Difference between revisions of "Annotating Runyankore-Rukiga"

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Runyankore-Rukiga refers to two of the four closely related languages of Uganda which form part of a new standardized language of Uganda together with Runyoro and Rutooro. Sometimes Runyakitara is used to refer to the standardized form of these four languages; see for example the following still incomplete wikipedia article .

Here we discuss questions related to the annotation of Runyankore-Rukiga texts and sentence collections in TypeCraft. The material is annotated by Allen Asiimwe who is a lecturer at Makerere University. She is a speaker of Rukiga.

Consider the following entry: (1) shows a standard TypeCraft annotation. TypeCraft uses three tiers in the annotation editor: a translational tier, a gloss tier and a POS (part of speech) tier. When interlinear glosses (IG) are exported from TypeCraft the translational and the gloss tier are collapsed for presentational reasons.

Notice that aha is categorized as an adverb here. Locative pronoun seems another possible categorization of aha. Aha may also function as a preposition. This is illustrated below: (2) In the example above aha is followed by the noun yunvasite which functions as the complement of aha. The verb gamb meaning speak carries the applicative suffix -ir. It is the applicative that forces a spatial interpretation of aha. The following sentence in contrast is ambiguous between a 'spatial interpretation' and a 'topic interpretation' of aha: (3) Notice different from (2), which only allows a spatial interpretation of aha, example (3) is ambiguous between a spatial and a topic interpretation of aha.