Abstract
Proverb is an age long phenomenon representing important aspect of verbal discourse that expresses ancient wisdom. It is used by humans in multifunctional ways and is generally true in the society. It has been discovered that proverbs can also be expressed in personal names. The focus of this Chapter is to provide a description of the morphology of proverbial personal names. A selection of Ígálà proverbial names was made, and unstructured interviews employed to elicit the interpretation/meaning of the names. The study provides answers to questions on what morphological information encodes Ígálà proverbial names. We discover among others that Ígálà proverbial names do not just contain philosophical and cultural values but are morphologically compound, complex and compound-complex words derived in part from the full proverbial expression embedding rich linguistic information useful for understanding the grammar of the language. This work contributes to current research progress on names across languages and encourages interest in the study of other aspects of language naming.
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Johnpaul, O.N. (2022). A Morphological Description of Proverbial Ígálà Personal Names. In: Ekpenyong, M.E., Udoh, I.I. (eds) Current Issues in Descriptive Linguistics and Digital Humanities. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2932-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2932-8_15
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