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Sotho parts of speech

Sesotho
Notes:

The Sesotho parts of speech convey the most basic meanings and functions of the words in the language, which may be modified in largely predictable ways by affixes and other regular morphological devices. Each complete word in the Sesotho language must comprise some "part of speech."

There are basically twelve parts of speech in Sesotho. The six major divisions are purely according to syntax, while the sub-divisions are according to morphology and semantic significance.

Parts of speech[1]
  1. Substantives signify concrete or abstract concepts:
    1. Nouns
    2. Pronouns
  2. Qualificatives qualify substantives:
    1. Adjectives
    2. Relatives
    3. Enumeratives
    4. Possessives
  3. Predicatives signify an action or state connected with the substantive:
    1. Verbs
    2. Copulatives
  4. Descriptives describe qualificatives, predicatives, or other descriptives:
    1. Adverbs
    2. Ideophones
  5. Conjunctives introduce or join up sentences
  6. Interjectives are exclamations

As a rule, Bantu languages do not have any prepositions[2] or articles. In Sesotho, locatives are inflected substantives and verb imperatives are treated as interjectives. The division of the four qualificatives is dependent solely on the concords that they use.[3] Cardinals are nouns but are given a separate section below.

In form, some parts of speech (adjectives, enumeratives, some relatives, some possessives, and all verbs) are radical stems which need affixes to form meaningful words; others (copulatives, most possessives, and some adverbs) are formed from full words by the employment of certain formatives; the rest (nouns, pronouns, some relatives, some adverbs, all ideophones, conjunctives, and interjectives) are complete words themselves which may or may not be modified with affixes to form new words. Therefore, the term "word classes" instead of the somewhat more neutral "parts of speech" would have been somewhat of a misnomer.

  1. ^ The peculiar names are due to Doke. Note that:
    1. The more familiar terms "conjunction" and "interjection" are special (radical) types of "conjunctives" and "interjectives"
    2. The simple "copulative" is usually expressed without the use of verbs (in contrast to "copulas" in English);
    3. There are four types of "qualificatives" (not simply one type of "adjective") distinguished morphologically by their use of concords;
    4. "Ideophones" (a term coined by Doke specifically for Bantu linguistics), unlike most English onomatopoeias, describe verbs and "qualificatives" (just like English adverbs); many of them describe qualities and actions which produce no obvious sound (such as redness, dying, darkness, silence, disappearing into a corner, appearing alone at a height, walking quickly due to feeling cold, etc.);
    and so forth. The grammatical classification is obviously quite different from that of European and Classical languages, and these terms are used to avoid the temptation of treating Bantu languages in the same manner as European languages, and to avoid the implications of more traditional terms.
  2. ^ Sometimes a certain class of constructions are called "prepositions" in Sesotho, but this is merely a misunderstanding aggravated by the disjunctive Sesotho orthography. They are formed from adverbs of place by contracting the locative class' possessive concord (ha-) affixed to the following word into them (as evidenced by the fact that they all end with a high tone a, and affect the tone of the following noun), and produce similar meanings to English prepositions:
    [hɑʀɪhɑn̩t͡ɬʼʊ] hare ha ntlo ('inside the house') → [hɑʀɑn̩t͡ɬʼʊ] hara ntlo
    [t͡ɬʼɑsɪhɑmɑʒʷɛ] tlase ha majwe ('underneath rocks') → [t͡ɬʼɑsɑmɑʒʷɛ] tlasa majwe
    [pʼɪlɑ] pela- ('next to'), [kʼɑpʼɪlɑ] ka pela- ('in front of'), [mʊʀɑ] ka mora- ('behind/after'), [hʊdimɑ] hodima- ('above'), etc...
    In each case, the "preposition" is found to be part of a genitive (possessive) compound formed with the following orthographical "word", but the current disjunctive orthography writes these parts separately. Note that in the Lesotho orthography an apostrophe is used to indicate the missing final vowel of the first word and ⟨h⟩ of the possessive concord (that is, the examples would be written ⟨har'a ntlo⟩ and ⟨tlas'a majoe⟩).
  3. ^ Other researchers call adjectives and relatives "agreeing adjectives" and "non-agreeing adjectives" respectively. In Sesotho, at least, these terms are only truly meaningful when forming simple copulatives (since adjectives assume the class prefix but relatives do not). In non-copulative uses in Sesotho, all qualificatives agree with the noun they are qualifying.

    The terms have more validity in languages such as Swahili where the "non-agreeing adjectives" really don't concord with the nouns they describe.

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