Temperature system of Siyas3 and Ewe

Abstract

Temperature phenomena are universal, easily perceptible by humans and basic in human categorisation (Wierzbicka 1996). Their conceptualization however, differs from language to language and involves a complex interplay between external reality, bodily experience and subjective evaluation. Temperature terms can therefore be characterized as both embodied and perspectival with regard to their meaning since rather than reflecting an objective image of the external world, they offer a naïve picture based on people’s experience and rooted in their cultural practices. This paper is a comparative work on temperature terms in two Kwa languages in contact. Firsching (2009) notes that the linguistic aspects of the temperature domain have received very little attention apart from some few works which analyzed temperature terms in Baltic languages – Russian and Swedish. Taking inspiration from Firsching, who is currently working on Temperature terms in 15 African languages, the paper investigates the number of temperature terms (TTs hereafter) and the number of basic TTs in the two languages. It will also categorize these terms according to their semantic fields or domains and find out which of these domains are relevant for temperature evaluation in the two languages. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 presents information on the literature on temperature systems as well as general information on Ewe and Siyase and Section 2 is the set up of data collection. Section 3 presents the findings and discussion whereas Section 4 concludes the paper.