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Historical Linguistics 257 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Ghent University Academic Bibliography K. Bostoen. Historical Linguistics 257 HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Koen Bostoen1 Linguists and archaeologists offer complementary view- ‘historical-comparative linguistics’, starts from extant points on human behaviour and culture in past African languages and tries to reconstruct their evolution from communities. While historical-comparative linguistics ancestral stages through the study of current-day varia- commonly deals with the immaterial traces of the past tion. Such inter-language variation can be phonological, in Africa’s present-day languages, archaeology unearths morphological, syntactic, semantic or lexical. the material vestiges of ancient cultures. Even if both In the case of Bantu, the hypothetical common ances- sciences share similar core concepts, their methods, data tor language reconstructed on the basis of similarities and interpretive frameworks are profoundly different. observed between languages known mainly from the Explaining some basic principles of historical-compar- 19th century onwards is commonly called Proto-Bantu. ative linguistics as applied to the Bantu languages and This proto-language is assumed to be the best possible debunking some common misconceptions are the central reflection of the ancestor language that was supposedly aims of this contribution. Due to space constraints, no spoken some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago in the area from detailed bibliographic references are provided through- where Bantu languages started to spread through Central out the text (see my earlier publications for extensive Africa and beyond. Bantu linguists agree to situate this bibliographies).2 Some essential readings for non-spe- homeland in the so-called Grassfields region of Cam- cialists are listed at the end of this chapter. eroon, not far from the country’s border with Nigeria. This zone displays the highest linguistic diversity (which I. DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS ON THE BASIS OF means that parent languages had sufficient time to di- SYNCHRONIC DATA verge locally) and is close to the area where the Benue- Ideally speaking, historical linguistics is the study of Congo relatives of Bantu languages are spoken. distinct historical stages in the evolution of one single language or language family. This is the case in Ro- II. REFERENTIAL VS. HISTORICAL OR GENEA- mance, for instance, where the development of Latin LOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS into its multiple daughter languages can be empirically The best-known Bantu classification is no doubt Mal- reconstructed. In Africa, examining language variation colm Guthrie’s. In 1948, Guthrie subdivided the Bantu through time on the basis of diachronic language data languages in 16 different zones labelled A, B, C, D, E, F, is hardly ever possible, due to the lack of written docu- G, H, K, L, M, N, P, R, S and T, which he reduced to 15 ments. in 1971 by merging the last two to one zone. Each zone The case of Kikongo, whose historical record starts is further subdivided into language groups, indicated by in the early 17th century, is exceptional, and even not a decimal number, in which individual languages are equalled by Kiswahili whose oldest surviving texts do indicated by a unit. Lowercase letters following certain not date further back than the mid-18th century. For units refer to dialects of a same language, e.g. Ciluba most other Central African languages, written docu- (L31a) and Lulua (L31b). In contrast to what is often ments become at best available from the late 19th cen- believed, Guthrie’s classification is strictly referential tury onwards. Even today, there are still many undocu- and was never meant to be historical: Guthrie did not mented languages, several of which are on the verge of rely on the ‘Comparative Method’ (which is the core ap- extinction. Historical linguistics in Africa thus usually proach of historical-comparative linguistics) or ‘shared consists in the comparative study of historically-related innovations’, its basic principle for historical subgroup- languages. This up-stream approach, also known as ing. Shared innovations are lexical, phonological or grammatical changes that took place only once in some 1 BantUGent - UGent Centre for Bantu Studies, Department of Languages ancestor language from which its daughter languages in- and Cultures, Ghent University, Belgium. herited it and which are therefore indicative of the closer 2 http://research.flw.ugent.be/en/koen.bostoen 258 Field Manual for African Archaeology. Chapter 6 relatedness between languages. By attributing a unique communities3 is a reflection of shared history, the study alpha-numeric code to each language, Guthrie wanted to of widespread cultural vocabulary usually provides in- facilitate comparison between the several hundred Bantu teresting insights on the lifestyle of past societies. This languages known at the time. sub-discipline is also known as the ‘words-and-things Despite its limited historical or genealogical value, method’ (see Ricquier, this volume, pp. 261-263) or lin- Guthrie’s classification remains a useful reference tool. guistic palaeontology. To archaeologists, language data Each one of the nearly 900 documented Bantu language are particularly useful as a source of indirect historical varieties can be approximately situated in space thanks to evidence for those aspects of human culture which are its unique code. That is exactly why Jouni Maho updated either immaterial or whose material traces do not con- Guthrie’s list by adding new languages, but remained as serve well. Similar words with similar meanings shared faithful as possible to the original approach. Other schol- by numerous languages can be inherited from a common ars did propose rearrangements on historical grounds. ancestor language and spread through the dispersal of its Only one of these gained relatively wide acceptance daughter languages. They can also have been adopted amongst Bantu linguists, i.e. zone J proposed by the through contact and spread across languages as loan- former linguistics department of the Royal Museum for words. Central Africa in Tervuren. To distinguish between inherited and borrowed vocab- Bantu as a language family has been established ever ulary, linguists depend on the principle of regular sound since Bleek (1851). Its homeland is the region where correspondences. These are phonological similarities the ‘Narrow Bantu’ languages, i.e. those conventionally between languages, which cannot be the outcome of his- classified as Bantu by Guthrie, meet the ‘Wide Bantu’ torical accident, because they are recurrent, systematic languages, i.e. their closest Benue-Congo relatives aka and without unexplainable exceptions. While synchroni- ‘Bantoid’. The small ‘Mbam-Bubi’ subgroup, consisting cally widespread inherited terms can be reconstructed of several languages of the Mbam region of central Came- into a putative proto-language via these regular sound roon and Bubi spoken on Bioko Island, is the genealogical changes, loanwords cannot. Several Great Lakes Bantu junction between Narrow and Wide Bantu. The (Narrow) languages, for instance, have a lexical doublet to refer Bantu family further branches into five major subgroups: to calabashes and glass bottles. These are two words that ‘North-Western’, ‘Central-Western’ (aka ‘North Zaire’ or are historically related, but one of them was acquired ‘Congo’), ‘West-Western’ (aka ‘West-Coastal’), ‘South- through regular intergenerational transmission from an Western’ and ‘Eastern’. We mainly owe this robust under- ancestor language, while the other was obtained from ve- standing of Bantu genealogy to quantitative analyses of hicular Swahili through contact-induced diffusion. The so-called ‘basic vocabulary’, such as lexicostatistics and inherited word for calabash is phonologically much more phylogenetics. Qualitative approaches based on phono- heterogeneous, e.g. Sukuma cuβa, Nyamwezi nsòhá, logical and/or grammatical features fit less with the tree Ganda ɛ̀ nsúwà, Shi nshùhá. These words were subject model of language divergence, and emphasize that con- to the regular sound changes that their language under- vergence due to language contact also had a significant went since Proto-Bantu for which *-cʊ́ pà ‘calabash’ has impact on the speciation of Bantu languages. been reconstructed. Such is not the case for the term for glass bottle, which they recently borrowed from Swa- III. LANGUAGE AS AN HISTORICAL SOURCE hili resulting in much more similar loanwords: Sukuma Our knowledge of the environmental, social, cultural, cupá, Nyamwezi cupa, Ganda ccúpà, Shi ìcúpà. In Swa- and historical phenomena underlying language change hili itself, the word chupa refers to both calabashes and is often very limited in Africa. Its languages most often glass bottles. When the latter type of containers were need to ‘speak for themselves’. The study of language introduced along the East African coast, Swahili speak- has in itself become an important method of reconstruct- ers called them after their traditional containers using the ing history to which not only linguists, but also historians word for calabash which they inherited from Proto-Ban- and archaeologists dedicate themselves. Founded on the basic premise that vocabulary shared between speech 3 A speech community is defined here as a group of people who consider themselves to speak a same language. K. Bostoen. Historical Linguistics 259 tu. Swahili speaking long-distance
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