The Leopard’s Spots Brill’s Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture Series Editors Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Cairns Institute, James Cook University) R.M.W. Dixon (Cairns Institute, James Cook University) N.J. Enfield (Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney) VOLUME 11 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bslc The Leopard’s Spots Essays on Language, Cognition and Culture By Gerrit J. Dimmendaal LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Gertrud Schneider-Blum Dimmendaal, Gerrit Jan, author. The Leopard’s spots : essays on language, cognition, and culture / By Gerrit J. Dimmendaal. pages cm. — (Brill’s Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture; 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-22244-1 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-22414-8 (e-book) 1. Language and languages—Variation—Africa. 2. Cognitive grammar—Africa. 3. Language and culture—Africa. I. Title. 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Contents Preface ix Abbreviations xii List of Tables, Maps and Figures xiv 1 By Way of Introduction 1 Part 1 Language Ecology 2 Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continent 9 2.1 The Genetic Classification of African Languages: A Brief State of the Art 9 2.2 Accretion Zones, Spread Zones, and Their Ecological Bases 15 2.3 Esoterogeny, Metatypy and Other Miracles of Language Contact 21 3 Accretion Zones and the Absence of Language Union in the Nuba Mountains 25 3.1 Genetic Diversity 25 3.2 Typological Diversity 32 3.2.1 Phonology 32 3.2.2 Lexical Diffusion 40 3.2.3 Morphological Diversity 42 3.2.4 Clause Structure 45 3.3 A Natural Refugium Zone 54 4 Esoterogeny and Localist Strategies in a Nuba Mountain Community 64 4.1 Introduction 64 4.2 Internal Variation in Tima and the “Apparent-time” Approach 64 4.3 An Initial Comparison with Katla 68 4.4 Metatypy, Esoterogeny, or Neither? 74 4.5 Localist Strategies 79 vi contents Part 2 Language and Co-Evolution 5 Some Observations on Evolutionary Concepts in Current Linguistics 85 5.1 Evolutionary Concepts and the Study of Language: Some Earlier Attempts 85 5.2 A Closer Look at the Brown and Witkowski Hypothesis 88 5.2.1 The Historical-Comparative Evidence and Counter-Evidence 90 5.2.2 The Empirical Basis: Synchronic Evidence and Counterevidence 93 5.3 An Alternative Account: Language and Cognition 97 5.4 Conclusions and Prospects 99 6 Studying Lexical-Semantic Fields in Languages: Nature Versus Nurture, or Where Does Culture Come into It These Days? 101 6.1 Investigating the Interaction between Language and Cognition: Research on Colour Terminology 101 6.2 Language Typology and the Study of Language Universals 103 6.3 The Berlin and Kay Framework 104 6.4 Some Problems with the Berlin and Kay Model 105 6.5 Extending the Greenbergian Framework to Other Lexical Domains 112 6.6 The Expression of Space and Direction in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective 115 6.7 The Problem of the “Radical Translator” 120 6.8 Implicational Scales and Historical Reconstruction 121 6.9 Some New Evidence for Linguistic Relativity? 122 6.10 Some Final Observations 123 7 Lexical-Semantic Fields in Tima 127 7.1 Introduction 127 7.2 Bio-nomenclature 128 7.3 Colour 130 7.4 Shape and Texture 135 7.5 Taste 138 7.6 Body Parts 139 Contents vii Part 3 Conversational Styles 8 Colourful psi’s Sleep Furiously: Depicting Emotional States in Some African Languages 147 8.1 Introduction 147 8.2 Categories and Event Structures 149 8.3 A Closer Look at Two African Language Families: Nilotic and Bantu 152 8.4 Interpreting Colourful psi’s 165 8.5 On psi’s and fta’s 167 9 Perception of the Living Dead and the Invisible Hand in Teso-Turkana 170 9.1 Introduction 170 9.2 Invisible Forces in Teso-Turkana 171 9.3 Perception of the Invisible Hand 175 9.4 A Note on Perception Verbs in a Nilotic Context 179 10 Conversational Styles in Tima 181 10.1 Introduction 181 10.2 Ideophones 182 10.3 Emotional States 187 10.4 Exoteric and Esoteric Languages 193 References 197 Language Index 216 Subject Index 220 Preface The main impetus for this collection of essays came from a language docu- mentation project “A linguistic and anthropological documentation of Tima”, financed by the Volkswagen Foundation between 2006 and 2012. I would like to express my deeply felt gratitude to the Foundation for making this research pos- sible. Special thanks go to Dr. Vera Szöllösi-Brenig, director of the programme Documentation of Endangered Languages of the Volkswagen Foundation, for her personal dedication and warm personality. I would also like to thank the wonderful research project team for this project, consisting of Suzan Alamin, Abeer Bashir, Meike Meerpohl, Abdelrahim Mugaddam, Gertrud Schneider- Blum as well as two dedicated student assistants, Meikal Mumin and Nico Nassenstein, for making this project such a success. The project allowed all researchers involved to acquaint themselves with a fascinating language spo- ken by a captivating group of people in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, who play a central role in several chapters of this volume. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the Tima community in the Nuba Mountains and the Tima diaspora in Khartoum for their kind hospitality and their interest in documenting their language and culture. Their “habitus” formed a major inspi- ration for me to reflect more deeply upon the link and interaction between language, culture and cognition. I am particularly grateful to the two main lan- guage helpers in the Tima documentation project, Nassardeen Abdallah and Hamid Kafi, whose pictures are shown on the front page of this monograph. The Tima documentation project would not have become such a success with- out the perseverance and positive thinking of Gertrud (Trudel) Schneider- Blum, whose tremendous contributions are gratefully acknowledged here. I am also deeply indebted to the editors of the series in which this mono- graph appears, Sasha Aikhenvald, Bob Dixon and Nick Enfield, as well as Stephanie Paalvast, Paige Sammartino and Irene van Rossum (Brill Publishers), for their untiring support and interest in the topic. Special thanks are also due to Prof. Al-Amin Abu-Manga, former Director of the Institute for African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, for his unflagging support and personal interest in languages and cultures of Sudan. This monograph could not have been finished without the indefatigable support, at different points in time, of four wonderful student-assistants, Silke Focke, Marvin Kumetat, Jan Peters, and Tobias Simon. Furthermore, the help of the cartographer Monika Feinen in preparing the maps is gratefully acknowledged here. Also, the positive and collegial atmosphere at the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne, provides a perfect x preface intellectual basis for scientific research. I would like to express my deeply felt gratitude to all my colleagues for this. Special thanks are also due to the rector of the University of Cologne, Prof. Axel Freimuth, for bestowing the Leo-Spitzer-Prize for excellent research upon me in 2013. This prize allows me to spend more time on research for a period of three years. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Bompeti Ngila for his help in interpreting the Mongo data in Chapter 5, to Thérèse Harlemann-Ndobo for data on Baca, to Osman Adam Ismail for data on Daju of Lagowa, and to Birgit Hellwig for making her data on Katla available. The extensive comments and criticism at different points in time from Felix Ameka, Nick Enfield, Axel Fleisch, Eva Lindström, Steffen Lorenz, Nico Nassenstein, Anna Wierzbicka, and Andrea Wolvers on different chapters are also gratefully acknowledged here. Last but not least, I would like to thank the wonderful Dave Roberts for his corrections and stylistic recommendations. Some readers may be surprised—or even shocked—by the title of this monograph if they are familiar with a book with an identical title published more than a century ago by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr., which was the first work of a trilogy on the Ku Klux Clan in the United States. Human beings construct identities on “self” and “otherness” in sometimes abstruse and morally despi- cable ways; unfortunately, this is part of human history. The present mono- graph, however, grew out of admiration and respect for cultural diversity and the various ways the human mind has constructed cultural identities and cre- ated language diversity. The monograph is divided into three parts, each starting with previously published articles and followed by others elaborating on these. I would like to thank the following publishers for making this approach possible: “Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent”, with kind permission of Wiley Publishers and the editors of Language and Linguistics Compass.