marking nouns to take an adjective?

[Vardelm]

Are there any languages where nouns need to be marked in order to take an adjective? This would be similar to marking a possessum instead of a possessor. I assume this would happen in a head-marking language. I would be particularly interested if the language also has adjectives as part of a stative verb class. As an example w/ made up words:

kadar = "horse"
tuvu = "black"
-um = adjectival/genitival/something else? marker
-lu = 3rd person verbal agreement

kadarum tuvu = "black horse"

tuvulu kadar = "The horse is black".

[Ziz]

Persian ezāfe. Nouns modified with an attributive adjective take an ending -e or -ye in most cases.

khāné ('house') + zard ('yellow') = khānéye zard ('yellow house')


EDIT: If you're talking about adjectives having different classes that nouns have to be modified to agree with, then Persian doesn't have that.

[Vardelm]

Thank you! I'll take a look at Persian. My conlang will probably inflect to agree with the adjective in some way, but I'm not sure how yet. As long as I see that there is at least 1 language that marks the noun in the way you show that Persian does, I think I'm on safe ground.

[Vijay]

In Tagalog, when a noun is modified by an adjective, it must be accompanied by a ligature as well. The adjective may come either before or after the noun, but either way, the ligature must come in between them. If the first word ends in a vowel, then <ng> is written at the end of that word. If it ends in a consonant, then the ligature is written as a separate word <na> instead. So, for example:

kabayo = horse
itim = black

kabayong itim = itim na kabayo = black horse

[Vardelm]

Thanks, Vijay. It's good to know this happens in more than 1 language family. Also, the difference in forms & placement is interesting!

A follow up question that occurred to me after seeing the replies: how do these languages handle nouns that are modified by both an adjective and a possessor? I'm thinking of something like "the man's yellow house" or "the yellow house of the man".

[Vijay]

Well, the adjective combined with a noun is a noun phrase, which is then modified by the possessor. So my understanding is that in Persian, you say khānéye zarde mard where mard means 'man' (the same affix is used for possession as well), and in Tagalog, you use ng (pronounced [naŋ]) for possession after the entire possessum, followed by the possessor, e.g. bahay na dilaw ng lalaki = dilaw na bahay ng lalaki = yellow house of the man. (Bahay = house, dilaw = yellow, lalaki = man).

[vokzhen]

Construct state outside of Semitic is sometimes sensitive to adjectives. Iraqw (South Cushitic):

waahla > waahlár ur
python > big python

It adds -ú for masculine nouns, -´r for feminine, and -á for plural.

In Kotoko (Chadic), there is instead an intervening word between the head noun and the modifier, ro for feminines and n for masculines and plurals (with different markers when the modifier is another noun). For something that includes a possessive, in Kotoko the possessive agreement is suffixed to the modifier:
tōlu n-gən ts'ā rə
road M-3S.M only 3S.M
his own way

In Iraqw, it appears that possessive agreement overrides construct state. Wikipedia has examples of the construct marker occurring before possessive agreement.

Neither of these, though, just mark adjectives, it's most modifiers (adjectives, numerals, relative clauses, possessors). The Kotoko marker is extremely similar to general attributive markers in East/SE Asia, though the feminine seems very likely cognate to the genuine affix of Iraqw.

[Vardelm]

Well, the adjective combined with a noun is a noun phrase, which is then modified by the possessor. So my understanding is that in Persian, you say khānéye zarde mard

I played around with this a bit, plus another idea I had, and I think this works pretty well for my conlang.

Thanks all for the info.

[Vijay]

No problem!