| Abstract: |
This paper explores the linguistic structure of personal names and their relationship with cultural and historical events in Kambari, a language cluster among the Niger-Congo family of languages, spoken in the Northern part of Nigeria. The paper argues that personal names in Kambari culture have to be understood from linguistic as well as historical and social perspectives. The study also adopts Horwich (2004) ‘use theory of meaning’. It is evidently clear from the findings that most Kambari personal names are amalgam of verbs and pronominal, nominal and verbs, adjectives and accusatives, and/or compound words with a verbal base. These are copiously instantiated in the paper. One instance is Lawamu, a compound name with the constituents Lawa+mu. Literally, lawa means leave while mu means me. The name connotes a child who survived after birth while many before him/her could not survive. The name becomes an amalgam of a verb and singular accusative form of a pronominal. |
EBONYI JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
