Menan du Plessis' Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

The name of the fourth river : a small puzzle presented by a fragment of Kora, for Johan Oosthuizen

CITATION: Du Plessis, M. 2017. The name of the fourth river : a small puzzle presented by a fragment of Kora, for Johan Oosthuizen. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 48:123-137, doi:10.5774/48-0-285.The original publication is available at http://spil.journals.ac.zaThis squib is a brief venture into the minor sub-branch of Linguistics known as Toponomastics, or the study of the meanings and sources of place names. The topic is suggested by a previously unpublished fragment in the Khoekhoe variety once spoken by the Korana Khoi of South Africa, in which four rivers (haka ǃgariku) were mentioned by Piet Links. While the names of three of the four are easily established, it is the identity and the original Khoekhoe name of the fourth river that is sought here. Various early records are consulted and compared for the purpose, and the original Khoekhoe names of three major rivers within the Vaal-Gariep system are proposed. In conclusion, the identity and name of the fourth river most likely to have been intended by Piet Links is arrived at.http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/285Publisher’s versio

The damaging effects of romantic mythopoeia on Khoesan linguistics

CITATION: Du Plesis, M. 2014. The damaging effects of romantic mythopoeia on Khoesan linguistics. Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural Studies, 28(3):569-592, doi:10.1080/02560046.2014.929217.The original publication is available at http://www.tandfonline.comThe article outlines some basic guidelines that should inform studies in comparative linguistics, and notes a tendency in contemporary Khoesan linguistics for these to be neglected, while pre-theoretical assumptions of ‘ancientness’ and ‘otherness’ take their place. The article demonstrates the damaging effects of this romanticism through two brief case studies – one concerning the supposedly primordial stratum made up of the JU and !UI-TAA languages, and the other concerning a conjectured intermediate stratum made up of the KHOE (or ‘Khoe- Kwadi’) languages. It is concluded that the construction of these linguistic layers, so neatly in agreement with the layers proposed in certain models of southern African population history, has been enabled by a willingness to believe that perceptions of otherness have some absolute and meaningful value, and that they take precedence over fundamental principles.http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560046.2014.929217Post prin

Words of apparent Arabic, Persian, Hindi or Malay origin in KHOE

The paper builds on the early detection by Carl Meinhof of one or two Arabic loanwords in Nama (Khoekhoe, Khoe), and explores the possibility of other borrowings, from not only from Arabic but also languages of the Cushitic family. A context in which such borrowings could have occurred is provided through the presentation of historical evidence that suggests, for the first time, an actual connection between speakers of Khoekhoe languages – and some of the early Shona states involved in the early Indian Ocean trade along the east coast of Africa, where foreign partners included speakers not only of Arabic but also Persian, Hindi, and Malay. Two sets of additional borrowings that have been found (from Arabic, and Cushitic) are then presented and discussed. Different distribution patterns in the case of borrowings shared with various Ntu languages are argued to suggest more than one stage in the emergence of the modern Khoe languages, while a particular connection is identified, for the first time, with languages specifically of the Mozambican and Madagascan coasts (as opposed to the Swahili coast). This evidence suggests that the earliest interactions behind some of the borrowings occurred during the older phase associated with the southerly hub of the Indian Ocean trade – which allows us to propose, in turn, that the people who came to be known as the ‘Khoi’ were forged by the constantly changing social and economic dynamics of an early African—yet cosmopolitan—world

Bird names in TUU languages of southern Africa

Tabulated list of bird names in ǃUi and Taa branches of TUU, with selected comparative reference data for KHOE and NTU languages. To accompany paper [Title] [Authors] (temporarily anonymised, pending review). Sources set out in Appendix B of the paper