Sunday 27 December, 2009

First person references..

All first person references in Kannada begin with one of न or ना.
Sample these:

naanu (नानू) - mein (Example: naanu Avinash).
naawu (नावु) - hum (Example: naawu Indians [Hint: naawu = we]).
nan- (नन-) - mEra (Example: nan mobile)
nam- (नम-) - humaara (Example: idu Bhaarata dEsha. Bhaarata nam dESha. idu namdu)

nan- has a little hyphen because it could be extended with a -du or -gay. We encountered
the -gay suffix here. Similar is the case with nam-.

idu is a rough translation of 'yEh' as applied to non-living things.
So, idu nandu means 'yEh mEra' (hai).

The (hai) above is in brackets since while adding this word in Hindi is commonplace, Kannada
has no such custom. If you'd force me to give you the exact translation for 'yEh mEra hai' (referring to something, not someone), I'd give you: idu nandu ide. And ide stands for the same exact meaning in Hindi: 'hai'.

While 'yEh mEra hai' is strictly incomplete as it could be a someone or something,
idu nandu is always used to mean something.

So, how do you denote something like humaara-waale?
A translation without an explanation would arrive at namm-avaru.
But this new word - namm-avaru - meanders straight into the bailiwick of the third person.
A little patience - we'll get to that eventually.

In this post, we were introduced to the -gay suffix. Applying this suffix to the 'na-' words
we encountered so far:

nan-gay (mEre-ko)
nam-gay (hum-ko)

Recall from this post that interrogatory words in Kannada begin with the 'y-' sound.
nan-gay yEnu? = mEre-ko kya?
naanu yaaru? = mein kaun?
naavu yaaru? = you tell me!
naanu yelli? = you tell me!