KORA DEDICATION This work is dedicated to the memory of the late Mike Besten, whose vision inspired this project, and in whose honour we have completed it. MIKE BESTEN, 2007. (Photograph courtesy of Edward Charles Human.) Ta a-b kobab ada kāxu-da, ti khoe-du’e! ‘Do not let our language be lost from us, you my people!’ (Benjamin Kats) ii KORA A LOST KHOISAN LANGUAGE OF THE EARLY CAPE AND THE GARIEP MENÁN DU PLESSIS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA PRESS SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY ONLINE FUNDED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES © 2018 University of South Africa & SAHO Funded by the National Institute for the Humanities & Social Sciences First edition, first impression ISBN 978-1-86888-981-5 (print version: Unisa Press) ISBN 978-1-86888-982-2 (online version: SAHO) Co-published by Unisa Press, University of South Africa & South African History Online Unisa: P O Box 392, 0003 UNISA, South Africa SAHO: 349 Albert Road, Woodstock, Cape Town 7925, South Africa [email protected] The publishers and the author acknowledge a contribution from the African Lives Series (Editor: Professor Andre Odendaal) Prior to acceptance for publication by Unisa Press, this work was subjected to a double-blind peer review process mediated through the Senate Publications Committee of the University of South Africa. Project editors: Hetta Pieterse & Ingrid Stegmann Print book design, typesetting & cover: Thea Bester-Swanepoel Copy editor: Jill Weintroub Indexer: Dawie Malan Printer: Harry’s Printers Print book cover: Portrait of a young Korana man carrying a stick and a spear, by William Burchell (Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, vol. 1 (1822) This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International: See www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons License, Please contact Unisa Press, University of South Africa at [email protected] or [email protected] Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND CONTENTS Acknowledgements and thanks vii List of figures and tables x List of abbreviations used in the glossing of example sentences xiv Introduction xv CHAPTER 1: The linguistic classification of Kora 1 1.1 Divisions and distributions of the Khoisan languages – a general overview 1 1.2 General characteristics of the JU and TUU families 7 1.3 General characteristics of the KHOE family 9 1.3.1 The Kalahari and Khoekhoe branches of KHOE 9 1.3.2 The Khoekhoe branch of KHOE 10 1.4 Hypotheses concerning relationships between languages of the KHOE family and various other languages of Africa 17 1.4.1 Mooted relations between the KHOE languages and languages of northern or eastern Africa 17 1.4.2 Relations between the KHOE languages and other Khoisan languages 20 1.4.3 Relations between KHOE languages and local languages of the BANTU family 20 1.4.4 Relations between the KHOE languages and varieties of Afrikaans 22 CHAPTER 2: Sources of the Cape Khoekhoe and Kora records: vocabularies, language data and texts 33 2.1 Records of Cape Khoekhoe: From the period prior to and after Dutch settlement (17th to late 18th centuries) 34 2.2 Records of Kora 38 2.2.1 From the end of the Dutch period 38 2.2.2 From the early period of British colonisation in the first half of het 19th century 38 2.2.3 From the later part of the 19th century 42 2.2.4 From the 20th century 45 2.2.5 Kora speakers in the 21st century 53 CHAPTER 3: The sounds of Kora 63 3.1 Vowels and diphthongs 64 3.1.1 Vowels 64 3.1.2 Diphthongs 67 3.2 The ordinary (or egressive) consonants of Kora 71 3.2.1 Stops 72 3.2.2 Nasals 76 3.2.3 Fricatives 77 3.2.4 Affricates 80 3.2.5 Approximants 84 3.2.6 Trill 85 3.3 The clicks, or ingressive consonants of Kora 85 3.3.1 The four basic (or ‘radical’) clicks of Kora, identified by place 87 3.3.2 The accompaniments of the Kora clicks 87 3.4 The Kora system of tone melodies 97 3.4.1 The citation melodies of Kora 97 3.4.2 The two classes of alternative tone melodies used in particular contexts 101 3.4.3 The theory of tonogenesis in Khoekhoe 102 CHAPTER 4: The structures of Kora 113 4.1 The noun phrase 117 4.1.1 Nominal expressions 118 4.1.2 Qualifying expressions 129 4.2 The adpositional phrase 136 4.3 The verb phrase 137 4.3.1 Verbs 138 4.3.2 Adverbs 147 4.4 The Kora sentence, part I 149 4.4.1 Action verbs in Kora, and the expression of tense, aspect, and mood 149 4.4.2 Process verbs 153 4.4.3 Non-verbal predications in Kora 155 4.5 The Kora sentence, part 2 160 4.5.1 Negatives 160 4.5.2 Interrogatives 162 4.5.3 Commands and polite requests 164 4.5.4 Coordination 164 4.5.5 Discourse connectives 166 4.5.6 Phrasal adjectives, phrasal nominals, and phrasal adverbs 169 4.6 Miscellaneous 173 CHAPTER 5: The heritage texts of the Korana people 183 5.1 Collective and personal histories, and private commentaries 186 5.2 Social and economic histories, and accounts of crafts and manufactures in earlier times 201 5.3 Oratory, lyrics, and folktales (or language-based arts) 227 5.3.1 The praise 227 5.3.2 The funeral lament 228 5.3.3 Lyrics 228 5.3.4 Word games 228 5.3.5 Animal stories 229 CHAPTER 6: A Kora-English Dictionary, with English-Kora index 274 Kora – English 278 English – Kora index 325 Special list 1: Names of the Korana clans 349 Special list 2: Korana names for animals, birds and smaller creatures 355 Special list 3: Korana names for plants and plant products 363 REFERENCES 378 INDEX 391 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS This project has been beset by difficulties and has taken far longer to bring to fruition than initially expected. This makes me all the more grateful for the tolerance of members of the Korana and Griqua communities in Bloemfontein in whose midst the book was first conceived; and for the patience and loyal support I have been blessed to receive from my dear husband Renfrew, and our two adored daughters, Camilla and Aurora. Apart from the members of my own small family, my staunchest supporters were my mother Frerna and my beloved brother Marius; and I know how proud they would have been to see this work finished. I have been fortunate to find a warmly supportive academic home as a Research Associate in the Department of General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University since 2013: for their gracious collegiality and encouragement I am deeply grateful to Christine Anthonissen, Johan Oosthuizen, and Frenette Southwood. The project could not have been completed without financial support: for this I am thankful to the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS, University of London, who in 2011 awarded us a small grant to fund the critically urgent fieldwork component of the project. Additional support came from Mark Kornbluh, the Dean of Arts and Science at the University of Kentucky, in the form of an invitation to spend a semester there in 2015 as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Linguistics headed by Andrew Hippisley. In the absence of any other material support, I have largely been sustained by the unflagging kindness and encouragement of good friends and colleagues. I believe they know who they are, but the list certainly includes Roger Lass, who has been my longstanding mentor in Linguistics; Anne Solomon, a long-term corresponding friend on matters of rock art and all other things beside; the members of the Qing- Orpen Project (John Wright, Jill Weintroub, José-Manuel de Prada Samper, Jeremy Hollmann and Justine Wintjes); fellow linguists Erin Pretorius, Kate Huddlestone, Alex Andrason, Erica George, Marcelyn Oostendorp, and Kerry Jones, as well as Bonny Sands (infinitely generous in her willingness to share data), and Willi Haacke (who has sent me several invaluable notes); and good comrades Horst Kleinschmidt vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS and Christine Crowley, Geoff Budlender and Aninka Claassens, Stephen Laufer, Barbara Nurse, Colin and Agnes Darch, and Sheila Barsel. Hospitable friends who made our stay in Kentucky a thoroughly enjoyable experience include Mark Kornbluh and Mimi Behar, Andrew Hippisley, Rusty Barrett, Fabiola Henri, Mark Lauersdorf, Mel Coffee, Carol Wilcher, Kathi Kern, Kate Black, Sue Roberts and Rich Schein and their family, Lisa Cligget, Steve and Joanna Davis, and Stan Brunn. Of course there are countless others, and I hope no-one will be offended if I have omitted a name simply through the poorness of my own memory. I am most grateful also to Hetta Pieterse and Sharon Boshoff at Unisa Press for their enthusiastic interest in the project from the outset, to Jill Weintroub for her firm but sensitive approach to copy-editing, and to my old comrade Omar Badsha at South African History Online (SAHO), whose offer to assist with the electronic aspects of the publication came at a time when my spirits were once again at a low ebb. Warm thanks also to Leander Gaum and Ian Africa at SAHO for their painstaking work on the electronic component of the project. The costs of production were partially subsidised, and the publishers are grateful in particular to the South African National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the grant received from them.