Related Nouns

A handful of noun roots appear in multiple noun classes with different, related meanings.

Gloss	Noun	Class	Gloss	Noun	Class
friend	xaarit	f	friendship	nqaarit	n
woman	otew	ox	womanhood	ndew	n
baobab tree	ɓaak	l	baobab fruit	ƥaak	n
palm tree	ndof	n	palm fruit	orof	ol
tree sp.	mbamb	n	fruit of tree sp.	pamb	l

There are indications of derivational processes along semantic grounds, e.g., from a person to a quality of that person, and from a tree to its fruit. However, neither of these processes is productive, and there are not enough examples to generalize, particularly with regard to the source and target noun classes.