Term-formation methods in the Gamo language

Abstract This research describes the techniques used to form terms in the Gamo language, an Omotic language of Afro-asiatic family spoken in South-Western Ethiopia. The introduction of Gamo as a medium of instruction in primary education and as a language subject for all grade levels requires the creation of new terms for concepts that do not already exist in the language. A number of new terms were formed to facilitate the teaching and learning of language, science and mathematics education. This research followed linguistic and communicative approaches, as illustrated in Antia ( 2000 : 39, 44), to describe techniques of term-formation and to analyse features of the terms in line with the linguistic properties of Gamo. To this end, lexical data were collected from language and mathematics textbooks prepared in the Gamo language. Data were also gathered from native speakers who participated in textbook preparation and terminology works. According to the data, borrowing, compounding, blending, initialism, paraphrasing and semantic extension were applied to form terms pertinent to education in the Gamo language. The most frequent mechanisms were borrowing, followed by compounding, but few terms were formed by blending and paraphrasing.