Gender is not distinguished except for animated beings, and in them either (1) by added words indicating sex (as so-po, "boy," so-pi, "girl"; aso-pinso, "male child"; aso-pi, "daughter"; chainòng-alo, "bull"; chainòng-api, "cow"), or (2) by the use of different terms (po, "father," pe or pei, "mother," phu, "grandfather," phi, "grandmother," etc.).
The ordinary suffix for the plural is -tum (which is originally a separate word meaning "company," "followers"); but other words are occasionally employed, as mar, a "mass, quantity, or company"; òng, "many"; and li, a respectful form used in addressing a number of persons. When -tum is suffixed to a noun, it takes the prefixed a- of relation, as arlèng-atum, "men"; when added to a personal pronoun it does not require this adjunct, as will be explained below (ne, "I," ne-tum, "we"; nàng, "thou," nàng-tum, "ye"; la, "he, she, it," la-tum, "they").
Case is indicated by position, or by postpositions. The nominative, and, generally speaking, the accusative, have no postpositions, but are ascertained by their position in the sentence, the nominative at the beginning, the accusative following it before the verb. Both, when necessary, can be emphasised by the addition of the particles -ke and -si, which in some sort play the part of the definite article; but these are not case-postpositions. There is no device (as in Tibetan) for distinguishing the case of the agent with transitive verbs.
The genitive always precedes the noun on which it is dependent. When the word in the genitive is a pronoun of the first or second person, nothing intervenes between them: ne-mèn, "my name"; nàng-pe, "thy clothes." But when, the pronoun is in the third person, or a noun is in the genitive case, the following noun has a- prefixed: e.g. la a-po, "his father"; Arnàm a-hèm, "God's house"; hijai-atum a-kàm, "the jackals' work"; arni-kàngsàm a-pòr, "day-becoming-cool time." This prefixed a- is really the pronoun of the third person, and means his, her, its, their; the full meaning of the combinations given above is therefore "he, his father": "God, his house": "the jackals, their work": "day becoming cool, its time." As in many other languages of the Tibeto-Burman family, nouns (especially those denoting personal relations, parts of the body, etc.) are seldom conceived as abstract and self-contained; they most often occur in relation to some other noun, and thus the syllable a- is more often prefixed to them than not. Especially is this the case with adjectives; these ordinarily follow the noun which they qualify, and almost always have a- prefixed; e.g. Arnàm a-kethe, "God Almighty": la a-kibi a-bàng, "that younger one." Sometimes this prefixed a- is thinned down to e-, as in hèm-e-pi, hèm-e-po, "widow, widower," literally "female or male owner of the house": hijai e-hur, "a pack of jackals." Most postpositions (originally nouns joined to the genitive of the qualified word) similarly require a- before them; and the suffix -tum of the plural, since it means "a company," also in this manner assumes the form a-tum. Before ing- the prefix a- is absorbed, and the result is àng.