A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF DERIVATION IN HAUSA AND NGAMO PERSONAL NAMES

Abstract

The names in Hausa and Ngamo languages are based on the same variety of factors facilitating the choice of a name such as the time or occasion of birth, circumstances of birth, appearance of the baby and sequence of the birth, historical association with certain renowned person as well as parental occupation at some instances. On the basis of these factors, the names of individuals are formed morphologically by derivational process from one grammatical category to another. The paper is mainly concerned with description of derivation in Hausa and Ngamo personal names formation regards to determining their similarities and differences. Unstructured interview and personal observation are used as methods for data collection for the study. In The theory of contrastive analysis is used as a framework which is concerned with the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. The paper reveals that Hausa and Ngamo languages derives their personal names based on days of the week, other times, birth sequence and related events, titles, occupation, kin terms, physical features, ethnicity and place of origin. On the basis of these factors, Hausa uses vowel shortening process to derive names of individuals morphologically from verb as in Tùnau ‘a child whose mothers’ pregnancy was after the parents had lost hope of getting a child’ < tuna ‘remember’ titles, occupation, kinship terms, adjectives etc. On the same ways, Ngamo uses vowel shortening process to derive personal names from common noun as in ngàrwu ‘a child born after the death of many children of the mother’ < ngàrwuu ‘slave’, verb, title, kinship terms, physical feature, circumstance etc.