Linguistic ``oddities'' explained

This paper investigates irregular phenomena or “oddities” in Hausa, Kanakuru, andTera, three languages belonging to the Chadic family. These phenomena appearodd in that they seem to be at variance with the patterns and normal grammat-ical formation rules in these languages. The Hausa anomalies are the plurals ofthe words màatáa ‘woman’ and ’yáa ‘daughter, small’ (máatáa ‘women’ and ’yáa‘daughters’, respectively). The Kanakuru anomaly, which also involves plurality,is the strange pair buut ‘he-goat’, plural bukurin ‘he-goats’. The anomaly in Terarelates to the form of the Linker -t(ǝ), which normally suffixes to the stem, e.g. luku‘garment’, luk-tǝ-ku ‘garments’, but in rare cases replaces the final consonant of thenoun to which it is attached, e.g., sǝɗi ‘snake’, sǝ-tǝ-ku ‘snakes’. It is shown that witha fuller and richer understanding of these languages, one can explain all of thesesupposed oddities as manifestations of regular morphological and phonologicalprocesses, whether viewed as deep synchronic morphophonology or as historicalvestiges.