The Problem of Word Division in Written Shona: A Historical Survey

Abstract

The exercise of reducing Shona to written form was undertaken by non-native speakers most of whom were Europeans. Their linguistic knowledge of their languages, whose structures are different from that of Shona, tended to influence the manner in which they dealt with Shona orthography, particularly its word division. In this paper, the methods of word division used by these early grammarians, namely conjunctive and disjunctive, are examined with the aim of discovering their sources and how they were applied to the Shona language. Different groups of missionaries worked on various Shona dialects using these two methods of word division. Here, this is illustrated by analyzing examples of the earliest gospel translations. They treated nouns and verbs differently in relation to disjunctive and conjunctive systems. Two types of words that result from the methods of word division used by early grammarians, namely phonological and morphological, are brought out and discussed.