Lesson 5 - Nouns: Number.

[Walas00]

For this lesson use http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Na'vi/Nouns as an additional source of knowledge.

Words used:
Tsmukan - brother
Nari - eye

Noun - a word defining a person or an object ([a] cat, car, dog, person, life, freedom, food etc.)

Na'vi have some important prefixes for nouns. We need to know them to continue our study. Those prefixes include "number, gender, and case".
Which is - how many of this object we want to describe? What gender is it ? (Gender is optional, used very rarely) And what's the object's role in the sentence (is it an object that something happened to, is it something we want to give something, etc.).

In this lesson I will cover "number" of nouns.

There are three prefixes marking the number of a noun.
1 - (no prefix) - tsmukan - singular
2 - me+ - mesmukan - dual
3 - pxe+ - pxesmukan - trial
plural - ay+, + - aysmukan , smukan - plural

Plural means that the number is unknown. In that case we can use a prefix ay with lenition or just do the lenition.
So smukan = aysmukan.

As you might have noticed all number prefixes cause lenition.
Yup, please refeer to the previous lesson for the lenition table.
Again, the most important number prefix to remember from this lesson is ay+.

In case of numbers with nouns there is an additional logical rule.
Since ikrans have only two eyes, you can't say that an ikran have eyes, you should say it has two eyes.
In this case: aynari - menari
This is pure logical case. We don't have to worry about it.

NOTE
This is not the way you say exactly how many objects are somewhere.
In English you can say that there is a "brother", and there are "brothers".
In Na'vi you can additionaly say that more like : "duobrothers" and "triobrothers" (the point is you don't use the exact word "two" or "three").

Numbers are a separate case (like 42 brothers).

So don't worry, for now you can only say 1, 2, 3, or unknown number of brothers

Here's an execrcise:
Translate to Na'vi: Goodbye brothers (remember about lenition!)
Answer (select): Kiyevame smuk (not 100% right, but if your translation looks like this - you did it good!)

Quick-link To Lesson 6- http://www.tree-of-souls.com/navi_la...e_you_him.html