Vowel harmony in kihaya

Katamba, (1984) analyzes the vowel harmony of the verb extensions in Luganda, a language closely related to the Kihaya group. His analysis, which divides harmonizing vowels into 31 mid and no-mid groups, contributes to the understanding of the vowel harmony in the language. It is no, however, very helpful when formalizing morphemes for computational purposes, as the position of mid and non-mid vowels in the string is difficult to specify (with any degree of predictive confidence).

The suggestion provided by Moris and Kirwan (1972) with regard to penultimate syllables may, however, be useful here. A penultimate syllable, a syllable preceding the final one (penultimate meaning “before last”), may help to position morphemes when vowel harmony is involved. For example, in the word bo-ro-go-ta? (flow of water) the penultimate syllable is “go” (and the one preceding it also has “o” as its vowel?). by analogy, we can conclude respecting the causative that, when a penultimate syllable is e or o, the causative extension will be es. On the other hand, when the penultimate syllable is a, I or u, the causative extension will be is or iz. Similar variations apply to applicative, intensive and stative morphemes.

There is no recent systematic and comprehensive publication on Kihaya morphology. The information in this study is derived from various sources, such as grammar books (Taylor, 1985), manuscripts (Ndoleriire & Oriikiriza, 1995) and also other Bantu language studies (Nurse & Phillipson, 2003). Following the linguistic typology in Comrie (1989), the Kihaya group falls under the group of synthetic, agglutinative languages. It has been observed that most languages cannot be categorized exclusively with respect to a single typology, and Kihaya also exhibits some features of fusion, as its verbs are highly inflected. Inflection, derivation, compounding and reduplication are productive features in Kihaya languages, and there is a noun classification structure which is unique to Bantu languages. This makes the morphology of Kihaya a complex topic, the learning of which may especially benefit from computer support.

(a)    Agglutination: Some words in Kihaya are formed through a process where morphemes are added together, each contributing a meaning to the whole. For example in a verb “titukamureebaga” (we have never seen him/her) morphemes are added as in the example below.

Ti – tu – ka – mu-reeb-a- ga

NG – 299L – FP – OM- V- VE- ADV

The example in 1 above shows the following morphemes have been added to the root: ti is a negation marker, tu is a subject marker, ka is a tense marking for “far past”, mu is an object marker for persons, reeb is a verb root, a is a verb end (indicative) and ga is an adverbial marker for “ever”.

(b)   Reduplication:

Words are formed through copying / doubling a part or a whole word. The following illustrates some of the reduplication that may occur in Kihaya: Kukwata (to catch) kukwata-kwata (to touch “in a funny way”) II) baareeba (they have seen) bareeba-reeb (they…….seen “suspiciously”) ibiri (two) ibiri-ibir (two and two) babiri (two people) babiri-babiri (two by two) omuntu-ntu (a “stupid” person) ogu (this one) Note that, for verbs and nouns, reduplication only affects the root while the entire word is repeated in the case of pronouns and numbers.

(c)    Inflection:

There is an extensive system of inflection for Kihaya verbs, but, as have noted. There currently is no consistent and accurate documentation of this subject in the Kihaya languages. Comparing Kihaya with other Bantu languages (Katamba, 2003), we noted that Kihaya verbs can be inflected for negation, subject, tense, aspect, object, mood and adverbial markers. The examples below illustrate the different forms of inflection of a Kihaya verb, the inflections being indicated in bold-facetype: i) Mood – shom –a (read) mu-shom-e (you should read) ii) Tense – mu-shom-ire (you read) – there are 7 tenses in Kihaya, each with a different tense moph. Iii) Aspect – n-aa-shom-ere (I have read) iv) Negation – ti-naa-shom-a (I have not read) tu-ta-sho-ma (we shouldn’t read) v) Adverbial marker (s) mu-sho-er-r (read for him/her e.g. read on his behalf). These are commonly called verb extensions. We identified 7 verb extension markers in Kihaya.

(d)   Compounding

A final important morphological process to be considered here involves compounding, the combination of lexical categories (nouns, adjectives, verbs or prepositions) to create a larger word. Kihaya includes many compounds such as the following; mwanmuara, ndumirakuili, abagambakamoi, etc

(e)    Derivation

Derivation forms a word with a meaning and /or category distinct from that of its base through the addition of an affix. Example; V-N lya “eat” (V) mulyo ‘meal’, jwara ‘to clothe’ kijwaro ‘cloth’.

(f)    Blends

Blends are created from nonmorphemic parts of two already existing items. For example; in Kihaya words like: banabe from bana and bawenene, owange from omushaija and wange, kyamushana from kyakulya and mushana.

(g)   Onomatopoeia

All languages have words that have been created to sound like the thing that they name. Examples of such onomatopoeic words in Kihaya include mugera, rushekuro, kanywaimunya, katururu etc. Since onomatopoeic words are not exact phonetic copies of noises, their form can differ form can differ from language to language.

(h)   Other Sources

In still other cases a word may be created from scratch. Called word manufacture’ or coinage, this phenomeno is especially common in cases where industry requires a new and attractive name for a product. In Kihaya, words like: eichumu, ekilele and emuga.