Chapter 1 Introduction “Uyadl[h]ala muthfu lotsi kugarudwa ջathfwana udlhala gematshe emati akona” 1 John Mbenyane Gqada, 1949, Tshepisong, Matatiele (quoted in Mzamane 1949:248) ‘The person who says children should not be educated is just playing; he plays with spittle when there is water’ This chapter is presented in three parts: §1.1 includes an overview of previous sources on the language (§1.1.1), a profile of the extant Phuthi communities (§1.1.2), an outline history of the speakers (§1.1.3), some insight into the maintenance of the Phuthi language (§1.1.4), the effects displayed from contact with other languages (§1.1.5), possible obsolescence (§1.1.6), and a classification (§1.1.7) of Phuthi as Nguni (§1.1.7.2), then more specifically Tekela Nguni (§1.1.7.3). §1.2 outlines the methodology used (§1.2.1), the empirical tradition into which the work fits (§1.2.2) and a brief overview of salient theoretical issues that will be raised in this work (§1.2.3). Finally, §1.3 outlines the structure of the dissertation. 1 The quote would be written in my Phuthi orthography with morpheme and interlinear glosses (breathy voice/depression diacritics, morpheme boundaries have been added, but not tone): u- ya- dl al-a mu-tfu lo- tshi ku- ga- rud - w - a (e)ba- tfwana SP 1-T/A-play-T/A NC 1-person NC 1REL -say NC 17- NEG -teach- PASS -T/A NC 2-children He - plays person who-says there-should-not-be-taught children u- dl al-a ge- ma- tshe ema-ti a- kona SP _NC 1-play-T/A INSTR -NC 6-water NC 6- water SP (P)6-there [SP (P)6 = ‘subject prefix he-plays with-spittle water it-being-there. participial, Class 6’] 1 1. 1. Language Background 2 Phuthi is a little described, south-eastern Bantu language spoken in a number of regions in southern Lesotho and the far northern Eastern Cape province of South Africa (Donnelly 1999). Map 1 provides for a somewhat clearer indication of these regions, to the best of my knowledge 3. Map 1 Current Phuthi-speaking areas in Lesotho and South Africa 4. 1. 1. 1. SOURCES Up until the mid-1990s, there had been four identifiable published linguistic sources for the Phuthi language and its speakers: Bourquin (1927), Mzamane (1949), Ownby (1985) and Msimang (1989). Bourquin, a missionary based in Cedarville / Mvenyane, worked with a speaker from the vicinity of the Thinana 5 River source, on the Lesotho-South Africa border—northwest 2 A part of this introductory chapter has been published as Donnelly (1999). 3 A more exhaustive list of Phuthi-speaking areas is given in Appendix B. 4 A slightly different version of this map appears in Donnelly (1999:98). 5 There is confusion in the entire South African region, even up to the present, as to the spelling of names of people and places which contain aspirated stops: [p h th kh]. The aspiration is correctly reflected in current orthographies (since it is a phonemic contrast that all southeastern Bantu languages make), but is still inconsistently used, especially in the spelling of proper names and place names; it is now covertly prestigious for some people in South Africa to spell an African name with the phonemic aspiration un marked (Nhlanhla Thwala, p.c., 2002; Nolutando Xate [sic], p.c., 2001). Spellings have occasionally been ‘corrected’ in this work, e.g. in 2 of Matatiele in the northern Transkei. He focuses on diachronic aspects of how proto-Bantu sounds are manifested in Phuthi, introducing some 280 lexical items which constitute what seems to be the first written record of Phuthi. Like most contemporaneous authors, he pays no attention to tone in the language; in addition, most items are presented in already analysed format (e.g. stems stripped of affixes, and vice versa), which makes it hard to assess what the extent of his knowledge of the language was, and impossible to reanalyse the data presented. Bourquin provides no details of the nature of the Phuthi speech community he was connected to. Mzamane’s 1948 Masters thesis, published by the University of Fort Hare (1949), contains by far the most substantial body of Phuthi data prior to the present work. He sets out to compare the Phuthi spoken in Matatiele and Mt. Fletcher (both sets of communities are in present-day South Africa, cf. Map 1) with Nguni (Xhosa and Zulu) and Southern Sotho. Although Mzamane covers a number of aspects of phonology and morphology, the treatment is so atheoretical and there are such inconsistencies in his data that it is not always easy to grasp the distribution of distinctive Phuthi phonological phenomena (such as the raised mid vowels [e o] and the labialised consonants [tf, dv] 6). The greatest strength in this work is the morphological data provided, which enables Phuthi to be convincingly established as a Sotho-Nguni hybrid. Again, there is almost no information on tone—just a single paragraph (1949:147-8), providing little clue to the breadth of paradigms characteristic of the language. Most subsequent references to Phuthi, including the morphological table in Doke (1954) derive from Mzamane’s work. Ownby (1985) contains 200 Phuthi lexical items from two isolated Phuthi speakers in Mutamong 7, near Mokhotlong in the east-central part of Lesotho. Since her central purpose was to classify the Nguni languages using a lexicostatistical method, no attention is paid to the distribution or composition of current Phuthi communities, nor to Phuthi grammar. Msimang (1989) is a comparative phonological and historical treatment of aspects of the largest set of Tekela Nguni languages to be examined at one time: Bhaca, Lala, Nhlangwini, Mzamane (1949) and elsewhere the river’s name is spelt as ‘Tinana’. 6 As in Swati, /d z ~ dv/ and /tsh ~ tf/ are affricated coronals. Labialised [tf] and [d v] occur in Mpapa before round vocalic segments [ ѐ o u w] (cf. detailed discussion in Chapter 2 §2.1.2). Inconsistently in his own text, Mzamane (1949) reports labialised /kh/ in <mukhfupha> ‘bread’. 7 Mutamong is described as being in the foothills of the Sani pass (Katherine Demuth, p.c., 1995). 3 Phuthi, Sumayela Ndebele and Swati. He is the first researcher in forty years to reestablish contact with a community of Phuthi speakers, but even this was achieved only at the fringes of Phuthi territory (Gcina, in Herschel). The primary data of about 250 lexical items from Palmietfontein (in the Herschel area) and Quthing is internally inconsistent with respect to various aspects of morphology and phonology. This may, in part, point to the semi-speaker status of the consultants, which is a phenomenon I observed in my own work in the Herschel area: most people in that region who claim to be ethnically Phuthi no longer have any fluent command of the language, or even any command at all. They are ‘lexical rememberers’ (Sasse 1992). Thus, the extant literature offers us little background on where Phuthi speakers are to be found, and what condition their language is in. All sources except Msimang (1989)—and this only in part—lack any tone marking of any sort; all contain serious internal inconsistencies in the tone data presented, raising questions about whether the inconsistencies reflect (a) the way the data was elicited; (b) the fact that the Phuthi language consultants were perhaps not fluent Phuthi speakers at all; (c) the state of the language in general, as it shows increasingly threadbare language maintenance in some communities. In fact, on the basis of this data one could be forgiven for wondering whether perhaps all Phuthi speakers had begun to lose their fully native command of the language. Happily, the present work has been able to establish that the language is still robustly attested, in rich morphological and phonological complexity, among several thousand native speakers. It is this robustly attested variety that this dissertation draws on. 1. 1. 2. PROFILE OF S PEECH C OMMUNITIES Fortunately for the survival of the language, there continue to be several thousand native speakers in various parts of southern Lesotho and the northern Transkei 8. The ones that I worked with live primarily in the following five non-contiguous areas (a-e) 9, all of them in Lesotho (see Map 1), as well as (f) where I have not yet worked. 8 A detailed list of the villages where I have established that Phuthi is spoken is contained in Appendix B. 9 Adhering to the convention of omitting noun class prefixes when nouns are cited in English, I have omitted locative prefixes as well, where possible (Phuthi: ka- , ge- , e- ; Sotho: ha- , ka- ; Xhosa: kwa- , e- ). The suffixes, however, remain. For example, Quthing . 4 (1) Common name in Lesotho / South Africa Phuthi name (where distinct) a. Quthing 10 [!u thi N] Qûthînî [!u ¶thi ¶ni ¶] b. Sinxondo [si ֊Ñѐndѐ] Sigxodo [sig || çdç] Seqoto [si!çtç] c. Mpapa [mpapa] d. Makoae [makwai] Magwayi [mag waji] e. Qacha [!at Sha] f. Matatiele [matati ele] Madadiela [mad adi ela] Among the sources examined above, only Msimang (1989) and Mzamane (1949) contain data from any of these areas (Quthing; Matatiele, respectively). Mzamane (1949:1) observes that Phuthi is spoken ‘chiefly in some parts of the districts of Qacha’s Nek and Quthing on either side of the Orange River in Basutoland and in the Cape Province at Ngonyameni, Thinana, Dzakwa’s and Likhetlane locations in the Mt. Fletcher district and in some parts of the Matatiele district’. But this information is more than 50 years old, and has not been verified since (to the best of my knowledge).