La terminologia linguistica nella lingua swahili.Prestiti, perifrasi e neologismi verso la costruzione di un sistema astratto

Swahili linguistics had been facing the need to set up a system for the linguistic terminology, creating a meta-language that had to be easily recognizable to take part to the international scientific debate, but flexible enough to describe a language so much different from the Indo-European languages. The analysis of a 150 words corpus for the Swahili meta-language (Tramutoli 2010) has shown that nearly 1/3 of the whole corpus consists in loanwords, while the remaining words are neologisms. Meta-linguistic loanwords in Swahili are taken both from Arabic or English. Arabic loanwords tend to be more ancient and display polysemy or a vagueness of meaning (e.g.. maana “importance, meaning”), so they can not be considered properly as technical linguistic terms unless they become a part of circumlocutions or new syntagms together with terms of Bantu origin (e.g.. maana ya msingi “denotative meaning, basic meaning”, where the Bantu prepositional syntagm is the determinans of the Arabic loanword). On the other side, Swahili accepts from English approximately 20 terms, including the names of the different levels in the linguistic analysis (that is: fonetiki, morfolojia, sintaksia, semantiki, pragmatiki) and the terms for their articulation units according to the structuralist pattern (e.g. fonimu, foni, alofoni, on the phonological level, and their paralleled terms in morphology mofimu, mofu, alomofu). As for the neologisms in Tramutoli’s corpus, they have been created by derivation, a very productive morphological process in agglutinative languages. Thanks to the linear addition of morphemes in morpheme chains, as a matter of fact we can observe a semantic drift from a concrete meaning towards more abstract meanings. It is very interesting to observe how both Arabic and English loanwords concern phonetics and phonology, while the coinage of neologisms deals especially with morphology and syntax, maybe depending on the strong scientific prestige of syntax, a field being considered the most technical and formalized in linguistics. In syntax, especially referring to the generative grammar, the formation of calques is the preferred strategy in creating neologism. While loanwords have been integrated in Bantu nominal classes 9-10 probably just because these classes show a zero class morpheme, the neologisms have been included or in the nominal classes 7-8, where we find words for inanimate and concrete objects, or in the nominal class 14 collecting abstract nouns. So there is an evident polarization displaying “concreteness” vs. “abstractness” for the meta-linguistic terms. In particular, all the neologism referring to the lexical categories (kiina “noun”, kitenzi, kitendo “verb”, kivuma “adjective”, kiwalikishi “pronoun”, kisifa, kielezo “adverb”, kihusishi “preposition”, kiunganisha “conjunction”, kihisishi “interjection”) are in class 7. Moreover, this article shows how some meta-linguistic terms are organized according to some structural metaphors, like the metaphor of “building”: kiambajengo “syntactic constituent” and uambajengo “syntactic structure” are derived from the verb kujenga “to build (esp. in a traditional way, with poles, mud and so on)”, while muundo “construction, structure”, used especially in syntactic field, goes back to the verb kuunda “to build (in particular using wood, as it is the case of ships and boats”). Sentence and word (e.g. in neeno unda, “derived word”) are then conceived as boats, to be built starting from their frame.