Author: Koen Bostoen

From March 24 until June 27 Prof. Igor Matonda (UNIKIN) is on a BantuFirst-funded research leave at BantUGent. Apart from consulting and exchanging with colleagues within our research group , the main goals of his stay are to

1. participate in BantuFirst workshop An Archaeology of the Bantu Expansion: early settlers south of the Congo rainforest (March 29-30, 2023),
2. prepare the forthcoming joint volume An Archaeology of the Bantu Expansion: Early Settlers South of the Congo Rainforest (Routledge) of which he is co-editor;
3. present online the talk titled Mapping the Archaeological Landscape of the Kwilu-Kasaï River Network, DRC at the 26th Biennial Meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists at Rice University.

For more info, check here.

On April 3 2023, Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent) presents a talk titled “2000 years of Bantu-Khoisan contact in Southern Africa: linguistic traces of interactions between hunter-gatherers and food-producers“ during a workshop on Past interactions in Southern Africa. For more info, see here.

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/373

When? Thu 2 March 2023, 14:30-17:00 (Tokyo time)
Where? Venue at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Who and what?
• Minah Nabirye: Language documentation for Lusoga (Bantu, JE16)
• Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: From corpus to online lexicon for Swahili (Bantu, G42d), and what its searches can tell us about actual dictionary use
Contact person: Professor SHINAGAWA Daisuke

http://www.tufs.ac.jp/tokyo-african-linguistics-knot/2023/02/dddlingtalk20225.html

From corpus to online lexicon for Swahili, and what its searches tell us about actual dictionary use

In a new French-spoken documentary film, Guy Kouarata (BantUGent) recounts the life and work of the Congolese historian and politician Jérôme Ollandet.

Guy Kourata (BantUGent) shared his reflections on the restitution of African cultural heritage during an international scientific symposium devoted to the life and work of Jérôme Ollandet at the Palais des Congrès in Brazzaville from December 14 to 16, 2022.

 

The PhD dissertation which Heidi Goes defended earlier this year (April 1, 2022) at UGent has been covered in a recent article by Miguel Faria de Bastos on the Portuguese language website Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa.

On Thursday November 24 Koen Bostoen & Guy Kouarata represent BantUGent on the “Meet the Ambassadors Event — Celebrating 15 years of AUGent Africa Platform” organized by the AUGent Africa Platform at Het Pand, Onderbergen 1, 9000 Ghent. The event’s program is available here. Their presentation can be downloaded here.