Standardization Of Oromo Orthographic And Lexical Perspectives

This study describes the orthographic and lexical standardization of Oromo. Qualitative research rndesign was employed to describe the orthographic and lexical standardization of Oromo. Both rnprimary and secondary sources of data were used. Focus group discussions and an interview rnwere the primary sources of data; whereas the documents compiled by the standardization rncommittee of Oromo and the primary and secondary school textbooks were the secondary rnsources of data. Even though there are a number of scholars who argue for and against the use of rnRoman based script, this study argues that Roman based script (Qubee) should be continued to rnwrite Oromo as a result of the linguistic, practical, acceptance and from the country's language rnpolicy point of views. Despite its occurrence in the various texts of Oromo, and its inclusion as rnan independent phoneme in the phonemic inventory of the language, the grapheme for the glottal rnstop is still not devised. Hence, this study, strongly recommends that it has to be represented with rngrapheme. Since the main reason for opting Roman based script is to mark the geminated rnrealization of grapheme, this study argues that the sounds represented by the digraphs have to be rnmarked when geminated. Though it requires experimental investigation, the graphamatic rnrepresentation of the ejectives [t’], [k’], [tʃ’] and [p’] may affect the rnmaximum transfer of skills and may have a negative impact on the transfer of reading skills in rnEnglish and Oromo as the graphemes with which these phonemes are represented are not the rnsame in both languages. This pedagogical and transfer of reading skill challenges can be resolved rnvia replacing the existing graphemes , , and by , , and rnrespectively. The geminated realization can better be marked via doubling ony the first letter to rnbe economical. The current alphabetic alignment of characters of the language is not systematic, rnparticularly with regard to the order of digraphs in the alphabet. Hence, the study suggests the rnrevisiting of the alphabetic order of the language.The finding also revealed that there arernvariations when writing Oromo ordinals, compounds, abbreviations, lexical and other word rnspacing related problems are the challenges of the standardization process of the language. The rnstudy believes that variation is due to the lack of codification and coordination among the rnstakeholders. Concerning the lexical elaboration strategy, both internal and external meanes are rnextensively applied in both the documents of the standardization committee of Oromo and in the rntextbooks to enrich the language. Semantic extension, derivation, compounding, blending, rnabbreviations, borrowing and loan translation are among the means which are used to elaborate rni rnthe language. Abbreviation and semantic extension are less productive in documents of the rnstandardization committee of Oromo than in the textbooks. Semantic extension and borrowing rnand are more extensively used in the textbooks than in the documents of SCO. Meaning rnextension, derivation, compounding, blending, borrowing and loan translation are the most rnproductive means of lexical elaboration in Oromo. All loanwords in Oromo are subject to rnmodification. Regarding source language preferences, English is the main source of loanwords of rnOromo as English is well developed to express scientific and technological concepts followed by rnAmharic, Arabic, Italian, Swahili and French. Greek loanwords are almost none in Oromo

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