5.1 The two singular endings: **-a** and **-ta**
5 · Nouns — naming things, and making them plural · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar
Nearly every Assyrian noun ends, in the singular, in one of two vowels-plus-consonant packages:
- -a → beta "house," baba "father," ilana "tree," susa/suysa "horse," kalba "dog," malka "king"
- -ta → bakhta "woman," brata "girl/daughter," shabta "week," urkha … wait — urkha ends in -a. That's the catch, and it's why gender is its own section below.
Think of -a and -ta as the noun's "singular hat." When you make the word plural or bolt a possessive ending onto it ("my…," "his…"), that hat comes off and a different ending goes on. So beta "house" → beti "my house" → bate "houses": the -a is the removable part.
Why -a and -ta? In older Aramaic -a marked masculine and -ta marked feminine, and that history still mostly holds: -ta words are reliably feminine. But over the centuries a number of -a words drifted to feminine gender, so -a is only a good guess at masculine, not a guarantee. That is the next section.
(Khan spends ~50 pages, §5.2–5.4, sorting nouns into dozens of shape-patterns — CaCa, CoCa, CCaCa, and so on. That's for historical linguists tracing where each vowel came from; it has no payoff for a speaker, so it's skipped here. You never need to know a noun's "pattern" to use it.)
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