User:Saamflores/sandbox

History
Enga people are known to be sedentary gardeners that grow sweet potatoes as their staple crop. Coffee and pyrethrum are also grown as cash crops in their culture and they also keep pigs, cattle, and fowls. Pigs, pearls, shells, axes, and plumes are items of wealth and signify social occasions when exchanged or circulated. Enga clans have an definite boundaries defining their homesteads across the territory and have been known to fight with each other over land, women, and vengeance. Men and women traditionally occupy different homes because it it believed that women are unclean and can be dangerous to men.

Nouns
Like the English language, Enga nouns use the determiners dóko and méndé as the and a, some, or else respectively.


 * 1) Akáli dóko epe-ly-á-mo.

man  the    come-PRES-3SG-DEC

The man is coming.

2. Akáli méndé epe-ly-á-mo.

man    a     come-PRES-3SG-DEC

A man is coming.

Noun classes in Enga have not been studied in great detail just yet, however it is shown to be based primarily on syntactic features. These classes include animates, pronouns, body parts, inanimates, locationals, events, colors, inner states, and minor classes. Nouns may also be inflected for cases such as agentive AG , instrumental INST, possessive POSS, locative LOC, and temporal. In the chart below it shows the case distribution and the noun classes in relation to one another. Animates can occur in different subclasses such as proper names. Some examples of animates can include takánge (father), endángi (mother), Aluá (a man's name), Pasóne (a woman's name), or mená (pig). All of which would include a determiner being either demonstrative or indefinite and can be with the agentive or possessive cases, but not used instrumentally or locative. Pronouns in the Enga language can easily be identified and can vary from dialects:


 * nambá I
 * émba you
 * baá he, she, it
 * nalímba we two
 * nyalámbo you two
 * dolápo they two
 * náima we plural
 * nyakáma you plural
 * dúpa they plural

These pronouns are similar to animates in that determiners may occur in agentive, and possessive cases, but not used instrumentally or locative. Body parts are in the animate class and can include words like kíngi (arm), pungí (liver), and yanúngí (skin, body). These differ from the previous classes in which they may have a determiner occur either instrumentally or locative, but not in the agentive or possessive cases. Location nouns are used to determine the place. These words can include kákasa (bush), Wápaka (Wabag- a place), or Lakáipa (Lagaipa- a river). This class only uses a determiner in the location case and nothing else. Events are nouns such as

The noun morphology of Enga is an exclusively suffixing language. These suffixes are generally the last member of the noun phrase, being either the determiner or the adjective. This expresses the inflectional categories of the noun such as tense, aspect, person, number, gender or mood. The suffixes can be broken down into two main groups: case suffixes and others. Case suffixes are exclusively expressed in noun and noun phrases while other suffixes can be on either noun and noun phrases or verb and verb phrases. Enga differentiates nouns from noun phrases though the case endings. There are seven different cases in which these are formally marked: associative -pa (only two)/ -pipa (two or more), agentive -me/-mi, instrumental -me/mi, possessive -nya, locative -nya/-sa/-ka, temporal -sa/-nya/-pa, and vocative -oo. Other suffixes, besides case suffixes, are broken into six different categories and occur only on nouns. There is the conjunctive suffix -pi meaning 'and' or 'even', two different suffixes -le meaning 'rather' or -yalé 'like' to indicate similarity, two different suffixes -mba 'very' or an argumentative -mba to indicate emphasis or contrast. These two forms of -mba differ in meaning as well as tone. When it is used in a argumentative sense it is said with a higher tone than previous syllables versus when it is used to emphasize.

Although it includes conjunctive suffixes, Enga does not actually include any conjunction words such as 'and' other than pánde 'or'. Instead those conjunctive suffixes are used to combine the noun or noun phrase with the all the noun phrases and then typically followed by the determiner.

Verbs
The verb morphology of Enga is an incredibly complex concept in the grammar of the language. This is due to the lack of subordinating or coordinating conjunctions such as 'and' or 'because', the lack of modal auxiliaries such as 'can' or 'want', and the lack of prepositions such as 'for' or 'to'. Instead, Enga uses a nearly unlimited number of concepts and kinds of actions expressed through different grammatical devices. The verb is known to dominate the Enga language.

Word Order
The crucial difference of the Enga language is that the main verb of the sentence will always be found in sentence-final position. This concept causes varying structures based on the type of sentence. In declarative sentences that include a nominal subject and object, the subject will precede the object.

Akáli dokó-mé mená dóko p-í-á.y

man DET-AG   pig    DET  pit-PAST

The man hit the pig.