Annotating Runyankore-Rukiga

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. In addition Justus Turamyomwe and Misah Natumanya both graduate students at the Linguistic Department at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU

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.

The free morphemes aha and omu

Notice that aha is categorized as a preposition in the examples below. Locative pronoun seems another possible categorization of aha. (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.

Is there a preposition 'of' in Runyankore-Rukiga?

The following 8 sentences have in common that each of them contains a phrase that is translated using the English preposition of. The corresponding element in RR is sometimes a free, sometimes a bound morpheme combining two nouns.

Its forms are: we,gwe, bw, rwa, ka, za, bwa, ya.

If these are instances of one and the same formative what exactly explains the variation we see?