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Le nouveau Commissaire Général du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (CENAREST) du Gabon, le Pr. Alfred Ngomanda, sera en visite à Bruxelles les 25 et 26 octobre prochain, notamment pour participer au jury de thèse de Nicolas Texier à l’ULB (26/10, 16h).

La visite du Commissaire Général du CENAREST est exceptionnelle et constitue une excellente occasion de le rencontrer et de lui exposer nos thématiques de recherche, ainsi que de rencontrer des acteurs scientifiques belges travaillant dans cette région. Nous profiterons ainsi de sa venue pour organiser une demi-journée scientifique à l’ULB le 25/10 à partir de 14h, consacrée à la recherche au Gabon et dans la sous-région. Ce sera, d’une part, l’occasion au Commissaire Général de présenter le CENAREST et la politique de la recherche au Gabon aux participants, et d’autre part, de présenter au Commissaire Général les recherches effectuées au Gabon par des équipes belges. Le caractère inter-disciplinaire de cette réunion scientifique permettra en outre aux chercheurs belges de différentes disciplines de découvrir une diversité de thèmes de recherches effectués dans la sous-région.

 

From October 24 until December 24 2021, BantUGent associate Jean-Pierre Donzo (ISP Gombe, Kinshasa) will be in Ghent for a research visit at BantUGent. He has been invited as a research fellow of the BantuFirst project to work on the velar merger in Central-Western Bantu with Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen and on the phonological and phonetic landscape of the Bantu languages of the Mai Ndombe Province (DRC) with Lorenzo Maselli.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Berlin professorship for African languages whose first holder was D. Westermann, its current holder Prof. Tom Güldemann is organizing a three-day workshop (November 4-6, 2021) titled “West-central African linguistic history between Macro-Sudan Belt and Niger-Congo: commemorating Diedrich Westermann’s legacy and the 100th anniversary of the Berlin professorship for African languages”. BantUGent associate Jean-Pierre Donzo (ISP-Gombe, Kinshasa) will also present a talk titled “Les implosives dans les langues du nord-ouest de la RD Congo: héritage diachronique ou diffusion”.

 

The full program can be found below. All non-presenters who are interested are required to register beforehand via email. Please send such an email to Gianna Marks at gianna.marks@yahoo.com, preferably with something like “Westermann workshop” in the subject matter line of the email.

 

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“West-central African linguistic history between Macro-Sudan Belt and Niger-Congo: commemorating Diedrich Westermann’s legacy and the 100th anniversary of the Berlin professorship for African languages”

I

Italic = digital presentation

Time	Thursday, 4th November	Friday, 5th November	Saturday, 6th November
09:00	Welcome and introduction
09:30-10:15	1 Johanna Nichols and Frederik Hartmann “The greater Sahara in the historical linguistic geography of Africa”	1 Henning Schreiber “Areality and borrowability: pronouns in the Macro-Sudan Belt”	1 Tom Güldemann and Ines Fiedler “Gender-number suffixes across Niger-Congo”
10:15-11:00	2 Dmitry Idiatov, Guillaume Segerer and Mark Van de Velde “Areal patterns of noun/verb ratios in Sub-Saharan Africa”	2 Tom Güldemann “Animacy-based noun classification as an areal trait of the eastern Macro-Sudan Belt”	2 Ulrich Kleinewillinghöfer “Upper Benue-Volta: the morphological evidence”
11:00-11:30	Coffee break	Coffee break	Coffee break
11:30-12:15	3 Florian Lionnet and Nicholas R. Rolle “Phonological profile changes in the Macro-Sudan Belt: the antagonism between ATR and interior vowels”	3 Jean-Pierre Donzo “Les implosives dans les langues bantu et non-bantu du nord-ouest de la RD Congo: héritage diachronique ou diffusion”	3 Harald Hammarström and Guillaume Segerer “Computational experiments in Adamawa sub-classification”
12:15-13:00	4 Valentin Vydrin “Tonal density index in Mande and beyond”	4 André Motingea Mangulu “Epenthetic l on vocalic affixes in some Inner Congo Basin languages: common innovation or contact-induced feature?”	4 Jack Merrill “Atlantic groups as primary Niger-Congo branches”
13:00-14:30	Lunch break	Lunch break	Lunch break
14:30-15:15	5 Florian Lionnet “Areal alignment and the diversification of Bua languages (Chad)”	5 Didier Demolin “The languages of the Ituri forest Pygmies: contact and historical perspectives”	5 Final discussion
15:15-16:00	6 Jakob Lesage “Plural words in the Macro-Sudan Belt”	6 Felix K. Ameka “Semantic convergence in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa): a micro-area within the Macro-Sudanic Belt?”
16:00-16:30	Coffee break	Coffee break
16:30-17:15	7 Karee Garvin, Katherine Russell and Hannah Sande “A typology of STAMP morphs in the Macro-Sudan Belt”	7 Roland Kießling “Looking for micro-areal features within the Macro-Sudan Belt”
17:15-18:00	8 Gregory Anderson “Towards a typology of auxiliary verb constructions, STAMP morphs and morphologically complex verb forms in Chadic languages”	8 Jeff Good “Individual-level lexical variation in the Bantu homeland and its implications for the development of Benue-Congo”

 

Martine Robbeets, Mark Hudson and the Archaeolinguistic Research Group of the Max Planck Institute of the Science of Human History in Jena (Germany) organize a three-day online workshop (November 16-18, 2021) on “Archaeology and Language” involving all the  contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language, which they co-edit.

 

On November 18 (11.30-11.55 am CET), Koen Bostoen (BantUGent), Peter Coutros (BantUGent) & Carina Schlebusch (Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University) will present a concept paper on the interdisciplinary “Niger-Congo including Bantu” chapter, which they were invited to write for the handbook.

Sifra Van Acker, Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) have, together with the world-renowned banana expert Edmond De Langhe (KU Leuven), a new article out in the journal Studies in African Linguistics. It is titled “Reconstructing West-Coastal Bantu Vocabulary as Evidence for Early Banana Cultivation in Central Africa” and part of the first author’s PhD project within the wider BantuFirst project.

On September 15, 2021, Maud Devos (RMCA – BantUGent) talked about “Language and Orality in the AfricaMuseum” during a workshop on “Voices from the past” at the Ghent Museum of Daily Life, aka “Huis van Alijn”. She showcased the oral heritage in African languages, mainly from Bantu-speaking Africa, exhibited and archived at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. Her talk and those of other speakers are available here.

A first version of the program for the Linguists’ Day of the Linguistic Society of Belgium on 22 October 2021 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has been drafted. You can find a copy in the attachment. One of the opening talks is on “Phonetic documentation in the  underexplored linguistic  landscape of the Mai–Ndombe  Province of the Democratic  Republic of the Congo” by Lorenzo Maselli, Jean–Pierre  Donzo, Sara Pacchiarotti and  Koen Bostoen from BantUGent

 

If you would like to attend, you can do so free of charge, even without being a member. Registration is possible through this form. Deadline for registration is 30 September 2021. Registration is compulsory, but free of charge and sanitary measures allowing, the conference will be organised on campus. If Covid measures prevent a live event, the entire conference will be moved online.

For more information check here.

On October 7, 2021, Hannah Gibson and Jenneke van der Wal organise an online workshop exploring the expression of mirativity and evidentiality in Bantu languages with research from amongst other Deo Kawalya (University of Makerere – BantUGent) & Maud Devos (RMCA – BantUGent).

Please contact Hannah Gibson (h.gibson@essex.ac.uk) or Jenneke van der Wal (g.j.van.der.wal@hum.leidenuniv.nl) if you are interested. They will send you the Zoom link!

 

13:00	Start and welcome	Hannah Gibson and Jenneke van der Wal
13:10-13:40	A corpus-driven analysis of the Luganda near-synonym evidential particles mbu and nti	Deo Kawalya
13:40-14:10	Looking for evidentiality in Bantu	Thera Crane
14:10-14:40	Mirativity in Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili	Claudius Kihara
14:40-15:00	BREAK
15:00-15:30	The expression of miratives in Rukiga	Allen Asiimwe
15:30-16:00	On the possibility of a mirative enclitic in Shangaji	Maud Devos
16:00-16:30	Post-verbal clitics and mirativity in Bemba	Nancy Kula, Hannah Gibson and Kyle Jerro
16:30-17:00	BREAK
17:00-17:30	Possible evidentiality in Copi	Melle Groen
17:30-18:00	Evidentiality Contrasts and TAM Marking in Bamiléké-Dschang: A Case of Double Duty	Matthew N. Czuba
18:00-18:30	Emphatic interpretations of Object Marking	Hannah Lippard, Justine Sikuku, Crisófia Langa da Camara, and Michael Diercks

On September 7, 2021, Koen Bostoen gave a short online master class on the Bantu Expansion in the precolonial African History course of Prof. Mohammed Bashir Salau and Drs. Matthew Lempke at the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History of the University of Mississippi (USA).

As the President of Euralex, the European Association for Lexicography, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent) attends and chairs several events at the virtual Euralex XIX congress,  which is organized by the Democritus University of Thrace in Alexandroupoli, Greece (7-9 September 2021).