Noun Morphology of Kafi Noono

Abstract

This paper aims at describing noun morphology in Kafi Noonoo (the Kafa language). Kafi Noonoo is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Omotic family. The language is now been reduced to writing and is serving as a medium of instruction, administrative, media, and judiciary tool in the Kafa zone since 2008. The study is made to look into the noun morphology of the language. To achieve this, primary data has been collected from Kafa Zone and analyzed categorically. Nouns in the language generally end in -o/oo in their lexical entry (i.e. in isolation). Few nouns end in - e(e), and few place names that end in -ɑ, and a few in -i. Most proper nouns end in -i. The vowels attached also indicate the gender (-o/ -oo (masculine), -e/ -ee (feminine)) and number (e.g. ɡédʤò ‘lake(s)) of the head noun. Proper names usually end in -i; and morphologically, the prototypical Kafi Noonoo noun inflects for gender, number, and case. Under the noun morphology of Kafi Noonoo, the discussion of proper names, common nouns, derived nouns (of different forms of verbal nouns, abstract nouns, agentive nouns, and result nouns), compounds (resulting in euphemism, verb-manner compounds, language names and compounds with Ɂìndèé ‘mother’ and dòónò ‘lord’) has been discussed. Noun inflection of Kafi Noonoo nouns is also discussed. Thus, it is attested that the language inflects gender (usually masculine and feminine), number (singular and plural; the latter is formed by suffixing -nàʔó), and case. Concerning case, Kafi Noonoo has distinct case marking morphemes which are identified and discussed as follows. Thus, the nominative (appears unmarked), accusative (marked either by the morpheme -n, or by lengthening the final vowel, or it can be found unmarked), vocative (morphologically unmarked), allative (suffixes -wàán ‘to(wards)’ or -máɡ), ablative (expressed by -wàánè or -máɡè ‘from’), dative, locative, genitive (all these three are marked by the suffix -ttʃ), instrumental (expressed by the morpheme -nà), comitative (expressed by -nnà), similative(marked by -òóm), and comparative (marked by -jèè to the compared subject) cases have been identified in Kafi Noonoo.