Lesson 7 - Nouns: Gender, Or "Male and Female".

[Txonä Tìranyu]

Originally Posted by Walas00

Sometimes we might want to say brother, but what if we want to say sister?
We would have to just change the gender, right?
Since Na'vi does not define genders for nouns (as in German, where all nouns have a gender) this is just some minor and additional information, use it only when you totaly have to.

Let's check out wikibooks page LINK

Masculine (male/man) -an
Feminine (female/woman) -e
(recall the lenition lesson - here we have suffixes with an "-" sign. That informs us that there is no lenition when the suffix is applied)

Let's examine a word that we already know, and which has a gender:
Tsmukan - Brother
Tsmuk-an
"Sibling"-MALE
(if you're not English use translate.google.com to translate word you don't understand)

Let's try to create a word "sister".
Tsmuk-e Tsmuke
"Sibling"-FEMALE
Sister

Important pronouncing note
I did not mention this before, but this is a good opportunity to explain it.
When a suffix is added, you stress it's only vowel. (the only exception are infixes which have not yet been introduced)

On Wikibooks you might notice something like this:
túte - person
It doesn't mean anything else than "stress the u letter", as in "read it like : tuuuute"
According to the note above the stress should change if we add a suffix
tute-an - tután - male person
(remember that á here also means "stress the a letter, as in "read it like: tuteaaaan")
(also "e" disappeared here, appearantly when adding a suffix, and there are two vowels meeting, you remove the one which is not in the prefix, so ABCA-EB would be ABCEB - removed last A)

You might be wondering what if we want to make a female person word?
tute-e - tuté - female person

Where did the suffix go?
It is there.
If after adding a suffix/prefix/infix there is a case where two similar (like i and ì) letters are next to eachother, get rid of one of them, so there is only one letter left.

So instead of writing tutee we get rid of one e, and get tute, and also we remember about the first rule about stressing the vowel in a suffix, and it's done!
When speaking it's very important to stress the right vowel in a word. Word tute can mean person and female person, so the reciever of our message might we a bit confused. When writing you should mark the stressed vowel in this case (túte - person ; tuté - female person)

New words:
tute - person

Excercises:
Translate an english word to Na'vi, select all text (CTRL+A) to get the correct answers (next to the words):
Sister - tute (tute-e, "person"-FEMALE)
Brothers - tutan/aytutan (ay+tute-an, PLURAL+"person"-MALE - remember about the "ay+" prefix (no lenition needed here) for plural (unknown number of objects, just many), you can also use the "+" prefix only (only lenition))
twin brothers - metutean (me+tute-an, DOUBLE+"person"-MALE - here we use the "me+" prefix for "two")

Quick-link To Lesson 8- http://www.tree-of-souls.com/navi_la...bject_and.html

hey forgive me if im wrong but shouldnt there be Lenition on the "two brothers" translation? (me+tute-an= mesutean) ??