The morphology of plant names in Chasu

Abstract

The study on which this paper is based examined the morphological structure of plant names in Chasu, a Bantu language spoken by the people living along the Pare Mountains in North-eastern Tanzania. The study was conducted in selected rural areas in the districts of Same and Mwanga in Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania. The data were collected using free listing, field interview (a walk–in–the–woods interview) and written texts, which contained Chasu plant names. The study found that the morphological structure of Chasu plant names is composed of a noun class prefix and a noun stem. It also found that the majority of plant names in Chasu are found in the noun class 3/4 pair, with 50.8% of the analysed plant names being found in that pair. Other plant names are found in the noun classes: 5/6 (25.8%), 9/10 (10.1%) and 7/8 (9.7 %). Only a few plant names are placed in noun classes 11/6 (1.9%) and 12/13 (1.7%). The paper reveals further that there are different strategies that speakers of Chasu use in naming plants including compounding, reduplication, descriptive phrases, borrowing, loan translation and semantic extension. The paper recommends further research on the semantics of plant names in Chasu.