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This article describes the Grammar of Tigrinya, a South Semitic language which is spoken primarily in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and is written in Ge'ez script. Simple present ==Gender== Like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Tigrinya has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, and all nouns belong to either one or the other. Grammatical gender in Tigrinya enters into the grammar in the following ways: *Verbs agree with their subjects in gender (unless the subject is first person). *Second and third person personal pronouns (''you'', ''he'', ''she'', ''they'', etc. in English) are distinguished by gender. *Adjectives and determiners agree with the nouns they modify in gender. Some noun pairs for people distinguish masculine and feminine by their endings, with the feminine signaled by ''t''. These include agent nouns derived from verbs — ከፈተ ''käfätä'' 'open', ከፋቲ ''käfati'' 'opener (m.)', ከፋቲት ''käfatit'' 'opener (f.)' — and nouns for nationalities or natives of particular regions — ትግራዋይ (unicode:''t́ǝgraway'') 'Tigrean (m.)', ትግራወይቲ (unicode:''t́ǝgrawäyti'') 'Tigrean (f.)'. Grammatical gender normally agrees with biological gender for people and animals; thus nouns such as ኣቦ ''’abbo'' 'father', ወዲ ''wäddi'' 'son, boy', and ብዕራይ (unicode:''bǝ‘ǝray'') 'ox' are masculine, while nouns such as ኣደ ''addä'' 'mother', ጓል ''(unicode:gʷal)'' 'daughter, girl', and ላም ''lam'' or ላሕሚ ''lah.mi'' 'cow' are feminine. However, most names for animals do not specify biological gender, and the words ተባዕታይ ''täba‘tay'' 'male' and ኣንስተይቲ ''(unicode:anǝstäyti)'' must be placed before the nouns if the gender is to be indicated. The gender of most inanimate nouns is not predictable from the form or the meaning. Grammars sometimes disagree on the genders of particular nouns; for example, ጸሓይ (unicode:''ṣäḥay'') 'sun' is masculine according to Leslau,〔Leslau, Wolf (1941) ''Documents Tigrigna (Éthiopien Septentrional): Grammaire et Textes''. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck.〕 feminine according to Amanuel.〔Amanuel Sahle (1998) (unicode:''Säwasǝw Tǝgrǝñña bǝsäffiw''). Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press. ISBN 1-56902-096-5〕 This disagreement seems to be due to dialectal differences. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tigrinya grammar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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