THE MONOSYLLABIC ROOT -AO IN MINDANAO LANGUAGES Francis Tom A. Paredes Sheila V. Paredes Agusan del Sur State College of Agusan del Sur State College of Agriculture and Technology Agriculture and Technology
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT In Philippine languages (PL), lexical roots1 consist of two or more syllables. Single- syllable lexical root words are rare. On the other hand, monosyllabic roots are not uncommon in PL. A monosyllabic root is a ‗submorphemic‘ element; it has no independent morpheme status in that it and its host form a single morpheme. An example is the sequence -ing- in the Tagalog root hinga, which conveys the meaning of the passage of air in the vocal tract. It is technically not a morpheme, since its host, h- ...-a, is not itself a morpheme; it is the whole word that is a morpheme. In this paper, we list down words, mostly from Mindanao languages, containing the monosyllabic root -ao (also written as -aw). These words have meanings related to water—watery areas or activities done with water. To people of archipelagic nations like Mindanoans, water -ao is life. Keywords: -ao, Water, Monosyllabic Root, Mindanao ISO 639-3 codes: SGD, TGN, TSG, MRW, MRY, MSM, TGL, CEB, WAR, KRJ, CPS 1 Examples of Tagalog lexical roots are bahay, dagat, bundok. The single-syllable words ba, nga, daw, and the like are functional, not lexical, words. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the 8th Annual In-house Review of the Research Office of Augsan del Sur State College of Agriculture and Technology (ASSCAT) on October 10, 2017.