Talk:Sesotho grammar

Copy of Sotho language?

This appears to largely be a copy of Sotho language. Is there a reason it's here? --Onorem♠Dil 12:29, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Look again. Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 18:42, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Linguistic terminology

The linguistic terminology seems very odd, or else a non-native speaker of English has written this. Examples:

(1) "Each word has one part of speech, which usually appears at the end of the word." Parts of speech presumably don't appear in spoken or written form, presumably. That would be like writing English "John-noun loves-verb Mary-noun." I think what is meant here is that words in Sesotho are head-final, i.e. the part of speech of the word is generally the part of speech of the last morpheme (a stem, presumably).

(2) "Each complete Sesotho word is composed of some part of speech." Words are not composed of parts of speech, they are composed of meaningful morphemes [ok, with some exceptions], and *belong to* a part of speech. Over-simplifying (e.g. ignoring compound nouns), the stem determines that part of speech.

(3) "Certain situations may make the word division complex... In all these situations, however, each proper word has exactly one main stressed syllable." I'm not sure what "proper word" means here. I would guess it means prosodic word, but that's only a guess. And footnote 8 mentions prosodic words, so unless different people have edited this part and the footnote, maybe something else is intended by "proper word." But I don't know what it is.

(4) "every word... contains exactly one root, from which it derives its most basic meaning (though, technically speaking, roots themselves do not really have any meaning)" I'm not sure what this is saying. On the face of it, it seems self-contradictory; I also doubt that it is true. Some morphemes in some languages lack meaning ('per-' and '-ceive' in English 'perceive', for example). But in general, roots do have meanings, even though they may be vague (ktb in Arabic, for example, means something like "having to do with writing").

(5) "Although in some cases various phonetic processes may ultimately change the root's form in predictable ways (such as the nasalization in the last two examples above) the root itself is considered to be unchanged." Again, self-contradictory. I *think* what is meant here is that "the root can still be recovered from the derived (or inflected) word." BTW, the orthographic change in the last two examples appears to be r --> th. I don't know Sesotho orthography, but 'th' would be a very odd way to write a nasal; are you sure this is nasalization?

(6) "The root is a dead thing — the study of roots is primarily to aid the compilation of dictionaries, to further the study of comparative Bantu linguistics, and to help trace the evolution and connections of different languages. Many roots are shared by a wide range of Bantu languages." Again, I don't know what this is trying to say. It sounds like another version of (4), but maybe saying that roots are only of historical interest. I doubt it: I think that's a misunderstanding of what a root is, confusing roots in modern languages with reconstructed roots in proto-languages.

(7) "Bantuists do it with multiple appendages." I almost think this is a joke, I have a picture of Bantuists using both their arms and their legs to reconstruct proto-Bantu. At any rate, I don't believe it belongs in a footnote.

I'm going to fix (1) and (2) above. Someone who knows Sesotho and linguistics should take on the rest of these points, and the article in general. (I know linguistics, but not Sesotho.) Mcswell (talk) 03:05, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Yo, McSwell.

(1) By part of speech I meant a specific type of morpheme, different from affixes. In your example "John-noun loves-verb Mary-noun", John, noun, loves, verb, and Mary are ALL parts of speech. Whereas on the other hand an example like "Unmitigated failure" might, in this sense, consist of two basic parts of speech and one prefix.

There's a specific reason I did this. As I explained (either in this article or another one in the series), in Doke's classification for Bantu languages, since the languages are agglutinative it helps to distinguish between basic parts of speech and the numerous affixes. In isiZulu, for example, inkosi "king" is a noun, while inkosikazi "queen" still only has one part of speech -- inkosi -- followed by a feminine suffix which is not viewed as a separate part of speech.

(2) Once again, perhaps I'm misunderstanding Doke, but by him each word is composed of affixes attached to a single basic part of speech. I guess I need to rewrite this to make it clearer, because I get your point.

(3) Yep. Prosodic word. Simply stressing that the language, unlike isiZulu, is not written as spoken.

(4) I gave several examples where the meaning is so vague as to not really exist, and a few others where completely unrelated words share roots that sound exactly the same. My point was that without "prefixes" nouns are meaningless -- we only use roots for classification in dictionaries and for comparative linguistics. "Ho hoka" to attach, and "dikgokahanyo" telecommunications, both have the same exact root.

(5) Well. Underlyingly the root is unchanged. The root of "lerato" love is the same as in "ho rata" to love, or "ho ratuwa" to be loved, or "thato" will, or "nthatuwa", beloved, or "thatohatsi" favorite. The phonetic changes are completely superficial, and all these words are found in the same place in the dictionary.

Please see Sesotho_phonology#pp_nasalization It is called that, once again, for historical and comparative reasons. Historically for r --> th, for example, the original proto-Bantu change was *t --> *nt, and the modern Sesotho forms are consistent no matter how you look at it. Similarly, in isiZulu nasalization of the same historical phoneme is th --> nt, for example "ukuthando" to love and "intando" will (one of the distinguishing properties of Siswati form the other Nguni languages is that it allows nasalized aspirated plosives, so we have eg. "nthombi" for girl instead of "ntombi"), which is perfectly parallel with the Sesotho change. The exact same change (with extremely predictable sound variation) happens in thousands of either Bantu languages and dialects, and is called nasalization in an effort to unify the study of the various languages.

Similarly, even if a modern word is not the nasalized form of another modern word, the historical parallel sound changes with other languages are still consistent. For example Sesotho "thope" and isiZulu "ntombi", both meaning girl, do not come from *rope or *thombi, but when compared to other languages they look like they do. Nasalization is consistent synchronically and diachronically, and one of the defining characteristics of the Narrow Bantu languages. Note that the dropping of the responsible nasal which caused the change is a Sotho-Tswana innovation, though it does occur in several other languages.

(6) Sesotho is not Indo-European. The root is right there, it doesn't need to be reconstructed. Reconstructed roots do of course exist, but most of the modern language does not have corresponding reconstructed forms, and the modern agglutinative/synthetic grammar still uses the concept of roots. There are very few examples of fossilized words with no known root form (usually a handful of adverbs and conjunctives). This is the reason why you shouldn't look at African languages coming from an Indo-European background, and why Doke often basically invented his own terms to avoid semantic confusion with European terms (see, for example, Sesotho parts of speech).

(7) But it's funny. The appendages are affixes.

--Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 11:29, 10 January 2011 (UTC)