Grammar
Nama has a subject–object–verb word order and has three gender classes: male, female and neuter. Male and female nouns have a singular, dual and plural; while neuter nouns only have singular and plural number.
| singular | dual | plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female | piris | pirira | piridi | goat |
| Male | arib | arikha | arigu | dog |
| Neuter | khoe-i | n/a | khoen | people |
Khoekhoe distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive 1st person plural pronouns. Sida is the exclusive form for we, it only includes a specific group; as opposed to sada, which is inclusive and refers to all.
Read more about this topic: Khoekhoe Language
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“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
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“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)