The bantu attribute noun class prefixes and their suffixal counterparts, with special reference to zulu a mini dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree magister artium. Many bantu languages employ strict grammatical agreement i. The exact place of bantu in this framework is controversial, and there is no comprehensive overview of bantu. Kiswahilis vowel harmony there are 9 noun classes in kiswahili. Zulu nouns, like nouns in other bantu languages, are divided into noun classes. As the source of bantu languages is generally argued to be in southwest adamawa, new data on bantu and related languages is important to the. There are five principal factors in bantu languages which contribute to ambiguous analysis of word tbrms.
Free language brings together the best in language education from across the world. Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first experiences from runyakitara fridah katushemererwe ms thomas hanneforth. All naming words such as boy, girl, delhi, cow, tiger, scale etc. Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first experiences from runyakitara fridah katushemererwe ms thomas hanneforth information technology department of computational linguistic faculty of computing and institute of linguistics information technology university of potsdam, germany. Irene tucker sil international 2001 contents on classifying bantu languages general referential classifications historical classifications appendix the bantu languages of africa the bantu languages of africanorthwestern area references on classifying bantu languages general. Jul 03, 2003 geographically, bantu languages are spoken in the southern half of africa.
Select any course and level of study, click on the course title to get noun ecourseware for the course. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ha is a typical bantu language with 16 noun classes and complex verbal morphology. Introduction to the phonology of the bantu languages. Bantu language is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted over 20 times.
The bantu languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of africa from southern cameroon eastward to kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent. There are about 520 languages in the bantu family, 670 languages in the southern bantoid branch which includes bantu, and 1,532 in nigercongo. Unfortunately, the free pdf download is no longer available and you can only read and print the html document. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Each noun class has both a singular and a plural form, to make 18 total. Naki shows nasals in classes 6a, 18a, and an apparent class 6, which has plural semantics. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. Noun class prefixes are obligatory in most bantu languages.
West mrican languages exhibited noun class features analogous to those classified as bantu johnston 1886. A comparative analysis of runyankorerukiga and luganda. Cbse class 6 english grammar kinds of noun cbse tuts. Although noun classes are not easy to grasp they reveal the beauty and depth of the language like nothing else. Categories with terms derived from bantu languages in various specific languages. In bantu languages, every noun belongs to a noun class. New developments in the classification of bantu languages. Learning how to license null nounclass prefixes in.
Crucially, this is not a case of where the unmarked h of other bantu languages has been reinterpreted as a marked h in this language. The 250 or so narrow bantu languages are conventionally divided up into geographic zones first proposed by malcolm guthrie 19671971. Download noun ecourseware course materials in pdf for. Bantu languages article about bantu languages by the free. The basis of bantu literature africa cambridge core. Learn bantu language with free interactive flashcards. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the attributive noun classes, as well as their suffixal counterparts, firstly in bantu, and secondly in zulu. We argue that a set of facts about the plural nominal class prefixes in southern bantu languages shows that some plural prefixes spell out a phrasal constituent, a specifier bottoming out in a classifierlike noun. The bantu attribute noun class prefixes and their suffixal. For instance, in kagulu, noun class 5 triggers agreement of noun class 5 yet this noun is animate petzell. The bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is swahili. The main characteristic of changana are the noun classes which are common for all bantu languages.
A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages comprising those of zanzibar, mozambique, the zambesi, kafirland, benguela, angola, the congo, the ogowe, the cameroons, the lake region, etc. Rugemalira 2007, with the addition that the speaker is free to move the demonstrative to prenominal position without apparent change in. Just as gender accord is required in many indoeuropean languages e. Some authors use the term grammatical gender as a synonym of noun class, but others consider these different concepts. New developments in the classification of bantu languages and. The investigation will be done with reference to aspects such as the following. For example, swahili utilizes over noun classes, the equivalence of a romance language having genders. Guthrie, the classification of the bantu languages 1948, repr. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20.
Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first. The lecture notes section lists the lecture files as per the topics covered in the course. If you dont have adobe acrobat reader, click here to get it for your computer. Each word must end in a vowel though in some modern dialects in eastern equatorial, west and south africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal. Bemba, like most bantu languages, has a very elaborate noun class system which involves pluralization patterns, agreement marking, and patterns of pronominal reference. Section 3 demonstrates the use of the bantu noun class system and its concordial. Some restrictions on sesotho null noun class prefixes. Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class. However, which nouns can be modified by these relative clauses is not uniform across the relevant languages, when we apply the binary classification of inner relations and outer relations. It not only helps the students use the language but also gives detailed information regarding the language. The semantic content of class in bantu languages has syntactic significance only to the extent that it corresponds to the semanticsyntactic features of the noun, and to that. The answer key can be found at the end of the document page 85. Isizulu course work in the department of african languages at the university of pretoria by linkie mohlala supervisor.
Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free. However, the sotho languages sesotho, setswana, sepedi permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of unmarked phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. Genetically, they form part of benuecongo, itself a part of the huge nigercongo phylum. Grammatical and lexical comparison 3 nurse and philippson 1980, for reasons unclear, do not fully resolve the internal classification of the smallest groups, and the seuta 8 languages are not included in gonzales 2002 study. Pages in category bantu languages the following 32 pages are in this category, out of 32 total. Did the protobantu verb have a synthetic or an analytic. Modes of compounding in bantu, romance and chinese 207 several theoretical and empirical analyses, comparatively, nn compounding in bantu languages has been largely neglected. Providing descriptive and typological information about the bantu languages of southern africa, this volume brings together a set of expert contributors and is divided into two parts. Bantu languages, a group of some 500 languages belonging to the bantoid subgroup of the benuecongo branch of the nigercongo language family. In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. Nov 29, 2015 bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of presentday cameroon.
Classifiers therefore are one among several systems of overt linguistic categorization of nominals as. It includes 26 chapters that address such specific business. The protoforms of the prefixes of classes 910 in bantu languages have invariably been represented as nnmeeussen 1967. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. Subcategories this category has the following 140 subcategories, out of 140 total. Swahili nouns are, like those in other bantu languages, noted for a system of semantically based classing, which affects not only nouns but also their modifiers adjectives, numbers, demonstratives and verbs. Swahili noun classes noun classes ngeli za kiswahili nouns in kiswahili are grouped into various noun classes because of two main reasons. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu. Download free pdf english books from nouns at easypacelearning. A noun class system is a grammatical system that some languages use to overtly categorize nouns. Studies in african linguistics 157 semantic reality of. Linguistic ties between ancient egyptian and bantu. In the morphosyntactic domain, classifiers can be distinguished from concordial systems such as gender best known from indoeuropean languages and noun class systems of bantu languages. Uncovering symbiotic affinities and relationships in vocabulary sharman, fergus on.
In changana, each noun things, animals, abstracts etc. Parts of the bantu area include languages from other language families see map. A look at the grassfields borderland blasius achiritaboh university of buea, cameroon abstract as is well known, bantu nouns typically consist of a stem each with an overt or covert prefix arranged in classes of singular and plural pairs called genders. Uncovering symbiotic affinities and relationships in vocabulary. Some scholars have proposed other forms, especially for cl. The system of noun classes is probably the characteristic most widely found in nigercongo languages and best known to those interested in language phenomena. Our nouns worksheets also cover plural nouns, common and proper nouns, possessive nouns, collective nouns and abstract nouns. The phenomenon, in fact, is even more constrained and unproductive than in romance notable exceptions are attested in some bantu languages, e.
English books for download pdf nouns easypacelearning. Uncover language learning resources, listen to industry podcasts, dive into memory and methods, scan polyglot news sources and much more. The hindu newspaper pdf free download 22 april 2020. A bantu language of kenya jelle cammenga, bernd heine, wilhelm j. The striking difference in the number of classes posited for proto bantu and individual bantu languages is due to the counting system and the status of certain classes. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu.
A survey report for the bantu languages by derek nurse cartographer. Though the extent to which the system operates varies greatly, it is nonetheless found in some form in languages. Did the protobantu verb have a synthetic or an analytic structure. With more than 2,400 courses available, ocw is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge. Noun classes are similar in concept to grammatical gender in many european languages, as the noun class determines how other words are inflected in concordance with the noun. Noun classes in the grassfields bantu borderland can expand the words and meanings of symbols that are often seen daily.
All nouns comprise a stem and one of a set of singular and plural. Nonetheless, noun class systems are grammatically productive in most bantu languages, and semantically productive to some degree. Cbse class 6 english grammar kinds of noun in the previous lesson you learnt that noun is the name of a person, place, animal or things. Guthrie classification of bantu languages wikipedia.
Johnston later went on to produce an extensive study of bantu and semi bantu pointing out these connections without clarifying the implications for genetic relationships or. In rr and luganda, such a phenomenon is not possible. Phonotactic clues to bantu noun class disambiguation. These were assigned letters as and divided into decades groups a10, a20, etc. Marktplatz is a german language course developed by deutsche welle with strong focus on business german.
Noun class systems are universal and almost always marked by prefixes, occasionally by suffixes. What is a noun class sil glossary of linguistic terms. Certain bantu languages today are developing as literary media, not only for official, educational, correspondence or publicity purposes, but for the more aesthetic side of life, for mental and spiritual culture. Relative clauses display similar structures across a number of bantu languages. An analysis of noun classes in tikar, a benuecongo language spoken in west central cameroon, looks at patterns in the noun class system, concord system possessives, demonstratives, demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, thirdperson pronouns, relative pronouns, copula, adjectivals, and numerals with an eye to determining whether tikar is a bantoid language or not. As a result, an immediately following l will be deleted by mr, as shown in 25c. Choose from 51 different sets of bantu language flashcards on quizlet. Bantu online resources, jacky maniacky, 7 july 2007, including list of bantu noun classes with reconstructed protobantu prefixes in french ehrets compilation of classifications by klieman, bastin, himself, and others pp 20409, ucla. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day country of cameroon. All structured data from the file and property namespaces is available under the creative commons cc0 license. Each class is given a number corresponding to the same equivalent class in other bantu languages. First in the series go tlhotlhomisa setswana exploring setswana south africa recognizes eleven official languages, nine of which fall into the bantu language family, a group of over five hundred languages spoken widely across subsaharan africa. Forms and functions of noun modifying clauses in bantu. In many atlantic languages the initial consonant of the noun takes alternates according to the noun class prefix with which it occurs.
Language and culture swahili is a bantu language of the nigercongo family and has a typical, complicated bantu structure. Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, or visit the webmasters page for free fun content. Phonotactic clues to bantu noun class disambiguation phonotactic clues to bantu noun class disambiguation braver, aaron. Observations on normal classes in bantu languages volume 18 issue 3 malcolm guthrie. Class prefixes as specifiers in southern bantu springerlink. First, nouns are grouped into more than ten marked noun classes. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. These classes are much more numerous than the genders of.
Files are available under licenses specified on their description page. The structure of the bantu noun phrase researchgate. Classes 110 and 12 were paired, the first member of the pair was for singular nouns, the second for plural nouns. This study is based on a convenience sample of about fourty areally differentiated bantu languages. Proto bantu had 19 classes, most of which have been conserved in its descendant languages, though some classes have been lost in a number of them. Researchers in bantu languages agree that that noun class features are determined by grammatical number, semantics, that is. There are about 250 bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and. This leads us to adopt a theory of lexicalization that leads to the conclusion that all nominal class prefixes in southern bantu lexicalize specifiers of this sort, and we argue. Database working in terms of a genetic tree diagram, reconstructing features of any intermediate node in the tree, in this case pb, ideally requires examining evidence. Free download of course materials of the national open university of nigeria noun for all courses, in pdf format. These grammar worksheets help kids learn to recognize and use nouns. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages. Section 2 outlines the reconstructed proto bantu noun class system and shows how some modern bantu languages, as well as more distantly related languages, have lost several noun class distinctions while preserving others.
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