Towards a better understanding of the nature of the word in African languages

Abstract

The analysis of the core linguistic element, the’ word’, has been a debatable issue in African languages ever since these languages were first written, and to this very day, linguists differ in their opinions on what truly constitutes a word in these languages. The very fact that the official languages of South Africa do not all conform to one specific writing system bears testimony to the differences in opinion that have prevailed in the analyses of these languages. The African languages are primarily agglutinating in structure which should be reflected in a common writing system, and not in the distinctly diverse disjunctive and conjunctive systems which have prevailed for over a century. In an article by Louwrens and Poulos (2006), the shortcomings of the disjunctive system of writing are discussed in detail. In this current article, the focus shifts to languages which use the conjunctive system of writing, and certain relevant issues on word structures are also drawn from other language types for example from an inflectional language such as Greek. By carrying out this type of typological investigation, it is believed that we might move closer towards a clearer understanding of the criteria which govern word boundaries in our African languages.

Keywords:

• African languages
• conjunctive writing system
• South Africa
• word boundaries
• Zulu