scholarly journals Registers of African-derived lexicon in Uruguay: etymologies, demography and semantic change

2019 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-255
Author(s):  
Laura Álvarez López ◽  
Magdalena Coll
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Data ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Social Behaviors ◽  
The Other ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
La Plata ◽  
West Central ◽  
Lexical Items

Abstract The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin registered in Uruguay by Ildefonso Pereda Valdés and Rolando Laguarda Trías between 1937 and 1965. Many of the lexical items were probably introduced by enslaved Africans brought to the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence shows that most of the words are apparently shared with varieties of Spanish outside the Rio de la Plata region, and most of them also appear in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. Furthermore, the African-derived lexicon is often used to denominate the ‘other’ with respect to people and social behaviors, and most of these loanwords are nouns with possible origins in Bantu languages spoken in West-Central Africa, which corresponds to the available demographic data.

scholarly journals Linguistic Evidence for the Introduction of Ironworking into Bantu-Speaking Africa

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 321-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Great Lakes ◽  
Central African Republic ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Lake Chad ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
West Central ◽  
Linguistic Evidence

Did Africans once independently invent the smelting of metals or did they obtain this technology from Europe or the Middle East? This continues to be an unresolved and hotly disputed issue, mainly because the dates for the earliest appearance of smelting in Africa south of the Sahara remain inconclusive. All the earliest sites in Western and West-Central Africa from Walalde in Senegal to the Tigidit cliffs and Termit in Niger, the firki plains south of lake Chad, Taruga, and perhaps Nsukka in Nigeria, Ghwa Kiva (Nigeria), and Doulo (Cameroon) in the Mandara mountains, Gbabiri (Ndio district) in the Central African Republic, and a few sites in Rwanda, Burundi, and Buhaya cannot be dated more closely than between 840 and 420 BCE. Greater precision is impossible because the C14 curve runs flat during these four centuries, hence all these sites yield the same date. (Alpern, Killick, Me Eachern, Holl, Jézégou/Clist, Kanimba Misago). If the earliest “real” dates fell before 800 BCE, they would support independent invention, while later dates strengthen the case for borrowing. Still, this information does tell us that ironworking was adopted in the northern parts of West and West -Central Africa and in the region of the Great Lakes within the span of a mere four centuries.The emergence of ironworking must have left linguistic traces in the relevant terminology irrespective of whether it spread by borrowing or by independent invention—hence historical linguistics can contribute to this debate. That approach is best tested by an examination of the relevant vocabulary in Bantu languages because the historical study of those languages is further advanced than that of any other language family in Africa (Nurse/Phillipson). Moreover Bantu-speakers occupy a large portion of the continent.

Ethnographic Appropriations: German Exploration and Fieldwork in West-Central Africa

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 69-128
Author(s):  
Beatrix Heintze
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Early Date ◽  
West Central ◽  
Special Area ◽  
Scientific Reputation ◽  
Historical Writings

German voyages of ‘discovery’ and field research in that part of Africa which, politically or linguistically, has been subject to Portuguese influence in past centuries, and still is so—an area which therefore corresponds for the most part (and also sufficiently so) to present-day Angola—has so far received only sporadic attention in corresponding historical writings. Nor for the most part have they been taken into account as ethnographic sources, language barriers above all being responsible for this. This is hardly because they are negligible in terms of either their numbers or the information they contain. In the last third of the nineteenth century especially, west-central Africa, in which Portuguese had been a lingua franca for centuries, became a special area of attraction for German travelers. Admittedly, the published results are far from even. One, Augspurger's, is interesting above all for the early date of his report. The scientific reputation of others, like the Jaspert brothers, is extremely dubious. For yet others, like Baum and Jessen, ethnographic documentation was of only marginal interest. The greater part of Wilhelm's sketches have been lost.On the other hand, one cannot write knowledgeably about the Loango coast without consulting Brun's and Pechuël-Loesche's reports. Any statement on northeast Angola in the last quarter of the nineteenth century will lose in value if one fails to use Pogge, Lux, Buchner, and Schütt. Studies on the Kisama without Mattenklodt or on the Cokwe without Baumann's great monograph would at best be a skeleton, at worst a distortion, in the context of what is possible.

scholarly journals Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (43) ◽  
pp. 13296-13301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Grollemund ◽  
Simon Branford ◽  
Koen Bostoen ◽  
Andrew Meade ◽  
Chris Venditti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Random Walk ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
West Central ◽  
Dated Phylogeny ◽  
Migratory Movements

Unlike most other biological species, humans can use cultural innovations to occupy a range of environments, raising the intriguing question of whether human migrations move relatively independently of habitat or show preferences for familiar ones. The Bantu expansion that swept out of West Central Africa beginning ∼5,000 y ago is one of the most influential cultural events of its kind, eventually spreading over a vast geographical area a new way of life in which farming played an increasingly important role. We use a new dated phylogeny of ∼400 Bantu languages to show that migrating Bantu-speaking populations did not expand from their ancestral homeland in a “random walk” but, rather, followed emerging savannah corridors, with rainforest habitats repeatedly imposing temporal barriers to movement. When populations did move from savannah into rainforest, rates of migration were slowed, delaying the occupation of the rainforest by on average 300 y, compared with similar migratory movements exclusively within savannah or within rainforest by established rainforest populations. Despite unmatched abilities to produce innovations culturally, unfamiliar habitats significantly alter the route and pace of human dispersals.

Spanning versus Constituent Lexicalization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Tarald Taraldsen
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Input Tree ◽  
Bantu Languages

This chapter seeks to evaluate the relative merits of two competing views of how lexical insertion should work in a nanosyntactic framework. One view holds that a sequence of heads meeting certain conditions, a “span,” can be replaced by a single morpheme even when those heads do not form a constituent in the input tree. The other view allows lexical insertion only to target constituents. The article focuses on certain properties of portmanteau prefixes identified by investigating the nominal class prefixes in Bantu languages. Accounting for portmanteau prefixes looks like a serious challenge to the theory restricting lexical insertion to constituents. They can be accommodated by positing only a richer syntactic structure than is usual. However, various empirical arguments show that the richer syntactic structure is in fact needed in an analysis of the nominal class prefixes in Bantu and that this conclusion extends to class prefixes in other languages.

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