Relative clause formation in the bantu languages of south. The bantu orthography manual is a resource for developing writing systems among the bantu subgroup of nigercongo languages. Relative clause formation in the bantu languages of south africa jochen zeller linguistics programme, faculty of human sciences, university of kwazulunatal. Relative clause formation in the bantu languages of south africa article pdf available in southern african linguistics and applied language studies 2212. 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 by torrend, j. Bantu languages have a number of features that are of interest to l2. The linear ordering of tamneg markers in the bantu. Guthries divisions of the bantu languages were based on geography, not on language characteristics.
Bantu languages, lexical comparison, morphosyntactic comparison, automated cognate judgement, subgrouping. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation. Revising the bantu tree american museum of natural history. The 2016 revision key findings and advance tables pdf. The term bantu people is used to describe the roughly 60 million africans who speak languages in the bantu language family. In other words, the differences are quite large and the separation must have been a long time ago with almost. Bantu languages root, prefix, prefixes, vowel and language. It offers a strategy for orthography development, combined with a list of resources for bantu linguistic information and the condensed advice of a coterie of respected bantu linguistic experts. Nilosaharan languages, a group of languages that form one of the four language stocks or families on the african continent, the others being afroasiatic, khoisan, and nigercongo. Challenges to the promotion of indidegous languages in sou. Most languages employ initial, medial as well as final markers, though individual languages can favour one or the other type. However, languages vary with respect to what morphological processes are available, how frequently they are used, and what types of information can be encoded in these processes. 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.
Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free. In the first section, i will start out by discussing some social and cultural aspects of swahili, followed by the morphological characteristics of. Bringing together linguistic and genetic evidence to test the bantu expansion. The southern bantu languages, also known as bantu zone s, are a group of languages in the bantu language family. Apparently in the parent language this particle had already these alternative forms, which resemble those in some west african negro languages. Talking about the bantu language, there are around 650 languages. 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. Capital letters correspond to language groups mentioned below. Each word must end in a vowel though in some modern dialects in eastern equatorial, west and south africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal consonant, generally a nasal. Second language acquisition of bantu languages jstor. The definition of the bantu cornes from a variety of sources, most. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. Congobrazzaville national languages online dictionary, bantu web site.
The pronouns in bantu are in most cases traceable to some such general forms as these. All but one of these are indoeuropean languages but from very divergent branches, and turkish is a turkic language. Each volume in the language handbook series is intended to provide an outline of the salient features of a particular language and a summary of the language situation and language problems of the country or area in which it is spoken. Grammatical gender as it features in dp syntax is primarily a categorizing fea ture that. Bantu articles on this topic in other wikimedia projects can be found at. This can be done more effectively by applying a feature mechanism which constructs strings of characters i. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. 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. That is, nearly a third of all africans speak a bantu language as their native. Scholars of bantu languages have long posited a common proto bantu pb source from which modernday bantu languages have evolved. Researchers in bantu languages have identified syntagmatic features that occur in most bantu languages, which include nominal classes and concords. The linguistic features have little genetic validity, which was as he.
Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. By theend of thecourse you willbe able to think of a lot of other syntactic and morphological commonalities on your own. Mwenyi k352 yukawa 1987b, use a high amount of initial markers, while languages of the northwest and central north, e. The migration of the proto bantu language group started around 3000 years ago. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. Despite the large number of languages and great geographic expanse that they cover, the most noteworthy properties concerning bantu syllable structure, consonantvowel inventories, and phonological. Over 500 languages are classified in this family, including swahili, xhosa, and zulu. The bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the southern part of africa. The balkan sprachbund comprises albanian, romanian, the south slavic languages of the southern balkans bulgarian, macedonian and to a lesser degree serbocroatian, greek, balkan turkish, and romani. Proceedings of the royal society of biological sciences 279. The homogeneity of this family is so striking, as compared with the inexplicable confusion of tongues which reigns in africa north of the bantu borderland, that the close relationships of these dialects have perhaps been a little exaggerated by. Given that there are approximately 400 of these closely related languages, it should come as no surprise that these people are incredibly diverse, and that societies and governments among bantus can be radically different. Southern bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the.
Based on shared characteristics and on territorial contiguity, guthrie grouped the bantu languages into. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation jochen zeller, university of kwazulunatal, durban. Today over 60 million people in central and southern africa speak bantu based languages and share some part of bantu culture. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. The population who lives in sub saharan african speaks this language. There are about 520 languages in the bantu family, 670 languages in the southern bantoid branch which includes bantu, and 1,532 in nigercongo. Within this perspective, bantu cm no longer be defined by. The southern bantu languages, however, are also a valid linguistic group the southern bantu languages are a group of languages in.
Njila, the latest common ancestor language of the southwestbantu. New developments in the classification of bantu languages. The greater ruvu bantu language varieties include kagulu g12, zigua g31, kwere g32, zalamo g33, nguu g34, luguru g35, kami g36 and kutu g37. A common characteristic of bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for human being or. A survey report for the bantu languages sil international. The comparison is based on 27 morphophonological and. One of the bestknown features of the bantu languages is their noun class system. In this lecture, well look at differences in morphology among a variety of languages and learn to categorize these languages based on their morphological. Morphosyntax of swahili introduction a meaningful analysis of child language is impossible without a clear understanding of the adult language. The primary evidence for this expansion has been linguistic, namely that the languages spoken in subequatorial africa are remarkably similar to each other. The bantu expansion is the name for a postulated millennialong series of migrations of speakers of the original proto bantu language group. Bantu languages while most linguists agree that the bantu languages are related to the west african language group, there is a great deal of debate about how closely they are related and about when the bantu languages separated. There is no mistaking a bantu language, which perhaps is what renders the study of this group so interesting and encouraging.
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. This spiritual existence is usually not considered enternal. The bantu migration was one of the largest movements of people in africas history. The bantu languages or narrow bantu languages are a branch of the nigercongo languages. The scope of the series is the major modern languages of asia and africa. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day country of cameroon. The bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken by the bantu peoples throughout. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu. Sesotho sa leboa english online northern sotho english dictionary pukuntsu ya sesotho sa leboa seisimane. Introduction as in other parts of the grammar, bantu segmental phonology can be characterized as a theme and variations. Introduction in scientific and anthropological usage, the notion of culture encompasses all that is the.
The interaction with another common bantu sound change, i. The comparison is based on 27 morphophonological and morphosyntactic parameters, supplemented by a lexicon of 500 items. The classification of the bantu languages malcolm guthrie, international institute of african languages and cultures international african institute, 1948 bantu languages 91 pages. The nilosaharan languages are presumed to be descended from a common ancestral language and, therefore, to be genetically related. While there are typological characteristics common to these and other bantu languages, there are.
Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. In bantu languages, gender features determine noun class, and we see that derived nominals like. This article discusses lexical and grammatical comparison and subgrouping in a set of closely related bantu language varieties in the morogoro region, tanzania 1. Pdf relative clause formation in the bantu languages of. Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class. In most africian cultures, including bantu cultures veneration of the dead plays a prominient role. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. 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.
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