Modifying with Nouns

Nouns can themselves modify nouns in syntactic patterns similar to those observed by certain adjectives.

 oɓii osafu suukar
 'sweet fruit (lit. sugar-tasting fruit)'

 ndawal safu kaane
 spicy meat (lit. hot-pepper-tasting meat)'

 xadegit xaɗaq xaʃokolaat
 xadegit ʃokolaat xaɗaq
 'two pieces of chocolate / two chocolate pieces'

 otew oʄoola omosu oxe
 'the beautiful Jola girl'

In (1) and (2), the adjective is 'be tasting like' and the nouns are suukar 'sugar' and kaane 'hot pepper'. In the third and fourth examples, the noun is 'Jola person', which is used to describe the origins of the girl.

Arguably, as discussed in the section on Special Adjectives, adjectives like ran 'white' and ɓaal 'black' are in fact nouns. For this reason, they cannot themselves be used with the -u adjective suffix, but must be derived with a causative suffix to (i.e., caused whiteness, caused blackness) in order to do so.

*ofiid oranu le
 ofiid orangu le
 'the white butterfly'

These actually being nouns may also explain why the following is ruled out: *ofiid ole ran na. With na-modification, only adjectives can modify na, since na is a pronominal form.