Ichi Igbo

Ichi Igbo chi  ejowo Southeastern Nigeria ma ka.,  

Abọ kụ ma ki Ichi dabi amọnę  Òdulugwu mi ọgwụ ekwa nyi ọka .

 Inabali 
Ọtakada ejọdụdụ kụ ma kọ ali Igbo chi ‘Inabali ami ọmaye ọnọkele kụ ma gbọ ọla ọjọ kụ ma di Caribbean.’ Ekọ kụ ma di ọtakada le dụfụ chi ọdọ  1777. Ọdọ 1789, ma ñwọ dadi publish ọtakada ọmune ge, ọdụ ñwu chi ‘ Ọla eriñwo lụgbọ ọlayi Olaudah Equiano.’   Ụgbọ kụ ma publish ọtakada le chi  London, England, ene ki kọ chi Olaudah Equiano, ki chi adụ akwọbi ọtakada le feature amí ọji ọla alụ igbo dabi Ẹ̀tẹẹ̀gwá ny’ẹ́yọ́ mẹ́lā. 

Ane Igbo
Ichi Igbo ọ ñwi ma ka ọjilę amí state Nigeria yield :
Abia State
Anambra State
Ebonyi State
Enugu State
Imo State
Northern Delta State
Rivers State

 Vocabulary 

 Word classes 
Lexical categories in Igbo include nouns, pronouns, numerals, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and a single preposition. The meaning of , the single preposition, is flexible and must be ascertained from the context. Examples from Emenanjo (2015) illustrate the range of meaning:

Igbo has an extremely limited number of adjectives in a closed class. Emenanjo (1978, 2015) counts just eight, which occur in pairs of opposites:  'big',  'small';  'dark',  'light';  'new',  'old';  'good';  'bad'. Adjectival meaning is otherwise conveyed through the use of stative verbs or abstract nouns.

Verbs, by far the most prominent category in Igbo, host most of the language's morphology and appear to be the most basic category; many processes can derive new words from verbs, but few can derive verbs from words of other classes.

Igbo pronouns do not index gender, and the same pronouns are used for male, female and inanimate beings. So the sentence,  can mean "he, she or it is beautiful".

 Phonology 
Vowels
Igbo is a tonal language. Tone varies by dialect but in most dialects there seem to be three register tones and three contour tones. The language's tone system was given by John Goldsmith as an example of autosegmental phenomena that go beyond the linear model of phonology laid out in The Sound Pattern of English. Igbo words may differ only in tone. An example is ákwá "cry", àkwà "bed", àkwá "egg", and ákwà "cloth". As tone is not normally written, these all appear as  in print.

In many cases, the two (or sometimes three) tones commonly used in Igbo dictionaries fail to represent how words actually sound in the spoken language . This indicates that Igbo may have many more tones than previously recognised. For example, the imperative form of the word bia "come" has a different tone to that used in statement O bia "he came". That imperative tone is also used in the second syllable of abuo "two". Another distinct tone appears in the second syllable of asaa "seven" and another in the second syllable of aguu "hunger".
The language features vowel harmony with two sets of oral vowels distinguished by pharyngeal cavity size described in terms of retracted tongue root (RTR). These vowels also occupy different places in vowel space:  (the last commonly transcribed , in keeping with neighboring languages). For simplicity, phonemic transcriptions typically choose only one of these parameters to be distinctive, either RTR as in the chart on the right and Igbo orthography (that is, as ), or vowel space as in the alphabetic chart below (that is, as ). There are also nasal vowels.

Adjacent vowels usually undergo assimilation during speech. The sound of a preceding vowel, usually at the end of one word, merges in a rapid transition to the sound of the following vowel, particularly at the start of another word, giving the second vowel greater prominence in speech. Usually the first vowel (in the first word) is only slightly identifiable to listeners, usually undergoing centralisation. /kà ó mésjá/, for example, becomes /kòó mésjá/ "goodbye". An exception to this assimilation may be with words ending in /a/ such as /nà/ in /nà àlà/, "on the ground", which could be completely assimilated leaving /n/ in rapid speech, as in "nàlà" or "n'àlà". In other dialects however, the instance of /a/ such as in "nà" in /ọ́ nà èrí ńrí/, "he/she/it is eating", results in a long vowel, /ọ́ nèèrí ńrí/.

Tone
The Igbo language is tonal in nature. This means that the meaning of a word can be altered depending on the tone used when pronouncing it. Igbo has two main tones: high and low. The high tone is usually marked with an acute accent (´) and the low tone is marked with a grave accent (`).

For example, the word  can mean "cry, egg, cloth, sew" depending on the tone used. If pronounced with a high tone on the first and last syllable it means "cry". But if pronounced with a low tone on the first syllable and high on the last syllable, it means "egg”. If it is pronounced with low tone on both syllables, then it will mean “cloth” or “sew”.

Another example is the word "eze” which means "king" or "teeth". In either case the first syllable is pronounced with a high tone. If the second syllable is pronounced with a low tone, it means "king". But if pronounced with a middle tone, it means "teeth".

The use of tonal inflection in Igbo language is very important because it helps to differentiate between words that would otherwise sound the same. It can be challenging for English speakers to learn how to use the tones properly, but with practice, it can be mastered.

Consonants

Igbo does not have a contrast among voiced occlusives (between voiced stops and nasals): stops precede oral vowels, and nasals precede nasal vowels. Only a limited number of other consonants occur before nasal vowels, including .

 Consonants of Standard Igbo (with nasal vowels) Labial Dental/Alveolar Post-alveolar Palatal Velar Labial–velar Glottalplainlab.Plosive/Affricate voiceless         voiced ~    ~ ~   Sonorant ~ ~  Fricative voiceless       voiced      ~ Rhotic        

In some dialects, such as Enu-Onitsha Igbo, the doubly articulated  and  are realized as a voiced/devoiced labial–velar implosive. The approximant  is realized as an alveolar tap  between vowels as in árá. The Enu-Onitsha Igbo dialect is very much similar to Enuani spoken among the Igbo-Anioma people in Delta State.

To illustrate the effect of phonological analysis, the following inventory of a typical Central dialect is taken from Clark (1990). Nasality has been analyzed as a feature of consonants, rather than vowels, avoiding the problem of why so few consonants occur before nasal vowels;  has also been analyzed as .

 Consonants of Central Igbo (no nasal vowels) Labial Alveolar Alveolo-palatal Velar Labial–velar Glottalplainpal.plainlab.Plosive/Affricate voiceless unaspirated         aspirated        voiced unaspirated         aspirated        Fricative voiceless plain       nasalized       voiced plain        nasalized        Rhotic plain         nasalized         Approximant voiceless         voiceless nasalized         voiced      

Syllables are of the form  (optional consonant, vowel) or N (a syllabic nasal). CV is the most common syllable type. Every syllable bears a tone. Consonant clusters do not occur. The semivowels  and  can occur between consonant and vowel in some syllables. The semi-vowel in  is analyzed as an underlying vowel "ị", so that -bịa is the phonemic form of bjá 'come'. On the other hand, "w" in  is analyzed as an instance of labialization; so the phonemic form of the verb -gwá "tell" is .

 Morphological typology 
Igbo is an isolating language that exhibits very little fusion. The language is predominantly suffixing in a hierarchical manner, such that the ordering of suffixes is governed semantically rather than by fixed position classes. The language has very little inflectional morphology but much derivational and extensional morphology. Most derivation takes place with verbal roots.

Extensional suffixes, a term used in the Igbo literature, refer to morphology that has some but not all characteristics of derivation. The words created by these suffixes always belong to the same lexical category as the root from which they are created, and the suffixes' effects are principally semantic. On these grounds, Emenanjo (2015) asserts that the suffixes called extensional are bound lexical compounding elements; they cannot occur independently, though many are related to other free morphemes from which they may have originally been derived.

In addition to affixation, Igbo exhibits both partial and full reduplication to form gerunds from verbs. The partial form copies on the initial consonant and inserts a high front vowel, while the full form copies the first consonant and vowel. Both types are then prefixed with o-. For example, -go 'buy' partially reduplicates to form ògigo 'buying,' and -bu 'carry' fully reduplicates to form òbubu 'carrying'. Some other noun and verb forms also exhibit reduplication, but because the reduplicated forms are semantically unpredictable, reduplication in their case is not synchronically productive, and they are better described as separate lexical items.

 Grammatical relations 
Igbo does not mark overt case distinctions on nominal constituents and conveys grammatical relations only through word order. The typical Igbo sentence displays subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, where the subject is understood as the sole argument of an intransitive verb or the agent-like (external) argument of a transitive verb. Igbo thus exhibits accusative alignment.

It has been proposed, with reservations, that some Igbo verbs display ergativity on some level, as in the following two examples:

In (4), the verb has a single argument, nnukwu mmīri, which appears in subject position, and in the transitive sentence (5), that same argument appears in the object position, even though the two are semantically identical. On this basis, authors such as Emenanjuo (2015) have posited that this argument is an absolutive and that Igbo therefore contains some degree of ergativity.

However, others disagree, arguing that the relevant category is not alignment but underlying argument structure; under this hypothesis, (4) and (5) differ only in the application of a transformation and can be accounted for entirely by the unaccusative hypothesis and the Extended Projection Principle; the nominal argument is generated in object position, and either it is raised to the subject position, as in (4), or the subject position is filled with a pleonastic pronoun, as in (5).

 Relative clauses 
Igbo relative clauses are externally headed and follow the head noun. They do not employ overt relative markers or resumptive pronouns, instead leaving a gap in the position of the relativized noun. Subjects and objects can be relativized. Examples include (relative clauses bracketed):

 Voice and valence 
Igbo lacks the common valence-decreasing operation of passivization, a fact which has led multiple scholars to claim that "voice is not a relevant category in Igbo." The language does, however, possess some valence-increasing operations that could be construed as voice under a broader definition

Igbo also possess an applicative construction, which takes the suffix -rV, where V copies the previous vowel, and the applicative argument follows the verb directly. The applicative suffix is identical in form with the past tense suffix, with which it should not be confused. For example:

 Verb serialization 
Igbo permits verb serialization, which is used extensively to compensate for its paucity of prepositions. Among the meaning types commonly expressed in serial verb constructions are instruments, datives, accompaniment, purpose, and manner. (13) and (14) below illustrate instrumental and dative verb series, respectively:

 Writing system 

The Igbo people invented Nsibidi ideograms, which spread to their neighbors such as Ekoi people, and  Ejegham people for basic written communication. Nsibidi is an ancient system of graphic communication indigenous to peoples in southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon in the Cross River region. It is also used by neighboring Ekoi, Ejegham, Efik, and Ibibio peoples. They have been used since at least the 16th century, under the Aro Confederacy, but died out publicly after they became popular amongst secret societies such as the Ekpe, who used them as a secret form of communication. Nsibidi, however, is not a full writing system, because it cannot transcribe the Igbo language specifically. In 1960, a rural land owner and dibia named Nwagu Aneke developed a syllabary for the Umuleri dialect of Igbo, the script, named after him as the Nwagu Aneke script, was used to write hundreds of diary entries until Aneke's death in 1991. The Nwagu Aneke Project is working on translating Nwagu's commentary and diary.

 History of Igbo orthography 
Before the existence of any official system of orthography for the Igbo language, travelers and writers documented Igbo sounds by utilizing the orthracyologies of their own languages in transcribing them, though they encountered difficulty representing particular sounds, such as implosives, labialized velars, syllabic nasals, and non-expanded vowels. In the 1850s, German philologist Karl Richard Lepsius published the Standard Alphabet, which was universal to all languages of the world, and became the first Igbo orthography. It contained 34 letters and included digraphs and diacritical marks to transcribe sounds distinct to African languages. The Lepsius Standard Alphabet contained the following letters:
 a b d e f g h i k l m n o p r s t u v w y z gb gh gw kp kw ṅ nw ny ọ s ds ts
The Lepsius orthography was replaced by the Practical Orthography of African Languages (Africa Orthography) in 1929 by the colonial government in Nigeria. The new orthography, created by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC), had 36 letters and disposed of diacritic marks. Numerous controversial issues with the new orthography eventually led to its replacement in the early 1960s. The Africa Orthography contained the following letters:
 a b c d e f g gb gh h i j k kp l m n ŋ ny o ɔ ɵ p r s t u w y z gw kw nw

 Ọnwụ 


The current Ọnwụ alphabet, a compromise between the older Lepsius alphabet and a newer alphabet advocated by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC), is presented in the following table, with the International Phonetic Alphabet equivalents for the characters:
LetterPronunciationA aB bCh chD dE eF fG gGb gbGh ghGw gwH hI iỊ ịJ jK kKp kpKw kwL lM mN nṄ ṅNw nwNy nyO oỌ ọP pR rS sSh shT tU uỤ ụV vW w Igbo children's reduced competence and performance has been attributed in part to the lack of exposure in the home environment, which impacts intergenerational transmission of the language. English is the official language in Nigeria and is utilized in government administration, educational institutions, and commerce. Aside from its role in numerous facets of daily life in Nigeria, globalization exerts pressure to utilize English as a universal standard language in support of economic and technological advancement. A 2005 study by Igboanusi and Peter demonstrated the preferential attitude towards English over the Igbo language amongst Igbo people in the co

 References 









 External links 

PREF:prefix
SUFF:suffix


Category:Agglutinative languages
Category:Languages of Nigeria
Category:Languages of Equatorial Guinea
Category:Igboid languages
Category:Vowel-harmony languages