The Bantu languages are the largest African language family, both in terms of number of languages and speakers and geographical distribution. About 350 million or about one in three Africans speak one or more of the 500 or so Bantu languages, which stretch from above the equator to South Africa. Swahili, Lingala, Kongo, Luba, Rwanda, Rundi, Ganda, Zulu, Xhosa, and Shona are just some of the best-known Bantu languages. Proto-Bantu is about 5000 years old and is said to have been born in the border area between Nigeria and Cameroon. This lecture is about the reconstruction of this hypothetical ancestral language, about the exceptionally rapid and large-scale diffusion of its daughter languages and about the history and future of the study area.
Where? Camelot (3.30), Campus Boekentoren, Building 05.03 – Blandijn, third floor, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent
1:30-2:00 pm: Peter Coutros(BantUGent – BantuFirst project):2021 archaeological reconnaissance of the West-Coastal Bantu homeland: preliminary results
2:00-2:30 pm: Sifra Van Acker (BantUGent – BantuFirst project): The introduction of sugarcane in Central Africa and reconstructing the semantics of *cʊ̀ngʊ̀ in Proto-West-Coastal-Bantu
2:30-2:45 pm: break
2:45-3.15 pm: Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent – BantuFirst project): Tonal evolutions with diagnostic power for the internal classification of West-Coastal-Bantu
Contact (in case you want to attend through Zoom):
For the MS-teams link, write to Kim.Groothuis@UGent.be.
In studies on African lexical tone languages, intonation is often approached either as emergent from the cumulative effects of local interactions between sub-tonal features like the register feature (Welmers, 1959; Inkelas & al, 1986; Connell & Ladd, 1990; Clements, 1979) or as limited to domain boundary manifestations (Rialland, 2007). When global effects are mentioned, they are often treated as phonetic in nature (Inkelas & al, 1986; a.o), supposedly because they match the predictions of the Frequency Code, which holds that questions are realized with a higher pitch than statements (Gussenhoven, 2002; Cahill, 2013). Here, we present the results of a case study (production and perception) of yes/no question intonation in Ede Chaabe (cbj, Benin). We found that questions’ register is lower and not higher, but also have a L% edge tone known to characterize ‘lax’ prosody languages (Rialland, 2009); hence contrary to the Frequency Code. Considering these findings, we argue that the observed global effects are represented in the grammar in the form of a Register feature, which is treated in the present account as an intonational feature than spans specific prosodic domains. We go a step further in proposing a new sub-tonal feature model that does not use a register feature (like previous models do), but rather treats lexical tones as pitch change instructions, where Polarity (+/-) indicates the direction of the change and Step (1/2) would indicate its magnitude. In this sense, any given lexical tone (with Polarity and Step features) is projected on the intonational Register plane, post-lexically.
Convened by the ΔiaLing and BantUGent research groups, Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Augsburg University) will present a talk titled “Towards a better understanding of Creoles through their comparison with fossilized learner varieties. The case of Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese”. This event is part of an Erasmus+ exchange.
Both Palenquero –a Spanish-lexified Creole spoken in the small village of San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia)– and the ‘partially restructured’ varieties of Portuguese spoken in the province of Cabinda (Angola) share the same ‘substrate’: some western varieties belonging to the Kikongo Language Cluster: cp. Schryver/Grollemund/Branford/Bostoen 2015 and Bostoen/Schryver 2018).
Thus, getting to know the structural similarities and differences between Palenquero and Cabindan Portuguese turns out to be extraordinarily helpful for the study of creolization, since it enables us to set quantitative and/or qualitative limits between the process of creolization and the fossilization of interlanguages (Selinker 1972), especially as regards the role of the substrate in the two possible outcomes (cf. Winford 2008; see Gutiérrez Maté 2020 for the particular case of the two languages compared here).
The ultimate goal of this talk is determining the different historical, sociological and attitudinal processes (i.e. the different ecologies) that account for the birth of a Creole, in one case, and a non-Creole, in the other, out of a very similar combination of contributing languages (Kikongo substrate and Ibero-Romance superstrate).
The data have been collected by the author in situ as a result of his fieldwork in Palenque (2017, 2018) and Cabinda (2019, 2020). In addition, for the case of Palenquero, the author also uses the interviews made by A. Schwegler during his first stays in the village (1985-1988), which reveal themselves as extraordinarily helpful for containing large language samples of so-called Traditional Palenquero (see Lipski 2020 about bilingualism in the village and other non- -traditional varieties of Palenquero).
Bibliography
Bostoen, Koen / Gilles-Maurice de Schryver. 2018. Seventeenth-century Kikongo is not the ancestor of present-day Kikongo. In K. Bostoen & I. Brinkman (eds.), The Kongo kingdom: the origins, dynamics and cosmopolitan culture of an African polity (pp. 60–102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel. 2020. De Palenque a Cabinda: un paso necesario para los estudios afroiberorrománicos y criollos. Gabriele Knauer, Alexandra Ortiz Wallner & Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (eds.), Mundos caribeños – Caribbean Worlds – Mondes Caribéens. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 105-138.
Lipski, John M. 2020. Palenquero and Spanish in Contact: Exploring the interface. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schryver, Gilles-Maurice / Grollemund, Rebecca /Branford, Simon /Bostoen, Koen. 2015. Introducing a state‑of‑the‑art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster. Africana Linguistica 21: 87-162
Schwegler, Armin. 2016. Combining Population Genetics with Historical Linguistics: On the African Origins of the Latin America Black and Mulatto Populations. In: Sessarego, Sandro/Tejedo, Fernando (eds.): Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10(3). 209–241.
Winford, Donald. 2008. Processes of Creole formation and related contact-induced language change. Journal of Language Contact 2/1. 124-145
Where?Faculty Room, Campus Boekentoren, Building 05.03 – Blandijn, first floor, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent
1:30-2:15 pm: Zhen Li (Leiden University, BaSIS project): Word order, subject marking and information structure in Teke
2:15-2:45 pm: Lorenzo Maselli (BantUGent – FWO fellow): Phonetic documentation in the underexplored linguistic landscape of the Mai-Ndombe Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
2:45-3.15 pm:Sifra Van Acker (BantUGent – BantuFirst project): The introduction of sugarcane in Central Africa and reconstructing the semantics of *cʊ̀ngʊ̀ in Proto-West-Coastal-Bantu
Heidi Goes talked about her research on the Kikongo Language Cluster and her fieldwork in Cabinda on June 20, 2021, as part of a lecture series organized by the Australian Esperanto Association. Her talk is available on Youtube.
On May 26, 2021, BantUGent and the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in Tokyo (Japan) have the second kick-off meeting of their FWO-JSPS-funded collaborative project on “The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography“.
On May 12, 2021, BantUGent and the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in Tokyo (Japan) have the first kick-off meeting of their FWO-JSPS-funded collaborative project on “The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography“.
The meeting is online. The Zoom link to participate can be obtained via koen.bostoen@ugent.be upon request.
Contact: If you would like to contact any of the presenters, click on their name below.
Click here for a photo report of the conference by Gilles-Maurice de Schryver and his team
Click here for a FREE download of the book ‘On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar’
Program
MONDAY NOVEMBER 19, 2018
Venue: Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22)
Opening
08.30: Welcome + Registration
09.15: Opening address by the organizing committee (Koen Bostoen)
Chair: Koen Bostoen
09.30: Thilo Schadeberg (Leiden University) Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar Half a Century after Meeussen (1967)
10.15: Rebecca Grollemund (University of Missouri) and Lutz Marten (SOAS) Reconstructing Proto-Bantu in the Light of the Latest Insights into Bantu Phylogeny
11.00: Coffee break
Proto-Bantu Phonology
Chair: Rozenn Guérois
11.30: Nancy Kula (University of Essex) Proto-Bantu Segmental Phonology
12.15: Gérard Philippson (DDL, Lyon) Double Reflexes’ Revisited: Implications for the Proto-Bantu Consonant System
13.00: Lunch break
14.00: Lotta Aunio (University of Helsinki) & Jacky Maniacky (RMCA, Tervuren) Proto-Bantu Nominal Tone
