Noun Formation in Mashami

Abstract

This paper examines the morphology of the noun in Mashami, a Tanzanian Bantu language (E62) spoken on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and describes the various ways in which a noun may be formed. Mashami illustrates the continuing modification of the grammatical and semantic structure of the Bantu noun class system, showing that the system has become quite arbitrary and is comparable to grammatical gender systems in many languages of the world. At the same time, an underlying semantic motive is clearly operative and gets exploited in creative ways to derive new forms for the lexicon. And this creativity, based on shifting and expanding worldviews, wreaks havoc to the traditional distinction between inflection and derivation.