Word Division
Like all other Bantu languages, Sesotho is an agglutinative language spoken conjunctively; however, like many Bantu languages it is written disjunctively. The difference lies in the characteristically European word division used for writing the language, in contrast with some Bantu languages such as the South African Nguni languages.
This issue is investigated in more detail in The Sesotho word.
Roughly speaking the following principles may be used to explain the current orthographical word division:
- Prefixes (except noun class prefixes) and infixes are written separately on their own, and the root and all following suffixes are written together. This is most obvious in the writing of the verb complex. One exception is the 1st. pers. sg objectival concord, and another is in the writing of the concords used with the qualificative parts of speech.
- With the exception of class 15, noun class prefixes are directly attached to the noun stem. These are an essential part of the lexicon, and not merely functional morphemes.
- Words which have been fossilised/lexicalised with historical prefixes are written as one word. This most frequently occurs with adverbs.
Of course, there are exceptions to these rough rules.
Read more about this topic: Sotho Orthography
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