Introduction verb stems in bantu languages may include a number of derivational suffixes called extensions that express various functions, such as causative, applicative, reciprocal or passive. It offers a bench mark for future study and research in soundmeaning relationships between words of common origin shared in the ancient egyptian and bantu languages of. Panbantu verbstem reduplication as is well known, bantu languages have a highly agglutinative word structure. Cultural phylogeography of the bantu languages of sub.
Nov 30, 2010 bantu languages vs non bantu languages. They moved eastward to the area between central africa and west africa. In the nearly total absence of any historical records, the only means of building up bantu history lies in linguistic research, in the study of existing dialects, of their relative degree of purity, of their connexion one with the other and of the most widelyspread roots common to the majority of the bantu languages. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation. Bantu language article about bantu language by the free. Most bantu languages have typologically unremarkable consonant inventories, typically. In order to produce a codeswitched utterance by combining. The southern bantu languages are a large group of bantu languages, largely validated in janson 199192. Choose from 500 different sets of bantu flashcards on quizlet.
The nguni languages are unique among bantu languages in that they have imploded clicking phonemes. Students of bantu languages have a great deal of material to work with, since the family is so large and speakers are widely scattered across africa. In this research we note that bantu languages have common logical forms and. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. How did the bantu speakers and the people they came into contact with benefit from this migration. The analysis of prefixlike elements such as tswana s31 from. By theend of thecourse you willbe able to think of a lot of other syntactic and morphological commonalities on your own. An estimated 2,5003,000 years ago bc to 500 bc, although other sources put the start of the bantu expansion closer to 3000 bc, speakers of the protobantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying. As the source of bantu languages is generally argued to be in southwest adamawa, new data on bantu and related languages is important to the.
Within this perspective, bantu cm no longer be defined by. Lexical semantics and selection of tam in bantu languages. The bantu languages descend from a common protobantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now cameroon in central africa. The bantu inhabit most of the continent s of the congo river except the extreme southwest. Two other frequent changes of the terminal vowel of the common root are those from a which is almost invariably the. Zones k and r are also included in this group on most trees. In this research we note that bantu languages have common logical forms and computational structures, and which have utility in semantic processing of natural. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. The largest group within the west bantu languages includes zones c and h, bira d32 and kumu d37. There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of subsaharan africa. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu. Bantu language is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted over 20 times.
In the case of most bantu languages these resources are not available now, and are unlikely to become available in the near future. About 2,000 years ago, the protobantu speaking people who lived in what is today the eastern part of nigeria began to work with iron. There are several groups speaking different bantu languages. The title of this short working paper is called the bantu rosetta stones and its main purpose is to draw attention and awareness in the field of afrolinguistic egyptology.
Bantu are said to have settled in uganda between a. Northern sotho and zulu, with the aim of describing and storing the morphemic units of these two languages in a single relational database, structured as a hierarchical ontology. The bantu migrations agriculture, ironworking technology spread throughout africa because of migration number of groups in africa spoke related languages originated from language called protobantu developed in what is now cameroon, nigeria over time more than 2,000 bantu languages developed. They are nearly synonymous with guthries bantu zone s, apart from the exclusion of shona and the inclusion of makhuwa. Njila, the latest common ancestor language of the southwestbantu languages, were. Talking about the bantu language, there are around 650 languages.
Cm and cs are extremely common and natural phenomena in any bilingual. Being in between narrow bantu and wide bantu, they sometimes. Bantu languages root, prefix, prefixes, vowel and language. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. Bantu languages use prefixes and the harmonic concord. Another potential criterion, mentioned also in the appendix, is the common interaction between tone and focus in bantu languages, which i survey in hyman 1999.
The intuition here is that this interaction will be more prevalent, or typologically different, in a language that. As a followup, the current article describes the implementation of our part of speech ontology. Hawaiian aloha hula ukulele wiki as in a wiki or wikipedia wiki means fast in hawaiian. Furthermore, the morphological marking of this alternation is close to, or even merged with, the tam. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages comprising those of zanzibar, mozambique, the zambesi, kafirland, benguela, angola, the congo, the ogowe, the cameroons, the lake region, etc. It is thought to have originally been spoken in westcentral africa in the area of what is now cameroon. Selection among linguistic elements is automatic, not readily subject to conscious recall. Files are available under licenses specified on their description page. The bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the southern part of africa. Proto bantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the bantu languages, a subgroup of the benuecongo family. Scholars of bantu languages have long posited a common proto bantu pb source from which modernday bantu languages have evolved. Morphologythe most distinctive morphological feature of bantu languages is the grouping of nouns in different classes, marked by a prefix.
Allen is a reader in morphology and syntax of bantu languages, with special focus on the runyankorerukiga language cluster. If not a few bantu languages, the verb used in a negative sense changes its terminal a to i. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. Directional asymmetries in the morphology and phonology of. The classification of the bantu languages malcolm guthrie. Derived nominals in these languages have agglutinative noun class morphology that allows us to test predictions made by the n analysis of gender. She has a passion for language description and documentation of lesserstudied bantu languages of uganda. Bantu words in american english montclair state university.
Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu bantu. The bantu are said to have originated from somewhere in the congo region of central africa and spread rapidly to the southern and eastern africa. All members of a given class share the same prefix. She is a lecturer in the department of african languages at makerere university, kampala uganda. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation jochen zeller, university of kwazulunatal, durban.
The migration of the protobantu language group started around 3000 years ago. The following propositions may be laid down to define the special or peculiar features of the bantu languages. From the perspective of nlp, as mentioned above, the pos categorization of. Apparently in the parent language this particle had already these alternative forms, which resemble those in some west african negro languages. The classification is primarily linguistic, and there are almost a hundred bantu languages, including luganda, zulu, and swahili. Bantu languages, group of african languages forming a subdivision of the benueniger division of the nigercongo branch of the nigerkordofanian language family see african languages african languages, geographic rather than linguistic classification of languages spoken on the african continent. Thus, a comparison of the acquisition of bantu languages offers an extremely rich area for research, providing insights not. The languages of the mbametinoubou district of the centre region of cameroon have a unique position in bantu linguistics. The bantu languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of africa from southern cameroon eastward to kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent.
However, only 5 million people speak the bantu swahili language as the first language. Obviously languages like zulu and xhosa have a high level of lexical similarity but thats because theyre arguably dialects of the same language. How much lexical similarity is there in the bantu languages. Thus, a comparison of the acquisition of bantu languages offers an extremely rich area for research, providing insights not only into how language is. Bantu, syntax, bantu languages, morphology, information structure, word order.
In order to appreciate the issues which arise in verbstem reduplication, the traditional internal constituents of the verb in protobantu pb and most of the daughter languages are shown in 1, as reconstructed by meeussen 1967. What the bantu languages can tell us about word order and movement. How far can we get in a proposal for bantu nominal syntax when we apply. The bantu languages are a group of some 500 languages, primarily spoken in. The intuition here is that this interaction will be more prevalent, or typologically different, in a language that has a h,o opposition vs. This chapter provides an overview of the common syntactic features as well as the. Combining these parameters results in four combinations, which are all attested in. To these sixteen prefixes, the use of which is practically common to all members of the family, might perhaps be added no. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu. There is a high resemblance between all of the eastern bantu languages, which can be explained by a common ancestor and relatively recent splitting up, or to a period of physical contact, or, presumably to both nurse and philippson 1975.
See also khoisan languages, which contains several audio clips. Approximately 30004000 years ago, it split off from other southern bantoid languages when the bantu expansion began to the south and east. Scholars of bantu languages have long posited a common protobantu pb source from which modernday bantu languages have evolved. Although tanda is a common verb in zulu, it has not in zulu all these variations, and in some other language where it may by chance exhibit all the variations its own form is changed to londa or randa. Languages in the bantu language family have on average 1220 noun classes, determined by number and gender. There are around 6 million people of kikuyu kenya and 10 million people of zulu in south africa who are included as bantu people. Over 500 languages are classified in this family, including swahili, xhosa, and zulu. As far as i can see lexical similarity doesnt seem that high amongst most bantu languages. Mar 18, 2020 the bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the southern part of africa. Most bantu languages have tones which serve to make lexical andor grammatical distinctions. New developments in the classification of bantu languages.
The common feature of this body of work is that the classifications are presented. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. Meeussen 1967 was particularly instrumental in reconstructing what is thought to be the noun class system of proto bantu see also guthrie 196771 and welmers 1973. Few phonemes are as typologically restricted as the socalled whistled, whistling, or whistly fricatives s z. The classification of the bantu languages malcolm guthrie, international african institute snippet view 1948. Common features in bantu language there is no mistaking a bantu language, which perhaps is what renders the study of this group so interesting and encouraging. They then combine many of these to form 26 intermediate groupings of which about half are controversial. Case of semantic classification of kiswahili verbs amani lusekelo1a abstract the existing literature on bantu verbal semantics demonstrated that inherent semantic content of verbs pairs directly with the selection ofreceived november 2015 tense, aspect and modality formatives in bantu languages like chasu, lucazi, lusamia, and shiyeyi. First, featurevaluation under closest ccommand permits a unified treatment of bantu operator agreement and west germanic complementizer.
Meeussen 1967 was particularly instrumental in reconstructing what is thought to be the noun class system of protobantu see also guthrie 196771 and welmers 1973. Uc berkeley phonology lab annual report 2008 submitted. The common feature of this body of work is that the classifications are. Protobantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the bantu languages, a subgroup of the benuecongo family. For more info on how wikipedia got its name, click here. Longlasting lateral influences have led to the merging of. All structured data from the file and property namespaces is available under the creative commons cc0 license. It offers a bench mark for future study and research in soundmeaning relationships between words of common origin shared in the ancient egyptian and bantu languages of africa. Morphemic units of bantu languages elsabe taljard university of pretoria, south africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. Yet these languages are spoken by over 100 million people spread over most of subsaharan africa. Despite this i argue that a closest ccommand based account chomsky 2000 is superior to a spechead agreement analysis, for two reasons.
As a followup, the current article describes the implementation of our partofspeech ontology. Canonical bantu grammatical features are more common in lingala makanza. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. New developments in the classification of bantu languages and. Nguni languages of southern africa, which include zulu and xhosa, are believed to have borrowed their clicks from khoisan languages. Oxford university press for the international african institute, 1948 bantu languages 91 pages. On the basis of common phonological or morphological innovations and relying on the intuition of other linguists, nurse and philippson propose to bundle the bantu languages in some 80 mostly uncontroversial local groupings. About 2,000 years ago, the proto bantu speaking people who lived in what is today the eastern part of nigeria began to work with iron.
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