The names of the supreme being in Bemba: some critical morphological insights

Abstract

In this article, we use lexical morphology to account for names of the supreme being in Bemba, a Bantu language spoken in Zambia as rendered by various translators in the Christian holy book, the Bible. Motivated by the agglutinative nature of the Bemba language in which lexical items are built out of distinctly identifiable sub-parts carrying specific meanings and functions, we segment morphemes of theonyms to unravel their meanings that are couched in the broader context of the Bemba sociocultural knowledge and narratives. We use semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis to collect data. There is a wealth of information and knowledge contained in the theonyms, and we propose two morphological structures on which the Bemba Christian theonyms are constructed. To this end, the study highlights single-word morphological structures that manifest as denominals, deverbals and de-adjectivals as well as a phrasal morphological structure, a combination of two or more separate words from any class as structures that inform the construction of the Bemba Christian theonyms.