Somali Notes

Notes on Saeed
• Strange sound changes happen.

▫ baabuurro-tii turns into baabuurradii. Is that for vowel
harmony?
▫ naago-kii turns into naagihii.
▫ caano-kii turns into caanihii
Look at this, /k/ turning into /h/!
▫ hablo-kii turns into hablihii (the girls, remote definite
article)
▫ qalin, when pluralized, is qalmaan, or alternately
qalimmo. Both cases feature /n/ to /m/.
• Do you understand the “remote definite article?”
▫ Don’t try to translate it as “that” - that’s a different thing.
• Do you know the declarative marker?
▫ It’s waa , downward accentuation.
• Do you understand “ah” yet?
▫ laba liin ah translates to “two oranges” but it literally
means “two orange be”, or “two which are orange”
• Noun declensions
▫ They’re primarily done phonologically.
▫ And those phonological markers fall into four patterns.
Last mora high, Low elsewhere. (genitive!)
Penultimate mora high, Low elsewhere
Low throughout (nominative often!)
First mora high, low elsewhere. (vocative!)
▫ Note that absolutive case case complicated accentual
tendencies depending on gender, number and other
factors.
▫ In very particular cases, genitive case can include the
suffix -od: hadal naagood (“women’s talk”)
▫ Do you know what the vocative case actually means? It’s
the case invoked by “names and nouns used as forms of
direct address”
Here’s some vocative suffixes for pronoun names:
eey/aay/ooy (these three options depend on the
preceding letter!), ow
Here’s some vocative suffixes for common nouns:
-yahay, -yohow (wow, those are kinda long)
• Here are examples of how nouns’ plurals are formed.

▫ Suffix -o is added, or for a singular ending in -i, the suffix
-yo is added (-iyo)
▫ Final consonant doubling, then adding -o or -yo to that.
▫ Adding the suffix -a (that’s declension 4)
▫ Mere accentual changes.
▫ Adding the suffix -oyin.
Example. Ayeeyo is grandmother, while grandmothers is
ayeeyooyin.
▫ Adding the suffix -yaal (think “horyaal”!)
In this declension pattern, note the following vowel
change.
aabbe “father”; abbayaal “fathers”
• Example sentences:
▫ Waan tegi karaa. I can go.
▫ Waan tegi waayey. I failed to go, I couldn’t go.
▫ Waan tegi gaadhay. I nearly went. (“ to almost do sth.”)
▫ Note that tegi is the infinitive for “to go”.
• Which chapters really matter for now?

▫ Chapter 3 matters a great deal. Explains all kinds of
non-intuitive phonological changes.
▫ Chapter 4 is the core of the whole book. Covers
every different possible grammatical component of a
sentence, be it verbs, focus markers, sentence type
markers, nouns, conjunctions and so on.
▫ Chapter 5 is high-level, so delay it until later; but it would
eventually help you eventually intuit information like
transitivity, nouns of profession, and verbs related to
emotion, but looking at merely the word formation.
▫ Chapter 6 matters. Deals with that pesky and
inscrutable “verbal group”: verb plus possible
adpositions, clitic pronouns, adverbial clitics, and
auxiliary verb constructions and dependent verbs.
▫ Chapter 7 matters a great deal. Sentence type
markers, etc.
▫ Chapter 8 matters for sure, but is too high-level to do
anything more than skim for now.
▫ So it’s settled. This week I will skim chapters 3, 4, 6 and 7
to ensure I’ve taken adequate notes on them.
• Notes on Chapter 3
◦ Strange sound changes result from “lexical or
morphological pressure”.
/t/ and /k/ do not occur in syllable final position.
drag “See!” compare to arkay “I saw” (the k was the
original root, but syllable final position forced upon the /k/
by the imperative form led to /g/)
/m/ does not occur word finally.
laamo “branches” turns to laan “branch” in the singular.
And again, this is because you cannot have “laam”.
Frankly, /m/ cannot exist unless it is followed by
either /b/ or another /m/. (Think “immisa”)
/n/ does not occur syllable finally.
◦ Consonant cluster simplification
This is very simple. Words that would be predicted by the
grammar to end in a geminated consonant, such as
“cabb” (Drink it!), must be simplified to remove one of
the doubled consonant: “cab”.
◦ Restrictions on “V syllables”
What do we mean by V syllable? We mean a syllable that
begins with a vowel.
When adding the clitic “uu” (him) to the negative word
“ma”, we don’t get mauu, but instead we have to add an
epenthetic glottal stop: mu’uu. This is because we want
to avoid CV$V (i.e., a CV consonant with a random other
vowel jammed onto the end).
Similarly, when adding the plural marker -o to the word
“mindi” (knife), we don’t get mindio but rather mindiyo.
On the other hand, this is no concern when pluralizing
woman into women: naag becomes naago (wait, why
not naak and naago?)
Because /k/ is forbidden in syllable final position, as we
reviewed already. Though it may have been the original
syllable from the root, it had to switch to /g/.
Why does “naagokii” (the [remote] women) not allowed
and instead has to become “naagihii”? What rule forces
that metamorphosis?
◦ Stem contraction
CVCVCV gets shortened to CVCCV. Examples include
hilibo (meats) changing to “hilbo”, jirido (“trunks”)
changing to jirdo, “safaray” (I travelled) changing to
safray, ha maqalin (“Don’t listen!”) changing to ha
maqlin, and dadabay “I blocked”) changing to dadbay.
Very useful.
◦ continue from page 27.
• Notes on Chapter 4
◦ The gender of nouns
Gender is generally not predictable from meaning.
Gender polarity (found in many Cushitic languages)
means that when a singular noun becomes plural, its
gender flips from male to female or vice versa.
sannad “year” is male. sannaddo “years” is female. (note
that Arabic has a little hint of this, think kursi M and
kiraasi F.
How do we intuit gender? Three ways.
suffixed determiners (kii male, tii female for example)
subject-verb agreement (-ay male, -tay female in the
past, for example; or compare “yimi” he came vs. “timi”
she came)
agreement with clitic subject pronouns (these are the
things that join onto Sentence Type Marker “waa”, among
other particles, to create wuu vs. way)
• Notes on Chapter 6: How the stuff in Chapter 4 combines

to form phrases. There’s 2 kinds of phrases:
◦ 1st kind of phrase: Verbal groups are verb, adposition,
clitic pronouns, adverbial clitics, auxiliary verb
constructions, dependent verb. Cluster of all that stuff.
Head-final. Meaning the last piece of the verbal group
(the verb…) is the most important.
Here’s the kind of stuff that can precede the verb.
Subject clitic pronoun.
Example: HE told it to him.
Object clitic pronoun “first series”
Example: She brought YOU
Verbal adpositions
Example 1: He told it TO HIM
Example 2: /u/ = for
Venitive (indicates ‘coming’ motion toward a particular
location or person) soo or allative (indicates ‘going’
motion away from a particular location or person) sii
Adverbials wada “together” or kala “apart”
Object clitic pronoun “2nd series”
Here’s some examples of how the verbal group is
ordered.
uu u sheegay. He to told = he told it to him. Takes
some getting used to that the “him” is implied.
ay ku keentay. She you brought.
aannu wada tagnay. We together went.
ay iiga soo iibsatay. She me for from VEN bought. (me
for from = i + u + ka) It certainly requires some practice,
to intuit that iiga traces back to “i-u-ka”. That’s
coalescence for you.
aan kuu soo iibsan lahaa. I you+for VEN buy would.
What does “kuu” arise from? Is it ka + u? Need to
review/learn the object pronouns such as “i” and “ka”.
◦ 2nd kind of phrase: Noun phrases.
◦ continue from page 165
• Chapter 7
◦ Declarative sentences without focus
◦ Verbless declarative sentences.
◦ Declarative sentences with focus
◦ Interrogative sentences
◦ Imperative sentences
◦ Optative sentences
◦ Potential sentences

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Notes on Saeed

• Strange sound changes happen.

• Here are examples of how nouns’ plurals are formed.

• Which chapters really matter for now?

• Notes on Chapter 6: How the stuff in Chapter 4 combines

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