Typically, bantu languages have somewhere between ten and twenty noun classes, which are overtly marked on. We contend that the strong preference for english as. The degree of semantic motivation for noun classes varies from language to language. How far can we get in a proposal for bantu nominal syntax when we apply. Bantu language is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted over 20 times. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu bantu languages malin petzell university of gothenburg, sweden harald hammarstrom max planck institute for psycholinguistics, the netherlands abstract this article discusses lexical and grammatical comparison and subgrouping in a set of. A noun class system is a grammatical system that some languages use to overtly categorize nouns. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. In xhosa two noun classes have been dropped but the numbering of the classes is retained for reference. Table 1 summarizes a basic semantic grid common to bantu noun class systems spitulnik 1989. In the hypothetically reconstructed bantu parent language there are 23 noun classes. Some scholars have proposed other forms, especially for cl. Their interpretation as archaic noun class markers is not impossible. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu bantu.
Nonetheless, noun class systems are grammatically productive in most bantu languages, and semantically productive to some degree. The main argument of this overview article is that the bantu languages of south africa should have a far more significant role in education. Proto bantu had 19 classes, most of which have been conserved in its descendant languages, though some classes have been lost in a number of them. Ha is a typical bantu language with a noun class system and fairly complex verbal morphology, both inflectionally and derivationally. The bantu attribute noun class prefixes and their suffixal. Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of cameroon, throughout central africa, southeast africa and southern africa. To what degree are the bantu languages mutually intelligible.
Classes 6 and 10 are inherited as polyplural classes by most. Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first. Mutual intelligibility depends on the closeness of individual languages for example, shona, kalanga and chewa are surprisingly. Noun classes article about noun classes by the free dictionary. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. The typological characteristics of the bantu languages most relevant for this chapter are their noun class system and extensive noun class agreement. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. There are about 520 languages in the bantu family, 670 languages in the southern bantoid branch which includes bantu, and 1,532 in nigercongo.
A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation. Relative clause formation in the bantu languages of south africa article pdf available in southern african linguistics and applied language studies 2212. All members of a given class share the same prefix. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. As the source of bantu languages is generally argued to be in southwest adamawa, new data on bantu and related languages is important to the. Students of bantu languages have a great deal of material to work with, since the family is so large and speakers are widely scattered across africa. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu.
Languages in the bantu language family have on average 1220 noun classes, determined by number and gender. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Most bantu languages have tones which serve to make lexical andor grammatical distinctions. Pdf relative clause formation in the bantu languages of. Pages in category bantu languages the following 32 pages are in this category, out of 32 total. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions. A note on bantu extensions and syntactic word formation jochen zeller, university of kwazulunatal, durban. In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively. The xhosa language, as all the bantu languages, is structured around the noun.
This site provide you with information relevant to bantu languages and linguistics on the net. Introduction verb stems in bantu languages may include a number of derivational suffixes called extensions that express various functions, such as causative, applicative, reciprocal or passive. Welcome to all bantu netizens speakers, students, researchers. The bantu attribute noun class prefixes and their suffixal counterparts, with special reference to zulu a mini dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree magister artium. The system of noun classes is probably the characteristic most widely found in nigercongo languages and best known to those interested in language phenomena. The investigation will be done with reference to aspects such as the following. Media in category bantu languages the following 24 files are in this category, out of 24 total. Morphologythe most distinctive morphological feature of bantu languages is the grouping of nouns in different classes, marked by a prefix. Unfortunately, however, this is far from what is found when the attend made. The swahili noun class system is typical of bantu languages. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. Noun classes in bantu languages constitute an example of a semantically opaque system. Over 500 languages are classified in this family, including swahili, xhosa, and zulu.
The various bantu languages have different numbers of noun classes. These were assigned letters as and divided into decades groups a10, a20, etc. Pluralizing nouns across agglutinating bantu languages acl. In the northern caucasian languages noun classes can express the category of number and may be found in nouns and words with which they agree. Jouni maho remarks on a few polyplural classes in bantu 163 table 1 summarizes the situation in a selection of the studied languages. What is a noun class sil glossary of linguistic terms. The linear ordering of tamneg markers in the bantu languages. Section 2 outlines the reconstructed proto bantu noun class system and shows how some modern bantu languages, as well as more distantly related languages, have lost several noun class distinctions while preserving others.
Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. In addition, fsm2 as a scripting language has not yet been applied or implemented to any of the bantu languages. For example, proto bantu class 10 contains plurals of class 9 nouns and class 11 nouns, while class 6 contains plurals of class 5 nouns and class 15 nouns. However, the fact that bantu languages are more than five hundred 500 in number means a great fraction is still unaccounted for, and there is evidence that runyakitara is not yet participating in the literature available. The cradle of bantu languages has been established to be the grassland area of cameroun and the adjacent benue region of southeastern nigeria afolayan, 2000 the area is shown on the map below. Section 3 demonstrates the use of the bantu noun class system and its concordial. Classes 110 and 12 were paired, the first member of the pair was for singular nouns, the second for plural nouns. East bantu, southeast it is particularly controversial whether bantu language history was treelike. Noun classes are paired up in seven major double class genders, and one minor double class gender. The noun class system of chufie bafanji sil international. Introduction the inflectional morphology of the bantu verb has been the subject of many previous comparative and descriptive studies.
A polyplural noun class is a plural class for more than one singular class. The real difficulty lies in the fact that none of the different. Though the extent to which the system operates varies greatly, it is nonetheless found in some form in languages. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day country of cameroon. Guthrie classification of bantu languages wikipedia. Derived nominals in these languages have agglutinative noun class morphology that allows us to test predictions made by the n analysis of gender.
The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. A look at the grassfields borderland blasius achiritaboh university of buea, cameroon abstract as is well known, bantu nouns typically consist of a stem each with an overt or covert prefix arranged in classes of singular and plural pairs called genders. The singular form of a noun belongs to a different noun class than the plural form of that. To keep it simple, i have divided them into 9 groups. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the attributive noun classes, as well as their suffixal counterparts, firstly in bantu, and secondly in zulu. The bantu languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of africa from southern cameroon eastward to kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent. The bantu languages are attractive to the explorer not only from the harmonious adjustment of vowels and consonants, but from the logic of their grammatical structure, which, in the majority of these tongues, provides for a wide range and a nice. Each word must end in a vowel though in some modern dialects in eastern equatorial, west and south africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal. The protoforms of the prefixes of classes 910 in bantu languages have invariably been represented as nnmeeussen 1967. Firstly, unlike romance languages, there is a greater variety of bantu languages estimated 250400 separate languages. There are over 20 noun classes, although most languages use fewer nurse and. A number of the differentia in the list were described as useful and this no means incorrect.
The 250 or so narrow bantu languages are conventionally divided up into geographic zones first proposed by malcolm guthrie 19671971. In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. Originally, bantu languages had over 20 noun categories. Isizulu course work in the department of african languages at the university of pretoria by linkie mohlala supervisor. Not surprisingly, linguistic fragmentation is highest in the northwest. The tonal system of ha has been analyzed as a pitchaccent system harjula 2004. Mar 18, 2020 the bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken primarily in the southern part of africa. Also shown in the map, are parts of the africa continent that are occupied by three branches of bantu, namely, western bantu, eastern bantu and.
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