Examples: The man—faré pumawn; the woman—faré pin; the house—faré naun; the men—fapi pumawn; the women—fapi pin; the two women—fagali pin; etc.
The second syllable of the plural fapi is also used to express the plural, e.g., the children—pi abetir; the people in a village—pi u binau.
Before going further into the maze of Uap words and their arrangement in sentences I am impressed with the advisability of quoting from Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain’s “A Hand-Book of Colloquial Japanese” (page 11) in order to give an excuse and to ask pardon for giving a comparison and classification of one of these Far Eastern languages in terms used in the grammars of the other side of the world.
“A word as to the parts of speech in Japanese. Strictly speaking there are but two, the verb and the noun. The particles or ‘postpositions’ and suffixes, which take the place of our prepositions, conjunctions, and conjugational terminations, were themselves originally fragments of nouns and verbs. The pronoun and numeral are simply nouns. The true adjective (including the adverb) is a sort of neuter verb. But many words answering to our adjectives and adverbs are nouns in Japanese. Altogether our grammatical categories do not fit the Japanese language well. They have only been adhered to in this work in so far as they may serve as landmarks familiar to the student.”
PRONOUNS
The PERSONAL PRONOUNS are igak—I, igur—thou, tsanem—he, she or it. Igak is thus declined:
Singular:
| Nominative | igak | I |
| Genitive and ablative | rak | of me |
| Dative | gufanei | for me |
| Accusative and dative | ngok | me; to me |
A curious refinement is to be noted in the dual and plural of this first personal pronoun; each possesses two inflections, namely, one conveying the ordinary idea of duality or plurality, such as gadou—we two, and gadad—we; and a second conveying the idea that the present company is alone referred to and that all others are excluded. For instance, gadou u Rul means simply “we two men of Rul,” but should the two men be joined by a third whom they did not wish to be included in the pronoun, the phrase would be gomou u Rul, that is, “we two men, and we two men alone, of Rul.” Thus, also, should a man happen to address the assembled people of his district, he would say: Gadad pi u Rul, i.e., “We the people of Rul,” but if he wished to express the idea that he refers to their own district, to the exclusion of all others, he would say, Gomad pi u Rul.
The two numbers, dual and plural, of the first person, are thus declined: