvash plurals and endings.

 pal"to  overcoat pal"tosem overcoats
 kenguru  kangaroo kengurusem kangaroos

Two features, which both anticipate later discussion, will be briefly mentioned here. As mentioned, nearly all inflectional morphemes in Chuvash have two forms, one used with front vowels /e, ĕ‚ i, ü/ and one used with back vowels /a, ă‚ i, y, u/. This pervades the entire Chuvash language, and is also characteristic of other Altaic languages as well. The Chuvash plural morpheme /-sem/ does not observe this difference in the formal written language. The spoken dialects (especially of the northern region) do employ [sam] with back vowel words, and [sem] with front vowel words.

The plural morpheme in Chuvash is placed after any other preceding suffixes, as possessive morphemes (to be learned later), whereas in all other Turkic languages, the plural morpheme follows the root morpheme, and then any possessive or other morphemes are added.