Studies in African Linguistics Supplement 11 West African Linguistics: Papers in Honor ofRussell G. Schuh edited by Paul Newman Lany M. Hyman Indiana University University of California, Berkeley Published by The Department of Linguistics and the Center for African Studies Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 2006 © Paul Newman and Larry M. Hyman 2006 Copyright on the individual chapters is retained by their authors. These individual articles are subject to a general academic public license which holds that as of January 1, 2009, the chapters may freely be used for scholarly or educational purposes with the proviso that full attribution is given to the authors as authors and to this SAL supplement volume in which the articles first appeared. Photo of Russell Schuh courtesy of Roxana Ma Newman CONTENTS Preface Vll 1. Roxana Ma Newman Russell G. Schuh: A Biographical Profile and Bibliography 1 2. Abdullahi Bature TamaRin Jerin Gwanon Amo ga Cunkoson BaRaRen Marabar Ga5ar Hausa ("Sonority Hierarchy Constraint on Hausa Abutting Consonants") 17 3. Norbert Cyffer Kanuri and its Neighbours: When Saharan and Chadic Languages Meet 33 4. Christopher Ehret The Nilo-Saharan Background of Chadic 56 5. Alhaji Maina Gimba Jinsi a Bolanci ("Gender in Bole") 67 6. Larry M Hyman and Imelda Udoh Relic Noun-Class Structure in Leggbo 75 7. Philip J. Jaggar The Hausa Perfective Tense-Aspect Used in Wh-/Focus Constructions and Historical Narratives: A Unified Account 100 8. Herrmann Jungraithmayr Apophony in the Verbal System of Gadang 134 iii 9. William R. Leben and Firmin Ahoua Phonological Reflexes of Emphasis in Kwa Languages of Cote d'Ivoire 145 10. Ian Maddieson Bilabial and Labio-Dental Fricatives in Ewe 159 11. Leslie C. Moore Changes in Folktale Socialization in an Urban Fulbe Community 176 12. Paul Newman Comparative Chadic Revisited 188 13. Mariame 1. Sy Vowel Harmony in Wolof Loanwords 203 14. H. Ekkehard Wolff Encoding Topography and Direction in the Verbal Systems of Lamang and Hdi (Central Chadic) 221 IV Russell G. Schuh PREFACE In 1976, Russell Schuh co-edited a festschrift for William Welmers, Professor of Linguistics at UCLA and America's leading African linguist of his day. At the time, Russ could not have imagined that 30 years later he would be occupying that position, that he would have established himself as one of the world's most prominent African linguists of his day, and that he would be the recipient of a festschrift in his honor (appearing like the earlier one as an SAL supplement). But that is the way things have turned out and we are extremely pleased to applaud Russ's enormous contributions to African linguistics, in both research and teaching, by means of this congratulatory volume. It is a testimony to the breadth of Russ's interests and his scholarly impact that the articles in this festschrift are not limited to Chadic, Russ's primary area of specialization, but also cover a range of West African languages extending from Nigeria to Senegal. The contributors to the volume have all had long-term personal and professional connections with Russ (in a couple of cases including co-authors who graciously agreed to participate). Will Leben and Russ were in the Peace Corps together in Niger working on similar adult literacy projects. Norbert Cyffer, Phil Jaggar, Roxana Ma Newman, and Ekkehard Wolff interacted with Russ in northern Nigeria in the mid 1970s when Russ was working at the Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages, Abdullahi Bayero College, now Bayero University. (Roxana Newman had worked with Russ a few years earlier on a comparative Chadic syntax project.) Herrmann Jungraithmayr, the doyen of Chadic linguistics, first met Russ at conferences and throughout the years greatly appreciated and supported his work. Alhaji Maina Gimba, Phil Jaggar, Leslie Moore, and Mariame Sy were Ph.D. students of Russ at UCLA. Russ and Gimba have since been co-investigators on a major NSF-supported Chadic project in northeastern Nigeria. Abdullahi Bature met Russ when he was a Ph.D. student of Will Leben at Stanford. Later, back in Nigeria, Bature worked closely with Russ on an innovative Hausa video project. In recognition of Russ's long time commitment to the development of local languages, evident in his publications list, both Bature and Gimba agreed to write their contributions to this volume in Hausa. Chris Ehret and Ian Maddieson have been valued colleagues of Russ at UCLA (Ian also being Russ's running partner). The two of us editors have had long and close relationships with Russ. Lany Hyman and Russ were fellow Ph.D. students at UCLA and worked together on Studies in African Linguistics in its early years, both having served as editor at different periods. They remained close colleagues when Lany was at USC and later Berkeley, and the two of them co-authored a major paper on tone. Paul Newman hired Russ as a graduate research assistant on his comparative Chadic project, research that formed the basis of Russ's Ph.D. dissertation, and later enticed him to join the research team of the fledgling Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages. They frequently exchanged ideas, resulting in an important jointly authored paper on the Chadic aspect system. In preparing this volume, we acknowledge the invaluable assistance and encouragement of David Odden, the current editor of SAL. Roxana Ma Newman helped greatly with technical and editorial matters. Financial support was provided by the West African Languages Institute, Indiana University. Vlll 1 RUSSELL G. SCHUH: A BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Roxana Ma Newman Russell Galen Schuh, affectionately known by his Hausa sobriquet as Malam Takalmi ("Mr. Shoe"), was born on March 14, 1941, in Corvalis, a small town in Oregon, although he spent most of his childhood in Klamath Falls, which he considers his hometown. Russ took an early interest in foreign languages, and earned a B.A. in French at the University of Oregon in 1963. He spent the following year at Northwestern University as a teaching assistant, earning his M.A. in French. It was there that he was introduced to the relatively new field of linguistics and began to develop his lifelong curiosity about the structural properties of the world's different languages. After his M.A., he spent a year studying linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was exposed to Asian and Native American languages. By then, he knew he was "hooked, born to be a linguist." Not content to continue being just a student, and wanting to broaden his experience, Russ embarked on a path that he says was "the defining moment" of his life: he volunteered for the Peace Corps in 1965. He went to Niger, a franco­ phone African country, and there he spent two years supervising adult literacy programs in the Agadez-Tahoua-Bilma region, applying his linguistics training to learn both Tamashaq, a Berber language, and Hausa, a Chadic language. Like many returned Peace Corps volunteers, Russ came back ready to go on to graduate school. He enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which had a nationally prominent program in African studies and African linguistics, and in a year (1968) earned a second M.A., this time in linguistics. Russ supported himself at UCLA as a teaching assistant responsible for teaching all levels of Hausa. In 1969-70, he interrupted his degree program to 2 Roxana Ma Newman return to West Africa as a research assistant for Paul Newman, who had received a National Science Foundation grant to conduct research on a number of Chadic languages in northern Nigeria. Working on this project, says Russ, gave him the research and geographical focus that he would subsequently develop over his linguistic career. Russ, accompanied by his wife Maxine, was based in Potiskum, now a thriving commercial center, but then a small town without electricity or running water. There he did research on Ngizim while Maxine collected data on Karekare, another West Chadic language. Russ's nearly 500-page dissertation on Ngizim syntax earned him a Ph.D. in 1972. Russ stayed on at UCLA as an acting assistant professor, teaching Hausa and general linguistics, until Newman, who had been appointed director of a newly formed Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages (CSNL) at Abdullahi Bayero College in Kano-now Bayero University-again tapped Russ to join him, this time as a research fellow of the center. Russ spent most of his two years (1973 to 1975) in Gashua, a remote town out in the bush doing ground-breaking fieldwork and writing up grammatical sketches on Bade, continuing to gather further data on Ngizim, while also learning about the little-known Manga dialect of Kanuri, a non-Chadic language. It was during those years that their first daughter Gretchen was born. (Their second daughter Elizabeth was born in the States.) In 1975, a tenure-track position in African linguistics opened up at UCLA, for which almost all of the research staff at CSNL applied, but for which Russ was ultimately and wisely chosen. He has been there ever since, teaching with enthusiasm about the nature of language, phonological analysis, the principles of historical change, and Hausa per se. He became full professor in 1984. Over the past 30 years, Russ has made some 15 trips to West Africa, some teaching related, but mostly for field research. For example, in 1982-83, Russ accepted a visiting professorship at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria, teaching courses on Hausa linguistics-taught entirely in Hausa! He spent two summers in 1987 and 1988 as director of the University of California's Education Summer Abroad Program in Togo, where he also worked on two Togolese languages, and the summer of 1991 in Dakar, Senegal, where he interviewed Wolof linguists and poets and collected Wolof poetry and songs, related to his growing linguistic interest in poetic meter in West African languages.