(Journal of Education, Humanities and Sciences, 2016) Ilonga, Emmanuel
This paper presents endocentric and exocentric compounds in Ruhaya, with specific
focus on their lexical properties, position of headwords, semantic relation between
headwords and modifiers, and the semantic classification of noun-noun compounds. It
offers a comparison between Ruhaya and other Bantu languages on these aspects, and
extends the comparison to Indo-European languages (English, Dutch and French). It was
found that Ruhaya has left-headed compounds, and words from the same and different
lexical categories can combine to make up compound words. In the case of headed
compounds, there is a kind of semantic relations through which modifiers slightly
change the meaning of headwords. With an exception of Northern Sotho, in which a
prefix of the left-most word becomes the head, the left-most word in Ruhaya, Bemba
and Kiswahili is the head. In comparison with Indo-European languages, French is left headed in this regard, while Dutch and English are right-headed.