Lesson 4 - Who does it belong to?
This lesson is about one of the most important things in any language - possessives!
This means how to say 'mine' or 'yours', 'of' etc, whether in a colloquial or ownership sense. It also brings in an idea you might have noticed already: that nouns can affect the words around them.
Let's start with an example in English. Compare the two phrases:
| my mother |
| my hoe |
In English the word 'my' is the same whatever word it is referring to. However in Shona things are a bit different: we would say the above as:
| my mother - amai vangu |
| my hoe - badza rangu |
You can see that the word for 'mine' is almost the same in both phrases: but the start is different. These 'starting letters' are called concords. Each kind, or group, of nouns is Shona has its own concord. Basically, there is no way to avoid simply learning which concords go with which nouns, but the task is not as difficult as it sounds.
Firstly, many nouns have concords which are very similar to the
start of the noun, for instance:
my children - vana vangu
We will see more of this later.
Secondly, nouns in the same group tend to be a similar kind of thing in real life: for instance almost all nouns for people are in the same group, while most plants are in another group. So if you don't know or can't remember the right concord, you can often make a fair guess.
Finally, if you get it wrong people will probably still understand you, and probably be happy to correct you if you ask.
Anyway, once you have the right concord, you have to add it to the right possessive 'stem': like you have already been adding prefixes to noun stems. The stems are:
| My... -ngu | Our... -du |
| Yours... -ko | Yours (plural)... -nyu |
| His/her/its... -ke | Their... -vo |
Putting these into practice, we would get:
| my mother... amai vangu | our mother... amai vedu |
| your mother... amai vako | your (plural) mother... amai venyu |
| his/her mother... amai vake | their mother... amai vavo |
So now we need to learn some concords for the nouns we already know. Altogether in Shona, there are 20 different noun groups, each with their own concord. Luckily this isn't so scary as it seems: some of the groups are not used very regularly, and almost all of the groups go in pairs, where one is the plural of the other. For now I will concentrate on 3 very commonly used noun groups.
In the table below I will put more details than you need to know just now, as they may be helpful for your own further learning. The noun group number is irrelevant for speaking, but useful for looking up grammar books and some dictionaries. The verb concord is added to the start of a verb stem, but I will not deal with this here.
| Group No. | Used for | Concord | Verb concord | Example |
| 1 | People (singular) | wa- | a- | mwana wangu (my child) |
| 2 | Plural of group 1, also respect | va- | va- | vana vako (your children) |
| 3 | Plants (singular) | wa- | u- | muti wake (his tree) |
| 4 | Plural of group 4 | ya- | i- | miriwo yedu (our vegetables) |
| 9 |
Some animals, objects (esp. modern things) |
ya- | i- | mbudzi yavo (their goat) |
| 10 | Plural of group 9 | dza- | dzi- | dzimba dzangu (my houses) |
Here are some more examples:
| Shona | English |
| Amai vangu vanogara Harare | My mother lives in Harare |
| Tiri kudya miriwo yedu | We are eating our vegetables |
| Anoda badza rake | He wants his hoe. |
| BUT: ndiri kuenda kumba kwangu | I'm going home (I'm going to my house). |
In this last case, the 'kw- ' of 'kwangu' goes with the 'ku-' of
'kuenda': another concord which is used sometimes. Its hard to know
when to use it so just listen to people and learn.
| EXERCISE 3: Translate | solutions here (or click ? to see answer) |
1. Mbudzi dzangu.
 |
5. Tatenda is cooking his vegetables.
|
| 2. Vana vedu.
|
6. The girls are going home.
|
| 3. Ndiri kutema miti yavo.
|
7. Can you help my brother?
|
| 4. Edson ari kurima munda wangu. |
8. Where are your (plural) friends? |
