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Linguistic evidence regarding Bantu origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Joseph H. Greenberg
Joseph H. Greenberg
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

This article has two related purposes. The first is to attempt a clarification of certain points raised by Professor Oliver in his article, ‘The Problem of the Bantu Expansion’, published in an earlier issue of this Journal, insofar as it concerns his discussion of the alternative theories of Professor Guthrie and the present writer regarding Bantu origins. The second and more general aim is to survey the basic assumptions of Guthrie's work on Bantu insofar as it relates to the same problem. In the course of the exposition, three types of evidence are considered: the internal Bantu linguistic evidence; the linguistic evidence external to Bantu, chiefly from West African languages; and the non-linguistic, chiefly geographic evidence.

It is argued that Guthrie's assumption which underlies his theory of a central ‘nuclear’ area as the point of origin, namely that the linguistically most conservative area reveals the place of origin, is contrary to empirical evidence. It is rather the area of greatest internal divergence, in this case the north-western area, which points to the earliest differentiation and hence point of origin.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , April 1972 , pp. 189 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

1 Roland, Oliver, ‘The Problem of the Bantu Expansion’, Journal of African History, VII (1966) 363–76. I wish to acknowledge here my indebtedness to Professor Oliver for comments and suggestions regarding an earlier version of this paper.Google Scholar

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4 Examples from The Languages of Africa, 2nd edition, Mouton, The Hague (1966), include 9–13, discussion of resemblances of the noun class system of the Adamawa Eastern languages with the remainder of Niger-Congo; 31, comparisons of the noun class system of Bantu with the rest of Niger-Congo; 35, grammatical innovations of Bantu; 46–8, Afroasiatic grammatical features found in the Chadic languages; 68–71, grammatical resemblances of Hottentot to the rest of Khoisan; 73–5, grammatical resemblances of Hatsa to the rest of Khoisan; 86–9, common grammatical features of the Nilotic and ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ languages; 509–57, grammatical features of the Eastern Sudanic languages found in the remainder of the Chari-Nile group; 530–3, grammatical evidence for the unity of Nilo-Saharan; 549–52, grammatical resemblances between the Kordofanian and the Niger-Congo families.

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11 The phrase ‘indisputably Bantu languages’ is employed here because there is at least one group of languages, the Jarawa, which I consider to be Bantu and which is in the central part of Nigeria, north and west of the area which I posit as the ultimate point of Bantu origin.

12 Guthrie, M., The Classification of the Bantu Languages (Oxford Press, London and New York, 1948). There are, of course, some differences of detail regarding these zones in the more recent work of Guthrie.Google Scholar

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23 I wish to express my thanks to Eric Hamp for making a copy of this excursus available to me. I am also indebted to Professor Hamp for a critical reading of the final version and particularly for his remarks on my Indo-European examples cited later in this paper.

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25 A possible source for the spread of this m- form in Bantu is the following. The object pronoun of Class I is mu− not only in 13antu but elsewhere (e.g. Fula mo). It could have spread analogically from the object pronoun to the noun and adjective and then to other classes. It is perhaps unnecessary to remark that the force of the argument against the conspiracy theory is not dependent on the validity of this specific theory to account for the Bantu situation.

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28 In Table I, I have avoided diacritics wherever possible, and have in other ways simplified the transcription. The only phonetic explanation required is that 2 stands for the glottal stop and c for a voiced pharyngeal. Grammatical elements such as prefixes and suffixes not belonging to the root are enclosed in parentheses.

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37 This alternation still survives in Bantu itself in Kirundi and a few other languages, but the palatalization explanation becomes confirmed, and strengthened by the evidence of other Benue-Congo languages. I presented these results in a talk at the West African language Congress at Ibadan in 1964. They were never published, but in 1965, Stappers published a paper which contains essentially identical data and conclusions. (See Stappers, L., ‘Het Hoofdtelwoord in de Bantoe-Talen’, Africana Linguistica, 11, 377–99, Tervuren, 1965).Google Scholar