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Grammar of Sango.Pdf A GRAMMAR OF SANGO William J. Samarin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Linguistics 1963 Hartford Seminary Foundation Hartford, Connecticut The research reported herein was performed pursuant to a contract with the United States Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The Sango language, page i Purpose of the grammar, iii Procedure in analysis, iv French words in Sango, vii Acknowledgements, viii Outline, ix Bibliography, x Statistical description of the corpus, xi Map, xiv PART ONE: PHONOLOGY Chapter Phonemes, page 1 o. Consonants, 1 1.20. Vowels, 5 1.21. Oral vowels 1.22. De-syllabification 1.2 3. Nasalized vowels 1.2 4. Long vowels 1.30. Tones, 10 1.31. Contrasts 1.32. Variations 1.33. Mid-tone 1.34. Frames 1.35. Polysyllabic words Chapter 2; Variations, page 17 2 .1o. External changes, 17 2.20. Internal changes, 19 2.21. C ons onants 2.22. Vowels Chapter 3: Intonation, page 23 3.10. Pauses, 24 3.11. Terminal 3.12. Non-t erminal 3.20. Tone, 26 3.30. Stress, 28 3.4o. French influenced, 2 9 PART TWO: WORD CLASSES Chapter Adjunctives, page 30 4.10. Ante-noun adjunctives, 33 4.20. Post-noun adjunctives, 38 4.21. ni 4.21.10. Restrictive 4.21.20. Pronominal 4.22. Numerals 4.23. sô 4.23.10. Relative constructions 4.23.20. Pronominal 4.23.30. Filler 4.2 3.4o. Mark subordinate clause 4.2 3.50. Clause final 4.24. wa 4.25. y§ 4.26. Others 4.30. Verbal adjunctives, 59 4.4o. Universal adjunctives, 62 4.41. gi 4.42. taâ Chapter 5: Connectives, page 65 5.10. andâa, 66 5.20. ka, 66 5.30. mais, na, 68 5.31. mais 5.32 . na 5.32.10. Coordinating 5.32.20. Subordinating 5.32.21. Locative 5.32.22. Benefaction 5.32.23. Temporal 5.32.24. Possessive 5.32.25. Miscellaneous 5.32.2 6. Verbless and pre-clausal constructions 5.32.3o. Tabulations 5.4o. ngbangati, teneti, 88 5.41. ngbangati 5.42. teneti 5.50. si, 93 5.51. Introduces clauses 5.52. Follows pre-clausal constructions 5.53. Final 5.6o. ti, 99 5.61. With noun complements 5.61.10. Noun + noun 5.61.11. Possession 5.61.12. Equation 5.61.13. Attribution 5.61.14. Location and time 5.61.15. Miscellaneous 5.61.16. "Prepositional expressions" 5.61.20. Verb + noun 5.61.30. Nothing + noun 5.62. With nominalized verb complement 5.63. With adjunctive complement 5.64. With verb complement 5.64.10. Noun + verb 5.64.20. Verb + verb 5.64.30. Ambiguities 5.65. Tabulations 5.7o. titane, 1-16 5.80. tongana, 119 5.81. Conditional-temporal 5.82, Comparative 5.82.10. Introducing noun phrases 5.82.20, Introducing clauses 5.82.30. Set phrases 5.82.4o. Initial in a clause 5.9o. wala, 124 5.91. Alternative-correlative 5.92. Marks questions Chapter 6: Nouns, page 127 6.10. Classes, 127 6.20. Derivation, 127 6.30. Nominalizing suffix -ngô, 128 6.4o. Pluralization, 131 Chapter 7: Pronouns, page 136 7.10. Personal pronouns, 136 7.11. Forms 7.12. Quoted 7.13. Anticipated plurality 7.14. Special use of lo 7.20. Subject marker, 138 7.21. General uses of -a without grammatical subject 7.22. Sample text Chapter 8: Sentence Particles, page 14? 8.10. Post-posed, 147 8.11. ma, o 8.12. pepe 8.12,10. Forms 8.12.20. Position 8.12.30. Domain 8.12.40. Ambiguities 8.13. laâ 8.20. Pre-posed, 155 Chapter 9: Verbs, page 156 9.10. Categories, 156 9.20. Sequences of verbs, 156 9.21. Verb + ti + verb 9.22. Verbs of motion 9.2 3. eke + verb 9.30. we, 160 PART THREE: CONSTRUCTION CLASSES Chapter 10 : Substantive Phrases, page 168 10.10. Noun phrases, 168 10.11. Noun + adjunctives 10.12. Noun ti-substantive phrase 10.13. Noun ti-verb phrase 10.14. -ngô nouns 10,20. Pronoun phrases, 171 10.30. Adjunctive phrases, 173 10.4o. Connective phrases, 173 10.50. Verbs, 174 Chapter 11 : Verb Phrases, page 175 11.10. Complements and their order, 176 11.11. Object and "copulative complement" 11.12. Modifier complement 11.13. na phrases and their order 11.14. ti-verb and ti-nominalized verb phrases 11.15. Subject intensifier 11.16. Verb intensifier 11.20. Functions, 193 11.30. Tables of frequency, 195 11.4o. Tables of possibility of occurrence, 19? Chapter 12; Pre-clausal Constructions, page 199 12.10. Relationship, 199 12.20. Function, 200 12,30. Types, 201 12.31. Subject 12.32. Object 12.33. Locative 12.34. Temporal 12.35. Topical /,2 .36. Adjunctival 12.37. Several at once Chapter 13: Sub.jectival Constructions, page 2o7 13.10. Pronoun subjects, 20? 13.20. Noun phrase subjects, 2o9 13.30. Remainder, 212 Chapter 14: Non-verbal Sentences, page 214 14.10. Sentence fractions, 215 14.20. Constructions, 216 Chapter 15: Verbal Sentences, page 218 15.10. Simple sentences, 218 15.20. Complex sentences, 218 15.21. Verbal + verbal 15.21.10. Disjunctive 15.21.11. Coordinate 15.21.11a. "Sequential" 15.21.11b. Additive 15.21.12. Subordinate 15.21.12a. Non^lexically marked 15.21.12b. Lexically marked 15.21.20. Conjunctive 15.22. Verbal + non-verbal Chapter 16: Questions and Processes, page 232 -16.10. Questions, 232 16.20. Processes, 234 PART FOUR: TEXTS Chapter 17 : Analyzed Text, page 2 36 Chapter 18 : Readings, page 242 PART FIVE: LEXICONS Chapter 19: Sango Lexicon, page 282 Chapter 20: French Lexicon, page 293 PART SIX: INDICES Index of examples, page 298 Subject index, page 307 INTRODUCTION The Sango language Sango is the lingua-franca of the Central African Republic, one of the few indigenous lingua-francas in Africa. Arising out of the Ngbandi dialects at the upper Ubangi River, it has spread throughout the country and into neighboring areas. There is a growing awareness of and pride in Sango as a national language. Although Sango does not have official status, it is used by government, both orally and in writing, for the popular dissemination of communications of all kinds. Among government officials, even at high levels, Sango is used along with French. It is also used in commercial establishments below the level of administration, and is the only African language used on the government-owned radio in the Central African Republic. It has not been used in public education up to the present, but it serves as a tool for basic education (by the missions) and its use in general elementary and mass educa- tion in the future is still under discussion. Sango is a second language for most speakers, but there is now a large group of children in the capital, Bangui, who are learning Sango as a first language with the tribal languages of their parents, and another large group who are learning only Sango as a first language, and who are not learning tribal languages at all (e.g. the texts N78, N79, N8o, N81). Research carried out in July 1962 by myself in the Central African Re- public indicates that the entire population except for very old women in remote areas speaks Sango. This leads to a significant upward revision of my earlier impression that one-third of the population used the lingua-franca. When the sizeable clusters of Sango-speaking people in both Congo Republics, the Chad, and the Cameroun, and the 115,000 speakers of Ngbandi (estimated by Lekens) are added, the figure of one million speakers of Sango seems very conservative. Until this year, literature on the language was scarce and rudimentary. A few phrase books and grammatical notes were published early in the century, but none described the structure of the language. A privately published set i of lessons, based upon personal experience in learning the language, was pro- duced in 1952, but is no longer available. This grammar, therefore, is the first attempt at a complete description of the Sango language. It stands also as one of the few descriptive grammars of a creolized language in the world. Sango is a creolized language because it stands in somewhat the same relationship to vernacular Sango as Haitian Creole to French and Sierra Leone Kriol (CCriole) to English. This is to say that a language, here vernacular Sango, one of the dialects of the Ngbandi complex (which itself is a language of the Adamawa-Eastern group of Greenberg's Niger-Kordofanian), at one time came to be used as a lingua-franca. Because of this use it was very much simplified and to some extent transformed in structure. Not having the grammatical means of enriching itself, Sango (as creolized Sango will henceforth be called) has borrowed extensively from other languages. But these borrowings, being lexical, affect the grammar of the language very little indeed. Because it is a creolized (by some people's definition even a pidginized) language, and because of its extensive assimilation of words from other languages, it is commonly held among many Europeans, and even by Centralafricans who have been influenced by their opinions, that there is no homogeneity in the language. Some will even announce that from one area to another and between one class of speakers and another, there is mutual unintelligibility. My own socio-linguistic research in 1962 and the care- fully selected texts (see map) belie these opinions. One of the important conclusions drawn from this year-long linguistic study is that there is not infinite variety in Sango speech, but rather that there is a demonstrably unified language, the varieties of which are negligible and pretty well defined.
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