LWM 505: A Grammar of Haro

A Grammar of Haro

Hirut Wolde-Mariam

Addis Ababa University

Haro is an endangered language spoken by less than 200 people who live on the eastern shore of an island in Lake Abaya.  Lake Abaya is located in the southwestern part of Ethiopia. Genetically, the language belongs to the Ometo linguistic group of the Omotic language family within the Afro-Asiatic super-family.  This study provides description of the phonological, morphological and syntactic structures of the language.  The structures of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, deictics, numerals, simple sentences and complex sentences are described and analyzed. Haro has a largely suffixal, transparent, agglutinative morphology that allows concatenation of up to four suffixes in a word stem.  It is common for inflectional categories to be expressed cumulatively by the use of portmanteau morphemes in contrast to derivational categories expressed by separate morphemes.  Haro is an interesting language from typological and historical perspectives. For instance, unlike the situation with related languages, the case system in Haro involves three core cases, and employs ‘differential case marking’ that exempts certain nouns from case marking. The three-way number marking in nouns is also attested uncommon among the Ometo languages.  Haro exhibits an intricate system of focus marking that affects the morpho-syntactic properties and categorization of a verb.   

9783862886661. Languages of the World/Materials 505. 248pp. 2015.