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1
Taji, Julius. "Definiteness in Chiyao." Ghana Journal of Linguistics 9, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 44–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/gjl.v9i2.3.
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The aim of this paper is to examine the linguistic devices used to express definiteness in Chiyao, a Bantu language of Southern Tanzania, Southern Malawi, and north-western Mozambique. The analysis is guided by the familiarity theory of definiteness, and is based on the data collected through audio-recording of traditional narratives which were later transcribed to identify utterances with definite NPs. Findings establish three main strategies of signalling definiteness in the language, which include morphological, morphosyntactic, and use of bare nouns. The morphological indicators of definiteness include subject and object markers while the morphosyntactic indicators include demonstratives, locative particles, possessive determiners, genitive expressions, and relative clauses. Bare definiteness is mainly expressed by nouns of inalienable possession, including those denoting body parts and family relations. These findings enrich the existing literature on definiteness in Bantu languages and inform future typological and comparative studies on this subject.
2
Odden, David. "Tone in the Makonde dialects Chimahuta." Studies in African Linguistics 21, no. 2 (August 15, 1990): 149–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v21i2.107437.
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This paper expands the descriptive study of tone in the Makonde dialects, started in Odden [1990], by studying the Chimahuta dialect. Like the Chimaraba dialect and a number of closely related Bantu languages of Southern Tanzania, Chimahuta verbs lack lexical tone properties, and all tones appearing on the surface in verbs arise as a consequence of rules of tone insertion, docking, spreading, and deletion.
3
Bernander, Rasmus. "On the “Atypical” Imperative Verb Form in Manda." Studia Orientalia Electronica 8, no. 3 (November 20, 2020): 22–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.23993/store.69737.
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This paper accounts for the atypical Imperative verb form found in Manda, a Bantu language spoken along the shores of Lake Nyasa in southern Tanzania. Unlike the vast majority of Bantu languages, Manda lacks a reflex of the so called “morphologically specialized” imperative. Instead, Imperatives (as well as other directives) are expressed with the suffixation of a marker of the form -ayi. Based on the form-meaning variation found both language-internally and in comparative data, this study reconstructs the functional and formal pathways of change leading to the highly unusual situation encountered in today’s Manda. The study shows that the Manda Imperative originates from a construction consisting of a reflex of the pre-final morpheme *-a(n)g-, an imperfective marker originally recruited into the directive domain to add pragmatic overtones of emphasis. However, at some point in time the meaning of this erstwhile emphatic construction became neutralized and conventionalized as the regular imperative, while the marker itself became decategorialized and morphophonologically opaque.
4
Patin, Cédric. "prosody of Shingazidja relatives." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 53 (January 1, 2010): 187–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.53.2010.398.
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Símákonde is an Eastern Bantu language (P23) spoken by immigrant Mozambican communities in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian mainland. Like other Makonde dialects and other Eastern and Southern Bantu languages (Hyman 2009), it has lost the historical Proto-Bantu vowel length contrast and now has a regular phrase-final stress rule, which causes a predictable bimoraic lengthening of the penultimate syllable of every Prosodic Phrase. The study of the prosody / syntax interface in Símákonde Relative Clauses requires to take into account the following elements: the relationship between the head and the relative verb, the conjoint / disjoint verbal distinction and the various phrasing patterns of Noun Phrases. Within Símákonde noun phrases, depending on the nature of the modifier, three different phrasing situations are observed: a modifier or modifiers may (i) be required to phrase with the head noun, (ii) be required to phrase separately, or (iii) optionally phrase with the head noun.
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Manus, Sophie. "prosody of Símákonde relative clauses." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 53 (January 1, 2010): 159–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.53.2010.397.
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Símákonde is an Eastern Bantu language (P23) spoken by immigrant Mozambican communities in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian mainland. Like other Makonde dialects and other Eastern and Southern Bantu languages (Hyman 2009), it has lost the historical Proto-Bantu vowel length contrast and now has a regular phrase-final stress rule, which causes a predictable bimoraic lengthening of the penultimate syllable of every Prosodic Phrase. The study of the prosody / syntax interface in Símákonde Relative Clauses requires to take into account the following elements: the relationship between the head and the relative verb, the conjoint / disjoint verbal distinction and the various phrasing patterns of Noun Phrases. Within Símákonde noun phrases, depending on the nature of the modifier, three different phrasing situations are observed: a modifier or modifiers may (i) be required to phrase with the head noun, (ii) be required to phrase separately, or (iii) optionally phrase with the head noun.
6
Bernander, Rasmus. "The grammaticalization of -kotok- into a negative marker in Manda (Bantu N.11)." Linguistics 56, no. 3 (June 26, 2018): 653–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0007.
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AbstractIt is common both crosslinguistically and specifically in Bantu languages for the prohibitive to be formed by a construction consisting of a cessative verb in collocation with a non-finite verb. This is also the case in Manda, an understudied Southern Tanzanian Bantu language. In Manda, a negative imperative is expressed by the auxiliary -kotok-, with the (lexical) meaning ‘leave (off), stop’, operating on an infinitive full verb. Intriguingly, there is variation in this construction, as -kotok- may be both formally reduced and may be used more broadly to denote non-factivity in other “non-main” (or non-standard) contexts. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that this functional and formal variation reflects a historical and ongoing process of grammaticalization along the verb-to-affix cline. Drawing on field data, the available historical data and (micro-)comparative data, this study argues that -kotok- is transforming into a more general non-main negation marker. These changes corroborate Güldemann’s hypothesis (Güldemann, Tom. 1999. The genesis of verbal negation in Bantu and its dependency on functional features of clause types. In Jean-Marie Hombert & Larry Hyman (eds.), Bantu historical linguistics, 545–587. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications) that the salient category of non-standard secondary negative markers in Bantu is derived from constructions with an auxiliary and a non-finite verb.
7
Odden, David. "Tone in the Makonde dialects Chimaraba." Studies in African Linguistics 21, no. 1 (April 15, 1990): 62–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v21i1.107439.
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This study presents data and an analysis of tone in the Chimaraba dialects of Makonde. It is shown that, as in many Bantu languages of Southern Tanzanian, verbs in Makonde have no lexical tone properties. Verb stems all select a single H tone, which is then mapped to some stem vowel, or is deleted, depending on the tense of the verb. Theoretical issues arise in the course of the investigation. The question of adjacency constraints in phonology is raised: Meeussen's Rule in Makonde requires that the involved tones be in adjacent syllables, although they need not be on adjacent morae. We also find evidence for treating the final syllable as extratonal. Since extratonality is rarer than extrametricality in stress systems, every example of extratonality has the potential to contribute to the theory of extraprosodicity.
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Legère, Karsten. "Missionary Contributions to Bantu Languages in Tanzania." Quot homines tot artes: New Studies in Missionary Linguistics 36, no. 2-3 (December 1, 2009): 393–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.36.2.11leg.
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Summary This paper deals with linguistic work by the lay missionary James Thomas Last (1850–1933), who was among the first Europeans to live up-country in what is now Tanzania. In the course of a seven-year stay he was exposed to African languages which have only partly been known outside Africa. Last collected linguistic data that culminated 1885 in the publication of the Polyglotta Africana Orientalis. This book is a collection of 210 lexical items and sentences elicited in or translated into 48 African languages, and supplemented by entries for some other languages. In order to demonstrate the relevance as well as the inconsistencies of this missionary’s contribution, special attention is paid to the book section on the Vidunda language currently spoken by approximately 10,000 people in Central Tanzania. It turns out that approximately 75 per cent of the Vidunda entries are still acceptable today. The data even provides insight into the grammatical set-up of Vidunda (e.g., the noun classes and constituents of the noun phrase). Less relevant are the verbal paradigms. In a nutshell, Last produced material which had for many years been the sole source of lexical and grammatical information about the Vidunda language.
9
Spuy, Andrew van der. "Phonological relationships between the Southern Bantu languages." African Studies 49, no. 1 (January 1990): 119–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020189008707720.
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Lusekelo, Amani. "The Incorporation of the Kiswahili Names of Cereals and Tubers in the Non-Bantu Languages in Tanzania." Utafiti 14, no. 2 (March 4, 2020): 295–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26836408-14010017.
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Abstract I articulate the mechanisms for the incorporation of Kiswahili names of the New World cereals and tubers in the Afro-asiatic, Khoisan and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Tanzania. The penetration of pastoral-terms from non-Bantu societies into Bantu communities is extensively documented. But research on the impact of Kiswahili on non-Bantu languages has not been given prominence except in a few studies. Thus, specific investigation of the names of cereals and tubers into non-Bantu languages is incomplete. With regard to transference of the nomenclature of the farm-related products, I show that the major donor languages in this study include Iraqw and Kiswahili. This result illuminates the fact that agro-pastoral communities (e.g. Iraqw) influence the lexicon of languages spoken by pastoralists (e.g. Datooga) and foraging communities (e.g. Hadza). I show that Kiswahili is the main agent of names of agriculture in non-Bantu communities. Moreover, I highlight that the names of crops are integrated through assignment of gender-number markers primarily in Hadza, Iraqw and Maasai. In Datooga, I show that the number suffixes dominate as the strategy to incorporate Kiswahili words in the language.
11
Knappert, Jan. "The Bantu languages : an appraisal." European Journal of Sociology 28, no. 2 (November 1987): 177–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003975600005464.
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The fact that the Bantu languages are related was first mentioned in a short publication by Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein (Berlin) in 1811. Very few Bantu languages were known at that time: only Kongo (Kikongo) as it was spoken at the mouth of the Zaire river, and some languages of southern Africa, on which a few notes were published in the Narrative of an Expedition by Captain J. K. Tucker in 1818, but which were written originally by William Marsden (probably in 1808) and possibly published separately.
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Pakendorf, Brigitte, Hilde Gunnink, Bonny Sands, and Koen Bostoen. "Prehistoric Bantu-Khoisan language contact." Language Dynamics and Change 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00701002.
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Click consonants are one of the hallmarks of “Khoisan” languages of southern Africa. They are also found in some Bantu languages, where they are usually assumed to have been copied from Khoisan languages. We review the southern African Bantu languages with clicks and discuss in what way they may have obtained these unusual consonants. We draw on both linguistic data and genetic results to gain insights into the sociocultural processes that may have played a role in the prehistoric contact. Our results show that the copying of clicks accompanied large-scale inmarriage of Khoisan women into Bantu-speaking communities and took place in situations where the Khoisan communities may have had relatively high prestige. In the Kavango-Zambezi transfrontier region, these events must have occurred at an early stage of the Bantu immigration, possibly because small groups of food producers entering a new territory were dependent on the autochthonous communities for local knowledge.
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Güldemann, Tom. "Head-initial meets head-final nominal suffixes in eastern a southern Bantu from a historical perspective." Studies in African Linguistics 28, no. 1 (June 1, 1999): 50–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v28i1.107378.
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Bantu languages in eastern and southern Africa possess nominal suffixes which serve to express locative relations or derive nominal stems. As these grammemes are final to their noun hosts, they are markedly distinct from canonic prefix morphology in Bantu nouns. Moreover, nominal syntagms are head-initial and canonic grammaticalization in this domain can be expected to yield prefixes. The elements under discussion are suffixes, yet they developed in Bantu from inherited nominal lexemes. Thus, they are unusual from a morphotactic viewpoint and cannot easily be accounted for by exclusively language-internal developments. For this reason, it is plausible to investigate the hypothesis that the nominal suffixes emerged due to interference from languages having a different grammatical structure. For this purpose, a sample of non-Bantu languages from the relevant geographic area in Africa is established and analyzed in order to test whether there are languages or entire groups with head-final and suffixing patterns that could have influenced the process of suffix emergence in Bantu.
14
Bar-el, Leora, and Malin Petzell. "(Im)perfectivity and actionality in East Ruvu Bantu." STUF - Language Typology and Universals 74, no. 3-4 (September 1, 2021): 533–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2021-1044.
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Abstract Temporal/aspectual morphology often serves as a diagnostic for actional classes. Bantu languages are known for their highly developed tense, aspect (and mood) systems. The East Ruvu Bantu languages of Tanzania are unusual in that they exhibit a decidedly reduced set of temporal/aspectual morphemes. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on Bantu actionality in showing that despite not being encoded overtly, perfective distinguishes between at least two actional classes. We suggest, however, that imperfective, morphologically encoded by present and non-past tense morphology, does not clearly delineate between the two verb classes. This discussion highlights the complex interaction between tense and aspect.
15
Downing, Laura J. "Questions in Bantu languages: prosodies and positions." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 55 (January 1, 2011): 182. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.55.2011.404.
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The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Workshop on Bantu Wh-questions, held at the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Université Lyon 2, on 25-26 March 2011, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZAS, is: Laura Downing (project leader) and Kristina Riedel (post-doc). The Paris team, at the Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP; UMR 7018), is: Annie Rialland (project leader), Cédric Patin (Maître de Conférences, STL, Université Lille 3), Jean-Marc Beltzung (post-doc), Martial Embanga Aborobongui (doctoral student), Fatima Hamlaoui (post-doc). The Lyon team, at the Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) is: Gérard Philippson (project leader) and Sophie Manus (Maître de Conférences, Université Lyon 2). These three research teams bring together the range of theoretical expertise necessary to investigate the phonology-syntax interface: intonation (Patin, Rialland), tonal phonology (Aborobongui, Downing, Manus, Patin, Philippson, Rialland), phonology-syntax interface (Downing, Patin) and formal syntax (Riedel, Hamlaoui). They also bring together a range of Bantu language expertise: Western Bantu (Aboronbongui, Rialland), Eastern Bantu (Manus, Patin, Philippson, Riedel), and Southern Bantu (Downing).
16
Dunham, Margaret. "On the verbal system in Langi a Bantu language of Tanzania." Studies in African Linguistics 33, no. 2 (June 15, 2004): 199–234. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v33i2.107335.
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This paper presents the Langi verbal system and the various ways in which tense, aspect and mood are encoded. Through a description of the structures and uses of the various forms, it attempts to demonstrate how the different conjugations fit together to form a coherent whole, morphologically and semantically, and how in some cases the system has been influenced by surrounding Cushitic languages.
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Vansina, J. "New Linguistic Evidence and ‘The Bantu Expansion’." Journal of African History 36, no. 2 (July 1995): 173–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700034101.
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New linguistic evidence about the classification of the Bantu languages does not support the current view that these languages spread as the result of a massive migration or ‘expansion’ by its speakers. Rather the present geographic distribution of Bantu languages is the outcome of many complex historical dynamics involving successive dispersals of individual languages over a time span of millennia and involving reversals as well as successes. This is as true for eastern and southern Africa, where a close correlation between the archaeological evidence documenting the diffusion of basic food-related technologies, including metallurgy and the spreading of Bantu languages has become an axiom, as it is elsewhere. The linguistic evidence concerning the dispersal of Bantu languages in these regions of Africa is completely incongruent with the archaeological record. The existing Bantu expansion hypothesis must be totally abandoned. The scrapping of the hypothesis will make room for more realistic and quite different interpretations and research hypotheses. For example, it follows that the local or regional contribution of speakers of other languages, autochthons and others, to the development of later cultures and societies was probably considerably greater than has hitherto been acknowledged and that the continuities in historical dynamics of all sorts between the Bantu-speaking parts of Africa and areas further north and west are greater than has been hitherto realized.
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Prinsloo, Danie J. "Electronic Dictionaries viewed from South Africa." HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business 18, no. 34 (March 8, 2017): 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v18i34.25798.
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The aim of this article is to evaluate currently available electronic dictionaries from a South African perspective for the eleven official languages of South Africa namely English, Afrikaans and the nine Bantu languages Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga and Venda. A brief discussion of the needs and status quo for English and Afrikaans will be followed by a more detailed discussion of the unique nature and consequent electronic dictionary requirements of the Bantu languages. In the latter category the focus will be on problematic aspects of lemmatisation which can only be solved in the electronic dictionary dimension.
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De Kind, Jasper. "Pre-verbal focus in Kisikongo (H16a, Bantu)." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 57 (January 1, 2014): 95–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.57.2014.421.
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The present paper aims at describing different pre-verbal focus strategies in Kisikongo (H16a), spoken in the vicinity of Mbanza Kongo, northern Angola. This western Bantu language is part of the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), stretching from southern Gabon to northern Angola, including Cabinda and parts of Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. Kikongo exhibits a clause-internal pre-verbal argument focus position, which has rarely been reported in Bantu languages, except in Mbuun (B87) (Bostoen and Mundeke 2012) and Nsong (B85d) (Koni Muluwa and Bostoen, this volume), both spoken in the neighboring Kwilu region of the DRC. The more extensively studied eastern and southern Bantu languages generally have a post-verbal argument focus position (cf. Watters 1979, Morimoto 2000, Creissels 2004, Güldemann 2007, Buell 2009, van der Wal 2009, among others). In addition to this mono-clausal argument focus strategy, Kisikongo also relies on different bi-clausal constructions to focus arguments, i.e. cleft-constructions.
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Nurse, Derek. "Dentality areal features and phonological change in northeastern Bantu." Studies in African Linguistics 16, no. 3 (December 1, 1985): 243–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v16i3.107500.
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A minority of the world's languages appear to have a series of dental (as opposed to alveolar) obstruents. Proto-Bantu does not have such a series, nor do most East African Bantu languages. By contrast, three Bantu languages in northeastern Kenya (the northern Swahili dialects, Pokomo, Elwana) have acquired such a series, which thus merits explanation. There are three mechanisms involved: sounds along with loan vocabulary, (b) a simple phonological shift whereby inherited alveolars moved one place to become dental, and (c) a more complicated shift whereby inherited (pre) palatals bypassed an intervening alveolar series to become dental, a process little reported in the literature. It is hypothesised that these forms of denta1isation took place under historical conditions of contact with neighboring Cushitic communities--not the larger Eastern Cushitic communities of today (Somali, Orma), but rather the ancestral forms of what are now remnant languages, (probably) Southern Cushitic Dahalo and (possible) Eastern Cushitic Aweera. (a) the borrowing of loan 1.
21
Legere, Karsten. "Missionary Contributions to Bantu Languages in Tanzania: James Thomas Last (1850–1933) and the Vidunda language." Historiographia Linguistica International Journal for the History of the Language Sciences 36, no. 2-3 (2009): 393–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.36.2-3.11leg.
Full textAbstract:
This paper deals with linguistic work by the lay missionary James Thomas Last (1850–1933), who was among the first Europeans to live up-country in what is now Tanzania. In the course of a seven-year stay he was exposed to African languages which have only partly been known outside Africa. Last collected linguistic data that culminated 1885 in the publication of the Polyglotta Africana Orientalis. This book is a collection of 210 lexical items and sentences elicited in or translated into 48 African languages, and supplemented by entries for some other languages. In order to demonstrate the relevance as well as the inconsistencies of this missionary’s contribution, special attention is paid to the book section on the Vidunda language currently spoken by approximately 10,000 people in Central Tanzania. It turns out that approximately 75 per cent of the Vidunda entries are still acceptable today. The data even provides insight into the grammatical set-up of Vidunda (e.g., the noun classes and constituents of the noun phrase). Less relevant are the verbal paradigms. In a nutshell, Last produced material which had for many years been the sole source of lexical and grammatical information about the Vidunda language.
22
Eaton, Helen. "A Discourse Analysis of Three Past TAM Forms in Vwanji." Studia Orientalia Electronica 8, no. 3 (November 20, 2020): 65–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.23993/store.68999.
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This paper presents data from Vwanji, an under-documented Bantu language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in southwestern Tanzania. Bantu languages are well known for having multiple degrees of past time reference grammaticalized in their TAM systems, and Vwanji is a good example of such a language, but one with some interesting typological differences from certain general TAM trends in Bantu languages noted in Nurse (2008). Three past TAM forms, in particular, are the focus of the research: P1 /Anterior SM-VB-ile, P2 SM-a-VB-a, and the Near Past Habitual SM-a-VB-aɣa. The analysis of data from a corpus of narrative and non-narrative texts (both written and oral) reveals that these three TAM forms have multiple discourse functions which do not necessarily follow in expected ways from their places in the TAM system as a whole. Comparing the Vwanji findings with those of neighbouring languages suggests some possible directions in which the verb forms in Vwanji may be changing functionally or being lost. The goal of this investigation is to increase understanding of a typologically interesting language which has not been well described and for which there is very little published data. The paper also shows the importance of taking natural discourse data into account when considering TAM functions in a language. Relying on elicited data alone may hide interesting complexities and variation.
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Roth, Tim. "The Major Dialects of Nyamwezi and Their Relationship to Sukuma: A Time-Based Perspective." Journal of Linguistic Geography 1, no. 2 (December 2013): 125–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2013.11.
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This paper identifies the main dialects within Nyamwezi, a Bantu language of Tanzania, and clarifies the historical relationship between these Nyamwezi (F.22) dialects and Sukuma (F.21). I claim, contrary to the conventional wisdom regarding these languages, that a rough linguistic border exists, which separates the Nyamwezi varieties from Sukuma. By implication, Sukuma and Nyamwezi do not exist in a dialect continuum with one another, and the Ndala lect described in Maganga and Schadeberg (1992) should be considered Sukuma. These claims are supported by primarily lexical and phonological evidence gathered during recent surveys conducted by SIL International. Furthermore, Batibo's (2000) relative chronology of the main innovations considered in this present study (*c/*j fricativization, Bantu spirantization, Dahl's Law, and *p-lenition) is re-examined in light of this new evidence. This paper demonstrates how diachronic dialectology can shed light on the dualistic processes of divergence and convergence in Bantu, and the resulting spread of linguistic innovation.
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Mtavangu, Norbert. "Place Names as Reservoirs of Rare Linguistic Data: the Bantu Locative Prefix i- in Southwest Tanzanian Toponyms." Utafiti 14, no. 2 (March 4, 2020): 315–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26836408-14010018.
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Abstract Since place names almost invariably outlive the speakers of a language, they are capable of retaining knowledge in connection with a specific locality. For instance a high percentage of toponyms in Southwest Tanzania with initial morpheme i- reveal this trait. This linguistic element is associated in this study with an old locative marker i-, a debated element in Bantu linguistics. Since previous studies locate the element only around the Great Lakes zone and South Africa, it is inferred from the findings presented here that the distribution of the morpheme may be spread in other Bantu speaking areas as well. This consideration recommends revisiting all the data that reflects the distribution of the morpheme i- and other morphemes, including data from other parts of Bantu speaking regions. In order to affirm the antiquity or the contemporaneity of the roles of this morpheme, these results recommend further morphosyntatic analysis to test the behaviour of the morpheme in specific languages spoken in the study area.
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Ngowa, Nancy Jumwa, and Deo S. Ngonyani. "The Subjunctive Mood in Giryama and Tanzanian Nyanja." Studia Orientalia Electronica 8, no. 3 (November 20, 2020): 99–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.23993/store.69768.
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This paper presents a study of the Subjunctive in the Bantu languages of Giryama in Kenya (E72a) and Nyanja in Tanzania (N201), and explores its distribution in the two languages. As in other Bantu languages, the Subjunctive is a morphological feature characterized by a verbal suffix -e, an obligatory subject marker, and the absence of tense. Syntactically, the Subjunctive appears in independent clauses, as well as dependent clauses with a certain class of predicates and adverbial subordinators. Independent clauses that may carry the Subjunctive are those that express exhortations or suggestions, and sentences marked with the future tense. Dependent clauses with Subjunctive verbs include: (a) complement clauses containing directive, volitional, and causative verbs, and (b) adverbial clauses such as clauses of purpose. Studies of the subjunctive have often associated its semantic distribution with irrealis, in contrast with the Indicative, which is associated with realis or assertion. We present evidence showing that the irrealis reading may sometimes appear to be absent. We argue that irrealis may not be a necessary and sufficient condition for the Subjunctive. However, the onstructions that give irrealis readings provide the best exemplars of Subjunctives in these two languages. Independent clause Subjunctives are shown to be clearly non-factive. Matrix verbs that take subjunctive complements are described as presupposition triggers of events that are non-factive relative to the matrix event.
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Uushona, Johannes, and Petrus Mbenzi. "Germanising Oshiwambo language." JULACE: Journal of the University of Namibia Language Centre 3, no. 2 (December 31, 2018): 26–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.32642/julace.v3i2.1383.
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Oshiwambo, a Bantu language spoken in Northern Namibia and Southern Angola, like other languages in contact, has adopted foreign words from other languages to meet the needs of its daily life vocabularies and activities. This paper identified and described the phonological changes which the loanwords from German go through to fit into Oshiwambo speech system and established the phonological rules that account for these changes. The paper is based on the hypothesis that words borrowed from other languages, especially European languages, into Oshiwambo, are phonologically modified to fit the Oshiwambo speech system because little information is available on the phonological wambonisation of German words. The data were collected from school textbooks, daily conversations and personal vocabularies of the researcher. The loanwords were transcribed for phonological analysis. The paper investigated how Oshiwambo borrowed words from German yet the two languages differ widely in terms of phonemic inventories and phonotactics. It has become evident that there are several vowel and consonant changes in the process of borrowing. The paper contributes to the linguistic study in the area of Oshiwambo in particular and Bantu languages in general. The knowledge acquired could be utilized by the institutions of higher learning too.
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Semo, Armando, Magdalena Gayà-Vidal, Cesar Fortes-Lima, Bérénice Alard, Sandra Oliveira, João Almeida, António Prista, et al. "Along the Indian Ocean Coast: Genomic Variation in Mozambique Provides New Insights into the Bantu Expansion." Molecular Biology and Evolution 37, no. 2 (September 26, 2019): 406–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz224.
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Abstract The Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory routes they followed during various phases of the expansion remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze the genetic profiles of southwestern and southeastern Bantu-speaking peoples located at the edges of the Bantu expansion by generating genome-wide data for 200 individuals from 12 Mozambican and 3 Angolan populations using ∼1.9 million autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms. Incorporating a wide range of available genetic data, our analyses confirm previous results favoring a “late split” between West and East Bantu speakers, following a joint passage through the rainforest. In addition, we find that Bantu speakers from eastern Africa display genetic substructure, with Mozambican populations forming a gradient of relatedness along a North–South cline stretching from the coastal border between Kenya and Tanzania to South Africa. This gradient is further associated with a southward increase in genetic homogeneity, and involved minimum admixture with resident populations. Together, our results provide the first genetic evidence in support of a rapid North–South dispersal of Bantu peoples along the Indian Ocean Coast, as inferred from the distribution and antiquity of Early Iron Age assemblages associated with the Kwale archaeological tradition.
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Flight, Colin. "The Bantu Expansion and the SOAS Network." History in Africa 15 (1988): 261–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171863.
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One difference between linguists and other Africanists seemed to be that others were prepared to jettison one part of their training to help other disciplines, but linguists apparently would not. Was this so, and if so, why?The Bantu expansion has been a problem for historians ever since the recognition by linguists of a single startling fact. During the nineteenth century, the descriptions of African languages available to scholars in Europe grew steadily in number; they also tended to gain in detail, and in accuracy. It thus became increasingly clear that a sinuous line could be traced across the map distinguishing a zone of extremely high diversity in the north from a zone of low diversity in the south. By the 1880s a popularizing writer could claim that this contrast was generally recognized “by students of African languages.” The situation as he described it was that in the northern half of the continent there are bewildering multitudes of diverse tongues belonging to many independent families, and apparently irreducible to a common origin. Yet cross the irregular boundary-line which runs over the continent from 6° N. on the west coast to the Equator on the east coast … and what do we find? Why that the whole of the southern half of Africa, with the exception of the Masai and Galla intrusion in the north-east and the Hottentot enclave in the south-west, is the domain of a single homogeneous family of languages, … differing perhaps less among themselves than do the many offshoots of the Aryan stock.
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Grimm, Nadine. "Color Categories in Language Contact: ‘Pygmy’ Hunter-Gatherers and Bantu Farmers." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 38 (September 25, 2012): 31. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v38i0.3320.
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<p>When speakers adopt colors from another language, do they only borrow certain lexical forms or do they absorb whole concepts? And if both a lexical term and a color category are borrowed, are they both borrowed at the same time or is one of them borrowed first? In this paper, I address the question of how color categories are borrowed, providing evidence from Gyeli ‘Pygmy’ hunter-gatherers (PHGs) in contact with Bantu farmers in southern Cameroon. The data shows rich variability in borrowing patterns. Color categories are not borrowed in toto, but only partially, i.e. the resulting color category in the recipient language only partially coincides with the color category in the donor language. Further, the borrowing of a color category may or may not be in conjunction with the borrowing of a color term from the recipient language. While Gyeli PHGs borrow a lexical term first from neighboring Bantu farmer languages and then expand the color category in a second step, the path of borrowing of Bantu farmers from colonial languages is the inverse. Farmer languages first adopt a new color category, but reject loanwords. Their second step in acquiring a new color is to find a name for the new color category.</p>
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Grice, Martine, and Frank Kügler. "Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective." Language and Speech 64, no. 2 (June 2021): 253–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00238309211015768.
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This paper is concerned with the contributions of signal-driven and expectation-driven mechanisms to a general understanding of the phenomenon of prosodic prominence from a cross-linguistic perspective. It serves as an introduction to the concept of prosodic prominence and discusses the eight papers in the Special Issue, which cover a genetically diverse range of languages. These include Djambarrpuyŋu (an Australian Pama-Nyungan language), Samoan (an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language), the Indo-European languages English (Germanic), French (Romance), and Russian (Slavic), Korean (Koreanic), Medumba (Bantu), and two Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min.
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Mtenje, Al. "On relative clauses and prosodic phrasing in Ciwandya." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 55 (January 1, 2011): 121–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.55.2011.411.
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The interaction between Syntax and Phonology has been one area of interesting empirical research and theoretical debate in recent years, particularly the question of the extent to which syntactic structure influences phonological phrasing. It has generally been observed that the edges of the major syntactic constituents (XPs) tend to coincide with prosodic phrase boundaries thus resulting in XPs like subject NPs, object NPs, Topic NPs, VPs etc. forming separate phonological phrases. Within Optimality Theoretic (OT) accounts, this fact has been attributed to a number of well-motivated general alignment constraints. Studies on relative clauses in Bantu and other languages have significantly contributed to this area of research inquiry where a number of parametric variations have been observed with regard to prosodic phrasing. In some languages, XPs which are heads of relatives form separate phonological phrases while in others they phrase with the relative clauses. This paper makes a contribution to this topic by discussing the phrasing of relatives in Ciwandya (a Bantu language spoken in Malawi and Tanzania). It shows that XPs which are heads of restrictive relative clauses phrase with their relative verbs, regardless of whether they are subjects, objects or other adjuncts. A variety of syntactic constructions are used to illustrate this fact. The discussion also confirms what has been generally observed in other Bantu languages concerning restrictive relatives with clefts and non-restrictive relative clauses. In both cases, the heads of the relatives phrase separately. The paper adopts an OT analysis which has been well articulated and defended in Cheng & Downing (2007, 2010, to appear) Downing & Mtenje (2010, 2011) to account for these phenomena in Ciwandya.
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Downing, Laura J., Lutz Marten, and Sabine Zerbian. "Papers in Bantu grammar and description." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 43 (January 1, 2006): 278. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.43.2006.281.
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The collection of papers in this volume presents results of a collaborative project between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZAS) in Berlin, and the University of Leiden. All three institutions have a strong interest in the linguistics of Bantu languages, and in 2003 decided to set up a network to compare results and to provide a platform for on-going discussion of different topics on which their research interests converged. The project received funding from the British Academy International Networks Programme, and from 2003 to 2006 seven meetings were held at the institutions involved under the title Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory, indicating the shared belief that current research in Bantu is best served by combining the description of new data with theoretically informed analysis. During the life-time of the network, and partly in conjunction with it, larger externally funded Bantu research projects have been set up at all institutions: projects on word-order and morphological marking and on phrasal phonology in Leiden, on pronominal reference, agreement and clitics in Romance and Bantu at SOAS, and on focus in Southern Bantu languages at ZAS. The papers in this volume provide a sampling of the work developed within the network and show, or so we think, how fruitful the sharing of ideas over the last three years has been. While the current British Academy-funded network is coming to an end in 2006, we hope that the cooperative structures we have established will continue to develop - and be expanded - in the future, providing many future opportunities to exchange findings and ideas about Bantu linguistics.
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Kileng’a, Aron. "An Investigation into the Sociolinguistics of Asu Personal Names in Same, Tanzania." July to September 2020 1, no. 2 (July 7, 2020): 20–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.46606/eajess2020v01i02.0018.
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Many Ethnic Community Languages (ECLs) in Tanzania are demographically and socioculturally pressured mainly by Kiswahili and English to a lesser extent. The ECLs which were previously used in elementary education, local administration and religious activities currently do not have any place in any official domain and thus are limited to home and other few immediate domains. Due to this unequal coexistence of the languages, many ECLs are considered endangered, calling for efforts from stakeholders to prevent the death of such a precious cultural heritage. By documenting the social aspects of Asu personal names, this paper is a contribution to such initiatives like The Languages of Tanzania Project aiming at documenting Tanzanian ECLs in every possible area and means. The paper used participant observation, in-depth interview and self-intuition to investigate personal names of a Bantu speaking people called Vaasu (Asu) of Northern Tanzania, considering naming as an important aspect of the society. The paper looked at Asu names within the purview of linguistic anthropology considering names as not being arbitrary labels but sociocultural tags that have sociocultural functions and meanings. By using thematic analysis technique, the paper analysed and discussed the typology of the names including family names, circumstantial names, theophorous names, flora and fauna names, to mention but a few. The paper further examined the changing nature of Asu naming system and practice as dictated by cultural contact mainly with Swahili and Christian/ western culture. The paper eventually recommends for further investigation on issues surrounding naming practices and strategic measures to prevent this important African cultural resource.
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Gibson, Hannah, and Lutz Marten. "Probing the interaction of language contact and internal innovation." Studies in African Linguistics 48, no. 1 (July 3, 2019): 63–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v48i1.114932.
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The Bantu language Rangi is spoken at the northern borderlands of Tanzania, where Bantu, Cushitic and Nilotic languages meet. In many regards, Rangi exhibits the morphosyntax typically associated with East African Bantu: SVO word order, an extensive system of agreement and predominantly head-marking morphology. However, the language also exhibits a number of features which are unusual from a comparative and typological perspective, and which may have resulted from language contact. Four of these features are examined in detail in this paper: 1) Verb-auxiliary order found in the future tense, 2) clause-final negation, 3) a three-way distinction in verbal deictic markers, and 4) an inclusive/exclusive distinction in personal possessive pronouns. These features are assessed with reference to three criteria: syntactic structure, lexical/morphological form and geographic distribution. The examination shows that two of the unusual features result from a combination of internal and external factors, while the other two appear not to be related to external influence through contact. The results of the study show the complex interaction between internal and external factors in language change, and the importance of investigating potentially contact-induced change in detail to develop a more complex and fine-grained understanding of the morphosyntactic process of innovation involved.
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Crane, Thera Marie, and Bastian Persohn. "Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa." Studies in African Linguistics 50, no. 2 (September 18, 2021): 227–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v50i2.123680.
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This paper presents some key findings of studies of actionality and the verbal grammar–lexicon interface in two Nguni Bantu languages of South Africa, Xhosa and Southern Ndebele. We describe interactions between grammatical tense marking (and other sentential bounding elements) and lexical verb types, arguing for the salience of inchoative verbs, which lexically encode a resultant state, and, in particular, a sub-class of inchoative verbs, biphasal verbs, which encode both a resultant state and the “coming-to-be” phase leading up to that state. We further discuss other important features of actional classes in Xhosa and Southern Ndebele, including topics such as the role of participant structure and the relative importance of cross-linguistically prominent distinctions such as that between Vendlerian activities and accomplishments. Although differences between Xhosa and Southern Ndebele are evident both in the behaviour of individual tense-aspect forms and in the interpretive possibilities of specific verbs, the general patterns are quite similar. This similarity suggests that the patterns are likely to extend to other Nguni languages, as well, and that cross-linguistic comparison of particular lexical items across these languages are both feasible and likely to bear fruit.
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Botne, Robert. "Prosodically-conditioned vowel shortening in Chindali." Studies in African Linguistics 27, no. 1 (June 1, 1998): 97–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v27i1.107386.
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In Chindali [Bantu M21, northern Malawi and southern Tanzania], the augment vowel of noun classes 1 a, Sa, 9 and 10 exhibits allomorphic variation in length. In other noun classes, the vowel of the noun class prefix varies in length before NCinitial stems. The author demonstrates that, in both cases, potentially long vowels become shortened, except that they do so under different conditions: mora-count of the noun stem in the first case, lack of high tone (accent) on the prefix in the second.
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Schmidt, Deborah. "Phantom consonants in Basaa." Phonology 11, no. 1 (May 1994): 149–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675700001871.
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Basaa, a zone A Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, is only one among many genetically unrelated languages for which the positing of phonetically null phantom consonants facilitates a phonological account of certain otherwise unexpected surface forms encountered in derivational paradigms. Clements & Keyser (1983), Marlett & Stemberger (1983), Keyser & Kiparsky (1984), Crowhurst (1988) and Hualde (1992) propose that phantom consonants exist in Turkish, Seri, French, Finnish, Southern Paiute and Aranese Gascon, for example, syllabifying as onsets or codas where appropriate and in certain cases inducing the gemination of an adjacent consonantal segment or the lengthening of a preceding tautosyllabic vowel, as we shall see takes place in Basaa.
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Filho, Americo Venâncio Lopes Machado. "NEW THOUGHTS ON THE HISTORICAL CONSTITUTION OF BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE." Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics 7 (September 23, 2014): 47–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/bjll.v7i0.922.
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The present paper aims at revising the main ideas that have been propagated in the academic field concerning the process of constitution of Brazilian Portuguese, whose identity and distance in relation to European Portuguese has long been observed. Moreover, it revives the discussion on the real dimension and role of African languages in the formation process of this linguistic variety in Brazil. To understand linguistic change, this study has sought to rekindle the issue to look beyond the albeit indispensible socio-historical and demographic data. Although studies that adopt the perspective that BP is a creole have yielded good results in the understanding of linguistic origins in the New World, such studies may have overestimated the occurrence of creoles in the southern hemisphere to the point of considering pidgins and creoles the only explanations of any contact that expanding languages might have had. Further and more detailed comparative studies on Bantu and Portuguese are required, which may provide new directions for research in this field.
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Campbell, Kurt. "Philological Reversion in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Sand Writing and Alternate Alphabets of Willem Boshoff." Philological Encounters 3, no. 4 (November 27, 2018): 524–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340053.
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Abstract This article focuses on the conceptual implications of specific works of contemporary artist and wordsmith Adriaan Willem Boshoff. Boshoff uses his creations to challenge the terms of the current debate around indigenous languages in southern Africa through artworks such as Blind Alphabet and his Sand Writing Series. These works call viewers to an emphatic return to an understanding of scripts (and the worlds they produce) as embodied systems of tradition that occupy the central place not only in the groups they serve, but indeed in a larger vision of a culturally tolerant and affirmative nation. The article tracks key South African educational policies such as the Apartheid era Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the Corrective Language Act of 1998 after the first democratic elections to contextualize the politics of legislative development in South Africa as related to indigenous scripts and languages. Beyond this bureaucratic history, the article foregrounds partisan agency that individuals such as Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and Magrieta Jantjies displayed as custodians of endangered scripts and languages, culminating in a discussion of the provocative works Boshoff created to stimulate critical thought on contemporaneous philological concerns in South Africa.
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Demuth, Katherine. "Subject, topic and Sesotho passive." Journal of Child Language 17, no. 1 (February 1990): 67–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900013106.
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ABSTRACTCounter to findings in English, German and Hebrew, recent acquisition studies have shown that the passive is acquired early in several non-Indo-European languages. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, this paper addresses certain typological phenomena which influence the early acquisition of passives in Sesotho, a southern Bantu language. After outlining the structure of the Sesotho passive and its syntactic and discourse functions, I examine Sesotho-speaking children's spontaneous use of passives, showing that the acquisition of passives in Sesotho is closely linked to the fact that Sesotho subjects must be discourse topics. I conclude that a detailed examination of how passive constructions interact with other components of a given linguistic system is critical for developing a coherent and universally applicable theory of how passives are acquired.
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Fuchs, Susanne, and Silke Hamann. "Papers in phonetics and phonology." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 37 (January 1, 2004): 243. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.37.2004.243.
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Table of Contents:
T. A. Hall (Indiana University): English syllabification as the interaction of markedness constraints
Antony D. Green: Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew: Morphology, not phonology
Sabine Zerbian (ZAS Berlin): Phonological Phrases in Xhosa (Southern Bantu)
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin): What African Languages Tell Us About Accent Typology
Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): (Un)markedness of trills: the case of Slavic r-palatalisation
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin), Al Mtenje (University of Malawi), Bernd Pompino-Marschall (Humboldt-Universitat Berlin): Prosody and Information Structure in Chichewa
T. A. Hall (Indiana University). Silke Hamann (ZAS Berlin), Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): The phonetics of stop assibilation
Christian Geng (ZAS Berlin), Christine Mooshammer (Universitat Kiel): The Hungarian palatal stop: phonological considerations and phonetic data
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Scheinfeldt, Laura B., Sameer Soi, Charla Lambert, Wen-Ya Ko, Aoua Coulibaly, Alessia Ranciaro, Simon Thompson, et al. "Genomic evidence for shared common ancestry of East African hunting-gathering populations and insights into local adaptation." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 10 (February 19, 2019): 4166–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817678116.
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Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa ∼300,000 years ago, but the demographic and adaptive histories of African populations are not well-characterized. Here, we have generated a genome-wide dataset from 840 Africans, residing in western, eastern, southern, and northern Africa, belonging to 50 ethnicities, and speaking languages belonging to four language families. In addition to agriculturalists and pastoralists, our study includes 16 populations that practice, or until recently have practiced, a hunting-gathering (HG) lifestyle. We observe that genetic structure in Africa is broadly correlated not only with geography, but to a lesser extent, with linguistic affiliation and subsistence strategy. Four East African HG (EHG) populations that are geographically distant from each other show evidence of common ancestry: the Hadza and Sandawe in Tanzania, who speak languages with clicks classified as Khoisan; the Dahalo in Kenya, whose language has remnant clicks; and the Sabue in Ethiopia, who speak an unclassified language. Additionally, we observed common ancestry between central African rainforest HGs and southern African San, the latter of whom speak languages with clicks classified as Khoisan. With the exception of the EHG, central African rainforest HGs, and San, other HG groups in Africa appear genetically similar to neighboring agriculturalist or pastoralist populations. We additionally demonstrate that infectious disease, immune response, and diet have played important roles in the adaptive landscape of African history. However, while the broad biological processes involved in recent human adaptation in Africa are often consistent across populations, the specific loci affected by selective pressures more often vary across populations.
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Güldemann, Tom, and Robyn Loughnane. "Are There “Khoisan” Roots in Body-Part Vocabulary? On Linguistic Inheritance and Contact in the Kalahari Basin." Language Dynamics and Change 2, no. 2 (2012): 215–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22105832-20120209.
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Lexical evidence has played an important role in trying to establish a “Khoisan” language family. With respect to the southern African languages there is indeed a considerable amount of shared vocabulary across all three major established non-Bantu families subsumed under “Khoisan,” viz. Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a, and Tuu. A historical reevaluation of this phenomenon is presented in a first comparative treatment of body-part vocabulary, including newly collected data. While our research provides support for the above three main lineages (this evidence is not discussed in this paper), it contradicts the view that vocabulary shared across them should also be interpreted in genealogical terms. Such vocabulary can rather largely be explained as the result of different types of language contact, supporting the current dominant view among specialists about the untenability of a “Khoisan” family. From a general perspective, the article argues against superficial unqualified lexical comparison and for a canonical historical-comparative procedure, whereby one reconstructs bottom-up and evaluates at every step whether genealogical relations should be built up further. Although such an approach is deeply entrenched in the traditional method, it is often neglected in many areas of historical language research. We apply it for the first time to the evaluation of the purported “Khoisan” language family and, in addition, venture that contact scenarios should be given more scope in the assessment of historical relations between languages, both in the Kalahari Basin and in general.
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Kibona, Neema Jangstony. "An Analysis of a Noun Phrase in Ichindali." Journal of Language Teaching and Research 10, no. 5 (September 1, 2019): 906. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1005.02.
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Ichindali is one of the Ethnic Community Languages spoken by an increasing population of the Ndali people in Mbeya region. The Ndali people live in southern Tanzania, Mbeya Region. Ileje District has 124,451 speakers in 2012. Ileje is bordered to the North by Mbeya rural and Rungwe district, to the East by Kyela district. Ndali people live in an area which crosses the Tanzania Malawi border. This paper investigates the way noun phrases are formed in Ichindali and the order of their formation (constituents) in this particular language. Therefore the main objectives of this paper were: i. To find out the Criteria for categorizing noun phrase elements in Ichindali. ii. To examine the various kinds of dependents in Ichindali noun phrase. In arriving at these objectives, the writer posed the following questions as a guide: i. What are the criteria relevant in categorizing the dependents of the noun in Ichindali? ii. What kinds of dependents form a noun phrase in Ichindali? A conclusion has been drawn from this work is that, the structure of a noun phrase in Ichindali is N-Det-Mod. An NP can function as a subject, direct or primary objects which is normally expressed in the accusative case, indirect or secondary object in dative case as well as an object of preposition.
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Юзмухаметов, Рамиль Тагирович. "PERSIAN LEXICAL LOANWORDS IN SWAHILI." Bulletin of the Chuvash State Pedagogical University named after I Y Yakovlev, no. 3(108) (October 20, 2020): 125–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.37972/chgpu.2020.108.3.014.
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Статья посвящена исследованию персидских лексических заимствований в языке суахили. Язык суахили является официальным языком ряда государств в Восточной Африке, таких как Танзания, Кения, Уганда, Коморские острова и др., эти страны можно считать родиной суахили. Актуальность исследования определяется интересом к распространению персидской заимствованной лексики в Восточной Африке параллельно с интересом к вопросу истории появления мусульманской культуры в Восточной Африке. Несмотря на то что арабские заимствования проникали в языки банту одновременно с персидскими словами, в этой статье рассмотрены исключительно персидские слова с целью подробнее исследовать тематические и структурные группы персидских заимствований, фонетические, морфологические и лексико-семантические изменения в них. Методологической и теоретической базой для исследования стали труды отечественных и зарубежных языковедов и африканистов, изучавших историю языка суахили, его строение, лексический состав, а также этническую структуру общества в Восточной Африке. Материалом для исследования послужили заимствованные из персидского языка слова, зафиксированные в «Суахили-русском словаре» под редакцией Н. В. Громовой. В лексическом составе языка суахили содержится значительное количество иностранных заимствований, что отражает разные периоды истории колонизации и освоения Восточной Африки. Персидских слов в суахили содержится порядка тридцати. Они представлены главным образом конкретными именами, обозначающими различные бытовые понятия, имеется и несколько абстрактных слов, связанных с религией и общественным укладом жизни. В морфологическом, фонологическом и лексико-семантическом плане обнаружены признаки глубокого усвоения иранизмов со стороны языка-реципиента - банту. The article is devoted to the study of Persian lexical borrowings in Swahili. Swahili is the official language of a number of states in East Africa; these are Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, the Comoros and others. These countries can be considered the homeland of Swahili. The relevance of the study is determined by interest in the distribution of Persian borrowed vocabulary in East Africa, along with interest in the issue of the history of the emergence of Muslim culture in East Africa. Despite the fact that Arabic borrowings penetrated the Bantu languages simultaneously with Persian words, this article exclusively discusses Persian words in order to study in more detail the thematic and structural groups of Persian borrowings, phonetic, morphological and lexical-semantic changes in them. The methodological and theoretical framework for this study was determined by works of the domestic and foreign linguists and africanists who studied the history of Swahili, its structural and lexical composition. The material for the study was taken from “Swahili-Russian Dictionary” (ed. N. V. Gromova). The lexical composition of Swahili contains a significant amount of foreign lexical borrowings, which reflects different periods of the history of colonization of East Africa. There are about thirty Persian words in Swahili. They are represented mainly by specific words denoting various everyday concepts, and there are several abstract words related to religion and the social way of life. On the morphological, phonological, and lexical-semantic plane, signs of a deep assimilation of Iranisms by the recipient language, Bantu, were found
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Ngonyani, Deo. "Conditionals in Ndendeule." Studies in African Linguistics, June 1, 2017, 175–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v46i1.107249.
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Ndendeule, a Bantu language spoken in southern Tanzania, has six conditional constructions identified by conditional markers. Construction I is marked by the subordinating conjunction anda ‘if,’ while Construction II is characterized by the conditional prefix nga- which appears on both the protasis and apodosis. The dependent -aka- in the if-clause marks Construction III. Construction IV is a negative conditional where the negative is marked in the subordinated clause. Construction V is identified as a directive conditional in which the protasis is either imperative or subjunctive and the main clause is subjunctive. Construction VI is a concessive conditional characterized by biclausal subjunctive protasis. It is argued that reality or unreality is expressed by the choice of the conditional marker on the protasis. Conditional markers express the speaker’s assumption about whether is factual or counterfactual. Constructions marked by anda ‘if’ and the dependent prefix -aka-, and the negative conditional express factual and probable conditions, while the use of nga- expresses counterfactual conditions. Tense, aspect and mood markers do not contribute to the conditional interpretation. They relate the protasis the time and completion of the event. Semantically, Ndendeule conditionals appear on Taylor’s (1997) gradient on three points, namely, factual, hypothetical and counterfactual.
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Pakendorf, Brigitte, and Mark Stoneking. "The genomic prehistory of peoples speaking Khoisan languages." Human Molecular Genetics, October 19, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddaa221.
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Abstract Peoples speaking so-called Khoisan languages—that is, indigenous languages of southern Africa that do not belong to the Bantu family—are culturally and linguistically diverse. They comprise herders, hunter-gatherers as well as groups of mixed modes of subsistence, and their languages are classified into three distinct language families. This cultural and linguistic variation is mirrored by extensive genetic diversity. We here review the recent genomics literature and discuss the genetic evidence for a formerly wider geographic spread of peoples with Khoisan-related ancestry, for the deep divergence among populations speaking Khoisan languages overlaid by more recent gene flow among these groups and for the impact of admixture with immigrant food-producers in their prehistory.
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Zsiga, Elizabeth. "In Favor of [Fortis]: Evidence from Setswana and Sebirwa." Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology 5 (February 10, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v5i0.4252.
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This paper argues that in favor of adding the feature [fortis/lenis] to the set of generally accepted phonological features, as originally proposed by Trubetzkoy (1939). Phonetic data from the consonant systems the Southern Bantu languages Setswana and Sebirwa is presented. Measurements of consonant closure and voicing duration in Setswana show that post-nasal “strengthening” and the distribution of ejective stops in this language can best be accounted for phonologically with the feature [fortis] rather than [+/- voice] or [constricted glottis]. In contrast, the phonetic data show Sebirwa to be a “true voice” language, demonstrating that the patterns of Setswana are not phonetically inevitable.
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Massoi, Lucy Willy. "Land coflicts and the livelihood of Pastoral Maasai Women in Kilosa district of Morogoro, Tanzania." Afrika Focus 28, no. 2 (September 16, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/af.v28i2.4869.
Full textAbstract:
This summary of my PhD thesis analyses conflicts around land in relation to pastoral Maasai women livelihoods in Tanzania. Issues of pastoralism and land use conflicts in Tanzania are well documented in literature. However, a gendered analysis of conflicts around land in relation to land reforms (changes in the use and ownership of, and access to land and land resources), prolonged climate variability and change, and food insecurity, hardly exists in the literature. Of particular concern is the rudimentary analysis of these conflicts as it relates to pastoral Maasai women, the primary and secondary users of land in pastoral livelihoods. Data analysed in this report were collected in Kilosa district, located in Morogoro, Tanzania, one of the renowned hotspots for pastoral-farmer conflicts in Tanzania. Within Kilosa, data were collect in pastoral Maasai settlements [villages] of Twatwatwa, Kiduhi, Ngaiti, and Mabwegere, and pastoral Maasai women were central focus. Through ethnographic research methods namely focus group discussions, interviews, and participant observations, I have found that vulnerabilities to conflicts around land are gender differentiated, and that pastoral Maasai women experience climate change, food insecurity, and land reforms differently from men. An overall conclusion in this report is that, conflicts around land in Kilosa are intricate in nature and cannot be analysed from a single narrative, and pastoral Maasai women by virtue of their specific gender roles and the gender relations are hit hard. I therefore argue that, (1) for secure land reforms, the political, economic, and social structures through which land access is mediated must also be reformed; (2) there should be a holistic conflict mitigation approach and strategies in resolving conflict around land in Kilosa. The approaches should focus at engaging pastoralists and pastoralist women in particular, and their institutions and making them an integral part of the solutions. (3) Decisions dealing with climate change mitigation strategies such as the Kilosa eviction of 2009 should also involve pastoralist women whose livelihood depends directly and/or indirectly on climate sensitive resources; (4) the introduction of forage crops production [such as grasses and legumes] in Kilosa is imperative. This will assist in increasing pasture production, which eventually will boost livestock production [livestock, the main preferred food source among the pastoral Maasai]. Equally, availability of forage crops within pastoralists reach reduces unplanned herd mobility, and at the same time lessens challenges that pastoralist women face in their responsibilities as default food managers.Key words: Bantu languages, Ubangian languages, contact langues, documentations, reconstructions, classifications
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Brauer-Benke, József. "Az afrikai tamtam-ok avagy résdobok története és típusai." Afrika Tanulmányok / Hungarian Journal of African Studies 12, no. 1-3. (October 30, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.15170/at.2018.12.1-3.8.
Full textAbstract:
A general survey of data leads one to conclude that, even though the slit drum type of instruments, owing to their simple structure, could have developed in any place with abundant tree cover, the available data suggest that the introduction of this instrument type, or the underlying idea, into the equatorial belt can be linked to the migration of speakers of Austronesian languages. After its introduction, however, the instrument type developed in highly localized fnctions and forms. On this basis the widespread slit drum types of Equatorial Africa were passed on in an East-to-West direction; the absence of these instruments in Southern Africa and the date of arrival of Austronesian-speaking groups in Africa suggest the possibility that the appearance of slit drums in Africa can be dated to the period between the 6th and 10th centuries. The communicative function and prestige value of this instrument type led to its wide adoption among the ethnic groups of the Congo basin in particular. Contrastingly, a major hindrance to its wider distribution over West Africa may have been the presence of a rival candidate for its communicative function (the membranophonic „talking drums”), as well as changes in the animistic religious concepts linked to this instrument type, a result of widepread conversion to Islam from the 14th century. In Eastern Africa too conversion to Islam from the 11th century and the associated spead of the use of Swahili may have been a significant factor, given the fact that Swahili, while a Bantu language, is not a tone language, and thus the diminished communicative potential of these instruments, dependent on tone, as well as the shrinking ritual aspects of their use as symbols of chiefly authority must have led to the gradual decline of the use of slit drums in this region.