A Descriptive Grammar of KʌThemnɛ (Temne)
Sheikh Umarr Kamarah
Virginia State University
KaThemne (Temne), is a member of the South Atlantic sub-family of the larger Niger-Congo family of languages. It is one of the two major languages of the West African country of Sierra Leone. The language is spoken by over a million native speakers and over a million second language speakers. It is the regional lingua franca of the Northern Province of Sierra Leone. KʌThemnɛ has been known to, and studied by European linguists for over one and a half centuries. Because of its comprehensive Noun Class system, KʌThemnɛ has been compared to Bantu languages.
This volume is the first comprehensive description of the linguistic components of the language. The book is divided into four parts: Part 1 presents the language and its dialects. Part 2 deals with the segmental phonetics and phonology of the language. The phonemes of the language are fully described, and phonological rules presented. In Part 3, the morphology of KʌThemnɛ is presented. Both nominal and verbal morphology are thoroughly explored. Part 4 deals with the syntax (sentence structure) of the language. This section presents, among other things, the Temne syntactic categories and phrasal types. Following this description is a sample text with interlinear translation.
Sheikh Umarr Kamarah has published several articles on Temne in refereed journals. He has also published work on Krio proverbs, and is currently working on a grammar of the Krio language of Sierra Leone. Sheikh Umarr Kamarah is also a poet; he has published two volumes of poetry.
ISBN 9783895863554. Languages of the World/Materials 465. 186pp 2007.
