nña

See also: nna, NNA, -nna, -nña, nnâ, nn'â, nn'a, and n̄na

Ye'kwana

Etymology

From Proto-Cariban *apina. Compare Trió anja, Wayana emna, Waiwai amna.

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): [nɲa]

Pronoun

nña

the first-person exclusive dual pronoun; he and I, she and I, it and I
the first-person exclusive plural pronoun; they and I, we (exclusive)

Usage notes

While most personal pronouns are optional in contexts where nouns, verbs, and postpositions already have personal prefixes, nña is obligatory, as there is no such prefix unique to the first-person exclusive dual; it normally uses third-person prefixes instead, but, in portmanteau prefixes indicating both a second-person and first-person(-dual-exclusive) agent and patient, it instead uses prefixes indistinguishable from those used with the first person.

Hall gives this as both the first-person exclusive dual and plural pronoun, whereas Cáceres initially claims that there is no first-person exclusive plural pronoun, but later contrarily provides nña as the first-person exclusive pronoun used with plural verb forms in her conjugation charts.

Verbs agreeing with this pronoun take singular agreement when the pronoun’s meaning is dual and (following the conjugation charts in Cáceres 2011) plural agreement when plural.

Inflection

Ye'kwana personal pronouns

	singular	dual	plural
first person exclusive	ewü,^Y üwü^D	nña	nña
first person inclusive	—	küwü	künwanno
second person	amödö,^Y ömödö^D	—	önwanno
third person	tüwü	—	tünwanno
Y. Caura River dialect. D. Cunucunuma River dialect.

References

Cáceres, Natalia (2011) “nña”, in Grammaire Fonctionnelle-Typologique du Ye’kwana‎^[1], Lyon, pages 120–122, 195–196, 330–332
Hall, Katherine Lee (1988) The morphosyntax of discourse in De'kwana Carib, volumes I and II, Saint Louis, Missouri: PhD Thesis, Washington University, page 282
Hall, Katherine (2007) “nɲa”, in Mary Ritchie Key & Bernard Comrie, editors, The Intercontinental Dictionary Series‎^[2], Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, published 2021
Meira, Sérgio (2002) “A first comparison of pronominal and demonstrative systems in the Cariban language family”, in Mily Crevels, Simon van de Kerke, Sergio Meira and Hein van der Voort, editors, Current Studies on South American Languages‎^[3], Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and American Studies (CNWS), Leiden University, →ISBN, pages 255–275