Ancestor Non-worship in Mampruli

This paper first draws attention to the necessity of careful choice of terminology in ethnological discussions of the areas of culture often termed 'traditional religion', especially in the use of terms like 'worship', There follows a discussion of some of the methodological difficulties in this area, with the suggestion that a lexicological approach to the vocabulary used by members of the society studied may make a useful contribution to understanding here. The second part presents tabulated lexical data from the Western Oti / Volta languages which illustrates the problems and possibilities discussed

From wordlist to comparative lexicography: the lexinotes

This paper sketches the history of the study of the languages of West Africa, particularly of their lexical resources, offered as a typical example of similar developments elsewhere in the world. The collection of wordlists from the languages and their use to establish genetic relationships is considered, with some practical observations on the improvement of this methodology. The final section reports on an ongoing project for a comparative dictionary in northern Ghana, particularly the use of simple semantic network studies both within and across languages. An appendix presents one of the preliminary papers circulated in connection with this project.Keywords: colonialism, comparison, dictionary, exploration, gur, history, languages, lexicography, lexicology, linguistics, semantics, vocabulary, west africa, wordlis