These include agglutinativity, a rich array of noun classes, extensive inflection for person (both subject and object), tense and aspect, and a subject–verb–object word order.
Zulu orthography does not indicate vowel length or tone, but it can be important to note this in a description of grammar.
The following diacritical marks are used throughout this article to indicate aspects that the standard orthography fails to: The Zulu noun consists of two essential parts: the prefix and the stem.
This is already evident in the example of ísifûba, where an underlying HH pattern is actually pronounced as FL (falling-low).
Thus, the application of the prefix spread rule can reveal the underlying tone of the first stem syllable.
Moreover, the final two syllables are generally not modified by any of the rules, so that the underlying tones are usually readily apparent there.
These rules combined can often lead to ambiguity as to the underlying tones, especially with longer stems and with class 9 prefixes.
But HHHH, LHHH or LLHH are also possible, with a falling-low final pattern due to phrase-final HH rather than tone displacement.
In this particular case, the noun is known to derive from ínhlâmvu, with a HH pattern, but that still leaves both HHLL and HHHH as possibilities.
The vowel of the prefix coalesces with any initial vowel of the noun, as follows:[4] For instance: Isilwane sethu, 'Our animal': formed by sá- (possessive prefix of the class 7 noun isilwane, 'animal') and -íthú (possessive stem of the first person plural personal pronoun).
For example: With nouns in class 1a, the prefix, extended with ka, is always attached to the simple form.
The copulative form of a noun expresses identity, and has a meaning similar to the English copula be.
To express the negative of the copula, corresponding to English "is not" and similar, the prefix a- is added to the subject concord of the existing copulative.
The forms mina, wena, thina and nina mean "I", "you" (singular), "we" and "you" (plural) respectively.
Note that outside of the first- and second-person singular, the possessive stem has an underlying high tone.
In the first- and second-person singular, only the possessive prefix is high-toned, so the resulting surface pattern is simply high-low.
As the verb already includes prefixes to indicate the subject and object, personal pronouns aren't strictly needed, and are mostly used for emphasis.
The single-syllable forms lá, lé and ló remain stressed on the final syllable when prefixes are attached.
As mentioned, adjectives in the restricted sense are rather rare in Zulu, with only about two dozen existing.
The first- and second-person forms are created analogically, by duplicating the vowel in the subject concord and then prefixing a.
Examples: That is: abantu is in noun class 2, so it's adjectival concord is aba-, which is attached to -ningi to form abaningi.
For 'many dogs' then it results in izinja eziningi, from izinja, 'dogs' (noun class 10) and ezin- (the adjectival concord for noun class 10) + -ningi, 'many', plus phonological conditioning to remove the double n. Note that -dala goes with om- and -de with omu- because the long form of the prefix/concord is used when the stem is monosyllabic, else the short one is used.
They are formed exactly parallel, with one key difference: for relatives, the subject concord is used as the base rather than the noun prefix.
Normally, verbs are cited in the stem of the principal present tense, which ends in -a, for example -wa "to fall", -dlá "to eat", -enza "to do, to make", -bôna "to see", -síza "to help", -sebénza "to work".
For example, wālipheka "he/she cooked it" consists of a stem -pheka "to cook", preceded in reverse order by an object prefix li- (class 5), the remote past tense marker -ā-, and the subject prefix u- (he/she/class 1, which becomes w- when a vowel follows).
Zulu is a pro-drop language: explicit personal pronouns are only used for emphasis, while in general the concords on the verb give enough information.
Examples: The reflexive prefix only occurs as an object, and refers back to the subject of the sentence.
The following list shows the approximate way in which the contraction of the immediate future preceded, using the verb -síza "to help" as an example.
In regular Zulu spelling, where vowel length is not marked, this distinction becomes invisible.
A range of Zulu verbs indicate a change of state or a process, which tends towards some final goal (cf.