A root (also known as root word or radical ) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology , a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word , and of a word family (this root is then called the base word), which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes . However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word without its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter , but the lexical root chat . Inflectional roots are often called stems . A root, or a root morpheme , in the stricter sense, may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem.
43-583: The Taung tribe or Bataung is a tribe of Bantu origin which speaks the Sotho-Tswana group of languages , namely, Setswana , Sepedi , Sesotho and Lozi . "Tau" is a Sotho-Tswana word meaning " Lion ", and this animal is their totem . "Bataung" is a plurality of a lion meaning "people of a place of Lions or Lion's den". Sidney Berman, Analysing the Frames of the Bible: The Case of Setswana Translation of
86-446: A publication now in the public domain : Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). " Hottentots ". Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company. Root (linguistics) The traditional definition allows roots to be either free morphemes or bound morphemes . Root morphemes are the building blocks for affixation and compounds . However, in polysynthetic languages with very high levels of inflectional morphology,
129-576: A result of these interactions. The Bantu migrations, and centuries later the Indian Ocean slave trade, brought Bantu influence to Madagascar , the Malagasy people showing Bantu admixture, and their Malagasy language Bantu loans. Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of the Sultanate of Zanzibar . With the arrival of European colonialists,
172-833: A significant clustered variation of genetic traits among Bantu language speakers by region, suggesting admixture from prior local populations. Bantu speakers of South Africa (Xhosa, Venda) showed substantial levels of the SAK and Western African Bantu AACs and low levels of the East African Bantu AAC (the latter is also present in Bantu speakers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda). The results indicate distinct East African Bantu migration into southern Africa and are consistent with linguistic and archeological evidence of East African Bantu migration from an area west of Lake Victoria and
215-436: A vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast African states. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect" , it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in
258-479: A vast genomic analysis of more than 2,000 samples taken from individuals in 57 populations throughout Sub-Saharan Africa to trace the Bantu expansion. During a wave of expansion that began 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking populations – some 310 million people as of 2023 – gradually left their original homeland West-Central Africa and travelled to the eastern and southern regions of the African continent. During
301-458: Is morphologically similar to the production of frequentative (iterative) verbs in Latin , for example: Consider also Rabbinic Hebrew ת-ר-מ √t-r-m ‘donate, contribute’ (Mishnah: T’rumoth 1:2: ‘separate priestly dues’), which derives from Biblical Hebrew תרומה t'rūmå ‘contribution’, whose root is ר-ו-מ √r-w-m ‘raise’; cf. Rabbinic Hebrew ת-ר-ע √t-r-' ‘sound
344-471: Is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not an ethnic group . People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms, which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for the larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's coinage was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups self-identifying as "people" or "the true people". That is, idiomatically
387-677: The Arabic language : Similar cases occur in Hebrew , for example Israeli Hebrew מ-ק-מ √m-q-m ‘locate’, which derives from Biblical Hebrew מקום måqom ‘place’, whose root is ק-ו-מ √q-w-m ‘stand’. A recent example introduced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language is מדרוג midrúg ‘rating’, from מדרג midrág , whose root is ד-ר-ג √d-r-g ‘grade’." According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann , "this process
430-854: The Baganda people of Uganda (5.5 million as of 2014), the Shona of Zimbabwe (17.6 million as of 2020), the Zulu of South Africa (14.2 million as of 2016 ), the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (28.8 million as of 2010 ), the Sukuma of Tanzania (10.2 million as of 2016 ), the Kikuyu of Kenya (8.1 million as of 2019 ), the Xhosa people of Southern Africa (9.6 million as of 2011), batswana of Southern Africa (8.2 Million as of 2020) and
473-888: The Congo rainforest by about 1500 BC and the southern savannas by 500 BC, while the eastward dispersal reached the Great Lakes by 1000 BC, expanding further from there as the rich environment supported dense populations. Possible movements by small groups to the southeast from the Great Lakes region could have been more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, because of comparatively harsh farming conditions in areas farther from water. Recent archeological and linguistic evidence about population movements suggests that pioneering groups would have had reached parts of modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa sometime prior to
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#1732855928608516-667: The Indian Ocean slave trade . The Swahili culture that emerged from these exchanges evinces many Arab and Islamic influences not seen in traditional Bantu culture, as do the many Afro-Arab members of the Bantu Swahili people . With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Zanzibar, Kenya, and Tanzania – a seaboard referred to as the Swahili Coast – the Bantu Swahili language contains many Arabic loanwords as
559-676: The Kingdom of Matamba the Kuba Kingdom , the Lunda Empire , the Luba Empire , Barotse Empire , Kazembe Kingdom , Mbunda Kingdom , Yeke Kingdom , Kasanje Kingdom , Empire of Kitara, Butooro , Bunyoro , Buganda , Busoga , Rwanda , Burundi , Ankole , the Kingdom of Mpororo , the Kingdom of Igara , the Kingdom of Kooki , the Kingdom of Karagwe , Swahili city states , the Mutapa Empire ,
602-521: The National Party governments adopted that usage officially, while the growing African nationalist movement and its liberal allies turned to the term "African" instead, so that "Bantu" became identified with the policies of apartheid . By the 1970s this so discredited "Bantu" as an ethnic-racial designation that the apartheid government switched to the term "Black" in its official racial categorizations, restricting it to Bantu-speaking Africans , at about
645-494: The Pedi of South Africa (7 million as of 2018). Abantu is the Xhosa and Zulu word for people. It is the plural of the word 'umuntu', meaning 'person', and is based on the stem '--ntu', plus the plural prefix 'aba'. In linguistics, the word Bantu , for the language families and its speakers, is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans" . It
688-570: The Zulu Kingdom , the Ndebele Kingdom , Mthethwa Empire , Tswana city states , Mapungubwe , Kingdom of Eswatini , the Kingdom of Butua , Maravi , Danamombe , Khami , Naletale , Kingdom of Zimbabwe and the Rozwi Empire . On the coastal section of East Africa, a mixed Bantu community developed through contact with Muslim Arab and Persian traders, Zanzibar being an important part of
731-412: The 3rd century AD along the coast and the modern Northern Cape by AD 500. Cattle terminology in use amongst the relatively few modern Bantu pastoralist groups suggests that the acquisition of cattle may have been from Central Sudanic , Kuliak and Cushitic -speaking neighbors. Linguistic evidence also indicates that the customs of milking cattle were also directly modeled from Cushitic cultures in
774-795: The 9th and 15th centuries, Bantu-speaking states began to emerge in the Great Lakes region and in the savanna south of the Central African rainforests. The Monomotapa kings built the Great Zimbabwe complex, a civilisation ancestral to the Shona people. Comparable sites in Southern Africa include Bumbusi in Zimbabwe and Manyikeni in Mozambique. From the 12th century onward, the processes of state formation amongst Bantu peoples increased in frequency. This
817-562: The Bantu expansion, Bantu-speaking peoples extirpated and displaced many earlier inhabitants, with only a few modern peoples such as Pygmy groups in Central Africa, the Hadza people in northern Tanzania, and various Khoisan populations across southern Africa remaining in existence into the era of European contact. Archaeological evidence attests to their presence in areas subsequently occupied by Bantu speakers. Researchers have demonstrated that
860-704: The Book of Ruth , Chapter 3, A History and Ethnographic Description of Batswana - Stellenbosch University. List of supporting thesis: Comaroff, Setiloane, Brown and others. This South Africa-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about an ethnic group in Africa is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Bantu peoples The Bantu peoples are an indigenous ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages . The languages are native to countries spread over
903-614: The Khoisan of the Kalahari are remnants of a huge ancestral population that may have been the most populous group on the planet prior to the Bantu expansion. Biochemist Stephan Schuster of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues found that the Khoisan population began a drastic decline when the Bantu farmers spread through Africa 4,000 years ago. Before the Bantu expansion had been definitively traced starting from their origins in
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#1732855928608946-605: The Zanzibar Sultanate came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili Coast, leading eventually to the fall of the Sultanate and the end of slave trading on the Swahili Coast in the mid-20th century. In the 1920s, relatively liberal South Africans, missionaries, and the native African intelligentsia began to use the term "Bantu" in preference to "Native". After World War II ,
989-555: The area. Cattle terminology in southern African Bantu languages differs from that found among more northerly Bantu-speaking peoples. One recent suggestion is that Cushitic speakers had moved south earlier and interacted with the most northerly of Khoisan speakers who acquired cattle from them and that the earliest arriving Bantu speakers, in turn, got their initial cattle from Cushitic-influenced Khwe-speaking people. Under this hypothesis, larger later Bantu-speaking immigration subsequently displaced or assimilated that southernmost extension of
1032-410: The category-neutral approach, data from English indicates that the same underlying root appears as a noun and a verb - with or without overt morphology. In Hebrew , the majority of roots consist of segmental consonants √CCC. Arad (2003) describes that the consonantal root is turned into a word due to pattern morphology. Thereby, the root is turned into a verb when put into a verbal environment where
1075-688: The fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into a designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race"." Bantu languages derive from the Proto-Bantu reconstructed language, estimated to have been spoken about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago in West / Central Africa (the area of modern-day Cameroon). They were supposedly spread across Central, East and Southern Africa in
1118-436: The forms derived from the abstract consonantal roots , a major Hebrew phonetics concept ג-ד-ל ( g-d-l ) related to ideas of largeness: g a d o l and gd o l a (masculine and feminine forms of the adjective "big"), g a d a l "he grew", hi gd i l "he magnified" and ma gd e l et "magnifier", along with many other words such as g o d e l "size" and mi gd a l "tower". Roots and reconstructed roots can become
1161-400: The head bears the "v" feature (the pattern). Consider the root √š-m-n (ש-מ-נ). Although all words vary semantically, the general meaning of a greasy, fatty material can be attributed to the root. Furthermore, Arad states that there are two types of languages in terms of root interpretation. In languages like English, the root is assigned one interpretation whereas in languages like Hebrew,
1204-469: The incorporation of Khoekhoe ancestry into several of the Southeast Bantu populations ~1500 to 1000 years ago. Bantu-speaking migrants would have also interacted with some Afro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast (mainly Cushitic ), as well as Nilotic and Central Sudanic speaking groups. According to the early-split scenario as hypothesized in the 1990s, the southward dispersal had reached
1247-544: The mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa , or roughly 5% of the total world population ). About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g.the large majority of West Africa, notably the most populous African nation Nigeria , Rwanda , Tanzania , Uganda , Kenya , Burundi (25 million),
1290-983: The range of Cushitic speakers. Based on dental evidence, Irish (2016) concluded: Proto-Bantu peoples may have originated in the western region of the Sahara , amid the Kiffian period at Gobero , and may have migrated southward, from the Sahara into various parts of West Africa (e.g., Benin , Cameroon , Ghana , Nigeria , Togo ), as a result of desertification of the Green Sahara in 7000 BCE. From Nigeria and Cameroon, agricultural Proto-Bantu peoples began to migrate , and amid migration, diverged into East Bantu peoples (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo ) and West Bantu peoples (e.g., Congo, Gabon ) between 2500 BCE and 1200 BCE. Irish (2016) also views Igbo people and Yoruba people as being possibly back-migrated Bantu peoples. Between
1333-2083: The reflexes of * bantʊ in the numerous languages often have connotations of personal character traits as encompassed under the values system of ubuntu , also known as hunhu in Chishona or botho in Sesotho , rather than just referring to all human beings. The root in Proto-Bantu is reconstructed as *-ntʊ́ . Versions of the word Bantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix *ba- ) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as bantu in Kikongo , Kituba , Tshiluba and Kiluba ; watu in Swahili ; ŵanthu in Tumbuka ; anthu in Chichewa ; batu in Lingala ; bato in Duala ; abanto in Gusii ; andũ in Kamba and Kikuyu ; abantu in Kirundi , Lusoga , Zulu , Xhosa , Runyoro and Luganda ; wandru in Shingazidja ; abantru in Mpondo and Ndebele ; bãthfu in Phuthi ; bantfu in Swati and Bhaca ; banhu in kisukuma ; banu in Lala ; vanhu in Shona and Tsonga ; batho in Sesotho , Tswana and Sepedi ; antu in Meru ; andu in Embu ; vandu in some Luhya dialects; vhathu in Venda and bhandu in Nyakyusa . Within
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1376-566: The region between Cameroon and Nigeria, two main scenarios of the Bantu expansion were hypothesized: an early expansion to Central Africa and a single origin of the dispersal radiating from there, or an early separation into an eastward and a southward wave of dispersal, with one wave moving across the Congo Basin toward East Africa, and another moving south along the African coast and the Congo River system toward Angola. Genetic analysis shows
1419-713: The root -rupt , which only appears in other related prefixd forms (such as disrupt , corrupt , rupture , etc.). The form -rupt cannot occur on its own. Examples of ( consonantal roots ) which are related but distinct to the concept developed here are formed prototypically by three (as few as two and as many as five) consonants. Speakers may derive and develop new words (morphosyntactically distinct, i.e. with different parts of speech) by using non-concatenative morphological strategies: inserting different vowels . Unlike 'root' here, these cannot occur on their own without modification; as such these are never actually observed in speech and may be termed 'abstract'. For example, in Hebrew ,
1462-501: The root ampli- . In the former case, the root can occur on its own freely. In the latter, it requires modification via affixation to be used as a free form. English has minimal use of morphological strategies such as affixation and features a tendency to have words that are identical to their roots. However, such forms as in Spanish exist in English such as interrupt , which may arguably contain
1505-480: The roots' vowels, by adding or removing the long vowels a , i , u , e and o . (Notice that Arabic does not have the vowels e and o .) In addition, secondary roots can be created by prefixing ( m− , t− ), infixing ( −t− ), or suffixing ( −i , and several others). There is no rule in these languages on how many secondary roots can be derived from a single root; some roots have few, but other roots have many, not all of which are necessarily in current use. Consider
1548-520: The same time that the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko and others were defining "Black" to mean all non-European South Africans (Bantus, Khoisan, Coloureds and Indians ). In modern South Africa, the word's connection to apartheid has become so discredited that it is only used in its original linguistic meaning. Examples of South African usages of "Bantu" include: [REDACTED] This article incorporates text from
1591-519: The so-called Bantu expansion , comparatively rapid dissemination taking roughly two millennia and dozens of human generations during the 1st millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS, together with a broad international consortium, retraced the migratory routes of the Bantu populations, which were previously a source of debate. The scientists used data from
1634-551: The syntactic environment. The ways in which these roots gain lexical category are discussed in Distributed Morphology and the Exoskeletal Model . Theories adopting a category-neutral approach have not, as of 2020, reached a consensus about whether these roots contain a semantic type but no argument structure, neither semantic type nor argument structure, or both semantic type and argument structure. In support of
1677-517: The term "root" is generally synonymous with "free morpheme". Many such languages have a very restricted number of morphemes that can stand alone as a word: Yup'ik , for instance, has no more than two thousand. The root is conventionally indicated using the mathematical symbol √; for instance, the Sanskrit root " √bhū- " means the root " bhū- ". English verb form running contains the root run . The Spanish superlative adjective amplísimo contains
1720-434: The tools of etymology . Secondary roots are roots with changes in them, producing a new word with a slightly different meaning. In English, a rough equivalent would be to see conductor as a secondary root formed from the root to conduct . In abjad languages, the most familiar of which are Arabic and Hebrew , in which families of secondary roots are fundamental to the language, secondary roots are created by changes in
1763-460: The trumpet, blow the horn’, from Biblical Hebrew תרועה t'rū`å ‘shout, cry, loud sound, trumpet-call’, in turn from ר-ו-ע √r-w-`." and it describes the suffix. Decompositional generative frameworks suggest that roots hold little grammatical information and can be considered "category-neutral". Category-neutral roots are roots without any inherent lexical category but with some conceptual content that becomes evident depending on
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1806-465: Was first introduced into modern academia (as Bâ-ntu ) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858 and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. The name was said to be coined to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu, from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing "people", and the root *ntʊ̀ - "some (entity), any" (e.g. Xhosa umntu "person" abantu "people", Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people"). There
1849-449: Was the result of several factors such as a denser population (which led to more specialized divisions of labor, including military power while making emigration more difficult); technological developments in economic activity; and new techniques in the political-spiritual ritualisation of royalty as the source of national strength and health. Examples of such Bantu states include: the Kingdom of Kongo , Anziku Kingdom , Kingdom of Ndongo ,
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