Dagbani is a Gur language spoken by approximately five hundred thousand people (Dagbamba/Dagombas) in Northern Ghana. With regard to morphological typology, Dagbani can be described as agglutinative with some degree of fusion: certain combinations of morphemes may be obscured by phonological and morphophonological rules. Most affixes in the language occur as suffixes, with a few prefixes to verbs. Compounding of verbal or nominal roots is common; typically, the output will be a noun. Syntactically, Dagbani is strictly AVO, SV; however frontshifting of objects or other non-verbal elements is very common.

As far as the status of the word is concerned, the language displays a number of interesting features. These include the structure of possible minimal words (§ 1.5), the role of noun–adjective constructions which surface as morphological compounds (§ 2.1), and adjectival derivations that illustrate the phenomenon of ‘bound words’ (§ 2.2). Dagbani also has a number of proclitic and enclitic elements, which is interesting, since most languages that are predominantly suffixing tend not to have proclitics (see Aikhenvald in chapter 2).

The following sections describe how Dagbani words can be characterised with respect to their relationship to phonology, morphology and syntax/ semantics.

Phonological word

As pointed out in chapter 1, the distinction between grammatical and phonological word is often difficult to make. Among the criteria for the definition of a phonological word, some of the following have been suggested, although there are problematic cases:

• boundaries defined by stress or tone;

• pauses (e.g. in dictation);

• phonological rules specifically applying to a word.

The term ‘clitic’ typically refers to a morphological element which does not have the full set of properties of an independent (phonological) word, and which forms ‘a phonological unit with the word that precedes it or follows it’ (Matthews 1997: 56) for the purposes of accent or prominence assignment (see Nevis, Joseph, Wanner and Zwicky 1994: xii–xx). And they behave differently from affixes. Sapir (1930: 70) remarked that ‘enclisis is … neither true suffixation nor juxtaposition of independent elements. It has the external characteristics of the former (including strict adherence to certain principles of order), the inner feeling of the latter’.

The consensus appears to be that clitics are morphemes which are prosodically deficient or unusual in certain ways. Criterial properties of clitics found in the literature invariably include that they are ‘loosely phonologically bound to a word’, or ‘occur in second position’ in a clause (Klavans 1985: 117), or ‘are phonologically deficient’.

This chapter has two distinct parts. In § 1, I propose parameters which help distinguish clitics from affixes, determine the nature of their similarity to other morpheme types and define their independent properties in a given language. These criteria suggest a scalar, or continuum-type, approach – that is, some morphemes turn out to be more affix-like and others to be more word-like. (In the Appendix, these parameters are compared to those which have been proposed in the literature.)

Introduction

Eastern/Central Arrernte (ECA) is a mesh of closely related dialects in the area around and to the east of Alice Springs in central Australia. These dialects form part of a larger dialect mesh for which there is no vernacular term. The language which incorporates the ECA dialects has been variously defined and labelled as Upper Aranda (Hale 1962), Eastern Arrernte (Wilkins 1989: 15) and Arrernte (Aranda) (Dixon 2001). ECA and Wilkins' Eastern Arrernte are more or less coextensive terms. Much of the description in this chapter cannot be extended to Arandic varieties beyond ECA.

There are estimated to be between 1,500 and 2,000 speakers of ECA, and probably around 4,500 speakers of Arandic group varieties in total (Henderson and Dobson 1994). ECA is under considerable pressure from English, which dominates local media, education and government. Nearly all ECA speakers also speak at least some English, often a distinctive Aboriginal variety. Many older people believe that younger speakers are not learning or using ECA as well as they should be, particularly in the areas closer to Alice Springs. Some of the phenomena described in the latter part of this chapter have been recorded primarily from middle-aged or older speakers. Principal sources on ECA are Wilkins (1989), Breen (1990), Henderson and Dobson (1994), Henderson (1998) and Breen and Pensalfini (1999).

This chapter and the next deal with rules which account for predictable allomorphy. The rules of predictable allomorphy are of three types:

replacement rules – replace one sound by a different sound in a certain position in the morpheme;

deletion rules – account for the loss of a sound, or sounds, from a morpheme;

expansion rules – expand a morpheme by inserting a new sound within the existing structure of the morpheme.

This classification exhausts the logical possibilities of what can happen to one phonetic segment. It can be replaced, deleted, or some sequence of sounds can be expanded.

Assimilation and types of assimilation

Assimilation rules are replacement rules which have the effect of making one vowel or consonant more similar to, or even identical with, another. In principle, assimilation can affect both vowels and consonants; most instances of assimilation discussed below, however, are cases of consonantal assimilation.

The process of assimilation can be described in terms of the target, the direction, and the scope of the resulting similarity. Assimilation can target some or even all of a sound's features: voicing, place, or manner of articulation. Depending on the direction of the influence between the sounds we find right-to-left assimilation, when the influence is from the second to the first sound, i.e. A ← B, also known as regressive assimilation, and left-to-right, when the first sound influences the second, the A → B type, known as progressive assimilation.

Unassimilated classical words

English contains classical words and phrases of two types:

1. (1) Those that have been fully assimilated into English, and have simply become English words (all the early borrowings, also most borrowings during and before the Renaissance); and

2. (2) True classical words that are either recognizably recent borrowings, or words and phrases fossilized in legal or scientific language.

The bulk of this book has been concerned with the former group, the words of classical origin that are now fully assimilated into English, and this chapter will be no exception. Before turning to the main topic, however, it may be useful to deal with the second group and recount briefly how unassimilated classical words and phrases are pronounced in English. The issue with these is: to what extent does one try to reproduce or simulate “authentic” Latin pronunciation? There are five traditional methods of Latin pronunciation found in modern times: (1) the classical Ciceronian, (2) the Italian, (3) the Continental, (4) the British, and (5) the American. The British system, though the one most commonly recorded in dictionaries, including some American dictionaries, is not in fact the one most commonly used in American English. It is, however, strongly favored in Britain. The essence of the British system is that not only the consonants but also the vowels are pronounced completely as they would be in a similar English word.

Terminology

Homophony. The term homophony (“sounding the same”) is commonly used to cover three types of semantic identity: homonymy, homophony, and polysemy. All of these count as homophones:

1. corn: on the cob vs. corn on toe

2. ear: of corn vs. ear of head

3. flight: from danger (flee), vs. flight in an airplane (fly), vs. flight of stairs

4. load: of dirt vs. lode in a gold mine

5. meal: ground up vs. meal at dinner time

6. mettle: in the sense of courage vs. metal in the sense of iron, copper

7. pupil: of your eye vs. pupil who is a student

8. score: score the table with a nail, vs. score high in game

9. sea: body of water vs. see verb of perception

10. sole: type of fish vs. sole only vs. sole the base of a shoe, vs. soul in a religious sense

11. trip: journey vs. trip to obstruct, cause to fall

12. waist: of a person vs. waste squander

To be homonymous (“having the same name”), words that sound alike must have different meanings and different origins: thus bear “carry,” bear “grizzly,” and bare “nude,” riddle “puzzle” and riddle “pierce with holes,” rock “stone” and rock “sway to and fro,” fit this definition. Homophony means approximately the same thing but even more broadly: words that sound alike but have different meanings, whether they have different origins or not. Dictionaries have separate entries for homonyms and homophones, thus fast(1) “quick, swift,” while fast(2) is “to abstain from food, or from some kinds of food.”

The origins of dictionaries

Dictionaries are a recent invention. Human language, in a form that must have resembled modern languages pretty closely, has existed for at least 50,000 years, and it may have been developing in ways unique to humans for more than a million years. But writing systems of any kind are quite recent, originating in the Near East no more than a few thousand years ago. Obviously writing systems have to exist before there is any need for dictionaries. The earliest alphabetic writing system, the kind that is universally used in western languages, is that of Greek, developed around the Aegean Sea less than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, and from it all the others are descended, either in the eastern version (Cyrillic) or the western (Roman). But inventive as the ancient classical civilizations were, they did not invent dictionaries – they invented grammars, they invented geometry, they invented the Olympic games, but not dictionaries. Dictionaries, curiously, are a quite accidental by-product of ignorance. The monks working in scriptoria (places where books were copied by hand, since printing had not been invented) in the Middle Ages often did not know Latin very well. Most of the texts they were copying were written in Latin; but the monks could not read it easily, and they jogged their memories as any elementary language student might do today.

This book is about the origins of English words, about their etymology. It is important to realize, however, that it is not about all possible origins, it is not about all the ways in which English has introduced new words into the language, but rather it is primarily about a particular subset, that portion of the vocabulary which is borrowed from the classical languages (Latin and Greek) either directly, or indirectly through French.

This (very large) portion of our vocabulary is a familiar subject. Greek and Latin roots in the English language have been studied and described for many centuries. Departments of Classical Languages traditionally offer courses under titles like “Classical Roots in English,” and in the past a decent education necessarily included a full program in the classics. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, it is extremely rare for students entering college to have a clear idea what Latin is, or whether English is derived from it or not, and even what it means for a language to be “derived,” in any sense, from another. The word cognate is not only generally unknown to undergraduate students, it often remains conceptually obscure, because it is simply not one of the topics we grow up with these days.

We take the view that people cannot call themselves “educated” who do not have a minimal acquaintance with the history and structure of the words in their own language.

The Early Modern English cultural scene

The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476. This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492. While its effect on our word stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon.

The end-point of Early Middle English coincides with two important events which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. We have already mentioned the appearance of the first really influential dictionary of English, the Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes by Samuel Johnson in 1755. That dictionary boosted enormously the prestige of English lexicographical research.

Morphological rules

Etymology is the study of the history of words. Over time, words may change both their form and their meaning. Knowing the etymology of a word requires familiarity with the ways in which its phonetic shape has evolved, and familiarity with the evolution of its semantic content. The following two chapters will deal with some regular changes in the phonological form of roots, affixes, and whole words. We will refer to these regularities as morphological rules.

Types of allomorphy

We can divide all the roots and affixes of English into three types of allomorphy:

1. (1) Unchanging – i.e., zero allomorphy.

2. (2) Irregular allomorphy: these are morphemes whose variant forms are not derived from one another by regular rules. These unpredictable allomorphs are said to be opaque because the relationship between them, though historically valid, is not apparent to the ordinary speaker of the language.

3. (3) Regular allomorphy: these are morphemes whose variation can be described in terms of regular rules; the allomorphs are predictable. Such allomorphs are said to be transparent because one can easily recognize that the two forms are variants of a single form.

Zero allomorphy

Morphemes belonging to this group preserve their base form in all the derivatives where they appear. Thus in the family of the root √phil “love,” this morpheme remains unchanged in Philadelphia, philanthropy, philology, philosophy, zoophilia.

A quick scan of a couple of pages in a dictionary that records the origin of our vocabulary reveals that many entries in it are historically “un-English.” This is not surprising; languages travel with the people who speak them. No language in the world today uses vocabulary which is entirely free of foreign influence, just as no country's population can remain completely indigenous. A genetically “pure” language is as hard to imagine as a genetically “pure” population. Like the society we live in, the language we speak is a product of history. Like nations and governments, languages differ in their attitude and adaptability to external pressure. History tells us how periods of hostility, isolation, self-sufficiency, follow upon periods of openness, constructive interaction, and peaceful coexistence with the outside world. The overall inventory of words used in a language is the outcome of centuries of political and cultural history. In many ways our vocabulary mirrors the events which have taken place in the history of English-speaking peoples. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the important socio-historical events and circumstances which have shaped our vocabulary. We start with some basic notions and facts about the place of English within the enormously broad picture of languages of the world.