The orthography used in this and related articles is that of South Africa, not Lesotho. For a discussion of the differences between the two see the notes on Sesotho orthography.
The Sesotho parts of speech convey the most basic meanings and functions of the words in the language, which may be modified in largely predictable ways by affixes and other regular morphological devices. Each complete word in the Sesotho language must comprise some "part of speech."
There are basically twelve parts of speech in Sesotho. The six major divisions are purely according to syntax, while the sub-divisions are according to morphology and semantic significance.
Parts of speech[1]
Substantives signify concrete or abstract concepts:
Nouns
Pronouns
Qualificatives qualify substantives:
Adjectives
Relatives
Enumeratives
Possessives
Predicatives signify an action or state connected with the substantive:
Verbs
Copulatives
Descriptives describe qualificatives, predicatives, or other descriptives:
Adverbs
Ideophones
Conjunctives introduce or join up sentences
Interjectives are exclamations
As a rule, Bantu languages do not have any prepositions[2] or articles. In Sesotho, locatives are inflected substantives and verb imperatives are treated as interjectives. The division of the four qualificatives is dependent solely on the concords that they use.[3] Cardinals are nouns but are given a separate section below.
In form, some parts of speech (adjectives, enumeratives, some relatives, some possessives, and all verbs) are radical stems which need affixes to form meaningful words; others (copulatives, most possessives, and some adverbs) are formed from full words by the employment of certain formatives; the rest (nouns, pronouns, some relatives, some adverbs, all ideophones, conjunctives, and interjectives) are complete words themselves which may or may not be modified with affixes to form new words. Therefore, the term "word classes" instead of the somewhat more neutral "parts of speech" would have been somewhat of a misnomer.
^The peculiar names are due to Doke. Note that:
The more familiar terms "conjunction" and "interjection" are special (radical) types of "conjunctives" and "interjectives"
The simple "copulative" is usually expressed without the use of verbs (in contrast to "copulas" in English);
There are four types of "qualificatives" (not simply one type of "adjective") distinguished morphologically by their use of concords;
"Ideophones" (a term coined by Doke specifically for Bantu linguistics), unlike most English onomatopoeias, describe verbs and "qualificatives" (just like English adverbs); many of them describe qualities and actions which produce no obvious sound (such as redness, dying, darkness, silence, disappearing into a corner, appearing alone at a height, walking quickly due to feeling cold, etc.);
and so forth.
The grammatical classification is obviously quite different from that of European and Classical languages, and these terms are used to avoid the temptation of treating Bantu languages in the same manner as European languages, and to avoid the implications of more traditional terms.
^Sometimes a certain class of constructions are called "prepositions" in Sesotho, but this is merely a misunderstanding aggravated by the disjunctive Sesotho orthography. They are formed from adverbs of place by contracting the locative class' possessive concord (ha-) affixed to the following word into them (as evidenced by the fact that they all end with a high tone a, and affect the tone of the following noun), and produce similar meanings to English prepositions:
[hɑʀɪhɑn̩t͡ɬʼʊ]hare ha ntlo ('inside the house') → [hɑʀɑn̩t͡ɬʼʊ]hara ntlo
[t͡ɬʼɑsɪhɑmɑʒʷɛ]tlase ha majwe ('underneath rocks') → [t͡ɬʼɑsɑmɑʒʷɛ]tlasa majwe
In each case, the "preposition" is found to be part of a genitive (possessive) compound formed with the following orthographical "word", but the current disjunctive orthography writes these parts separately. Note that in the Lesotho orthography an apostrophe is used to indicate the missing final vowel of the first word and ⟨h⟩ of the possessive concord (that is, the examples would be written ⟨har'a ntlo⟩ and ⟨tlas'a majoe⟩).
^Other researchers call adjectives and relatives "agreeing adjectives" and "non-agreeing adjectives" respectively. In Sesotho, at least, these terms are only truly meaningful when forming simple copulatives (since adjectives assume the class prefix but relatives do not). In non-copulative uses in Sesotho, all qualificatives agree with the noun they are qualifying.
The terms have more validity in languages such as Swahili where the "non-agreeing adjectives" really don't concord with the nouns they describe.
and 29 Related for: Sotho parts of speech information
The Sesotho partsofspeech convey the most basic meanings and functions of the words in the language, which may be modified in largely predictable ways...
Sotho (/sɛˈsuːtuː/) Sesotho, also known as Southern Sotho or Sesotho sa Borwa is a Southern Bantu language of the Sotho–Tswana ("S.30") group, spoken...
Pretoria Taal, or Pretoria Sotho (affectionately called Sepitori/S'pitori by its speakers), is the urban lingua franca of Pretoria and the Tshwane metropolitan...
itself does not really have any meaning). Roots are the basis of the Sothopartsofspeech. The following words: [huˌʀutɑ] ho ruta ('to teach') [bɑliˌʀutʼile]...
The tone of a syllable is carried by the vowel, or the nasal, if the nasal is syllabic. The tone carried by syllabic /l̩/ (and, in Northern Sotho and Setswana...
transcription delimiters. The phonology of Sesotho and those of the other Sotho–Tswana languages are radically different from those of "older" or more "stereotypical"...
composed of a noun prefix and a stem (which may in turn be derived from other partsofspeech; see below under Derivation). Each noun belongs to one of several...
may be as a result of the inadequacy of 'r' in the languages. Sotho (Tswana, Northern Sotho and Southern Sotho) speakers have a similar accent, with...
of the eight partsofspeech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these...
The orthography of the Sotho language is fairly recent and is based on the Latin script, but, like most languages written using the Latin alphabet, it...
verbs often form the centre of a complex web of regular derivational patterns, and words/roots belonging to many partsofspeech may be directly or indirectly...
prefixes, and it is not unreasonable to assume that originally the other partsofspeech were made to agree with the noun by simply prefixing them with the...
Translate produces approximations across languages of multiple forms of text and media, including text, speech, websites, or text on display in still or live...
the family of Africa). Additional stanzas were written later by Sontonga and other writers, and the original verse was translated into Sotho and Afrikaans...
representation ofspeech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists...
Lingala is important in Central Africa. Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans...
constitute a large and rich class of morphemes, indicating such things in a sentence as tense, mood, aspect, speech level (of which there are 7 in Korean)...
In the Sotho language, the deficient verbs are a special subset of Sesotho verbs that require a subordinate or complementary verb to complete their action...
the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent partsof signs. The...
the knowledge of more than just the infinitive form known as the principal partsof which there are seven in French. With the knowledge of these seven principal...
occur across a number of different word classes (e.g. Mundang, Ewe, Sotho, Hausa). Despite this diversity, ideophones show a number of robust regularities...
raised in the township of Seshego near Polokwane in the Transvaal, in the region now known as Limpopo. His family is Northern Sotho, and his mother was a...
and Chobe in northern Botswana. The development ofSotho–Tswana states based on the highveld, south of the Limpopo River, began around 1000 CE. The chief's...
lih-SOO-too, Sotho pronunciation: [lɪˈsʊːtʰʊ]), formally the Kingdom of Lesotho, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. As an enclave of South Africa...
tonal pattern is characteristic of the speech heard in partsof the rural upper Midwest that have come under the influence of Norwegian phonology through...
"Saxon genitive or English possessive" (-'s). Eight "word classes" or "partsofspeech" are commonly distinguished in English: nouns, determiners, pronouns...
heard in the 21st century in the speechof many speakers in Ireland, Scotland and partsof the US. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, the...
The grammar of the Kashubian language is characterized by a high degree of inflection, and has relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement...
Afrikaans, English, Pedi, Tswana, Southern Sotho, Tsonga, Swazi, Venda, and Southern Ndebele (in order of first language speakers), as well as South African...