You Know You're A Nerd When...

Maybe the thousands of dollars used towards paying tuition on an advanced degree in linguistics was not a complete waste. J

 

The linguistic discovery itself is not the indicator of the nerdy-ness…just the unparalleled joy of the discovery.

So…here it is

 

A nominalization morpheme in Sango!

 

Now, I most certainly did not “discover” it in some “no-linguist-has-ever-noticed-this-before-kind-of-thing” discovery.  But it was the kind of discovery that would be that kind if I was working here several decades before and it was done through principles that I learned in school!  Yeah!

 

Well, anyways…here it be…

 

You take a verb in Sango like ga which means “to come”

And

You add the morpheme “ngo” at the end of it and it makes the verb a noun so gango is translated something like “the coming”.

That is not too interesting as in English we use “the coming”  like “The coming of Jesus is at hand. Etc.”

 

But they also do this with the verb te meaning “to eat” so tengo means something like “the eating”

So, Tengo ayeke nzoni  is literally translated “The eating was good.”

But in English we do not say it that way.  Although “The eating was good.” Kind of makes sense, it sounds more like a caveman talking.  The translation just is not natural.  The word-for-word translation just does not work. You must translate meaning-for-meaning.  We would say something like, “It was a pleasant dining experience.” or something like that.

 

So I went through every verb I knew and added the ngo morpheme to see whether or not this was used on these particular verbs and each time our language helper said,  “Yes, we use that a lot.”  And many times the verbs are like the example above of “the eating” where it would be impossible to translate it from Sango into English word-for-word. 

 

Neat, huh?