Classes 9 and 10: animals, modern loanwords

Quirk of classes 9 and 10: their prefix is N- (realised as a pre-nasal: m-, n-, ng-, ndj-, etc.) — and that prefix is often fused with the root or even invisible.

Consequence: singular and plural are identical in most cases. Nyumba can mean « a house » or « houses » depending on context.

This class contains:

• Many animals (goat, bird, monkey)
• Concrete objects (clothing, house)
• Many colonial-era French loanwords (taksi, lapitali, likoli)

The class-9 N- prefix is a fascinating linguistic case: it adapts to the following consonant, obeying Bantu phonetic assimilation rules.

• Before ɓ → *mɓuzi* (pre-nasal mɓ)
• Before g → *nguo*
• Before k → *nkima*
• Before dj → *ndjema*
• Before a vowel or some loanwords → invisible: nyumba, taksi, lapitali

That's why so many words start with pre-nasals in M1.7: half of them are in class 9, and their initial n- is a class prefix, not part of the root.

Classes 5 and 9 share an often-zero singular prefix: gari (cl. 5) and taksi (cl. 9) have nothing visible up front.

The difference shows in the plural:

• Class 5/6: plural in ma- → gari → magari (different)
• Class 9/10: plural identical to singular → taksi → taksi (same)

Practical method: for an older loanword (19th c., early 20th — well integrated), it usually migrated to class 5 and has a ma- plural. For a more recent loanword (mid 20th c. onwards), it stayed in class 9 and is invariable.

That's why gari (« car » from the 1880s, via swahili) has a plural but taksi (20th c.) doesn't.

Lesson 3.8 closes Module 3 with class 15 — that of verbal infinitives (the « to eat », the « to read », the « to see »). It has no plural and its prefix varies by dialect: hu- in Ngazidja/Ndzuani, u- in Maore.