Classes 5 and 6: the 'miscellaneous' class

Gender 5/6 (prefixes Ø in singular / ma- in plural) is semantically the most heterogeneous class. You'll find:

• Objects: gari (car), gato (cake)
• Fruits and plants: trovi (banana)
• Paired body parts: dzitso (eye), kio (ear)
• Irregular kinship terms: koko (grandmother)
• And above all: the majority of recent French loanwords (gari, gato, dukutera, shofera…)

It's also the easiest class to spot in the plural: the ma- prefix stands out.

In the singular, many class-5 nouns have no visible prefix: you say gari, gato, bega — nothing in front. This is called a zero prefix (noted Ø).

It can trick you. When you see a word without an obvious prefix, two possibilities:

• Class 5 (Ø in sg, ma- in pl) → test the plural: if it's ma-, confirmed
• Class 9 (Ø in sg, Ø in pl) → if the plural is identical to the singular, confirmed

The difference shows up in the plural. That's why learning a Bantu noun means learning the sg/pl pair — not just the isolated form.

When shikomori absorbed French words in the colonial era (gari, gato, dukutera…), they had to be assigned a noun class. Classes 1/2 and 3/4 have too marked a sg prefix (m-) — a loanword would look weird with an added m-. Solution: class 5, whose sg prefix is zero, takes loanwords as is with no graphic modification.

The plural is then built mechanically with ma-: gari → magari, dukutera → madukutera. Elegant.

Notable irregularities: shofera → mazofera (not mashofera), polisi → mapvolisi (pv stands for the [β] sound, written v̄ in the Mahoran booklet: mav̄olisi). These are phonetic assimilations or contaminations from other classes.

Lesson 3.6 explores classes 7/8 — the class of tools, everyday objects, and crucially language names. That's where you learn why shimaore, shingazidja, shindzuani, shimwali all start with shi-.