miya-english-hausa dictionary - UCLA Department of Linguistics

Verbal tones: Each verb class has several tonal subclasses. Classes A1, A2, B have
classes L, HH, and HL. Class D has L and H. These classes undergo distinct tonal
alternations in various contexts. Unlike non-verbs, the tone classes do not necessarily
indicate citation tones because of many contextual tonal alternations special to verbs. See
below for an explanation of tone marking, and see Schuh (1998) for details of verbal
tones.
Verbal nouns: Every verbal entry includes one or more verbal nouns. Verbal nouns,
like all other nouns, have grammatical gender. This is marked as “(m)” or “(f)” for
verbal nouns where gender was checked. I did not check gender on verbal nouns left
unmarked for gender.
Other categories
Categories and entries for categories of word and morpheme classes other than nouns
and verbs should be relatively self-explanatory. See the list of abbreviations below for
the meanings of the category labels.
Definitions
Entries have definitions in both English and Hausa. Every word has one or more
English definitions. These definitions are as complete as possible, given current data.
More study of texts may bring out additional meanings and/or functions. Some entries
lack a Hausa definition. These are cases where neither Vaziya nor I could readily find a
good Hausa equivalent. Rather than make something up, I felt it was better to leave the
Hausa blank.
Examples
There are examples of usage, idioms, and special grammatical properties for many
entries. These could, and should be expanded by drawing more examples of usage from
texts and from example sentences in Schuh (1998). This would be a long term project,
however, so the dictionary is produced as is for the time being.
Alphabetical order
The first letter of the alphabet is taken to be ’ (glottal stop), the second letter is ”. The
only vowel that can begin a word is a. There is a contrast between ’a and a at the
beginning of a word. As far as I know, there is no phonetic difference between ’a and a,
but the difference shows up in context and in morphology. A word beginning in /’a/ is
always pronounced with an initial [a], whereas initial /a/ disappears under some
circumstances and is lengthened under others (see Schuh (1998) for details). Words
beginning in [”] and [i] all begin in underlying /í”/ and /’i/ respetively (no words begin in
initial [u]). Following these two letters, ordering is the normal Roman alphabetical
ordering, with the “hooked” letters ordered after their non-hooked counterparts. Sounds
represented by digraphs, such as ts, tl, sh, are treated as the sequence of letters for
purposes of alphabetization.
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