2. Historical Linguistics and Genealogical Language Classification in Africa1 Tom Güldemann
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2. Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa1 Tom Güldemann 2.1. African language classification and Greenberg (1963a) 2.1.1. Introduction For quite some time, the genealogical classification of African languages has been in a peculiar situation, one which is linked intricably to Greenberg’s (1963a) study. His work is without doubt the single most important contribution in the classifi- cation history of African languages up to now, and it is unlikely to be equaled in impact by any future study. This justifies framing major parts of this survey with respect to his work. The peculiar situation referred to above concerns the somewhat strained rela- tionship between most historical linguistic research pursued by Africanists in the 1 This chapter would not have been possible without the help and collaboration of various people and institutions. First of all, I would like to thank Harald Hammarström, whose comprehensive collection of linguistic literature enormously helped my research, with whom I could fruitfully discuss numerous relevant topics, and who commented in detail on a first draft of this study. My special thanks also go to Christfried Naumann, who has drawn the maps with the initial assistence of Mike Berger. The Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig under Bernhard Comrie supported the first stage of this research by financing two student assistents, Holger Kraft and Carsten Hesse; their work and the funding provided are gratefully acknowledged. The Humboldt University of Berlin provided the funds for organizing the relevant International Workshop “Genealogical language classification in Africa beyond Greenberg” held in Berlin in 2010 (see https://www.iaaw.hu-berlin. de/de/afrika/linguistik-und-sprachen/veranstaltungen/greenberg-workshop). I would also like to express my gratitude to colleagues who kindly offered their expertise and/ or furnished unpublished data, namely Colleen Ahland on Baga, Pascal Boyeldieu on Bongo-Bagirmi, Bruce Connell on Ijoid, Ines Fiedler on Gbe and Guang, Jeffrey Heath on Dogon, Angelika Jakobi on Nubian, Ulrich Kleinewillinghöfer on a number of Adamawa groups, Raija Kramer on Fali, Manuel Otero on Koman, Mechthild Reh on Nilotic, Lameen Souag on Songhay, and Valentin Vydrin on Mande. Their information and material did not always come to be used here but nevertheless helped me to get a better picture about the genealogical status of individual families. It goes without say- ing that I am solely responsible for any shortcomings in the interpretation of such data. Last but not least, this chapter has benefitted immensely from the effective and skillful proofreading by Heather Weston. The abbreviations recurring in examples, firgures and tables are: A Animate, ABSTR Abstract, ACC Accusative, ADJ Adjective, ANTICAUS https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421668-002 Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa 59 post-Greenbergian era and the perception of this work by the general discipline, which considers Greenberg’s classification to be “badly in need of major reinves- tigation and reworking” (Campbell and Poser 2008: 128). It is no coincidence that the fundamental split in opinion became particularly apparent from two papers that emerged in the same context, namely the conference “Language and prehistory in the Americas: a conference on the Greenberg classification” held in 1990 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. On the one side was Thomason (1994) – an attempt by a non-Africanist to make sense of the apparent contradiction between the almost universal acceptance of Greenberg’s (1963a) African classification and the lack of equal success of his later, methodologically similar works on the Pacific (1971) and the Americas (1987). On the other side was Newman (1995) – an Africanist’s vigorous defense of Greenberg (1963a) and its methodological underpinnings. This conflict resurfaces in the indirect exchange between Dixon’s (1997) “outsider” assessment of the genealogical classification on the continent and the response to it on the occasion of the 32nd Annual Conference on African Linguis- tics held in 2001 at the University of California Berkeley. Dixon (1997: 32–34) wrote: One finds statements like, ‘[Greenberg’s] major conclusions have by now become the prevailing orthodoxy for most scholars’ … However, one searches in vain for proof of this ‘genetic relationship’. Africanists tend to respond to queries about this matter from outsiders by saying that only Africanists can judge such matters. Maybe. But after reviewing the available literature an outsider is forced to conclude that the idea of genetic relationship and the term ‘language family’ are used in quite different ways by Africanists and by scholars working on languages from other parts of the world. … The hypothesis of a ‘Niger-Congo family’ was first put forward almost fifty years ago. During the intervening period no attempt has been made to prove this hypothesis by the criteria used for I[ndo-]E[uropean], Uralic, Algonquian, etc. in fact, … it appears that Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by an overlapping series of diffusion areas … Anticausative, APPL Applicative, ASSC Associative, AUX Auxiliary, BEN Benefac- tive, C Consonant, CAUS Causative, COP Copula, CONC Concord, CPET Centrip- etal, DAT Dative, DEF Definite, DEM Demonstrative, DI distal, DIR Directional, E Exclusive, EXT Extension, F Feminine, FUT Future, GEN Genitive, HAB Habitual, I Inclusive, IMP Imperative, INCH Inchoative, INSTR Instrumental, IPFV Imperfec- tive, ITER Iterative, ITR Intransitive, LOC Locative, M Masculine, MID Middle, N Nasal, NEG Negative, NEUT Neuter, NOM Nominative, NOMZ Nominalizer, NUM Numeral, O object (in word order schema), OBJ Object, OBL Oblique, P Plural, PASS Passive, PERF Perfect, PFV Perfective, PLUR Pluractional, POSS Possessive, POSSR Possessor, PR Proximal, PST Past, RCPR Reciprocal, REFL Reflexive, REL Relative, REPT Repetitive, RSLT Resultative, S Singular or (in word order schema) Subject, SBJ Subject, SEPR Separative, STAT Stative, TR Transitive or Transnumeral (in gender or declension system), V Vowel or (in word order schema) Verb, X Other (in word order schema). 60 Tom Güldemann The Niger-Congo situation is a classic example of taking the IE-type family tree as the only model of linguistic relationship, and employing it willy-nilly, without proper care and criteria. The organizers of the African linguistics meeting in Berkeley reacted to Dixon by posing the following questions in their conference announcement: Has proof of genetic linguistic relationships in Africa been as elusive as Dixon claims? If so, is it our [the Africanists’] fault or “theirs”? (i. e. the languages’?) Suffice it to say here that Dixon’s “reviewing [of] the available literature” was rather superficial, missing in particular the pre-Greenbergian research on Niger- Congo languages that made specialists confident about at least parts of Green- berg’s scheme. At the same time, it is argued here in line with Dixon that most parts of Greenberg’s classification are indeed not based on evidence according to mainstream criteria of the general discipline, and that this is hardly the “languages’ fault”. It is the prevailing contradiction between the general and the philological approach to language classification that justifies the seemingly disproportionate size of this contribution compared to other chapters of this book. Greenberg’s (1963a) classification is not only entrenched deeply among Afri- canists, however. This is reflected by the reluctance of non-specialist linguists to take into account relevant and publicly available findings that question important parts of Greenberg’s scheme. For example, the fact that many specialist linguists have never followed his Khoisan hypothesis has been obvious since early on (cf., e. g., Westphal 1962a, 1962b, 1971; Sands 1998b; Güldemann and Voßen 2000). Nevertheless, such major linguistic survey works as Haspelmath et al. (2005) and Lewis, Simons, and Fennig (henceforth Ethnologue), at least until its 17th edition of 2013, have continued to perpetuate Greenberg’s non-specialist assessment of this2 and other African language groups, while simultaneously discarding similar lumping classifications for language families in the Pacific and the Americas. 2.1.2. The pre-Greenbergian background In order to understand Greenberg’s work itself as well as its later impact, it is useful to briefly consider some historical background of the genealogical clas- sification of African languages (see Cole [1971] and Köhler [1975] for relevant overviews). The crucial points can be illustrated by a typical pre-Greenbergian classification, as given in Figure 1. 2 Admittedly, this perception is still transmitted by some specialist publications as well, notably Voßen (2013) within the Routledge Language Family Series [emphasis mine]. Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa 61 Sudanic Bantu Hamitic (including also Fula, Maasai, Khoekhoe according to Meinhof [1912]) Semitic Bushman Figure 1: General pre-Greenbergian classification of African languages One point comes out clearly in Figure 1, namely that the research history of African languages had been shaped by then by highly lumping classificatory schemes, often even just a tripartite one. According to Wolff (1981), this was largely deter- mined by the three major geographical thrusts of the early European interaction with and colonization