COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF VARIETIES OF THE SOCIO-TERMINOLOGY ɖu, dzi, ye AND MANGER IN EWE, MFANTSE, DANGME AND FRENCH

Theophile Kwame  ATONON; Portia Mamle  ANGMORTERH; Patience  OBENG

Theophile Kwame ATONON Department of French Education, University of Education, Winneba/ Portia Mamle ANGMORTERH
Portia Mamle ANGMORTERH Department of French Education University of Education, Winneba
Patience OBENG Department of Akan Education University of Education, Winneba

Keywords: Ghanaian languages, terminologies, contrastive study, semantic properties

Abstract

Every language is characterised by its own linguistic values. African languages in general, and Ghanaian languages, are in most cases interconnected at different levels; phonologically, morphologically, semantically, etc. Generally, there are terminologies whose equivalents in other languages retain their expressive values. This study is a contrastive study of the socio-terminological varieties of ‘‘du in Ewe, 'dzi' in Mfantse, 'ye' in Dangme and ‘manger’ in French. The study is based on an observation of the structure and uses of ‘ɖu, ‘dzi’, ‘ye’ and manger’’ in the four selected languages. The assumption is that these words express similar concepts and are used in similar contexts in the different languages. The focus of the study is to find out how this assumption plays out in the use of this common socio-terminology in the given languages. In this study, the semantic properties of the use of the four lexical items were compared and examined in various contexts. This comparison helped to conclude and confirm that these expressions have common behaviour patterns in different sociolinguistic contexts. Thus although these terms share the literal meaning “eat”, they acquire some other contextual meanings which may be present in one language or another but absent in others.