norwegian syllable structure

In unstressed syllables, /ɛ/ tends to reduce to a simple schwa []. Examples of Syllables in English. The Norwegian phrase for Please is “Vær så snill.” A single syllable English word needs to be translated into a four-syllable Norwegian phrase. A theory of weight is advanced in which a syllable shape in a given position is only heavy if it is, on average, sufficiently proportionally … Some of the famous dishes of Norwegian cuisine include smalahove (dish made from sheep’s head), pinnekjøtt (a mutton or lamb dish), Rakfisk (a dish made from char or trout that is st… Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. The duration of the syllables preceding strong vs. weak phrase boundary varies considerably. The få passive applies to the indirect and not the direct object of corresponding active constructions. common gender). Depending on phonetic context voiceless ([χ]) or voiced uvular fricatives ([ʁ]) are used. In Eastern Norwegian the tone difference may also be applied to groups of words, with different meaning as a result. Amongst the various views on how to interpret this situation, the most promising one may be that the words displaying these complex tones have an extra mora. Phonetic length only exists in syllables which carry main or secondary stress. The present tense ending -er is more generalized in BN: c.f. PDF | On Jan 1, 2012, A. Schüppert and others published Syllable reduction and articulation rates in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate Loanwords may have other stress patterns. Another variety is the objectless impersonal passive: NN dei åt til seint på kveld “they were eating until late in the evening” ~ det vart ete til seint på kveld. So, a reflexive pronoun may refer to the subject of a higher predicate: BN hun(i) lovet sin(i) more(j) å vaske seg(i) ordentlig “she preomised her mother to wash properly.” Even higher-clause objects may act as the antecedent of lower-clause reflexives, where the reflexive lexeme can narrow the range of potential interpretations: NN Jon (i) freista å få henne(j) til å tala vent om seg(i/j)/seg sjølv(j) “Jon tried to make her say something nice about herself/himself.”. Penultimate stress is found in recent non-GE loans, e.g. ( Log Out /  Pronominal possessives and genitives are the only determiners that may occur postnominally after the definiteness suffix. Monosyllables are neutral with regard to tonal opposition, but since stress is associated with low tone, tone 1 could be considered as the polysyllabic continuation of the basic, default monosyllabic stress-pitch correlation, with tone 2 being the marked one. han burde(1) ha(2) kunnet(3) forsøke(4) å lære(5) å utføre(6) arbeidet noe raskere “he ought to have been able to try to learn to do the work more quickly.”, The infinitive is regularly preceded by a nominal object and may be assumed to occupy a nominal position: NN dei hadde tilbode han å køyra han heim “they had offered him to drive him home.” It can also occupy an adverbial position: BN hun overtalte vennene til å bli over helgen “she persuaded her friends to stay over the weekend.”, Common in GMC, these verbs involve particles, e.g. Accent 1 generally occurs in words that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, and accent 2 in words that were polysyllabic. Chen & C. Wang (1998) The emergence of the unmarked in second language phonology. It has been considered that the absolutive construction is the primary lexical option with intransitive verbs that are not in the passive. Compared to EN, semantic distinctions are less lexicalized in NO: BN mulighet vs. EN possibility, opportunity, option; and BN hver vs. EN each and every. The Finland Swedish dialects also lack a tonal accent; no such phenomenon exists in Finnish. NO is much less rich than GE with regards to prefixal formations; NO lacks the hin-/her- deictic prefixing of GE, and NO often has one lexical verb where GE derives multiple meanings of a word by varying prefixes. This sort of thing does not exist for NN. To express past counterfactuality, the pluperfect or preterite of a modal together with the infinitive perfect or the past participle is used: BN hvis jeg hadde hatt vinger, skulle jeg (ha) fløyet. NO is spoken by about 5 million people. bilen (the car) [biː.ln̩], where it was originally [biː.lən]. Originally (from ON times) monosyllabic words generally have tone 1 and originally bi- and polysyllabic words have tone 2, thus, polysyllables with tone 1 are either later borrowings or secondarily developed from vowel epenthesis. /su:ɽ/ sol “sun”), or to standard /r/, and /ʈ, ɳ, ʂ/ correspond to the orthgraphic representations . This variant is the most common one taught to foreign students. komme ut “appear.” Sometimes they may be prefixed: utkommer (in NN, prefixing is required in the participle and in deverbal nouns: lære opp ~ opplært). In all four dialect groups of Norwegian, a syllabic alveolar nasal, /n/, may be heard. NN ein katt hadde seti på taket heile dagen “a cat had been sitting on the roof all day long” ~ det hadde seti ein katt på taket heile dagen “there had been sitting a cat on the roof all day long.” In these constructions, det is obligatory, and definite noun phases are excluded, leading these to be considered as grammaticalized means of rhematization. f. ho – hennes), BN 3 sg. For formal, BN uses third person plural forms: de, dem, deres, ans NN uses the second person plural: de, dykk, dykkar (formal/informal neutralized in plural). Verb chains made up of a governing verb and one or more governed verbs are right-branching and may be quite long, e.g. By use of komme constructions: NN han kjem til å ha/få gjort arbeidet ferdig før neste uke. BN has leveled gender distinctions again by restricting plural formation to suffixes with an -e-. /ba:ɳ/ “child”) as well as through morphophonemic processes (e.g. BN’s. Indexes Index of authors. The phonology of Māori is typical for a Polynesian language, with its phonetic inventory being one of the smallest in the world with considerable variation in realisation. materi’ale, sosial’isme, me’tode, and final stress in others, usually from French, e.g. Derivational morphemes may be classified into tone-transparent and tone-inducing. Some speakers have an additional diphthong, The second element of the fronting diphthongs can be fricated. syllable structure tone syllable . in BN, and BN 3 sg. Norwegian; Sami 1 Official religion none 2 Monetary unit Norwegian krone (pl. Some SE NO non-standard dialects enforce the first-syllable stress rule. Most temporal complementizers are homonymous with corresponding prepositions or adverbs: til, før, fra, siden, da, når etc. In preterite, the meaning is deontic counterfactuality: han skulle ha gjort det “he ought to have done it.” Deletion of ha is common in counterfactual constructions. The two tones can be transcribed on the first vowel as ⟨ɑ̀⟩ for accent 1 and ⟨ɑ̂⟩ for accent 2; the modern reading of the IPA tone diacritics (low ⟨ɑ̀⟩ and falling ⟨ɑ̂⟩) corresponds to the pronunciation of eastern Norway, whereas an older tradition of using diacritics to represent the shape of the pitch trace (falling ⟨ɑ̀⟩ and rising-falling ⟨ɑ̂⟩) corresponds to the pronunciation of western Norway. The passive auxiliary is bli and also verta in NN (huset vart/blei selt “the house was sold”). Negation can be preposed or be placed after the finite verb. 2. Modern cuisine of the country is, however, largely influenced by international cuisines and includes pizzas, tacos, pasta, etc. Particles precede non-pronominal object noun phrases, but pronominal objects must precede them. The female speaker has four syllables preceding strong and eleven syllables preceding weak phrase boundary, the male speaker has two and ten syllables, respectively. /ʈ, ɳ,/ also occur from sequences with /ɽ/ corresponding to /lt, ln/, as in /gʉ:ʈ/ gult “yellow” (vs. /gʉ:lt/). Extractability of Sentence Elements from Embedded Clauses: Extraction from a subordinate clause dependent on a head constituent is not allowed. masc. There is, however, a small number of dialects that use both the uvular /r/ and the retroflex allophones. They are formed by omission of the present –r suffix and replaced with -s(t) to form a passive or middle voice meaning. Past tense and participle (supine) ending NN -a BN -et/-a. drap “killed,” las “read” vs. drepte, leste. Thus, the words [vɔ̀ːɡ] ('dare') vs. [vɔ̀ɡː] ('cradle') have merged into [vɔ̀ːɡ] in the dialect of Oppdal. masc., fem. but not in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. Syllable definition: A syllable is a part of a word that contains a single vowel sound and that is pronounced... | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples Table 2. Both subjects and objects are regularly relativized. The Syllable Harry Van Der Hulst , Nancy A. Ritter This collection offers a fairly exhaustive presentation of current day approaches to the phonotactics or syllabic organization of words as well as a rich display of the syllabic organization of some 20 languages. Word order suggests three clause types: subordinate, main clauses and imperatives. When it is, it is usually expressed through coordination with another verb such as gå “go,” stå “stand,” ligge “lie”: BN hun stod og tenkte “she stood there thinking.” When these constructions involve bli (NN verta), the first verb becomes a present participle and the second verb an infinitive, and og is retained: BN han ble gående og tenke “he kept walking around thinking.”. Here the position of the (X) depends on whether it is a vowel or a consonant. (t2)tenkte (t1)ut vs. Eastern NO (t2)tenkte-ut. Completion in the future may be expressed in a few ways: 1. Non-subjects are more often extracted than subjects. In a compound word, the pitch accent is lost on one of the elements of the compound (the one with weaker or secondary stress), but the erstwhile tonic syllable retains the full length (long vowel or geminate consonant) of a stressed syllable.[58]. Most of the retroflex (and postalveolar) consonants are mutations of [ɾ]+any other alveolar/dental consonant; rn /ɾn/ > [ɳ], rt /ɾt/ > [ʈ], rl /ɾl/ > [ɭ], rs /ɾs/ > [ʂ], etc. NO, then, displays operator-operand and operand-operator order, with a tendency towards the latter outside of the domain of quantifiers and adjectival modification. Use of the reflexive possessive pronoun: engelskmannen sin båt “the Englishman’s boat.” This is originally a loan from Low GE. There exist constructions known as “double passives” in which the first, governing lexical verb is in the -s- or bli- form, and the second main lexical verb is in the form of the passive participle. The syntactic structure is similar to that of English. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. A quick internet search will help you figure out whether your native language is a syllable-timed or syllable-stressed language but I've included a few examples. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20: 261-280. Adjectives have two inflectional paradigms, the strong and the weak declension. 22 Sievers’ Law in Vedic. While impersonal passives with a retained direct object obey the (in)definiteness constraint, their counterparts with a prepositional complement are exempt from it. Complex attributive adjective phrases are allowed but not common or optimal in speech: dette i mange henseender særdeles pålitelige dokument “this in many respects exrtraordinarily reliable document.” The same goes for present participles as prenominal attributes: en leende pike “a laughing girl.”. Adverbials/prepositional complements that subcategorize the main lexical verb occupy the adverbial position in the content field and are excluded from the nexus field: BN han hadde tenkt på henne hele tiden vs. *han hadde på henne tenkt hele tiden “he had been thinking of her all the time.” Local/temporal adverbial adjuncts occur in both fields. In both accents, these pitch movements are followed by a rise of intonational nature (phrase accent), the size (and presence) of which signals emphasis/focus and which corresponds in function to the normal accent in languages that lack lexical tone, such as English. å være hjemme/at vi endelig er hjemme, er godt “to be home/that we are finally home is good.”). Wikipedia English - The Free Encyclopedia. In most forms of Norwegian and Swedish, pitch differences are regularly associated with primary stress. As of 1993, 83 percent of the Norwegian population received primary education in BN and 17 percent in NN. syllable - translate into Norwegian with the English-Norwegian Dictionary - Cambridge Dictionary Non-pronominal direct/indirect objects are typically placed after the sentence negator BN ikke NN ikkje and any non-finite verb forms, though they may be placed before the negator if the lexical verb is finite: BN han ga henne den ikke “he didn’t give it to her.”. For example, in Pintupi (Hansen and Hansen 1969, 1978) and Northern Sámi (Nielsen 1926), stress falls on odd-numbered syllables but not on final syllables. Unless noted otherwise, this article describes the phonology of Urban East Norwegian. The opposition is between (1) steadily rising tone (pitch) and (2) delayed rise of tone. Discourse particles and certain adverbials may be placed at the rightmost end of the sentence in spoken language. staving, stavelse Norwegian Discuss this Syllable English translation with the community: 22 Sievers’ Law in Vedic. Only the pronouns exhibit case distinction between subject and non-subject forms. Counterfactual use of simple preterite (e.g. Unstressed central [ə] is considered an allophone of /e/. According to Nina Grønnum, tjukk l in Trøndersk is actually a postalveolar lateral flap [ɺ̠].[17]. BN skyter, “shoots,” finner “finds” vs. NN skyt, finn. In most of Eastern Norway, including the capital Oslo, the so-called low pitch dialects are spoken. On the other hand, in most of western and northern Norway (the so-called high-pitch dialects) accent 1 is falling, while accent 2 is rising in the first syllable and falling in the second syllable or somewhere around the syllable boundary. Index of languages. This mora may have little or no effect on duration and dynamic stress, but is represented as a tonal dip. ( Log Out /  Main stress is assigned to the first syllable of most words of Common Germanic origin, and to the second syllable in many loan words with the originally German (GE) prefixes be-, er-, for-. The strong declension is applied in environments where agreement in gender and number is required: (a) Prenominally when no determiner is present (BN gammelt brød); (b) prenominally after the indefinite article; (c) as a postnominal appositional attribute (BN/NN det gamle huset, stort og dyrt “this old house, large and expensive”); (d) predicative position (complement clauses and infinitives are realized as neuter, e.g. Finite verbs are morphologically distinguished between present and preterite. Thus, the ending (T1)—en implies determinate form of a masculine monosyllabic noun (båten /ˈbòːtən/ 'boat', bilen /ˈbìːlən/, 'car'), whereas (T2)-en denotes either determinate form of a masculine bisyllabic noun or an adjectivised noun/verb (moden /ˈmûːdən/ 'mature'). "Gjert Kristoffersen has worked as Assistant Professor of General Linguistics and of Nordic Languages at the University of Tromso (1979-84); Editor at the Norwegian University Press (Universitetsforlaget) in Tromso and Oslo (1984-88); and Associate Professor of Nordic Languages at the University of Tromso (1988-91). BN de ble kjørt hjem vs. NN dei vart køyrde heim “they were driven home.”, få “get” is used in another type of passive construction with the supine or past participle: BN han fikk tilsendt bøkene “the books were sent to him.” NN distinguishes between the supine and participle: han fekk tilsendt bøkene vs. han fekk bøkene tilsende. Definiteness is marked by a suffixal morpheme, e.g. Main clauses have the finite verb in second or first position (in questions). The statal passive with “be” denotes a completed action: huset er selt “the house is sold.” The distinction between this and the perfect/pluperfect of the actional passive is sometimes not clear-cut: BN han er (blitt) valgt til stortingsmann “he has been elected a member of parliament.” In BN, the passive’s participle form is an invariant, while NN has a participle that takes gender/number agreement: c.f. The focus will be on compound stress. Som is common in cleft constructions: det var henne (som) Per hadde gitt en bok for en uke siden “it was her (who) Per had given a book to a week ago.” Due to the cleft construction’s usefulness for focusing constituents, it is often used instead of the basic wh-question form: BN hvem kommer? It is also used to create lexicalized reflexive/reciprocal verbs (de møtes “they met), but this morpheme could not be defined as a reflexive-forming morpheme. The possessive dative is only retained in a few phrases: BN det ligger ham i blodet “it’s in his blood.” Otherwise it is replaced by prepositional phrases with på “on/at” or by regular attributive possessives. Absolutive and passive constructions have in common that the subject is not in the subject position. This paper discusses some prosodic traits in the Esperanto spoken by one of them. This is also based on that fact that tone 2 is mostly excluded from words of GE or Romance origin. One of the more interesting types of final stress avoidance is found in several languages in which a syllable type that is stressed in non- This can also be used for non-past reference. Weak verbs inflect according the the following declension classes: 1. Overall, more originally strong verbs have become weak in in BN than in NN, c.f. Indexes Index of authors. Perfect and pluperfect are formed with present or past forms of ha “have” or BM væra, NN vera “be.” The latter form is restricted to use with verbs that indicate change of state or location. Retroflex sounds occur in stems (e.g. This new Norwegian and the literary Dano-Norwegian were officially recognized by Parliament in 1885 and became Nynorsk and Bokmål respectively. ha råd til “be able to afford,” BN ha mulighet for “be in a position to.”. mer/mest levende “more/most alive.”. All of the examples provided in this post, as well as most of the information overall, have come from König and Van der Auwera’s The Germanic Languages. The prenominal determiner must be used when there is a prenominal adjective: den gamle mannen “the old man.” The “definiteness doubling” seen here is more common in NN than BN (where the enclitic is omitted before various postnominal modifiers like complement clauses and restrictive clauses). NN has resorted to translation loans to replace BN forms in some cases. The strong declension is composed of four declensional subclasses: A generalized -e- ending in all genders and both numbers in BN and NN. ), (2) Subject and oblique form in combination with the genitive (2 pl. In BN, pronominalization rules are sensitive to animacy (guten “the boy” → han “he”; stolen “the table” → den “it”), while in NN, the agreement system is more strictly based on grammatical gender (guten → han; stolen →han). Prenominal genitives are common in BN but more often avoided in NN. Consonant clusters are considered to be equivalent to long consonants with regard to this rule. ", Comparison of Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Danish, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Norwegian_phonology&oldid=984160482, Articles needing additional references from January 2010, All articles needing additional references, Articles containing Norwegian-language text, Articles lacking reliable references from April 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, There is not an agreement about the frequency of occurrence of the fricative allophone of. Norwegian is part of the Germanic language group, which English also belongs to. Non-subject, or object/indirect object form, is used as a predicative in BN: det er ham “it is him.” Pronouns are divided into four declension classes: (1) Subject and oblique form in combination with inflected possessives (1 sg., 2 sg., 1. The other function is distinctiveone. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. Possessive pronouns or pronominal genitives may follow a noun with the definiteness suffix (boka mi “my book,” boka hennes “her book”), but non-pronominal genitives must be prenominal (BN mannens bok vs. *boken/boka mannens “the man’s book”). NO has an invariant relative pronoun, som. The Māori language retains the Proto-Polynesian syllable structure: ()V(V(V)), with no closed syllables. Nordavinden og solen kranglet om hvem av dem som var den sterkeste. Norwegian, a language like Cairene Arabic with final consonant extrametricality, is predictable from phonetic duration. In dialectal Southeast NO, the retroflex /ɽ/ corresponds to either /l/ (e.g. The verb suffix –ere and stressed verb prefixes ut–, gjen-, på-, til- induce tone 1. Other dialects with tonal opposition in monosyllabic words have done away with vowel length opposition. More complicated are the cases of /ʂ, ç, j/. Exceptions involve the addition of inflectional endings that can sometimes yield a V:CC structure. /ʉ/ is represented by . ( Log Out /  Sentence adverbs, pronouns and discourse particles are often placed clause-finally in the spoken language for emphasis/tagging, known as “right copying”: BN jeg går hjem nå, jeg “as for me, I’m going home now,” du er vell ikke sint, vel? 20 Quantity in Norwegian syllable structure. Within a syllable (or syllables) prosodic characteristics of speech are realized, which form the stress pattern of a word and the intonation structure of an utterance. til fødselsdagen hadde hun fått en kunstbok “for her birthday she had received a book on art” vs. *hun fortalte at til fødselsdagen hun hadde fått en kunstbok. Adverbials commonly take sentence-initial position, often for emphasis. in combination with the indefinite pronoun (BN/NN noen, noe, NN nokon, noko), or the two are incorporated into one single word like ingen “no one/nobody.” Due to constraints against content-field position of sentence negation, the latter forms cannot occur in object position after a non-finite verb: NN *dei hadde sett ingen “they had not seen anyone.” Incorporated negation object forms are acceptable in the nexus field, where the positional constraint is not violated: BN de hadde ingenting sett “they had seen nothing,” but there is an awkwardness to this usage. Basic Sentence Structures and Syntagmatic Variations: Field and position analysis of Norwegian clause and sentence structure: Sentence-initial position cannot be regarded as the subject-encoding position in Norwegian due to its availability to other syntactic categories. Derivations often result in stress shifts. (4) No distinction between subject and oblique form, and no genitive (NN 3 sg. poli’tikk. For assistance with IPA transcriptions of Norwegian for Wikipedia articles, see, Map of the major tonal dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, from, [²nuːɾɑˌʋɪnˑn̩ ɔ ˈsuːln̩ ²kɾɑŋlət ɔm ʋɛm ɑ dɛm sɱ̍ ˈʋɑː ɖɳ̍ ²stæɾ̥kəstə], Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Nordavinden og sola: Opptak og transkripsjoner av norske dialekter", "Sound Change and Articulatory Release: Where and Why are High Vowels Devoiced in Parisian French? Genitival suffix -s- is the only remnant of case inflection, which marks a subordinate nominal constituent. For example, in most Norwegian dialects, the word uttale ('pronounce') is pronounced using tone 1 (/ˈʉ̀ːttɑːlə/), while uttale ('pronunciation') uses tone 2 (/ˈʉ̂ːttɑːlə/). common gender and neuter. Through their presence, the Vikings also influenced the English language, bringing it even closer to Scandinavian. NN has more morphological variation than BN. in particular sonority and syllable structure, thus makes the morpho-logical structure of such forms in Danish far more opaque than is the case in our close Scandinavian relatives. “if I had wings, I’d fly”) is limited to present (or non-past) time reference. The definite suffix in the singular and the derivational suffix -het are tone-transparent. Some words have one syllable (monosyllabic), and some words have many syllables (polysyllabic). The indefinite article is only preceded by a few indeclinable quantifying elements: BN mang(en) en ung forfatter “many a young author,” nok en dårlig ny bok “another bad new book.” Besides these, the indefinite article is part of a larger paradigmatic class of quantifying determiners. kunne “can,” BN ville NN vilja “will.” They take a zero ending in the present and take no preterite suffix. See the article on the Norwegian language conflict for further information. ikke etc.) The background for this lack of agreement is that after the dissolution of Denmark–Norway in 1814, the upper classes would speak in what was perceived as the Danish language, which with the rise of Norwegian romantic nationalism gradually fell out of favour. Example: past tense of (Danish) love ‘promise’ and its The subject of this construction sometimes corresponds to a prepositional phrase in the active form (e.g. Standard Danish, Rigsdansk, replaces tonal accents with the stød, whilst some southern, insular dialects of Danish preserve the tonal accent to different degrees. They are not marked for person, number or aspect, and only minimally for mood. With skulle/ville with the infinitive perfect: BN jeg skal/han vil ha ordnet alt før neste uke “I/he’ll have it all arranged before next week.”. The past particple’s formation depends on the declension class of the verb. There are numerous quantifiers, used as prenominal and preadjectival determiners in noun phrases. Modal/discourse particles come first, then sentence negation stands last with grading adverbials of various semantic designations in between. Pronominal genitive in postnominal position followed by an uninflected proper name or noun: huset hans Ola/far “Ola’s/father’s house.”. This is similar to numerous cases of a verb and non-referential noun forming a complex semantic unit, e.g. Pitch accent. NN infinitive ending -ja/-je, no present tense suffix, past tense suffix -de vs. BN absence of -j- stem formation, suffix -er in present tense, past tense suffix -te (with or without vowel alternation). Det “it” is used as an expletive/dummy pronoun for “impersonal constructions,” such as weather statements: det snødde i går “it snowed yesterday.” It is also used for cleft constructions. The variety of phrasal verb constructions is diverse: (1) The particle is an adverb, e.g. The rules of syllable structures differ from language to language, but there are languages with the same or almost the same syllable structure. The results indicate that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts. Diphthongs are subject to the same morpheme-structure rules as long vowels. Syllable-stressed: English, Thai, German, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch. -en, -et), there are corresponding determiners when a prenominal adjective is present, e.g. Day 4: OVERVIEW It is, however, not clear whether these languages lost the tonal accent or whether the tonal accent was not yet there when these languages started their separate development. The rules of syllable structures differ from language to language, but there are languages with the same or almost the same syllable structure. Kehoe, M. & C. Stoel-Gammon (2001) Development of syllable structure in English-speaking children with particular reference to rhymes. ~ hvem er det som kommer? This page provides all possible translations of the word Syllable in the Norwegian language. Keywords articulation rate, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, syllable deletion, syllable reduction /ai/ and /oi/ are found mainly in loanwords. BN inflectional endings reflect DA influence, such as the predominance of the unstressed vowel -e(-) in inflectional morphology. In these dialects, accent 1 uses a low flat pitch in the first syllable, while accent 2 uses a high, sharply falling pitch in the first syllable and a low pitch in the beginning of the second syllable. BN samme, NN same is inflected like a weak adjective and only is used prenominally. Gender and number agreement can be overriden in some cases of coreferential issues. The stress pattern is unpredictable unlike many other Polynesian languages. Similarly, the ending (T1)—a denotes feminine singular determinate monosyllabic nouns (boka /ˈbùːkɑ/ 'book', rota /ˈrùːtɑ/ 'root') or neuter plural determinate nouns (husa /ˈhʉ̀ːsɑ/ 'houses', lysa /ˈlỳːsɑ/ 'lights'), whereas the ending (T2)—a denotes the preterite of weak verbs (rota /ˈrûːtɑ/ 'made a mess', husa /ˈhʉ̂ːsɑ/ 'housed'), and feminine singular determinate bisyllabic nouns (bøtta /ˈbœ̂tɑ/ 'bucket', ruta /ˈrʉ̂ːtɑ/ 'square').