Bagre: A Dagaaba Celebration of Environmental Balance Between Humans and Non-Humans

Dannabang Kuwabong

University of Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT

The religious myth and festival of the Bagre performed among Dagaaba in Ghana, Burkina Faso, and CoteD'Ivoire encapsulates the general feel of Dagaaba environmental spirituality and theology in which the relationship between humans and non-humans become defined, narrated, interpreted, and lived. Bagre articulates in word and action Dagaaba beliefs of human origins and survival in the physical environment.

I argue in this paper that Bagre is a conduit through which Dagaaba shamans pass down to neophytes an apocryphal vision and perception of Dagaaba spiritual, cultural, and ritual relationship with their seemingly harsh, semi-arid natural environment, which baffles them in its unpredictability, but also, nonetheless, nourishes them. I show briefly in this paper that Dagaaba myths, like other traditional people's myths, need further investigation toward a more comprehensive and compassionate appreciation of Dagaaba traditional environmental knowing by modern environmental educators, who are concerned with the question of desertification and environmental degradation in that part of West Africa.
 

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Dagara Orthography

Joachim D. Some

United Bible Societies

ABSTRACT

This paper is an attempt to describe the progress accomplished in Burkina Faso in the process of reforming the writing system of the Dagara language during the last three decades. After a quick description of the historical background, this paper explains the dominant features of the present Dagara orthography. The most important part of the paper focuses on, and is devoted to, a wide overview of the present state of Dagara orthography. In this regard, the reader will find a table which provides the entire alphabet of 38 letters (vowels and consonants). The alphabet is carefully compared with the French alphabet, and in this process, the main similarities and discrepancies existing between the alphabets of the two languages are highlighted. The most innovative section however, is where the rules governing the marking of the tones with only two accents are analyzed and explained in detail. This is followed by the set of rules concerning the combinations and sequences of vowels (i.e. long vowels, diphthongs, vowel harmony and nasalization). The rules related to the conditions of the distribution of the locative and diminutive morphemes are examined. Finally, compound nouns are analyzed to show how they are formed and written, with regard to hyphenation and word breaks.

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Relativization in Dagaare

Adams Bodomo
The University of Hong Kong

Ken Hiraiwa
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT

This paper examines in detail the syntax and semantics of relativization in Dagaare, a Mabia (Oti-Volta) language of the Gur branch in the Niger-Congo family. The main aim of our investigation is to explicate a cluster of features of relativization in Dagaare. In particular, we will show that Dagaare relative clauses, despite surface identity, come in two varieties, Head-External Relative Clause (HERC) and Left-Headed Head-Internal Relative Clause (Left-Headed HIRC). The latter type of relativization has rarely been noticed cross-linguistically in the previous literature and therefore is of considerable significance for general linguistics as well as theoretical linguistics.
 

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Updated on June 3, 2005.