Abstract
This paper reports on the incorporation of lexical items into one of the well-known dialects of Setswana, namely Sengwato. A native speaker of the Sengwato dialect provided much of the data for this study. The data show that borrowings from English and Afrikaans Dutch adhere to the phonological canons of Sengwato via the application of a number of sound change processes such as lenition, fortition, affrication, palatalization and obstruent devoicing to name a few. In addition, the data demonstrate how lexical borrowings undergo gender-based classification when incorporated into Sengwato and are categorized into fourteen gender classes identified from the Swadesh list provided by the informant. The paper discusses how the semantic content of loanwords plays a vital role in their incorporation into the Sengwato dialect.
Highlights
Much of the linguistic aspects of the Niger-Congo languages remain largely undocumented
The present research paper deals with a well-known dialect of the Setswana language, a Bantu branch belonging to the larger Niger-Congo family, namely the Sengwato dialect
One way to examine how reinterpretation occurs is by analyzing loanwords that do not share the general semantic criteria of their noun classes; for example, consider the following from the bo-/ma- class: (81) bo-rotho > ma-rotho < Afrikaans Dutch brood “bread” (82) bo-roxo > ma-roxo < Afrikaans Dutch brug “bridge” (83) bo-rokwe > ma-rokwe < Afrikaans Dutch broek “trousers” Note that the examples above all contain onset clusters which when incorporated into Sengwato were simplified via epenthesis of the vowel /o/
Summary
Much of the linguistic aspects of the Niger-Congo languages remain largely undocumented. Vol 4, No 3, 2020 from English and Afrikaans Dutch besides the fact that much linguistic inquiry is lacking The goal of this short paper is to draw on linguistic data from the native speaker of Sengwato in an attempt to describe and generalize certain linguistic aspects relevant to the incorporation of lexical borrowings from English and Afrikaans Dutch into the Sengwato dialect. Such characteristics include, but are not limited to, the linguistic processes in the adaptation of phonological, syllable structure, and morphosyntactic loanwords. The analysis of the linguistic incorporation of loans into Sengwato is framed within the rule-based as well as the Optimality-theoretic approach
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