Determining word boundaries in afaan Oromoo (Oromic)

Oromic, the language of the Oromo people, a Cushitic language spoken mainly inEthiopia, has officially been using a Latin script-based orthography since 1991. Theorthography is widely accepted by Oromic speakers. With the expansion of the application of this orthography to more than literacy and elementary education, thenecessity for some updates on the rules has been felt at times. One such requiredupdate is the rules of determining word boundaries encompassing affixes, clitics,and words. This issue is very important in Oromic to minimize ambiguity andmanage the length of the words. This paper proposes which morphemes should beaffixed and which ones should be written separately, based mainly on the criteriaproposed by Kutsch Lojenga (2014), and explains how this helps disambiguation.