Annotating Runyankore-Rukiga

Runyankore-Rukiga refers to two of the four closely related languages of Uganda which form part of a new standardized language of Uganda together with Runyoro and Rutooro. Sometimes Runyakitara is used to refer to the standardized form of these four languages; see for example the following still incomplete wikipedia article .

Here we discuss questions related to the annotation of Runyankore-Rukiga texts and sentence collections in TypeCraft. The material is annotated by Allen Asiimwe who is a lecturer at Makerere University. She is a speaker of Rukiga. In addition Justus Turamyomwe and Misah Natumanya both graduate students at the Linguistic Department at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU annotate.

Annotating in TypeCraft

The following example shows a standard TypeCraft annotation. TypeCraft uses three tiers for linguistic annotation: a translational tier, a gloss tier and a part-of-speech tier. When interlinear glosses (IG) are exported from TypeCraft the translational and the gloss tier are collapsed for presentational reasons. You need to have a login to TypeCraft in order to annotate. Simply write and e-mail using the mail address given on the [Main Page]

(1)

The free morphemes aha and omu

The free forms aha and omu are derived from the locative classes ha- and mu- via the affixation of an initial vowel. Both forms may occur as part of a locative expression, as determiners or as pronouns. In the example below aha is categorized as a preposition. On of the projects the Runyankore-Rukiga group is working on is to develop a better understanding of the role that both elements play in the grammar of Runyankore-Rukiga. (2)

Here one of the interesting facts we have come across:

In the example above aha is followed by the noun yunvasite. The verb gamb meaning speak carries the applicative suffix -ir. It is the applicative that forces a spatial interpretation of aha. The following sentence in contrast is ambiguous between a 'spatial interpretation' and a 'topic interpretation' of aha: (3)

Is there a preposition 'of' in Runyankore-Rukiga?

The following 8 sentences have in common that each of them contains a phrase that is translated using the English preposition of. The corresponding element in RR is sometimes a free, sometimes a bound morpheme combining two nouns.

Its forms are: we,gwe, bw, rwa, ka, za, bwa, ya.

If these are instances of one and the same formative what exactly explains the variation we see?