A few years ago on this very forum, while discussing new ways to develop Igbo (and save it from the same fate as Latin), I had mentioned that Igbo will need two things.

1. One or more new classes of adverbials
2. Many more verb roots

I have been interested in #2 as of late. As a case in point, I have endeavored myself to coin several new verb roots. The results have been better than expected, but then I realized one of the reasons why it worked so well—compounds.

For a YEAI language, Igbo is an oddity. The verb compounding feature of the language is highly developed and serial verb constructions are practically nonexistent (compared to what can be easily attested in the Yoruboid, Edoid and Akokoid set of languages). Of course I began my analysis and now want to share my findings.

I’ll start first with serial verb construction and why this is so important (or why it’s lack thereof is so important to Igbo).

In layman’s terms, serial verb construction is where a series of verbs or verb phrases are strung together in a sentence without any sort of hint of words like “and” (coordinating conjunction) or “because” (subordinating conjunction). On top of that, their meaning is treated as a single event and not as separate events (due to there being separate verbs).

For instance, “she carry book come”. Here we have two verbs, “carry” and “come”. Ordinarily, as these are verbs in their own right, they will be thought of as separate events in their own right when used alone. However, for practically all YEAI languages, the entire serial construction of “carry … come” as used above is semantically thought of as a single event. In the minds of YEAI speakers, you are effectively saying “she brought the book”, which would be the semantic meaning of “carry … come”. This is true for all YEAI languages… except Igbo.

Igbo is the only branch that lacks any sense of modern serial verb construction. Instead, something else developed in its place—verb compounds. We can compare and contrast the difference as seen below.

YEAI: “she carry book come”
Igbo: “she carry-come book”

Modern Igbo language studies teaches us that this is “verb inflection”, but I have begun to disagree with that. My attempts at coining new roots has only been successful because verb compounding in Igbo is highly productive. It stands to reason that virtually every “inflection” we see on verbs is historically a verbial that has been reanalyzed in the language.

Take the following example for instance. In Ngwa using Onwu orthographic standard, “I kahigba hwe nne ahu.”

I      ka     hi     gba    hwe    nne    ahu
you    talk   much   run    thing  plenty body

The above is a typical Ngwa construction. Semantically, it means “you belabor the point.” What many do not know (and what most Ngwa people seem to take for granted) is that “kahigba” is not a series of inflections but rather the direct reanalysis of live verbs into an on-demand verbal compound.

When we break down the aforementioned example in the Ngwa person’s mind, we get three full verb phrases.

-ka hwe
-hi nne
-gba ahu

If we split the compound apart, we would get the following sentence.

“I ka hwe hi nne gba ahu”.

Although this might be morphosyntactically legal in Ngwa, it is borderline clumsy to the point where no one even thinks to seriously make a statement like this. This would have been the serial verb construction, but an Igbo speaker’s mind practically rejects it.

My understanding of my own dialect plus my attempt to coin new roots suggests that one of the keys to further develop Igbo lies in our capacity to reanalyze verbs into on-demand compounds.

Following the Ngwa example, the range of what we can semantically convey will increase exponentially when we combined the creation of new roots with the the reanalysis of said newly-created roots into compounds.

There is also one other thought that this had triggered in me about Igbo’s SVO (subject-verb-object) structure potentially having been an originally SOV (subject-object-verb), but perhaps I might save that to discuss at a later date.

I’m interested in seeing now (if we follow the Ngwa example) what sort of new semantic meaning we can convey. There was a thread we had here a while back on translating words and/or modern things into Igbo. Perhaps I’ll go pluck from there and come back with some potential examples of how we can be productive with an already highly developed and productive morphosyntactic system.

See brilliant people that Ohaneze should support, but no. They will prefer to go around and be doing bambiala from politicians.

i dont have much to contribute but a suggestion, please compile your ideas onto a blog, would love to read through it all, wordpress is an easy site to start with.

How do you think Igbo would be if serial verb-construction was more of a thang?

OkayDaddy:
See brilliant people that Ohaneze should support, but no. They will prefer to go around and be doing bambiala from politicians.

People have the things that are important for them, I guess. Whether it is national politics, or the regular “us vs them” on NL or sports or fashion, etc. We cannot fault people for having what they consider important interests.

I just happen to be among a handful of our people where Igbo language and linguistic anthropology happen to be my interest. I will continue to advance Igbo linguistics for myself and for those who either don’t have time or have other interests more important to them. They can come and read what I write and benefit from what I create.

Maazieze:
i dont have much to contribute but a suggestion, please compile your ideas onto a blog, would love to read through it all, wordpress is an easy site to start with.

I’m actually a developer/systems software engineer. I work on many projects, but one of them that I recently started is to build a platform where we can openly publish this sort of content, review others’ publishings, cite each other, etc. I hope to finish building the platform in about 6 - 8 months. I know a few people here on NL that I will certainly invite to be initial contributors, and one need not be an academic or PhD to publish on this site. There can even be amateurs, but at least we will all get to openly publish, share, cite each other and hopefully create something lasting that will advance our Igbo languages and save them from the same fate as Latin.

Probz:
How do you think Igbo would be if serial verb-construction was more of a thang?

This is where things get interesting.

So using the Ngwa example that I mentioned earlier, we have “i kahigba hwe nne ahu” which breaks down to “i ka hwe hi nne gba ahu”. We could posit that “i ka hwe hi nne gba ahu” might have been a serial verb construction, and on the surface it makes sense. It makes sense because it mirrors the modern “kahigba” sequence rather well. The one-for-one correlation is so readily apparent that we can be almost certain that “kahigba hwe nne ahu” comes from the breakdown of “ka hwe hi nne gba ahu”. At the very minimum, we can be almost 100% certain that “kahigba hwe nne ahu” once was likely a serial verb construction. However, even if this thought makes sense, it has one major flaw.


To go from “ka hwe hi nne gba ahu” to “kahigba hwe nne ahu” requires A LOT of linguistic motivation. Here’s what I mean.

Language is not a logical thing. It’s just a series of conventions that speakers agree to and even modify over time by speech consensus. So very few things in language are rigid rules. For Igbo, one of those few rigid rules seems to be word order.

Igbo is a strict word order language. The subject goes in a specific place, the object goes in a specific place and the verbs go in a specific place, etc etc. I have not come across any linguistics study that has proven Igbo to have a loose word order whether in modern times or historically. This strict word order is important, because it acts as a direct hinderance to the theory I just gave earlier.

Basically, because Igbo is a strict word-order language, we have to face the hard truth that a development from “ka hwe hi nne gba ahu” to “kahigba hwe nne ahu” would have likely been impossible without to heavy motivation by the speakers. This is because in order to get the modern “kahigba”, we have to significantly break the word order, jump “hi” over one clause, in this case “hwe”. We also have to jump “gba” over two clauses, in this case, both “hwe” and “nne”.

In a strict word-order language, this would not be possible without significant pressures. Either the speech community decided to re-engineer their language, or direct contact with another language community caused a rather abrupt speech change. Think about it like a chemical reaction. The linguistic bond within “gba ahu” and “hi nne” and “ka hwe” as clauses is stronger than the external bond between “ka hwe” and “gba ahu” (because of being a strict word-order language). We would require a strong catalyst to break “ka hwe”, “hi nne” and “gba ahu” to create “kahigba” and “hwe nne ahu”.

It would be very difficult to break the bond within “gba ahu” and shift “gba” to be a compound with “ka”. That is, if we were still talking in SVO terms… SOV though makes it 100% possible with far less motivation.

So some clarification.

Igbo is an SVO language with strict order. Subject clause comes before the verb clause and the verb clause comes before the object clause. SOV languages are different in the sense that the subject clause comes first, followed by the object clause and then by the verb clause.

So this sparked a question in my mind. If Igbo was originally SOV, then it would be 100% possible to get verb compounding from serial verb construction. And it is a specific type of serial verb construction. The key here is that the objects in Igbo verb compounds are treated as a singular object and not separate objects.

Using the Ngwa example of “i kahigba hwe nne ahu”, the “hwe nne ahu” (though written separately for our orthographic benefit) is semantically treated as a singular object. This means that the “ka” in “kahigba” governs the “hwe nne ahu”. This means that for Igbo, it is easier to move objects clauses than it is to move verbs.

If we still wanted to hold on to the SVO structure, we end up with

“i ka hwe nne ahu hi gba”.

This is actually significant. It takes us one step closer to unraveling this mystery, except that it doesn’t allow us to create the verb compound. The “hi” and “gba” are separated from “ka”, and we are still stuck with requiring significant linguistic motivation to move “hi gba” and break the bond between “ka” and “hwe nne ahu”.

However, if we sequence it as an SOV, EVERYTHING falls in place.

Recall, the key to Igbo verb compounds is that the objects are governed together as a single unit and not as separate units. The “main verb” of “ka” governs them and the “hi” and “gba” lose their objects and become closely linked with “ka”.

To do SVO, we have

“i ka hwe nne ahu hi gba”

To do SOV, we have

“i hwe nne ahu ka hi gba”

The verb compound now has an unbroken serial context and sharing a singular object that is governed by the “main verb”.

This is so far what my analysis has led me to. Our Igbo languages may have originally been SOV.

My theory, we had an SOV word order and developed serialization in the SOV context. We later developed compounding from the SOV serialization, then (due to YEAI pressures) we switched to an SVO word order.

Now, I am not claiming this is the actual case. It is just that the fact that our verb compounding is highly developed, highly productive and creates only a singular object that is shared by the compound, suggests that only and SOV word order would allow us the chance to develop such serialization.

Once we had it, “ka”, “hi” and “gba” became closely linked. The “hi” and “gba” verbs govern no objects, so they can be treated as a single lexical unit with the main verb “ka”.

The motivation for shifting

{i} {hwe nne ahu} {ka hi gba} to our modern syntax

Requires far less linguistic effort than shifting

{i} {ka hwe} {hi nne} {gba ahu}

So, long story short. To answer your question, Probz, I think Igbo would have to have been an SOV language for serial verb construction to be more of a thing and develop into the modern compounding we have now.

ChinenyeN:


I’m actually a developer/systems software engineer. I work on many projects, but one of them that I recently started is to build a platform where we can openly publish this sort of content, review others’ publishings, cite each other, etc. I hope to finish building the platform in about 6 - 8 months. I know a few people here on NL that I will certainly invite to be initial contributors, and one need not be an academic or PhD to publish on this site. There can even be amateurs, but at least we will all get to openly publish, share, cite each other and hopefully create something lasting that will advance our Igbo languages and save them from the same fate as Latin.

I am in a community aswell, we mostly archive files related to igbo history and groups related online, i will share your site to them when the time comes. Jisike

As promised, let's run some experiments using verb compounding with modern or scientific terms and see if we can coin more natural expression than any examples that already exist in Igbo.

Let's start with a moderate one, "evolution".

Some conventions before I start, so we all are on the same page. I will be marking tones and diacritics to help with the pronunciation. I will use this orthography.

High tones - unmarked (i.e. aka - arm, all high tones)
Low tones - grave accent (i.e. òkpò - road)
Mid tones - macron (i.e. imē - to do)

I chose this because it would be a good test. I don't hear this word much in an Igbo conversation and I guess it makes sense. It's too technical. If anyone uses it, they will most likely just say something like "evòlushọ̀nụ̀". If you search a translation for "evolution" across different "Igbo language" sources, you will see all sorts of things.

The most common is "mgbanwè", but that just means "change". The term "evolution" carries more implication than just "change". Anyhow, what other expressions have I seen, "webàta" (not sure where their minds were at trying to coin this... unfortunate). I've seen "ghọ̀rọ" used in some way. I've also seen "mmalite" from Google translate, but as I recall that is more like "beginning". Definitely not something I would pick for "evolution". I could go on, but I'll stop there. It's clear that the term "evolution" will make a great candidate since we don't seem to have any satisfactory translations for it. So let's create one using verb compounding.

Let's see...

I like -gba. Actually, I like it a lot. -gba is one of our "catch all" expressions. It doesn't have any real meaning in and of itself in most cases. Its meaning is opaque, but it definitely triggers the concept of "action". Our ancestors probably used it a lot when they couldn't find any good ways to explain or nail down a process or phenomenon. We will probably come to find out that -gba can serve in many cases as our "main verb" in a verb compound, because it is so opaque. But, inasmuch as I like -gba, I think we can do better. For verb compounds to be truly effective, the "main verb" needs to anchor the primary concept. -gba, though effective can be thought of as too generic. Using -gba would mean that the following verb in the compound will need to be the driver and anchor for the primary concept. So we would need two phonemes just to construct our main verb. Maybe I don't want that, so I will leave -gba alone.

In that case, I like -ghọ̀, but -ghọ̀ is heavily coupled with the appearance of something. I'm concerned this coupling of appearance would drive us into a corner. We'll end up being so focused on the appearance of evolution that we will fail to coin a concept that explains its process[es]. I've said this before and I will say it again. Igbo is a great language for compactly discusses processes.

Anyhow, both -gba and ghọ̀ are out.

Hm... I do not know about other lects, but in Ngwa we have the verb -we ewe used to express a sense of "acclimation". Yes, this might actually be good. When we say -we ewe, we generally mean "get used to". I think I like this for the root word. Thinking about it now, I especially like this root because of how it explains the acclimation process. This is how it is used:

[external phenomenon] [-we, acclimates] [thing being acclimated]

This is actually an excellent way to express evolution. Evolution is the adaptation that results from interacting with one's environment. For example, fish are accustomed to water, or in the mind of an Ngwa speaker...

[water, external phenomenon] [-we, acclimates] [fish, thing being acclimated]

Yeah, this is almost perfect for a "main verb" in the verb compound to explain evolution, but I don't think we're done. -we only conveys the acclimation. We still need to add more verbal context to distinguish "evolution" as a process from something mundane such as "getting used to traffic in a new city". Some verbs come to mind.

-che (conveys a sense of preservation), -dì (conveys a sense of perpetuation)...

I think I like -dì. We can come up with our own verb phrase here. In Ngwa, the word ihwu means "generation[s]". I've never heard anyone say this before, but perhaps we can come up with -dì ihwu (endure generations) that speaks to the inheritability of the acclimation. Let's test this as a type of serial verb expression.

[òsùmìrì, ocean] [-we azụ̀, acclimates fish] [-dì ihwu, perpetuates over generations]

In natural speech it would be "òsùmìrì we azụ̀ dì ihwu", but we've already established that this serial structure doesn't work for Igbo, so let's convert it into a verb compound.

Òsùmìrì èwedìa azụ̀ ihwu
Fish evolved in the ocean

It's not bad for a first attempt, I think. At least we did not end up with a long, explanatory sentence. The idea is compacted thanks to verb compounding.

Àlà èwedìa madụ̀ ihwu
Human beings evolved on land

Oh, I think I like this. I'll catalog it as a candidate for the next volume of the Ngwa dictionary I am developing. If I still like it enough later on, then I'll add it as a new term.

Iwēdì ihwu - to spur the development of an adaptation/acclimation enduring over generations, a.k.a, to evolve.

Perhaps it's not the best we can do, but it's not bad for a first attempt, and definitely better than other options.

Mgbanwè: Madù àgbanwè l'àlà ... this is grammatically correct, but semantically does not make sense. I'm left asking "a person changed what?". Or if we instead said àlà àgbanwè madù, but that semantically conveys a sort of one-time transformation and not necessarily an evolutionary change or adaptation. Perhaps it can be used colloquially, but it certainly does not express the processes of evolution.

Ghọ̀rọ: How would we even say this? Madụ̀ ghọ̀rọ̀ ... ... Yeah, this doesn't do it. Perhaps this one can be used more so for explaining the change from one point to the next for the population that acclimated. For example, humans evolving from primates.

I think I will stop here for now. If you have any terms, expressions, translations you might want to explore with verb compounding, drop them here. I'll go look for something else and come back.

Mods, bigfrancis21, odumchi, Fulaman198, my previous post has been hidden and my ability to reply was blocked for a few days. Can we please unhide the post, if it is not breaking any rules? Thank you.

ChinenyeN:
Mods, bigfrancis21, odumchi, Fulaman198, my previous post has been hidden and my ability to reply was blocked for a few days. Can we please unhide the post, if it is not breaking any rules? Thank you.

Unlocked. The spam bot incorrectly flagged your post due to so many words. Maybe try to break up the posts into shorter posts to avoid future flag downs.