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Bantu languages: Difference between revisions
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The technical term Bantu, meaning "human beings" or simply "people", was first used by Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875), as this is reflected in many of the languages of this group. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as ''muntu'' or ''mutu'' for "human being" or in simplistic terms "person", and the plural prefix for human nouns starting with ''mu-'' (class 1) in most languages is ''ba-'' (class 2), thus giving ''bantu'' for "people". Bleek, and later Carl Meinhof, pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical structures of Bantu languages. | The technical term Bantu, meaning "human beings" or simply "people", was first used by Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875), as this is reflected in many of the languages of this group. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as ''muntu'' or ''mutu'' for "human being" or in simplistic terms "person", and the plural prefix for human nouns starting with ''mu-'' (class 1) in most languages is ''ba-'' (class 2), thus giving ''bantu'' for "people". Bleek, and later Carl Meinhof, pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical structures of Bantu languages. | ||
==Classification== | |||
{{main|Guthrie classification of Bantu languages}} | |||
[[File:Bantu zones.png|thumb|350px|The approximate locations of the sixteen Guthrie Bantu zones, including the addition of a zone J around the Great Lakes. The Jarawan languages are spoken in Nigeria.]] | |||
The term 'narrow Bantu' was coined by the ''Benue–Congo Working Group'' to distinguish Bantu as recognized by Malcolm Guthrie in his 1948 classification of the Bantu languages, from the Bantoid languages not recognized as Bantu by Guthrie (1948). In recent times, the distinctiveness of Narrow Bantu as opposed to the other Southern Bantoid groups has been called into doubt (cf. Piron 1995, Williamson & Blench 2000, Blench 2011), but the term is still widely used. A coherent classification of Narrow Bantu will likely need to exclude many of the Zone A and perhaps Zone B languages. | |||
There is no true genealogical classification of the (Narrow) Bantu languages. Most attempted classifications are problematic in that they consider only languages that happen to fall within traditional Narrow Bantu, rather than South Bantoid, which has been established as a unit by the comparative method. The most widely used classification, the alphanumeric coding system developed by Guthrie, is mainly geographic. | |||
At a broader level, the family is commonly split in two depending on the reflexes of proto-Bantu tone patterns: Many Bantuists group together parts of zones A through D (the extent depending on the author) as ''Northwest Bantu'' or ''Forest Bantu'', and the remainder as ''Central Bantu'' or ''Savanna Bantu''. The two groups have been described as having mirror-image tone systems: Where Northwest Bantu has a high tone in a cognate, Central Bantu languages generally have a low tone, and vice versa. | |||
Northwest Bantu is more divergent internally than Central Bantu, and perhaps less conservative due to contact with non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages; Central Bantu is likely the innovative line cladistically. Northwest Bantu is clearly not a coherent family, but even for Central Bantu the evidence is lexical, with little evidence that it is a historically valid group. | |||
The only attempt at a detailed genetic classification to replace the Guthrie system is the 1999 "Tervuren" proposal of Bastin, Coupez, and Mann.<ref>The Guthrie, Tervuren, and SIL lists are compared side by side in [https://web.archive.org/web/20090325021837/http://www.african.gu.se/maho/downloads/bantulineup.pdf Maho 2002].</ref> However, it relies on lexicostatistics, which, because of its reliance on similarity rather than shared innovations, may predict spurious groups of conservative languages that are not closely related. Meanwhile, ''Ethnologue'' has added languages to the Guthrie classification that Guthrie overlooked, while removing the Mbam languages (much of zone A), and shifting some languages between groups (much of zones D and E to a new zone J, for example, and part of zone L to K, and part of M to F) in an apparent effort at a semi-genetic, or at least semi-areal, classification. This has been criticized for sowing confusion in one of the few unambiguous ways to distinguish Bantu languages. Nurse & Philippson (2006) evaluate many proposals for low-level groups of Bantu languages, but the result is not a complete portrayal of the family. ''Glottolog'' has incorporated many of these into their classification.<ref name=Glottolog/> | |||
Nonetheless, some version of zone S (Southern Bantu) does appear to be a coherent group. The languages that share Dahl's Law may also form a valid group, Northeast Bantu. The infobox at right lists these together with various low-level groups that are fairly uncontroversial, though they continue to be revised. The development of a rigorous genealogical classification of many branches of Niger–Congo, not just Bantu, is hampered by insufficient data. | |||
==Language structure== | |||
Guthrie reconstructed both the phonemic inventory and the vocabulary of Proto-Bantu. | |||
The most prominent grammatical characteristic of Bantu languages is the extensive use of affixes (see Sotho grammar and Ganda noun classes for detailed discussions of these affixes). Each noun belongs to a class, and each language may have several numbered classes, somewhat like grammatical gender in European languages. The class is indicated by a prefix that is part of the noun, as well as agreement markers on verb and qualificative roots connected with the noun. Plural is indicated by a change of class, with a resulting change of prefix. | |||
