I’m preparing a handout on morphology in Akan today, and it’s always enjoyable and insightful to look at compounds in other languages. For example, lion decomposes into chew + metal. Not that we should draw any Whorfian conclusions from these kinds of things—do you dissect and reassemble grasshopper every time you hear that word or do you immediately think of the mental concept/real-world extension of the word?

I’m preparing a handout on morphology in Akan today, and it’s always enjoyable and insightful to look at compounds in other languages. For example, lion decomposes into chew + metal. Not that we should draw any Whorfian conclusions from these kinds of things—do you dissect and reassemble grasshopper every time you hear that word or do you immediately think of the mental concept/real-world extension of the word?

Tags: akan linguistics