Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification PDF
Preview Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification
Schriften zur Afrikanistik Research in African Studies Herausgegeben von Rainer Vossen Band 12 PETERLANG Frankfurt am Main • Berlin ■ Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford - Wien William A. A. Wilson Guinea Languages of the Atlantic Group Description and Internal Classification Edited by Anne Storch PETERLANG Europ&ischer Verlag derWissenschaften Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at <http://www.d-nb.de>. Redaktion: Sonja Ermisch ISSN 1436-1183 nSBN-10: 3-631-55170-3 ISBN-13: 978-3-631-55170-7 US-ISBN: 0-8204-9891-2 © Peter Lang GmbH Europaischer Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2007 All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany 1 2 3 4 5 7 www.peterlang.de Foreword Historical linguistics is based on and depends on essentially two fun damental conditions and activities, i.e. on solid descriptive data, and on sound methods in language comparison. Especially in the African con text, where written records on languages are hardly available, the basic description of individual languages is a conditio-sine-qua-non; only after carefully transforming the orally existing linguistic facts into written material can we start going about comparative and reconstructive work. And with such descriptive data - as with anything in life - it is less important how much than how good it is. These are some of the reasons why W.A.A. WlLSON's data collected some forty years ago on minority languages of the (West) Atlantic group - the names of which are hardly known up to the present - is of great value and importance. The name of W.A.A. Wilson, whom I have known for almost forty years and whose contributions to the West African Languages Congresses have always been highly valued by all of us for their undoubted solidity and correctness, guarantees quality. In addition, the fact that Anne STORCH - herself a young scholar of excellent standing - has volunteered to take on the burden of editing Wilson's linguistic materials is laudable in itself and strengthens our confidence in the new linguistic source material made available and accessible to the linguistic community by the present volume. Herrmann Jungraithmayr Preface This book is intended to fill the gap in the literature that is currently available to scholars and students of Atlantic languages. Most publi cations on the Atlantic group as a whole are written for surveys of Niger- Congo or the languages of Africa and do not contain detailed data and examples of the linguistic structures of the group's individual languages. Even though an already large number of monographs on Atlantic lan guages have appeared during the last decades, there is still nothing available on such languages as Nalu, or the fast disappearing Cobiana and Cassanga. Our task has been twofold: to present data on the Atlantic languages spoken from the Casamance to Sierra Leone, in such a way that it is understandable and comparable in terms of the various gram matical features, morphemes and structures both in Atlantic and in Niger-Congo as a whole, and also easily available to scholars who are interested in languages on which otherwise no published data would be accessible. We have undertaken this task with certain considerations in mind. Because most of the material presented here was collected many years ago, a sketch of Wilson's field trip in the Atlantic area is included. The introductory part of the book also contains an overview of Atlantic and its internal classification, and a list of the coastal Atlantic languages of the Guinea Republic, compiled from information given by Erhard Voeltz, to whom we are very indebted for giving us access to his data, and for his fascinating ideas. The descriptive part of the work contains sketches of 17 Atlantic languages and of some of their subgroups, covering phonology, mor phology and syntactical patterns. The languages are listed roughly from north to south. Well-studied languages like Fula and Wolof have not been included, for they are the subject of a huge number of publications already, and they were not in our research focus. The third part consists of comparative wordlists based on Swadesh's "First 100". We have included all Atlantic languages on which material was available, both from personal field data and from published sources. The late Professor Malcolm Guthrie was the inspirer of this research. It was he who had invited Wilson, when about to graduate from Cam 8 W.A.A. Wilson & Anne Storch bridge in 1951, to apply for a studentship to join his Africa Department at SOAS, London, and in due course, by the clarity of his lectures on Bantu grammar, gave him a model to aspire to. Unfortunately on his return from Guinea, Wilson's career took a sud den turn away from Atlantic, preventing the writing of more than hand ful of articles on the subject, until his retirement, when he could return to his Guinea notebooks. We must acknowledge the kindness of the many Portuguese admin istrative officers and traders, and of the missionaries, who made Wil son's work possible in their various ways, giving him hospitality, ar ranging his travel, and putting him in contact with the many excellent informants with whom it was always a stimulating adventure to work, and who deserve our warmest thanks. The initial typesetting of the manuscripts was carried out by Antje Helfrich, Bernhard Kohler and Melanie Schucht, to whom we are indebted for their careful and painstaking work. We are also grateful to Roger Blench, Marie-Paule Ferry, Konstantin Pozdniakov and Rosine Santos for their many useful comments, suggestions and encourage ment. We thank Gabriele Tauchnitz for drawing the maps. We are delighted and grateful that John Stewart has agreed to "come on board", with his own special insights. He and Wilson first met in 1951, outside the interview room where both were accepted for graduate studentships in African studies at SOAS, and they remained colleagues, there and later in Ghana, for many years. Just recently he has been ex tending his interest westwards from the Ivory Coast, to look at Atlantic in the light of his extensive knowledge of (Western) Kwa and Proto Bantu relationships. We are very much indebted to Tucker Childs for his many helpful comments and suggestions and for making his bibliographies available to Anne STORCH. We also thank Erhard Voeltz for supplying us - besides his data - with many otherwise unknown references. We are very grateful to Professor Herrmann Jungraithmayr for his most generous Foreword and for his encouragement, and to Professor Rainer VOSSEN for his support in making it possible for Anne STORCH to edit this work. We also thank the anonymous referees of the series for their many constructive remarks. Preface 9 Most of all Wilson owes a huge debt of thanks to Anne Storch, without whom this volume could not have appeared. Ever since she first wrote to him some seven years ago she has expressed interest in his ma terial, saying she felt sure her Institute could have it published in some form, and eventually suggesting he send his typescripts to her for editing. Southborough and Frankfurt am Main, 2005 W.A.A. W. and A. S. Abbreviations zero morpheme or segment o + plus < stems from, derived from equal to > becomes * hypothetical or ungrammatical ~c latent prenasal Id 1st person dual Ip, 2p, 3p 1st, 2nd, 3rd person plural Ipi 1st person plural inclusive IPX 1st person plural exclusive IS, 2S, 3S 1st, 2nd, 3rd person singular 3SO 3rd person singular object Aff affirmative ANIM animate ANPS after noun phrase subject Ass assertive ATR advanced tongue root Ben benefactive bNPS before noun phrase subject C consonant CM consonant mutation Cop copula COP copula Csv causative D dual Def definite Dem demonstrative +DF definite -DF indefinite Disadv disadvantage DP dependent prefix Emph emphasis EX exclusive FUT future
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