TECHNICAL NOTE ON GENDER CONFLICT IN NE/CE SENTENCES
Since every noun in Hausa has its own grammatical gender, and since a ne/ce sentence can have two nouns, it is possible that those nouns will not have the same gender. The question thus arises as to whether ne or ce will agree in gender to the first noun (the "subject") or the second noun (the "predicate"). A number of technical linguistic works on Hausa have discussed this. I will not discuss the details of any of these works here. Suffice it to say that either ne or ce is possible in such sentences, and there is no grammatical rule that determines the choice. Here are some examples from Junaidu (1995):
| Wando (irin) tufa ne. | Wando (irin) tufa ce. | 'Pants are (a type of) clothing'. |
| wando
(m) 'pants' tufa (f) 'article of clothing' |
| Dabba da na gani rak'umin sarki ce. | Dabba da na gani ra'kumin sarki ne. | 'The animal that I saw was the camel of the chief.' |
| dabba
(f) 'animal' rak'umi (m) 'camel' |
Junaidu, who is the only linguistically trained native speaker of Hausa to have specifically addressed this issue, claims that the difference "is on what element one wants to focus on". That is, the noun with which ne or ce agrees is the element which the speaker is focusing on. Thus, in the first example above, ne indicates that the speaker is stressing the fact that PANTS are a type of clothing where ce indicates that pants are a type of CLOTHING, not something with some other function.
Junaidu, Ismail. 1995. "Nature of Hausa equational sentences," Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Hausa Language, Literature, and Culture, Bayero University, Kano, 7-12 August 1995. [so far not published]
Parsons, F.W. 1963. "The operation of gender in Hausa: stabilizer, dependent nominals and qualifiers," African Language Studies 4:166-207.
Schachter, Paul. 1966. "A generative account of Hausa ne/ce." Journal of African Languages 5:34-53.