Questions & Answers about Kar ku wuce gidanmu.
Broken down word by word:
- kar – a negative command marker, roughly “don’t / don’t let”.
- ku – “you (plural)”, the subject pronoun.
- wuce – “pass, go by, go past”.
- gidanmu – “our house”.
- gida – house
- -n- – a linker sound that often appears before possessive endings
- -mu – “our” (1st person plural possessive suffix)
So the structure is: Don’t + you (pl) + pass + our-house.
Kar (often also kada) is used specifically for negative commands or warnings (negative imperative/subjunctive).
- With kar, you are telling someone not to do something:
- Kar ku wuce gidanmu. – Don’t pass our house.
- Ba is the general negative used in statements, not commands:
- Ba za ku wuce gidanmu ba. – You will not pass our house.
So:
- Use kar/kada when you are ordering, warning, advising.
- Use ba … ba when you are just stating a negative fact.
Functionally, they mean the same thing here: both introduce a negative command.
- Kar ku wuce gidanmu.
- Kada ku wuce gidanmu.
Both can be understood as “Don’t pass our house.”
Nuances:
- Kada is slightly fuller / more formal, and common in writing and careful speech.
- Kar is a shortened spoken form, very common in everyday speech.
In most everyday contexts, you can treat them as interchangeable before ku/ka/ki.
You normally cannot drop the subject pronoun after kar/kada in Hausa. The pattern is:
kar/kada + subject pronoun + verb
So you get:
- Kar ku wuce… – Don’t you (plural) pass…
- Kar ka wuce… – Don’t you (one male) pass…
- Kar ki wuce… – Don’t you (one female) pass…
A bare Kar wuce gidanmu sounds incomplete or ungrammatical to Hausa speakers. The pronoun is required to show who is being addressed.
Because of ku, the sentence is addressed to more than one person:
- ku = you (plural)
So the sentence is aimed at a group. It could be:
- Literally more than one person (friends, a family, a group of children, etc.).
- Or in some contexts, a polite / general “you all” (e.g., to everyone passing by).
To address one person, you would not use ku.
You change only the subject pronoun:
- To one male:
- Kar ka wuce gidanmu. – Don’t (you, male) pass our house.
- To one female:
- Kar ki wuce gidanmu. – Don’t (you, female) pass our house.
- To several people (your original sentence):
- Kar ku wuce gidanmu. – Don’t (you all) pass our house.
So the pattern is:
- kar + ka (you sg. masc)
- kar + ki (you sg. fem)
- kar + ku (you pl)
In Hausa, possessive pronouns are usually added as suffixes to the noun, not as separate words. So:
- gida – house
- gidanmu – our house (gida + -n- + mu)
Some useful parallels:
- gidana – my house
- gidanka – your (sg. masc) house
- gidanki – your (sg. fem) house
- gidansa – his house
- gidanta – her house
- gidanmu – our house
- gidanku – your (pl.) house
- gidansu – their house
So where English uses “our house”, Hausa typically uses one word with a possessive ending: gidanmu.
The -n- you hear in gidanmu is a linking sound (often called a linker or genitive marker). It frequently appears:
- Between a noun and a possessive suffix, or
- Between a noun and another noun that depends on it.
So:
- gida (house) + -n- (linker) + -mu (our)
→ gidanmu (our house)
You see the same pattern elsewhere:
- motarka – your car (sg. masc)
- motarmu – our car
- littafina – my book
- littafinsu – their book
The exact linker sound can vary (-n, -r, -n- with assimilation), but its job is to connect the noun to what follows.
Wuce basically means “to pass, go past, go beyond, go by”, without stopping.
So Kar ku wuce gidanmu most naturally means:
- Don’t go beyond our house / Don’t pass our house (go past it).
It is not specifically about entering the house. If you wanted to say “Don’t go into our house”, you’d normally use shiga (enter):
- Kar ku shiga gidanmu. – Don’t enter our house.
So wuce focuses on passing by or past, not going inside.
No. In Hausa, the usual order here is:
kar/kada + pronoun + verb + object
So:
- Kar ku wuce gidanmu. – correct
- Kar ku gidanmu wuce. – wrong / ungrammatical
The object gidanmu stays after the verb wuce. You can, however, add extra information after it:
- Kar ku wuce gidanmu a yau. – Don’t pass our house today.
- Kar ku wuce gidanmu da dare. – Don’t pass our house at night.
But you still keep verb → object → extra information.
You usually soften Hausa commands by adding polite or softening expressions, without changing the core grammar. For example:
- Don Allah, kar ku wuce gidanmu.
– Please, don’t pass our house. (literally “for God”) - Dan Allah, kar ku wuce gidanmu.
– A very common colloquial version of “please”. - Da fatan, kar ku wuce gidanmu.
– Hopefully, don’t pass our house. / I hope you (will) not pass our house.
The core imperative structure kar ku wuce gidanmu stays the same; you just add politeness markers in front.