Luchazi Grammar

By Emil Pearson and Kalenga Chihinga

Luchazi Grammar
Copyright © 2022 Emil Pearson (Africa Evangelical Fellowship)
All rights reserved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387669011

Book preview

Luchazi Grammar

Luchazi Grammar

Copyright © 2022 Emil Pearson (Africa Evangelical Fellowship)

All rights reserved.

Forward by Kalenga Chihinga.

Table of Contents

Forward

Preface

Orthography and Phonetics

Consonants

Vowels

Diphthongs (gliding vowels)

Consonantal glides

Euphony

Coalescence

Elision

Umlaut

Accent

Stress Accent (Emphatic or Dynamic)

Semantic Tone, Intonation, Pitch, Musical Chromatic Accent

The Noun

Classification of Nouns

Notes on Nouns

The Derivation and Formation of Nouns

I. From Verbs

II. from Nouns

III. from other Parts of Speech

Proto-Bantu Class

The Alliterative Concord

The Pronoun

The separable or Absolute Pronoun

The Inseparable Pronoun

The Positive Indicative Pronoun

The Negative Indicative Pronoun

The Enclitic Pronoun

The Possessive Pronoun

The Intensive or Emphatic Pronoun

The Reflexive and Reciprocal Prefix li

The Relative Pronoun

The Interrogative Pronoun

The indefinite pronoun

The Demonstrative Pronoun

The Compound Pronouns

The Compound Interrogative Pronoun

The Compound Demonstrative Pronoun

The Compound Locative Demonstrative Pronoun

The Negative Pronouns

The Locative Possessive

Idioms with Pronouns

Notes on the Locative Pronouns

The Pronominal –kua

The Verb

Inflection by Conjugation

Voice

Mood

The infinitive Mood

The Participial Mood

The Imperative mood

The Conjunctive Mood

The Negative mood

The Frequentative Mood

The Conditional Mood

The Indicative Mood

The Incomplete Present

The Present Progressive

The Present Continuative

The Definite Present Continuative

The Present Prefect

The Immediate Past

The Indefinite Medium Past Perfect

The Definite Past Perfect

The Imperfect Past

The Continuing Past

The indefinite Past

The Definite Past Perfect

The Indefinite Past Progressive

The Definite Past Progressive

The Emphatic Past

The Perfect Progressive

The Past Imperfect Continuative

The Near Distant Continuative

The Very Distant Past Continuative

The Extensive Continuative

The Past Infinitive

The Present Progressive Definite

The Simple Future

The Immediate Future

The Near Future

The Determinate Future

The Continuing Determinate Future

The Premier Near Future

The Medium Distant Future

The Distant Future

The Definite Future

The Near Perfect Future

The Distant Future Perfect

The Auxiliary Verbs and Particles

Pua, kala and li

Inflection by formative suffixes and infixes

The causative species

The transitive and intransitive verb

The prepositional or applied species

The intensive, Emphatic or Continuative species

The Repetitive species

The Reversive or Inversive Species

The Iterative Species

The Stative Species

The Tendentious Species

The Extensive Species

The Operative Species

The Stationary Species

The Correlative Species

The Completive Species

The Ablative Species

The Applicative Species

The Potential Species

The Oscillatory Species

Various Unclassified suffixes

Verbs with Adjuncts

The Adjective

The Cardinal Numbers

The Ordinal Numbers

Fractionals

Multiplicatives

Comparison of Adjectives

The Adverb

The Adverb Proper

Onomatopoeia

Modal or Descriptive Adverbs or Intensives

Interrogative Adverbs

The Preposition

The Conjunction

The Interjection

Appendix

Forward

Luchazi (Lucazi, antonym: Chiluchazi) is a Bantu language of Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia and Zambia. The language belongs to Ciokwe-Luchazi (K.13) class of the Niger-Congo languages (Language code: ISO 639-3 lch). The Language can also be referred to as Lujash, Lujazi, Lutchaz, Lutshase, Luxage, Ponda, and Chiluchazi depending on area. Luchazi language is written in Latin script.

According to 17th edition of Ethnologue, Luchazi is a prestige form of the Ngangela language cluster. Axel Fleisch in his book entitled: Lucazi Grammar: A Morphosemantic Analysis, writes, Although the number of Lucazi speakers is difficult to estimate, the language must be considered one of the major languages of southern central Africa. Several hundred thousand individuals use one of the intelligible Ngangela varieties. How many of them consider themselves Lucazi speakers is unknown. So far little has been published on the languages of south-eastern Angola.

We live in an electronic age where people do everything from virtually anywhere on any device. This eBook is reproduced from an edition (Luchazi Grammar by Emil Pearson) in the collection of the Africa Evangelical Fellowship. The purpose of reproducing it in electronic form is to make it easily accessible to those who wish to learn the Luchazi language. They say that If you can speak your language, but you cannot write it properly or read it fluently, you are illiterate.

The information in this book has been edited to include definitions and tables (where applicable) that were missing in the previous edition. The authenticity and integrity of the original edition has been preserved, or in some cases simplified and amplified by defining certain terms or by using tables so that the average adult, who wishes to learn more about Luchazi language, is capable of comprehending the Luchazi grammar basically.

Kalenga Chihinga

Lusaka, Zambia.

Preface

The Lord said… Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth (Genesis 11: 6-8).

Luchazi is the principal language of the Ngangela Group. The VaNgangela were still in a state of flux in 1920 when I contacted them. There were no permanent villages, that is, villages surrounded by milemba trees, planted by the inhabitants. Headmen of the villages would tell that they had been born hundreds of miles to the north or northeast. The people said their forebears had come from the east through the Congo, a long time before. When they had reached the sources of the Zambezi River, some of them turned south and built in what is now Zambia. The bulk of the people went southwest into Angola, while a small group stayed in the Congo.

Linguistic divergences must have been at work during the centuries of movement and it is rather remarkable that the differences between the dialects are not greater. Some eighteen different tribal names may be found among them but the linguistic changes are not great. The intermarriages have had a leavening influence as well as the impact of modern civilization.

If you speak Luchazi you can travel from the Kunene River (the last big river before you reach the ocean) and go east for nearly a thousand miles before you exhaust the area where you will be understood. In the book, People of the Aurora, I have described the people at more length, as to their location when I first met them.

Emil Pearson.

Author.

(African Evangelical Fellowship).

Orthography and Phonetics

Orthography is the study of spelling and how letters combine to represent sounds and form words according to standard usage. Luchazi is written using the Latin alphabet, with most characters representing the same sound as in English, with some exceptions. The letters Q, W, X and Y are not part of the proper alphabet, and appear only in names or in a few native words and in borrowed words from Portuguese and other languages.

Phonology, according to Oxford dictionary, has been defined as the system of contrastive relationship among the fundamental speech sounds of a language. Phonetics is the study and systematic classification of the sounds made in spoken utterance. From the viewpoint of pure phonetics the ordinary alphabet is inadequate, but by observing the general rules that follow, the student should have no difficulty.

Consonants

A consonant is any letter except a, e, i, o, and u. It is also defined as one of a class of speech sounds (such as \p\, \g\, \n\, \l\, \s\, \r\) characterized by constriction or closure at one or more points in the breath channel and which can be combined with a vowel to form a syllable. The following table displays all the consonants in Luchazi:

Figure 1. Consonants in Luchazi

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