Chapter in:
Grammatical and Sociolinguistic Aspects of Ethiopian LanguagesEdited by Derib Ado, Almaz Wasse Gelagay and Janne Bondi Johannessen †
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 48] 2021
► pp. 15–33
Term-formation methods in the Gamo language
Almaz Wasse Gelagay | Kotebe Metropolitan University
This research describes the techniques used to form terms in
the Gamo language, an Omotic language of Afro-asiatic family spoken in South-Western
Ethiopia. The introduction of Gamo as a medium of instruction in primary education
and as a language subject for all grade levels requires the creation of new terms
for concepts that do not already exist in the language. A number of new terms were
formed to facilitate the teaching and learning of language, science and mathematics
education. This research followed linguistic and communicative approaches, as
illustrated in Antia (2000: 39, 44), to
describe techniques of term-formation and to analyse features of the terms in line
with the linguistic properties of Gamo. To this end, lexical data were collected
from language and mathematics textbooks prepared in the Gamo language. Data were
also gathered from native speakers who participated in textbook preparation and
terminology works. According to the data, borrowing, compounding, blending,
initialism, paraphrasing and semantic extension were applied to form terms pertinent
to education in the Gamo language. The most frequent mechanisms were borrowing,
followed by compounding, but few terms were formed by blending and paraphrasing.
Keywords: Gamo, education, terminology, term-formation methods
References
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<
https://glosbe.com/gmv/am Glosbe: Gamo Amharic Dictionary Online.