A Morphophonemic Analysis of Akan Honorific and Title Names for God

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.