Historical Linguistics

Linguists and archaeologists offer complementary viewpoints on human behaviour and culture in past African communities. While historical-comparative linguistics commonly deals with the immaterial traces of the past in Africa’s present-day languages, archaeology unearths the material vestiges of ancient cultures. Even if both sciences share similar core concepts, their methods, data and interpretive frameworks are profoundly different. Explaining some basic principles of historical-comparative linguistics as applied to the Bantu languages and debunking some common misconceptions are the central aims of this contribution

Examining variation in the expression of tense/aspect to classify the Kikongo Language Cluster

In this article we examine variation in the expression of tense and aspect (TA) in 23 modern and two historical Bantu language varieties belonging to Guthrie’s B40, H10 and H30 groups in order to shed light on the internal classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC). We apply the Comparative Method to this specific set of morphological data to test a recent phylogenetic classification of the KLC. We identify eight widespread TA markers as shared retentions dating back to the period before the internal fragmentation of the KLC. Six of these are inherited from Proto‑Bantu. Two other markers go back to Proto‑Kikongoid and Proto‑Kikongo. They confirm that the KLC constitutes a discrete clade within West‑Coastal Bantu. We furthermore distinguish fourteen shared innovations that took place after the break‑up of the last common ancestor of the KLC. These innovations provide corroborating evidence for three phylogenetic subgroups within the KLC, namely East, South and West, and for the fact that the latter subgroup falls apart in two discrete genealogical subunits. They furthermore testify to the horizontal transmission of TA features between subgroups. Such language convergence often correlates with relatively recent historical developments within the Lower Congo region and contributed to the multilayered constitution of the KLC

Bantu lexical reconstruction

Lexical reconstruction has been an important enterprise in Bantu historical linguistics since the earliest days of the discipline. In this chapter a historical overview is provided of the principal scholarly contributions to that field of study. It is also explained how the Comparative Method has been and can be applied to reconstruct ancestral Bantu vocabulary via the intermediate step of phonological reconstruction and how the study of sound change needs to be completed with diachronic semantics in order to correctly reconstruct both the form and the meaning of etymons. Finally, some issues complicating this type of historical linguistic research, such as “osculance” due to prehistoric language contact, are addressed, as well as the relationship between reconstruction and classification

Progressive vowel height harmony in Proto-Kikongo and Proto-Bantu

The systematic comparison of the different types of progressive Vowel Height Harmony (pVHH) attested within the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC) leads to the conclusion that this common Bantu process of long-distance assimilation cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Kikongo. The ‘(a)symmetric-pVHH’ and ‘back-pVHH’ patterns, the two main and structurally different kinds of pVHH within the KLC, emerged independently and relatively late within two distinct subgroups, viz. South Kikongo and North Kikongo respectively. Moreover, the ‘(a)symmetric-pVHH’ pattern further spread from a South Kikongo focal area coinciding with the heartland of the Kongo kingdom to other parts of the KLC through contact-induced dialectal diffusion. Furthermore, the historical-comparative evidence from the KLC suggests that neither symmetric nor asymmetric pVHH should be reconstructed to Proto-Bantu, the most recent common ancestor of all Bantu languages

Was Proto-Kikongo a 5 or 7-vowel language? Bantu spirantization and vowel merger in the Kikongo language cluster

This article addresses whether Proto-Kikongo (PK), the most recent common ancestor of the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), should be reconstructed with an inventory of 5 or 7 vowel phonemes. Based on the synchronic vowel systems of its descendants, the most economic reconstruction would be 5 vowels, as all present-day varieties within the KLC have 5 vowels or once went through a 5-vowel (5V) stage. If such were the case, the reduction of the inherited Proto-Bantu (PB) 7-vowel (7V) system to a 5V system in PK would count as a genealogically significant shared innovation setting apart the KLC as a discrete sub-group within the “West-Coastal” or “West-Western” branch of the Bantu family. Most other West-Coastal Bantu (WCB) languages have either retained the PB 7V system or extended it. However, based on Bantu spirantization (BS) patterns within the KLC, it cannot be excluded that PK actually was a 7V language. Within Bantu, BS and 7>5V reduction are known to be closely interconnected sound changes in that the vowel merger generally takes place after BS. The irregular application of BS at the stem level in several KLC varieties as well as the near-total absence of BS across morpheme boundaries suggest that PK was a 7V language. Different stems manifest irregular patterns of BS in different varieties across the KLC. These irregularities can only be accounted for if we assume that the merger of PB close (/*i/, /*u/) and near-close vowels (/*ɪ/, /*ʊ/) recurrently occurred within the KLC as an independent innovation after BS had started but before it had affected all possible targets within the language.de ce dernier ont soit conservé le système à 7V, soit développé des systèmes comptant plus de 7 phonèmes vocaliques. Cependant, la façon dont s’est déroulée la spirantisation au sein du KLC suggère qu’il se pourrait bien que le PK ait été une langue à 7V. De fait, au sein de l’ensemble bantou, il est bien connu que la spirantisation et le passage de 7 à 5 unités vocaliques constituent des évolutions phonologiques étroitement liées, la réduction du nombre de voyelles survenant généralement après le phénomène de spirantisation. Le fait que la spirantisation ne se soit produite que de façon irrégulière à l’intérieur des racines et restée exceptionnelle au niveau des frontières entre morphèmes laisse penser que le PK était une langue à 7V. En effet, ce ne sont pas les mêmes radicaux qui manifestent une spirantisation dans les diverses variétés du KLC. Ces irrégularités ne peuvent s’expliquer que si l’on admet que la neutralisation du timbre entre voyelles fermées (/*i/, /*u/) et mi-fermées (/*ɪ/, /*ʊ/) s’est produite à plusieurs reprises dans le KLC, et que ce processus de neutralisation constitue donc une innovation indépendante dans les variétés où il est attesté. On est aussi conduit à supposer que ces neutralisations se sont produites après le début du phénomène de spirantisation, mais avant que ledit phénomène n’ait affecté toutes les cibles possibles dans les langues concernées

The Bantu expansion

The Bantu Expansion stands for the concurrent dispersal of Bantu languages and Bantu-speaking people from an ancestral homeland situated in the Grassfields region in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon. During their initial migration across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, which took place between approximately 5,000 and 1,500 years ago, Bantu speech communities not only introduced new languages in the areas where they immigrated but also new lifestyles, in which initially technological innovations such as pottery making and the use of large stone tools played an important role as did subsequently also farming and metallurgy. Wherever early Bantu speakers started to develop a sedentary way of life, they left an archaeologically visible culture. Once settled, Bantu-speaking newcomers strongly interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers, as is still visible in the gene pool and/or the languages of certain present-day Bantu speech communities. The driving forces behind what is the principal linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa are still a matter of debate, but it is increasingly accepted that the climate-induced destruction of the rainforest in West Central Africa around 2,500 years ago gave a boost to the Bantu Expansion

On how 'middle' plus 'associative/reciprocal' became 'passive' in the Bantu A70 languages

In this paper we show that the Bantu A70 languages did not preserve the passive morpheme inherited from Proto-Bantu (PB), but developed a new suffix. It is a morpheme that is compound in origin, consisting of two verbal derivation suffixes which still function independently in today's languages as a middle marker and an associative/reciprocal marker respectively, though with variable degrees of productivity. The genesis of a passive marker from the stacking of two pre-existing suffixes is a typologically rare evolution path, but it fits in with a wider Bantu phenomenon of double verb extensions which develop non-compositional meanings. Especially double extensions involving the Proto-Bantu associative/reciprocal marker *-an- tend to develop such idiosyncratic meanings. This suffix is also one of the constituents of the Bantu A70 passive marker Nevertheless, even within Bantu, the emergence of a productive passive marker from such double extension is unique. In this paper, we argue that the notion of co-participation may account for the rising of this passive meaning out of the stacking of the common Bantu associative/reciprocal suffix to a common Bantu middle suffix. The semantic development of this compound suffix fix (and its historical constituents) happened within the semantic continuum that links reciprocals, reflexives, middles and passives in many languages of the world, but did not necessarily follow the typologically common reflexive > reciprocal > middle > passive cline

Linguistique historique

Les linguistes et les archéologues développent des points de vue complémentaires sur la culture et le comportement des sociétés africaines du passé. Tandis que la linguistique historique comparée traite habituellement des traces immatérielles du passé dans les langues de l’Afrique contemporaine, l’archéologie met au jour des vestiges matériels de cultures anciennes. Même si les deux disciplines partagent des concepts clés similaires, leurs méthodes, données et cadres interprétatifs diffèrent profondément. Cette contribution vise à expliquer les principes de base de la linguistique historique comparée – telle qu’appliquée aux langues bantu – et à débusquer une série de fausses idées courantes