Open AccessThe Treatment of Borrowed Nouns in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele and Isichazamazwi SezoMculo
Author(s) -
Eventhough Ndlovu
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
lexikos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.28
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 2224-0039
pISSN - 1684-4904
DOI - 10.5788/19-0-181
Subject(s) - prefix , noun , linguistics , proper noun , vowel , computer science , class (philosophy) , mathematics , artificial intelligence , philosophy
This article focuses on the lemmatisation of vowel-commencing borrowed nouns and the allo-cation of borrowed nouns to noun class prefixes in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele, the first monolingual general-purpose Ndebele dictionary, and Isichazamazwi SezoMculo, the first specialised Ndebele dictionary of musical terms. It adopts a comparative approach, also highlighting the controversies surrounding the status of the initial vowel of the prefix or the pre-prefix in Ndebele and other Nguni languages. It further looks at the challenges and limitations of lemmatising the noun using either the initial vowel of the prefix or the initial letter of the noun stem. It is found that there are some inconsistencies in the lemmatisation of vowel-com-mencing borrowed nouns and the allocation of borrowed nouns to noun class prefixes in the two dictionar-ies. These inconsistencies impact negatively on the standardisation and treatment of borrowed nouns