Accounting for the Morphophonological Alternations in Classes 1 and 2 of Bantu Languages of Zone A

Abstract

Generally, noun class prefixes of Bantu languages have two or more variants which can be accounted for by phonological and/or morphological rules. These rules might be straightforward, natural and psychologically real, or sometimes complicated and less natural in that it is not always clear what phonological processes are involved. These complications have been noticed with gender 1/2 prefixes of the Bantu languages of Zone A. This paper examines the alternations noted in classes 1 and 2 (for the lexemes "man, " "woman" and "child") of two Bantu languages, Bankon (A42) and Mokpe (A22) to demonstrate the difficulty in accounting for those alternations. A detailed analysis is provided with a wide range of alternative hypotheses.