I have been looking at various translation challenges at the CBB today, and I’ve found one that’s nicely suited to showcase a specific feature of noun phrases in Buruya Nzaysa:
“I have bought coffee and tea with milk.”
Does this mean that there was milk only in the tea, or that both the coffee and the tea contained milk? In English, the sentence is ambiguous between these two readings (and possibly other readings too). As it turns out, it’s not ambiguous at all in Buruya Nzaysa.
Let me first sum up some relevant characteristics of Buruya Nzaysa noun phrases. Most significantly, every full NP in the language is required to have a determiner, typically an article. This article marks case, but not number (although there are a few indefinite quantifiers which can be used as determiners if it’s pragmatically significant that there are several instances of the referent involved). Numerals, however, cannot be used as determiners, so they need a separate article to support them:
(All examples are given in the accusative case.)
lu mpɛsa
DEF.ACC fish
“the fish”
(singular or plural)
ɔ mpɛsa
INDEF.ACC fish
“(a) fish”
(singular or plural)
(xa) oba mpɛsa
(this.ACC) many fish
“(these) many fish”
(plural only; note that the determiner is optional)
ɔ ñe mpɛsa
INDEF.ACC two fish
“two fish”
(plural only)
The simplest way to use several nouns at once in a single argument slot is to link them with the conjunction o “and”. Note that each noun needs a separate determiner in this construction:
ɔ ñufɛ o ɔ tsə
INDEF.ACC cat and INDEF.ACC dog
“a cat and a dog” / “cats and dogs”
lu mo o lu naysi
DEF.ACC town and DEF.ACC field
“the city and the countryside”
More than two nouns can be connected in this way:
lu rudɔ o lu musmə o lu rifə
DEF.ACC role_model and DEF.ACC fool and DEF.ACC ugly_person
“the good, the bad, and the ugly”
On a basic syntactic level, the above construction creates several independent noun phrases and conjoins them after the fact. Accordingly, it tends to mean that the referents are all involved in the relevant activity, but each in its own way.
A different way of grouping nouns, which results in a much closer semantic connection between them, is to combine the relevant nouns into a single noun phrase with a single determiner. The individual nouns are still linked with the conjunction o, and the end of the list is marked with a stranded preposition kwə “with”:
(The similarity to the Latin postclitic =que is accidental, but welcome.)
ɔ kwamɛdi o nzuma kwə
INDEF.ACC tea and coffee with.3
“both tea and coffee”
oba naló o bɔ o xɛvra kwə
many horse and ox and sheep with.3
“many horses and oxen and sheep”
(all of them together)
Knowing all this, we can now tackle the abovementioned translation challenge. The mandatory articles and the different ways of grouping noun phrases combine easily to describe the situation unambiguously, and they even enable us to make further distinctions not originally required.
Ɔdeya ɔ nzuma o ɔ kwamɛdi o te’o kwə barɛda.
RES.AUX-1SG>3 INDEF.ACC coffee and INDEF.ACC tea and milk with.3 acquire
“I have bought coffee and tea with milk.”
(There is milk only in the tea.)
There are two noun phrases here: ɔ nzuma “(a) coffee” and ɔ kwamɛdi o te’o kwə “(a) tea with milk”. Because the word for “milk” is very closely connected to the word for “tea” in a kwə-construction, and the word for “coffee” is in a different noun phrase, it is obvious that there is no milk in the coffee.
Ɔdeya ɔ nzuma o te’o kwə o ɔ kwamɛdi o te’o kwə barɛda.
RES.AUX-1SG>3 INDEF.ACC coffee and milk with.3 and INDEF.ACC tea and milk with.3 acquire
“I have bought coffee and tea with milk.”
(Both the coffee and the tea contain milk.)
Now the words o te’o kwə “with milk” are repeated in both noun phrases, making it clear that there is milk in both the coffee and the tea.
Ɔdeya ɔ nzuma o kwamɛdi o te’o kwə barɛda.
RES.AUX-1SG>3 INDEF.ACC coffee and tea and milk with.3 acquire
“I have bought coffee and tea and milk.”
(All three are separate items.)
On the surface, this sentence differs from the first one only in a single phoneme which has been left out, namely the indefinite article ɔ before kwamɛdi “tea”. This minimal difference results in a very different meaning: There is now only a single article in the sentence, and the word for “tea” thus cannot be interpreted as the head of a separate noun phrase anymore. Instead, all three nouns are now part of a single kwə-construction, ɔ nzuma o kwamɛdi o te’o kwə “coffee and tea and milk (together)”. The sentence now indicates that all three beverages are separate items, but were acquired in a single act of buying from a single merchant.
Ɔdeya ɔ nzuma o ɔ kwamɛdi o ɔ te’o barɛda.
RES.AUX-1SG>3 INDEF.ACC coffee and INDEF.ACC tea and INDEF.ACC milk acquire
“I have bought coffee and tea and milk.”
(All three are separate items.)
Finally, here are all three nouns treated independently, each in its own noun phrase, even though they are still linked and all of them still share the same object slot in the argument structure of the verb. Note that the stranded preposition kwə is gone, and that there are now three separate articles. Semantically, this sentence can be interpreted in the same way as the last one, but its meaning is not as precisely restricted. In fact, it carries the connotation that the different drinks were probably bought independently at different times and/or from different people.
tarre = again (adverb) (some things Google found for "tarre": an uncommon term; an uncommon last name; a rare first name that can be feminine; user names; Tarre Heating & Cooling Inc. in western Pennsylvania; in English an obsolete term meaning "to incite, to provoke"; name of a place in Chad)
