# Jacques Rongier, Dictionnaire éwé-français

Kofi Yakpo

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DOI: 10.4000/lla.12125

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Date of publication: December 31, 2016

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Kofi Yakpo, "Jacques Rongier, *Dictionnaire éwé-français*, *Linguistique et langues africaines* [Online], 2 | 2016, Online since 21 September 2023, connection on 04 October 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lla/12125; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lla.12125

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#02

Juin 2016

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LLA

Linguistique
et Langues
Africaines

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- Additive Coordination, Comitative Adjunction, and Associative Plural in Tswana

- The Locative System in Cuwabo and Makhuwa

- Question Formation in ||Gana

- La liaison tonale en shingazidja septentrional

- Comptes-rendus / Book Reviews

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9 782359 351811

ISSN 2429-2230
ISBN 978-2-35935-181-1 20 €

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Lambert-Lucas
LLA

Linguistique
et Langues
Africaines

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#02

Juin 2016

1. Additive Coordination, Comitative Adjunction, and Associative Plural in Tswana (Denis Creissels) 11

2. The Locative System in Cuwabo and Makhuwa (P30 Bantu Languages) (Rozenn Guérois) 43

3. Question Formation in ||Gana, a Khoesan Language (Rose Letsholor) 77

4. La liaison tonale en shingazidja septentrional (Cédric Patin) 95

Comptes-rendus / Book Reviews

Aliou Mohamadou, Le Verbe en peu l: Formes et valeurs en pulaar du Fuuta-Tooro (2ᵉ édition) par Viktoria Apel 117

Michka Sachnine, Grammaire du yorùbá standard (Nigéria) par Nicolas Aubry 121

Anne Storch, A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach par Noam Faust 125

Wilhelm J. G. Möhlig, Atlas of Kamba Dialects (Kenya Bantu E.55). Phonological and Lexical Comparison par Lolke J. van der Veen 131

Jacques Rongier, Dictionnaire éwé-français par Kofi Yakpo 135

Photo de couverture: Nicolas Quint: Vannier fabriquant un panier avec des nervures de rônier, village de Djifanghor, Sénégal, 2011.

Couverture: Jean-Irénée Cuin

Production et diffusion: Éditions Lambert-Lucas
LLA

Linguistique
et Langues
Africaines

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© Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2016
ISSN 2429-2230
ISBN 978-2-35935-181-1
**Comité scientifique**

Emilio BONVINI (LLACAN, CNRS), Denis CREISSELS (DDL, Université Lyon 2), Claude HAGÈGE (EPHE), Bernd HEINE (University of Cologne), Larry HYMAN (University of California - Berkeley), Sambieni KOFFI (Université d'Abomey-Calavi), Jérémie KOUADIO (Université d'Abidjan), Friederike LÜPKE (SOAS, University of London), Gudrun MIEHE (University of Bayreuth), Maarten MOUS (Leiden University), Papa Alioune NDAO (Université Cheick Anta Diop de Dakar), Margarida PETTERS (Universidade de São Paulo), Thilo SCHADEBERG (Leiden University), John MCWHORTER (Columbia University).

**Comité de rédaction**

Nicolas AUBRY (LLACAN, INALCO), Mélanie BOURLET (LLACAN, INALCO), Pascal BOYELDIEU (LLACAN, CNRS), Gwenaëlle FABRE (LLL, Université d'Orléans), Maximilien GUÉRIN (LLACAN, Université Paris 3), Sophie MANUS (DDL, Université Lyon 2), Aliou MOHAMADOU (LLACAN, INALCO), Sylvester OSU (LLL, Université de Tours), Yvonne TREIS (LLACAN, CNRS), Marie-Claude SIMEONE-SENELLE (LLACAN, CNRS), Valentin VYDRIN (LLACAN, INALCO).

**Rédaction**

Paulette ROULON-DOKO (LLACAN, CNRS), Nicolas QUINT (LLACAN, CNRS), Loïc-Michel PERRIN (LLACAN, INALCO).

**Administration**

Jeanne ZERNER

**Directeur de la publication**

Mark VAN DE VELDE
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## Consignes de soumission

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## Comptes-rendus

Les ouvrages sont à adresser à
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Sommaire

1. Additive Coordination, Comitative Adjunction, and Associative Plural in Tswana .................................................... 11
Denis CREISSELS

2. The Locative System in Cuwabo and Makhuwa (P30 Bantu Languages) .................................................... 43
Rozenn GUÉROIS

3. Question Formation in Gana, a Khoesan Language ........................ 77
Rose M. LETSHOLOR

4. La liaison tonale en shingazidja septentrional .................................... 95
Cédric PATIN

Comptes-rendus de lecture / Book Review

Aliou Mohamadou :
*Le Verbe en peul : Formes et valeurs en pulaar du Fuuta-Tooro*
(2ᵉ édition) .................................................................................... 117
par Viktoria APEL

Michka Sachnine :
*Grammaire du yorùbá standard (Nigéria)....................................*
par Nicolas AUBRY

Anne Storch :
*A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach ....................*
par Noam FAUST

Wilhelm J. G. Möhlig :
*Atlas of Kamba Dialects (Kenya Bantu E.55).*
*Phonological and Lexical Comparison ............................................*
par Lolke J. VAN DER VEEN

Jacques Rongier :
*Dictionnaire éwé-français ............................................................*
par Kofi YAKPO
Comptes-rendus
Book reviews
Jacques RONGIER, *Dictionnaire éwé-français*. Paris, L'Harmattan, 2015, 858 p.

par Kofi YAKPO

The University of Hong Kong

Ewe has been the subject of some of the earliest work in African linguistics, it is one of the major languages along the West African littoral zone between Senegal and Nigeria, an important regional language in Ghana, and the most widely spoken language of Togo. Jacques Rongier's monumental and comprehensive *Dictionnaire éwé-français* narrows an existing gap. The only comprehensive Ewe dictionary to-date was Westermann's *Ewe-Deutsches Wörterbuch* written in German. We can only hope that the gap will be finally closed sometime in the future with the publication of an Ewe-English dictionary.

Rongier's *Dictionnaire éwé-français* complements his *Dictionnaire français-éwé* which appeared twenty years earlier (1995). The *Dictionnaire éwé-français* is even more ambitious in scope. Any modern dictionary of Ewe will invariably be measured against the yardstick of Westermann's lexicographic masterpiece of early African linguistics, the *Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache*. And indeed, my first reflex upon receipt of the review copy of the *Dictionnaire éwé-français* was to pick the 1905 edition of Westermann's book from my shelf, and page through it, with great curiosity as to the differences between the two works.

Take, for example, the entry, *àtikè*, for which Rongier's work provides the translation 'médicament, remède, drogue, fard' [medicine, remedy, drug, make-up]. Westermann's translation of *àtikè* has a slightly more sinister set of translations, namely 'Arznei, Medizin, Gift, Säure' [drug, medicine, poison, acid], providing as the only example to the entry *atike wuame* 'tödliches Gift' [deadly poison]. The different senses in Rongier's and Westermann's works are, of course, a consequence of cultural change. Where a 'medicine' may have had a much wider, multidimensional range of meanings in the holistic approaches of traditional medical spiritual practice in Westermann's times, 'medicine' in contemporary Ewe tends towards the more one-dimensional sense it has acquired through curative medical practice of today. A similar proliferation of meanings as in Ewe traditional uses of *àtikè* can be found in Latin *medicamen* 'medicine, drug, remedy' but also 'cosmetic' and 'dye' and 'substance to treat seeds or plants' (Oxford Latin Dictionary 1982), as opposed to the modern meaning of German *Medikament* or French *médicament*.
Beyond that, the differences in the lexicographic approach between
Rongier's and Westermann's work could not be greater. While the latter
work contents itself with a single entry on àtíkè, Rongier's work lists
altogether forty-seven entries containing àtíkè, including among others,
endocentric compounds (àtíkètùkpá 'flacon de médicament' [medicine
vial], àtíkèmámá 'dose' [dose] and àtíkè ngú núnya 'pharmacologie'
[pharmacology]), agent nouns (àtíkèwòlá 'médecin, guérisseur' [doctor,
healer] and àtíkèdzrálá 'pharmacien'), action nouns (àtíkèdqàdà 'prépa-
ration de médicaments' [preparation of drugs]) and place nouns (àtíkèwɔ́fé
'laboratoire' [laboratory], àtíkèxɔ́ 'depôt de médicaments' [drugstore]).
How useful is such an exhaustive listing of compounds given the
predominantly isolating and mildly agglutinative morphological type of
Ewe? Or phrased differently, which of these complex expressions warrant
separate headwords because they involve a certain degree of
lexicalization, and which of them can be predicted via regular word
formation processes, and could therefore have been omitted or treated
differently in the dictionary?

The segmentation of àtíkèdqàdà, for example, reveals the following
morphological structure: àtíkè ‘medicine’ + dqàdà ‘preparation’, which is
in turn an action noun derived by reduplication from the mono-mor-
phemic root dqà ‘prepare (by way of a process of physical transformation);
cook’. For an Ewe speaker, the composite expression àtíkèdqàdqà therefore
has a predictable meaning and can be derived by regular word formation
processes. In fact, the *Dictionnaire* already lists the action noun dqàdqà
separately under the letter /Đ/. The same observation can be made with
respect to a place noun like àtíkèwɔ́fé {àtíkè-wɔ́-fé} ‘medicine-make-
PLACE’ or àtíkèwòlá {medicine-make-AGN} ‘medicine-maker’. An
alternative approach would have been to list àtíkèdqàdqà as a subentry
under the headword dqàdqà, as one among other examples of collocations
involving dqàdqà.

Another aspect worthy of note is that the *Dictionnaire* only lists nomi-
nal derivations or compounds containing àtíkè and not a single verb-noun
collocation. This can be problematic because contrary to many derived or
compound nouns, verb-noun combinations are often less predictable in
their meaning. For example, the *Ewe Encyclopedic Dictionary of Health*,
a gem compiled by an editorial team at the University of Ghana, Legon,
lists dó àtíkè {put medicine} ‘inhale/insert medicine’ as a subentry to
àtíkè. The meaning ‘inhale’ cannot be regularly derived because dó is one
of the many generic verbs of Ewe with a vague general sense similar to
‘put’ in English, and which acquires more specific senses in collocations,
e.g. dó gá {put money} ‘borrow money’, dó víví {put sweetness} ‘enter-
tain; give relief’.
Decisions about the ordering of entries of course constitute one of the major challenges of dictionary making. Such decisions also depend on the author's intended audience and I assume, although this is not explicitly stated by the author, that the *Dictionnaire* is aimed at a lay and a specialist audience alike. For the former, a strictly alphabetical order is easier to handle than one which involves prior mental parsing. User-friendliness is also likely to have motivated Rongier to choose a different path from Westermann in the ordering of entries beginning with the letter /a/. The *Ewe-Deutsches Wörterbuch* contains a mere six entries under /a/, in contrast, Rongier's *Dictionnaire* contains a whopping 250 pages of words listed under /a/, constituting a third of the book. The enormous difference between the two is due to the fact that Westermann treats the initial vowel /a/ in nouns like *àmè* 'person' as a segmentable nominal prefix discernible from the root, hence *à-mè*. Rongier, however, takes into account that the nominal "prefix" is not productive (any longer) in Ewe and is not subjected to allomorphy as in other Kwa languages. Akan, for example, features prefixal inflection for singular and plural number with nouns and adjectives, e.g. *o-nipa* 'person' *n-nipa* 'people'. The large number of entries under /a/ is, however, a bit unwieldy during look-up, and the question therefore does arise whether it might not have been useful for Rongier to follow Westermann's morphologically oriented approach instead.

Some observations are in order on the orthographic rendering of Ewe employed in the *Dictionnaire éwé-français*. The first relates to the representation of Ewe tones, a language with two phonemic tones, namely H(igh) and L(low). Ewe additionally features a phonetic M(id) tone and two phonetic contour tones (rising and falling). In his earlier work, the *Dictionnaire français-éwé*, Rongier opted for the full marking of tone on every syllable of an entry. In the *Dictionnaire éwé-français*, he opts for a shallow system of tone marking with the following orthographic conventions (i) an initial L-toned syllable of an entry remains unmarked, an initial H-toned syllable bears an acute accent; (ii) a non-initial syllable is only marked by an acute (H) or grave (L) accent when its tone differs from that of the preceding syllable. In this, Rongier follows the system employed by Westermann in his dictionary and his grammatical descriptions of Ewe (e.g. 1930), as well as the approach developed in other classical works, e.g. Christaller's *Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language* (1881). The shallow system renders the following orthographic representations: *mázàzàmetétɔtɔ* [mázàzàmètétɔ́tɔ́] 'ladder', and *yedótoemè* [yèqótɔ́émè] 'sunset'. Shallow and minimal systems of tone marking (or indeed no tone marking at all) are very common in African orthographies – Yoruba with its full tone-marking (M tone unmarked) as part of the regular orthography being one of the few
exceptions, e.g. *olódùmaré* [olódùmaïré] ‘creator, supreme being’ (Abraham 1962). Given the scope of this work, it is regrettable that Rongier decided to shift from full tone marking in his *Dictionnaire français-éwé* to partial tone marking in the present *Dictionnaire éwé-français*. For users unfamiliar with reading tone languages, and indeed unfamiliar with Ewe, getting the tones right will constitute a challenge, since unmarked syllables can either be specified for H or L.

A second observation is that Rongier departs from the official Ewe orthography in his *Dictionnaire éwé-français* in the rendition of nasalized vowels, an approach already taken in the *Dictionnaire français-éwé*, which he justifies in the latter work with enhanced “readability”. Instead of writing the nasal tilde above the vowel as in *àtsyɔ* ‘beauty’, he writes it below the vowel, i.e. *àtsy*. I disagree with this approach, which disregards established Ewe orthographic conventions that have been in use for decades and is equivalent to transcribing *Schönheit* ‘beauty’ in a dictionary of German as *Schönheit* for the sake of expediency. A final note on form: in the font employed in this work, the grave accent (L tone) over the letter /i/ appears to the left of the dot on the *i*. This should not be the case if a Unicode font had been used, and it mildly tarnishes the otherwise very satisfactory typeset of the *Dictionnaire*.

These are, however, minor observations in view of the breath-taking scope of Rongier’s *Dictionnaire éwé-français*. This is a stupendous work, which is likely to serve generations of learners of Ewe and francophone linguists. The sheer coverage of the *Dictionnaire* and Rongier’s matter-of-factly presentation of the richness of this beautiful language also provide long-awaited relief from the racist pronouncements of Westermann in his introduction (see p. 16) to the first edition of his *Ewe-Deutsches Wörterbuch*, which will remain a perpetual stain on an otherwise timeless work.

## References

ABRAHAM, Roy Clive. 1962. *Dictionary of modern Yoruba*. 2nd ed. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

CHRISTALLER, Johann Gottlieb. 1881. *A dictionary of the Asante and Fante language called Tshi (Chwee, Twi)*, with a grammatical introduction and appendices on the geography of the Gold Coast and other subjects. Basel: Evangelical Missionary Society.

Department of Linguistics. 2011. *Ewe encyclopedic dictionary of health*. Accra: University of Ghana, Legon.

GLARE, Peter G.W. 1982. *Oxford latin dictionary*. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

RONGIER, Jacques. 1995. *Dictionnaire français-éwé: suivi d'un index français-éwé*. (Collection “Hommes et Sociétés”). Paris: ACCT - Karthala.

WESTERMANN, Diedrich. 1905. *Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache. 1. Teil: Ewe-Deutsches Wörterbuch*. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
WESTERMANN, Diedrich. 1930. *A study of the Ewe language*. Translated from German by A.L. Bickford-Smith. London: Oxford University Press.

WESTERMANN, Diedrich. 1954. *Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache*. Redigierte Ausgabe. Vol. 8. (Veröff. Des Inst. Für Orientforschung Der Deutschen Akademie Der Wissenschaften Zu Berlin). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.