Abstract:
This study investigates the morphophonemics of Akan honorific and title names
for God (AHTN-G). The scope of the study is motivated by the observation that
earlier works have looked at Akan personal names either from non-linguistic
perspectives or overlooked the morphological and phonological dimensions of
AHTN-G in spite of their intra-language pervasiveness and the analytical
interest that their structure excites across languages. It, therefore, highlights
morphological processes such as affixation, compounding, reduplication and
borrowing that underlie the names. It also explores some phonological
processes such as elision, homorganic nasal assimilation, voiced-to-nasal
assimilation and vowel harmony that the names undergo. Prior to the
morphophonemic analysis, the etymology of some of the names are briefly
examined to get insights into the Akan’s belief and worldview about God. To
formalize the analysis, the study adopts Lexical Phonology (LP) as its
theoretical framework. Further, the study is purely qualitative; it draws on
ethnographic research design and the data analysed were ascertained from both
primary and secondary sources. The study reveals that Akan honorific and title
names ascribed to God are complex nominals and may even be sentential. In the
study, Appah’s (2003) claim that the relative marker is overt in the surface form,
is found to be seemingly unsatisfactory. Again, vowel harmony is less
productive regarding this study, because, one of the violators, the suffix -foᴐ,
features in most of the names. It is recommended that future researchers explore
other grammatical aspects of Akan personal names to bridge the gap created in
the existing literature.
