SECOND CLASS PERSONAL PRONOUNS

You should review the FIRST CLASS personal pronouns before moving to the SECOND CLASS.

Here are the SECOND CLASS personal pronouns:

nako ( na-ko ) – My
nimo ( ni-mo ) – Your
niya ( ni-ya ) – His or Her
nato ( na-to ) – Our (inclusive of the person being addressed)
namo ( na-mo ) – Our (exclusive of the person being addressed)
ninyo ( nin-yo ) – Your (plural)
nila ( ni-la ) – Thier

As stated with FIRST CLASS there can only be one used in a sentence but with SECOND CLASS there is no limit on how many you can use.
Gamay ang balay. (The house is small)

Now lets expand this sentence to denote ownership of the house.

Gamay ang balay nako – My house is small

You can see we are using the SECOND CLASS personal pronoun.

Attaching SECOND CLASS personal pronouns to objects denotes ownership.

In a previous lesson we had:

Gamay ang balay ako / ko WOULD PROBABLY BE UNDERSTOOD BUT VERY WRONG GRAMMAR

Using the wrong CLASS of personal pronoun can often change the entire meaning of the sentence.

So here is the example for each SECOND CLASS personal pronoun expanding our description of a small house to denote ownership:

Gamay ang balay nako – My house is small
Gamay ang balay nimo – Your house is small
Gamay ang balay niya – His or Her house is small
Gamay ang balay nato – Our house is small (inclusive of the person being addressed)
Gamay ang balay namo – Our house is small (exclusive of the person being addressed)
Gamay ang balay ninyo – Your house is small (plural as in belongs to those being addressed)
Gamay ang balay nila – Their house is small

The MARKER ANG is FIRST CLASS and identifies the topic of the sentence which in this case is the house.

There are other ways to construct sentences with the same meaning but making other parts of the sentence the topic.

This is often done for emphases or continuation of a previous topic.

It can also be the personal choice of the speaker what form the like to use.

This is an advanced area we will look at in the future but for now I just wanted to touch on it here.

In our next lesson we will attach SECOND CLASS personal pronouns to VERBS.