Questions & Answers about Haya tana da tsada.
Why is there a separate word tana after haya? In English we just say Rent is expensive.
In Hausa, it is normal for a sentence with a noun subject to include a subject/agreement marker before the rest of the predicate.
So the sentence breaks down like this:
- haya = rent
- tana = a 3rd-person singular feminine marker
- da tsada = with expensiveness / expensive
So tana is not redundant. It is a regular part of Hausa sentence structure.
Why is it tana and not yana?
Because haya is treated as a feminine singular noun in Hausa.
Hausa has grammatical gender, so the agreement marker must match the noun:
- yana = masculine singular
- tana = feminine singular
- suna = plural
Since haya is feminine singular, tana is the correct form here.
What does da mean in this sentence?