Afaan Oromoo is what is a called a marked nominative language. Marked nominative is when a word is the “doer” of the sentence’s verb that word is marked compared to its normal form. What this means is that if you ask someone what the word for coffee is, they will say buna but if you are using the word in a sentence like
Is there coffee?- Bunni jiraa?
You will see the word buna has changed into the word bunni. This shows that coffee is the subject of the sentence or the “doer” of the sentence verb. There are about five ways that the nominative is formed from the accusative. In the future, I may go through the different ways that this happens and work through more example sentences to demonstrate that. Today I will briefly go through the different ways that the nominative is formed and give some word examples of that.
| accusative | nominative |
| nama | namni |
| buna | bunni |
| arba | arbi |
| aduu | aduun |
| afaan | afaan |
| haadha | haati |
| intala | intalli |
If you look through the list you can see that the different ways that people change the accusative into the nominative are -ni, -i, -n, -∅, ti. In the next day or two, hopefully I will be able to expand on the different ways that the case system are used in these situations.
Afan Oromo by Abebe Bulto
In this week’s book Afan Oromo by Abebe Bulto, this comes up on page 23. Here an odd way of explaining this happens. The examples, “Sareen kee guddaa dha.” and “Maqaan ishee Haimanot dha.” are given and it is explained that the –n is added to the nouns saree and maqaa to “show its specificity, like a definite article.” At the same time the example “Mannii isaa baredaa dha.” is given without any comment, but the noun mana has been changed to mannii. These are not the equivalent of a definite article (there is a better equivalent to a definite article but it is not used as frequently as in English), but are considered the nominative form of the noun within the case system of afaan Oromoo.