Inherent properties of the noun

The present chapter surveys primarily the morphology of nominal entities and their modifiers. The Romani noun has a number of ‘inherent’ properties that are not assigned either at the sentence level (case), or at the discourse and information level (definiteness), but accompany the selection of a noun as a lexical entry. The least ambiguous of those is grammatical gender. Romani belongs to those NIA languages which have simplified the historical gender classes into just two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. Gender is relevant first to the classification of nouns by inflectional paradigms, and further to the agreement patterns between the nominal head and its modifiers. As Elšík (2000a) points out, gender in Romani consistently coincides with inflection class, as noun classes are either exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine. Loans may be assigned gender based on the natural sex of the animate noun, on the grammatical gender of the loan in the source language or the grammatical gender of the original noun which it replaces, or else on the phonological shape (usually the ending) of the loan. At the syntactic (agreement) level, the prominence of gender in Romani, compared to other NIA languages, stands out in the obligatory selection of gender with both pronouns and articles. Romani (like Domari) is exceptional among the NIA languages in neutralising gender agreement in the plural of adjectives.