Sotho nouns
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Sesotho nouns signify concrete or abstract concepts in the language, but are distinct from the Sesotho pronouns.
Bantu languages are often said to have sentences which are "centred around the noun" due to the striking nature of the noun concordance system. In Sesotho, pronouns, verbs, copulatives, adjectives, relatives, enumeratives, and possessives all need to agree with the noun(s) associated with them.
Except for class 1a (which has a "null prefix"), nouns are composed of a noun prefix and a stem (which may in turn be derived from other parts of speech; see below under Derivation). Each noun belongs to one of several noun classes and the knowledge of noun classes and their concords is pivotal to composing coherent sentences.
Usually, the noun's class can be discerned by simply looking for the prefix, but there are many instances where this can become very complicated:
There are further complications caused by stems that begin with vowels when the vowels interact causing the quality and tone of the prefix vowel to change (this never happens if the stem comes from a vowel verb); in these cases it is often simply a matter of memorising the correct class and plural for each individual word.
Noun stems can range in length from monosyllabic as in [mʊtʰʊ] motho ('person'), to very long stems formed either by duplication (e.g. [xodumodumo] kgodumodumo ('great and fearsome thing', the swallowing monster) or derived from long and complex verbs, such as the seven-syllable [pʰupʼɑʀʊl̩lɛlɑnɔ] phuparollelano ('the act of mutual giving and receiving'), derived from a verb which is in turn idiomatically and recursively and comes through four distinct steps — derived from the verb [fupʼɑ] fupara ('to close one's hand suddenly').
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