0.0. Symbols and Explanations - Alexandre Kimenyi

598 Pages·2009·1.04 MB·English

KINYARWANDA SPELL CHECKER
ALPHA DROP
b y Alexandre Kimenyi
0.0. Symbols and Explanations

S= sentence
cl= clause
mcl= main clause
scl= subordinate clause
NP= noun phrase
VP= verb phrase
N= noun
CN= compound noun
DN= deverbal noun (noun derived from a verb)
V= verb
DNV= denominal verb (verb derived from a noun)
AUX= auxiliary verb
AU= augment
PFX= prefix
PPFX= preprefix
SFX= suffix
PSFX= post suffix
Tn= tone
T= tense
PST= past tense
FUT= future tense
TAM= tense-aspect-modality
ASP= aspect
PA= perfective aspect
IA= imperfective aspect
PR= pronoun
OP= object pronoun
CM= class marker
IDO= ideophone
ITJ= interjection
RED= reduplication
APPL= applicative
PASS= passive
CAUS= causative
ASS= associative
REC= reciprocal
ADJ= adjective
ADV= adverb
DEM= demonstrative
POSS= possessive
var.= lexical or phonetic variation
lw= loan-word
all classes= can take the class marker of all noun classes
*= incorrect form
0= a default zero morpheme given to some words class 5i , 9i and 10i which have lost
it.or certain tenses such as as the habitual.
/ /= morphological or underlying representation
[ ]= phonetic representation (how the word should be pronounced)
( )= optional morphological elements
>= changes into
1a= noun of class 1 lacking the augment u-
2a= noun of class 2 lacking the augment a- and take ba instead
5i= noun of class 5 without the class marker –ri-
9a= noun of class 9 lacking the augment (preprefix) i-
9i= noun of clas 9 lacking the class marker, the nasal -n-
10a= noun of class 10 lack augment and take za in its place

0.1. Introduction

Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda and is a sister dialect of Kirundi,
the national language of Burundi. Linguistically speaking, these are indeed
dialects of the same language as in the case of American English and British
English since there is total intelligibility between their respective speakers.
Together with another dialect known as Giha spoken in Tanzania, it is the second
largest language cluster after Kiswahili within the Bantu language group. Despite
genocide which took place taking lives of more than one million Tutsi, its
speakers are perhaps more than 20 million people. Rwanda has around 8,5
million people right now, Burundi has around 7 million but besides the Giha
speakers there are also ethnic Banyarwanda in Southern Uganda in the Kigezi
discrict known as Bafumbira. Other Kinyarwanda speakers are Banyamulenge in
Southern Kivu and ethnic Banyarwanda in Masisi and Rutshuro in Northern Kivu
in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kinyarwanda is also spoken in Tanzania,
in Karagwe region which was a kingdom of Kinyarwanda speaking people before
colonialsim. Kinyarwanda belongs to the interlacustrine (Great Lakes) Bantu
languages. Kinyarwanda has an official orthography. Although, both short and
long vowels are phonemic and are realized at the phonetic level, only short
vowels are used which creates a lot of homonyms (homographs). Thus the word
kuvura can stand for either [kuvura] ‘to foam’ or [kuvuura] ‘to cure/to heal’ The
language also has tones but the orthography does not mark them either. Without
a proper context, it will not be easy to tell if a word like ino stands for [ino] ‘toe’
or [inó] ‘here’.
Kinyarwanda has one ethnic dialect, the Gitwa which is characterized by the
anticipation of tone and two distinct regional dialects, the northern dialect known
as Igikiga and the southern dialect known as Ikinyanduga. These two main
dialects have in turn subdialects (Ikigoyi, Igishiru, Ikirera) .
Kinyarwanda is an agglutinative language having a handful of items which are
free morphemes. Nouns and verbs get their full phonetic shape depending on the
function they play in the sentence stucture., thus having to have prefixes or
suffixes added. For instance the number of extensions on the verb stem depends
on how many noun complements the verb has. The verb morphology and the
word order of these morphemes seems also to be a mirror image of the sentence
structure.

Simple nouns consist of an augment, a class marker and a stem. Simple nouns
don’t use suffixation that much. Only deverbal nouns do.

Kinyarwanda and other Bantu languages have few adjectives. Associative
morphemes or relative clause constructions are used to modify the head noun.

Unclassified categories are interjections, exclamations and ideophones. Function
words such as prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliaries seem to not exist in
Kinyarwanda. It is the structure which determines where a word is a regular word
or a function word. Thus nouns can function as prepositions when they occur
before other nouns can occur and verbs as conjunctions or auxiliaries when they
occur before other verbs also.
Phonological rules affecting vowels are vowel deletion, vowel lengthening, vowel
shortening, vowel coalescence, gliding, vowel harmony, vowel copy and vowel
insertion. Those affecting consonants are consonant deletion, consonant addition,
consonant assimilation, Dahl’s law, palatal fricative harmony,
Noun tones can occur on any syllable or mora except class markers. In verb they
are assigned differently. They occur ever in the prestem position, first mora of the
first syllable of the stem or the first mora of the stem second syllable. Other
domains are extraprosodic. No tone activity can take place there. The tone rules
found in the language are Meeussen rule or Beat Deletion (deletion of the second
tone on the right), Beat Addition (secondary tone assignment), Beat Movement
(high tone spread), Weak Beat Alternation, Iambic Reversal.
The following list of Kinyarwanda words is found in the majority of Bantu
languages with sometimes slight phonetic differences due to known universal
phonological rules and phonetic factors. These lexical items are associated with
universal phenomena or referents in the shared Bantu cultural experiences.

Verbs: kubara 'to count' , kubona 'to see', kubora 'to rot', kubyara 'to give
birth', kubyina 'to dance', kubumba 'to mould', guha 'to give', guhita 'to pass',
kugura 'to buy', gukura 'to grow', kuroga 'to poison', kuruma 'to bite',
kubora 'to rot', kugenda 'to leave', gutuka 'to insult', kunywa 'to drink', kurya
'to eat', gupfa 'to die', kugwa 'to fall', kunnya 'to defecate', gucya 'to dawn',
kurara 'to spend the night', kurota 'to dream', -ti 'to say', kurira 'to cry', kugona
'to snore', kwita 'to name', gukubita 'to hit', kurima 'to toil', kurinda 'to
guard', kuririimba 'to sing', guseka 'to smile/laugh', gushyika 'to arrive', gutema
'to cut', gutuma 'to send', kuza 'to come'

Nouns:
Humans: uuuntu 'person'; umupfumu 'diviner'; umuganga 'medicine-
man'; umugeni 'bride'; umwana 'child'; umwari 'well behaved marriable girl';
umuzungu 'white person'.

Body parts: ibere 'breast', umutwe 'head', ugutwi 'ear', ijisho 'eye',
iryinyo 'tooth', umunwa 'mouth', ururimi 'tongue', rugongo 'clitoris', umugongo
'back', ukuboko 'arm', itako 'thigh', itama 'cheek', imboro 'penis',
ubwonko 'brain'

Animals: imbwa 'dog', inkoko 'chicken', inkware 'partridge', umubu
'mosquito', inzoka 'snake', impyisi 'hyena' imbogo 'buffalo', imvubu 'hippo',
ingona 'crocodile', ingwe 'leopard', ingurube 'pig', inkanga 'guinea-fowl',
umuswa 'termite', inzuki 'bees'.
Others: inzara 'hunger', inyota 'thirst', isoni 'shame/shyness', inyumba
'large house', ibuye 'stone', inyanja 'lake', imbeho 'cold/wind', imvura 'rain',
igiti 'tree', inyama 'meat', imboga 'vegetables', indurú 'war cry', ijuru 'sky',
izuba 'sun', ukwezi 'moon/month', umwaka 'crop/year', amazi 'water', ingabo
'shield', inyundo 'hammer', ingoma 'drum', icumu 'spear', isi 'earth', umwotsi
'smoke', umuriro 'fire',

Adjectives: -inshi 'many/much/a lot'; -ese/-ose 'all/every', -shya 'new'; -re-re
'long/tall/deep'; -kuru 'old/important'; -bi 'bad'; -zima 'alive/healthy';

Numbers: -mwe 'one'; -biri 'two'; -tatu 'three'; -ne 'four'; -tanu 'six'; -nani
eight’; icumi 'ten'.

A large number of words which have cognates in a larger number of Bantu
languages are either monosyllabic or have lost the initial consonant.
3. Part of Speech.

Kinyarwanda has the following parts of speech : nouns, verbs, adjectives,
conjunctions, subordinators, ideophones and interjections. Each part of speech has its
formal charatertics.

3.A1. Noun

The noun in Kinyarwanda consists of a stem, a prefix and a preprefix or augment.
This preprefix which is realized as a vowel, seems to be a copy of the prefix vowel.
These prefixes are also known in Bantu as class markers.

3.1.1. Noun Morphology.

There two types of nouns in Kinyarwanda, nominal nouns and deverbal nouns (DN),
derived from verbs. A regular Kinyarwanda noun consists of a preprefix (PPX) or
augment (AU), a class marker (CM) and a stem. A deverbal noun consists of a
preprefix or augment also, a class marker, a verb, an optiional lexical extention (LE),
an optional grammatical extention (GE) and a nominalizer (NR), as the following
examples show.

NN = Au-CM-Stem.

-gabo, 1 ‘man’ u-mu-gabo >umugabo
-enda, 4 ‘clothes’ i-mi-enda>imyenda
-aha, 15 ‘armpit’ u-ku-aha> ukwaha

DN= Au-CM-Verb Stem-(LE)-(GE)-NR

-kino, 3 ‘game’ u-mu-kin-o umukino
AU-CM3-play-NR
-funguzo,11 ‘key’ u-ru-fung-ur-y-o urufunguzo
AU-CM11-open-LE-GE-NR
-terano, 9 ‘meeting’ i-ter-an-ir-o iteraniro
AU-cause-LE-GE-NR
-kinisho, 7 ‘toy’ i-ki-kin-ish-o igikinisho
AU-CM7-play-GE-NR
The most productive morpheme which can be added to the verb stem to create new
words are the class 5 augment i- which precedes the verb stem to short action or state,
the nominalizer –yi, and the suffix –ire which is always accompanied with the
augment and class marker of class 4 to show manners.
i-a
-kor- ‘work’ ikora ‘working’
-som- ‘read’ isoma ‘reading’
-ib- ‘steal’ iyiba ‘stealing’

-yi
-kor- ‘work’ umukozi ‘worker’
-som- ‘read’ umusomyi ‘reader’
-ib- ‘steal’ umwibyi ‘thief’

-ire
-kor- ‘work’ imikorere ‘ways of working’
-som- ‘read’ imisomere ‘ways of reading’
-ib- ‘steal’ imyibire ‘ways of stealing’

3.1.2. Noun Classes.

Kinyarwanda has 16 classes. Modifiers (adjectives, demonstratives, numerals,
possessives) agree with the head noun by taking this class marker.
In some cases, however, the modifier takes a different type of prefix depending on
whether it is an adjective, a verb, an object pronoun , a quantifier or a possessive as
illustrated in (1).
The numbers 1-16 correspond to traditional conventional Bantu noun classification.

Noun adjective subject pronoun object pronoun demonstrative possessive

1. u-mu- mu- a- -mu- u- u-
2. a-ba- ba- ba- -ba- ba- ba-
3. u-mu- mu- u- -wu- u- u-
4. i-mi- mi- i- -yi- i- i-
5. i-ri- ri- ri- -ri- ri- ri-
6. a-ma- ma- a- -ya- a- a-
7. i-ki- ki- ki- -ki- ki- ki-
8. i-bi bi- bi- -bi- bi- bi-
9. i-n- n- i- -yi- i- i-
10. i-n- n- zi- -zi- zi- zi-
11. u-ru- ru- ru- -ru- ru- ru-
12. a-ka- ka- ka- -ka- ka- ka-
13. u-tu- tu- tu- -tu- tu- tu-
14. u-bu- bu- bu- -bu- bu- bu-
15. u-ku- ku- ku- -ku- ku- ku-
16. a-ha- ha- ha- -ha- ha- ha-

For illustration purposes, let’s use the stem of the noun –gabo which belongs to class 1
for singular and class 2 for plural and –bindi ‘clay jar’ which belongs to class 7 and
pluralizes by taking class 8 marker.

-gabo 1/2 ‘man/husband’ noun : umugabo ‘man’/abagabo ‘men’
adj : umugabo mugufi ‘a short man’/abagabo bagufi ‘short men’
sub.pr. umugabo araguye ‘the man has just fallen’/abagabo baraguye ‘the
men have just fallen’
obj.pr. baramubona ‘they see him’/barababona ‘they see them’
dem. uriya mugabo ‘that man’/bariya bagabo ‘those men’
poss. umugabo wanjye ‘my man’/abagabo banjye ‘my men’
-bindi 7/8 : noun ikibindi ‘clay jar’/ibibindi ‘clay jars’
adj. ikibindi kigufi ‘a short clay jar’/ibibindi bigufi ‘short clay jars’
sub.pr. ikibindi kiraguye ‘the clay jar has just fallen down’/ibibindi
biraguye ‘the clay pots have just fallen down’
obj.pr. barakibona ‘they see it’/barabibona ‘they see them’
dem. kiriya kibindi ‘that clay jar’/biriya bibindi ‘those clay jars’
poss. ikibindi cyanjye ‘my clay jar’/ibibindi byanjye ‘my clay jars’

Class 1 and Class 2 : -mu-/-ba-

-ntu, 1/2. umuntu/abantu ‘person/people’
-gabo, 1/2 umugabo/abagabo ‘man/men’
-gore, 1/2 umugore/abagore ‘woman/women
-ana, 1/2 umwana/abana ‘child/children’
-arabu, 1/2 umwarabu/abarabu ‘Arab/Arabs’
-iru, 1/2 umwiru/abiru ‘royal ritualist/royal ritualists’
-ega, 1/2 umwega/abega ‘menber of the Bega clan/members of the Bega clan’
-hungu, 1/2 umuhungu/abahungu ‘boy/boys’
-kobwa, 1/2 umukobwa/abakobwa ‘girl/girls’
-ami, 1/2 umwami/abami ‘king/kings’
-oro, 1/2 umworo/aboro ‘poor person/poor people’
-ari, 1/2 umwari/abari ‘a teenager girl/teenager girls’
-arimu, 1/2 umwarimu ‘teacher/teachers’
-boyi , 1/2 umuboyi/ababoyi ‘cook/cooks’
-foroma, 1/2 umuforoma/abaforoma ‘nurse/nurses’
-geni, 1/2 umugeni/abageni ‘bride/brides’
-kwe, 1/2 umukwe/abakwe ‘groom/grooms,
-nyarwanda, 1/2 umunyarwanda/abanyarwanda ‘Rwandan/Rwandans’
-nyafurika, 1/2 umunyafurika/abanyafurika ‘African/Africans’
-ere , 1/2 umwere/abere ‘innocent person/innocent people’
-camanza, 1/2 umucamanza/abacamanza ‘judge/judges’
-ibyi, 1/2 umwibyi/abibyi ‘thief/thieves’

Class 1a and 2a : 0/ba

data/ba data ‘my father/my fathers’
mama/ba mama ‘my mother/my mothes’
papa/ba papa ‘pope/popes’
perezida/ba perezida ‘president/presidents’
muganga/ba muganga ‘doctor/doctors’
maneko/ba maneko ‘secret agent/secret agents’
mayibobo/ba mayibobo ‘street child/street children’
magendu/ba magendu
magigiri/ba magigiri ‘spy’
ruharwa/ba ruharwa ‘suicider’
gitimujisho/ba gitimujisho ‘the one whose name should not be mentioned’
rugizerute/ ba rugizerute
minisitiri/ba minisitiri ‘minister/ministers’
padiri/ba padiri ‘priest/priests’

Class 3 and Class 4 : -mu-/-mi-

-ti, 3/4 umuti/imiti ‘medicine/medicines’
-gozi, 3/4 umugozi/imigozi ‘rope/ropes’
-rima, 3/4 umurima/imirima ‘field/fields’