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52-457: Like other proto-languages , there is no record of Proto-Bantu. Its words and pronunciation have been reconstructed by linguists. From the common vocabulary which has been reconstructed on the basis of present-day Bantu languages, it appears that agriculture, fishing, and the use of boats were already known to the Bantu people before their expansion began, but iron-working was still unknown. This places

104-473: A complete explanation and by Occam's razor , is given credibility. More recently, such a tree has been termed "perfect" and the characters labelled "compatible". No trees but the smallest branches are ever found to be perfect, in part because languages also evolve through horizontal transfer with their neighbours. Typically, credibility is given to the hypotheses of highest compatibility. The differences in compatibility must be explained by various applications of

156-473: A few millennia ago, allowing the descent to be traced in detail. The early daughter languages, and even the proto-language itself, may be attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and Spanish. Likewise, Proto-Norse , the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages ,

208-408: A genuine reconstruction is non-existent. Most claimed Proto-Bantu is either confined to particular subgroups, or is widely attested outside Bantu proper." According to this hypothesis, Bantu is actually a polyphyletic group that combines a number of smaller language families which ultimately belong to the (much larger) Southern Bantoid language family . The homeland of Proto-Bantu was most likely in

260-427: A language family. Moreover, a group of lects that are not considered separate languages, such as the members of a dialect cluster , may also be described as descending from a unitary proto-language. Typically, the proto-language is not known directly. It is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics. The tree

312-411: A language to change, and "[as] a result, our reconstructions tend to have a strong bias toward the average language type known to the investigator." Such an investigator finds themselves blinkered by their own linguistic frame of reference . The advent of the wave model raised new issues in the domain of linguistic reconstruction, causing the reevaluation of old reconstruction systems and depriving

364-413: A low or a high tone. A high tone is conventionally indicated with an acute accent (´), and a low tone is either indicated with a grave accent (`) or not marked at all. Proto-Bantu, like its descendants, had an elaborate system of noun classes . Noun stems were prefixed with a noun prefix to specify their meaning. Other words that related or referred to that noun, such as adjectives and verbs, also received

416-405: A nasal and a following obstruent. They could occur anywhere a single consonant was permitted, including word-initially. Pre-nasalised voiceless consonants were rare, as most were voiced. The nasal's articulation adapted to the articulation of the following consonant so the nasal can be considered a single unspecified nasal phoneme (indicated as *N ) which had four possible allophones. Conventionally,

468-531: A number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family . Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method . In the family tree metaphor, a proto-language can be called a mother language. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache ( pronounced [ˈuːɐ̯ʃpʁaːxə] ; from ur- 'primordial', 'original' + Sprache 'language')

520-568: A position he occupied from 1862 until his death in 1875. In addition to this work, Bleek supported himself and his family by writing regularly for Het Volksblad throughout the 1860s and publishing the first part of his A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages in London in 1862. The second part was also published in London in 1869 with the first chapter appearing in manuscript form in Cape Town in 1865. Unfortunately, much of Bleek's working life in

572-428: A prefix that matched the class of the noun (" agreement " or "concord"). Maho offers a broad characterization of five types of Bantu concordial systems. Languages descended from Proto-Bantu can be classified into each of the five types. The following table gives a reconstruction of the system of nominal classes. Spellings have been normalised to use the ɪ and ʊ notations. Guthrie's original work uses y to describe

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624-479: A relatively small inventory of 11 consonants and 7 vowels. The above phonemes exhibited considerable allophony , and the exact realisation of many of them is unclear. Consonants could not occur at the end of a syllable, only at its beginning. Thus, the syllable structure was generally V or CV, and there were only open syllables . Consonant clusters did not occur except for the "pre-nasalised" consonants. The so-called "pre-nasalised" consonants were sequences of

676-464: A young man named |a!kunta. But because of his youth, |a!kunta was unfamiliar with much of his people's folklore and an older man named ||kabbo was then permitted to accompany him. ||kabbo became Bleek and Lloyd's first real teacher, a title by which he later regarded himself. Over time, members of ||kabbo's family and other families lived with Bleek and Lloyd in Mowbray, and were interviewed by them. Amongst

728-410: Is a statement of similarity and a hypothesis that the similarity results from descent from a common language. The comparative method, a process of deduction , begins from a set of characteristics, or characters, found in the attested languages. If the entire set can be accounted for by descent from the proto-language, which must contain the proto-forms of them all, the tree, or phylogeny, is regarded as

780-667: Is attested only fragmentarily. There are no objective criteria for the evaluation of different reconstruction systems yielding different proto-languages. Many researchers concerned with linguistic reconstruction agree that the traditional comparative method is an "intuitive undertaking." The bias of the researchers regarding the accumulated implicit knowledge can also lead to erroneous assumptions and excessive generalization. Kortlandt (1993) offers several examples in where such general assumptions concerning "the nature of language" hindered research in historical linguistics. Linguists make personal judgements on how they consider "natural" for

832-551: Is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in the Elder Futhark . Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries. The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language

884-647: Is termed "Pre-X", as in Pre–Old Japanese. It is also possible to apply internal reconstruction to a proto-language, obtaining a pre-proto-language, such as Pre-Proto-Indo-European. Both prefixes are sometimes used for an unattested stage of a language without reference to comparative or internal reconstruction. "Pre-X" is sometimes also used for a postulated substratum , as in the Pre-Indo-European languages believed to have been spoken in Europe and South Asia before

936-408: Is used instead. It is also sometimes called the common or primitive form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic , Primitive Norse ). In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested daughter languages . It is therefore equivalent with the ancestral language or parental language of

988-525: The Burgersdorp and Colesberg regions and variations of one similar-sounding "Bushman" language. Bleek was particularly keen to learn more about this " Bushman " language and compare it to examples of "Bushman" vocabulary and language earlier noted by Hinrich Lichtenstein and obtained from missionaries at the turn of the 19th century. In 1863 resident magistrate Louis Anthing introduced the first ǀXam -speakers to Bleek. He brought three men to Cape Town from

1040-554: The paleolithic era in which those dialects formed the linguistic structure of the IE language group. In his view, Indo-European is solely a system of isoglosses which bound together dialects which were operationalized by various tribes , from which the historically attested Indo-European languages emerged. Proto-languages evidently remain unattested. As Nicholas Kazanas  [ de ] puts it: Wilhelm Bleek Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (8 March 1827 – 17 August 1875)

1092-429: The realist or the abstractionist position. Even the widely studied proto-languages, such as Proto-Indo-European , have drawn criticism for being outliers typologically with respect to the reconstructed phonemic inventory . The alternatives such as glottalic theory , despite representing a typologically less rare system, have not gained wider acceptance, and some researchers even suggest the use of indexes to represent

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1144-430: The wave model . The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the formulation of the characters by the linguists working on it. Not all characters are suitable for the comparative method. For example, lexical items that are loans from a different language do not reflect the phylogeny to be tested, and, if used, will detract from

1196-531: The Cape, like that of his sister-in-law after him, was characterised by extreme financial hardship which made his research even more difficult to continue with. Bleek's first contact with San people (Bushmen) was with prisoners at Robben Island and the Cape Town Gaol and House of Correction, in 1857. He conducted interviews with a few of these prisoners, which he used in later publications. These people all came from

1248-493: The Guthrie zones, others are found in every zone. These include for example * mbʊ́à 'dog', * -lia 'eat', * ma-béele 'breasts', * i-kúpa 'bone', * i-jína 'name', * -genda 'walk', * mʊ-kíla 'tail', * njɪla 'path', and so on. (The asterisks show that these are reconstructed forms, indicating how the words are presumed to have been pronounced before the Bantu expansion began.) Other vocabulary items tend to be found in either one or

1300-760: The Kenhardt district to stand trial for attacks on farmers (the prosecution was eventually waived by the Attorney General ). In 1866 two San prisoners from the Achterveldt near Calvinia were transferred from the Breakwater prison to the Cape Town prison, making it easier for Bleek to meet them. With their help, Bleek compiled a list of words and sentences and an alphabetical vocabulary. Most of these words and sentences were provided by Adam Kleinhardt (see Bleek I-1, UCT A1.4.1). In 1870 Bleek and Lloyd , by now working together on

1352-521: The Revd W Kronlein who provided Bleek with Namaqua texts in 1861. In 1859 Bleek briefly returned to Europe in an effort to improve his poor health but returned to the Cape and his research soon after. In 1861 Bleek met his future wife, Jemima Lloyd, at the boarding house where he lived in Cape Town (run by a Mrs Roesch), while she was waiting for a passage to England, and they developed a relationship through correspondence. She returned to Cape Town from England

1404-424: The arrival there of Indo-European languages. When multiple historical stages of a single language exist, the oldest attested stage is normally termed "Old X" (e.g. Old English and Old Japanese ). In other cases, such as Old Irish and Old Norse , the term refers to the language of the oldest known significant texts. Each of these languages has an older stage ( Primitive Irish and Proto-Norse respectively) that

1456-418: The compatibility. Getting the right dataset for the comparative method is a major task in historical linguistics. Some universally accepted proto-languages are Proto-Afroasiatic , Proto-Indo-European , Proto-Uralic , and Proto-Dravidian . In a few fortuitous instances, which have been used to verify the method and the model (and probably ultimately inspired it ), a literary history exists from as early as

1508-571: The customs and daily life of the informants. Photographs and measurements (some as specified by Thomas Huxley 's global ethnographic project, see Godby 1996) were also taken of all their informants in accordance with the norms of scientific research of the time in those fields. More intimate and personal painted portraits were also commissioned of some of the Xam teachers. Although Bleek and Lloyd interviewed other individuals during 1875 and 1876 (Lloyd doing this alone after Bleek's death), most of their time

1560-426: The date of the start of the expansion somewhere between 3000 BC and 800 BC. A minority view casts doubt on whether Proto-Bantu, as a unified language, actually existed in the time before the Bantu expansion, or whether Proto-Bantu was not a single language but a group of related dialects. One scholar, Roger Blench , writes: "The argument from comparative linguistics which links the highly diverse languages of zone A to

1612-475: The disputed series of plosives. On the other end of the spectrum, Pulgram (1959 :424) suggests that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions are just "a set of reconstructed formulae" and "not representative of any reality". In the same vein, Julius Pokorny in his study on Indo-European , claims that the linguistic term IE parent language is merely an abstraction, which does not exist in reality and should be understood as consisting of dialects possibly dating back to

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1664-544: The following year. Bleek married Jemima Lloyd on 22 November 1862. The Bleeks first lived at The Hill in Mowbray but moved in 1875 to Charlton House . Jemima's sister, Lucy Lloyd , joined the household, became his colleague, and carried on his work after his death. When Grey was appointed Governor of New Zealand , he presented his collection to the National Library of South Africa on condition that Bleek be its curator ,

1716-505: The labial pre-nasal is written *m while the others are written *n. The earlier velar nasal phoneme /ŋ/ , which was present in the Bantoid languages , had been lost in Proto-Bantu. It still occurred phonetically in pre-nasalised consonants but not as a phoneme. The representation of the vowels may differ in particular with respect to the two "middle" levels of closedness. Some prefer to denote

1768-485: The last hundred years, beginning with Carl Meinhof and his students, great efforts have been made to examine the vocabulary of the approximately 550 present day Bantu languages and to try to reconstruct the proto-forms from which they presumably came. Among other recent works is that by Bastin, Coupez, and Mann, which assembled comparative examples of 92 different words from all the 16 language zones established by Guthrie . Although some words are found only in certain of

1820-509: The nation's heritage and traditions. In this endeavour Bleek must surely have been influenced by Louis Anthing. Bleek died in Mowbray on 17 August 1875, aged 48, and was buried in Wynberg Anglican cemetery in Cape Town along with his two infant children, who had died before him. His all-important work recording the |Xam language and literature was continued and expanded by Lucy Lloyd , fully supported by his wife Jemima. In his obituary in

1872-446: The near-close set as *e and *o, with the more open set represented as *ɛ and *ɔ. Syllables always ended in a vowel but could also begin with one. Vowels could also occasionally appear in a sequence but did not form diphthongs ; two adjacent vowels were separate syllables. If two of the same vowel occurred together, that created a long vowel, but that was rare. Proto-Bantu distinguished two tones , low and high. Each syllable had either

1924-514: The other of the two main Bantu dialect groups, the Western group (mainly covering Guthrie zones A, B, C, H, K, L, R) or the Eastern group (covering zones D, E, F, G, M, N, P, and S). Words reconstructed for these two groups are known as "Proto-Bantu A" ("PB-A") and "Proto-Bantu B" ("PB-B") respectively, whereas those which extend over the whole Bantu area are known as "Proto-Bantu X" (or "PB-X"). Building on

1976-542: The palatal semi-vowel, which has been normalised to use the j notation. An alternative list of Proto-Bantu noun classes from Vossen & Dimmendaal (2020:151) is as follows: Wilhelm Bleek 's reconstruction consisted of sixteen noun prefixes. Carl Meinhof adapted Bleek's prefixes, changing some phonological features and adding more prefixes, bringing the total number to 21. A. E. Meeussen reduced Meinhof's reconstructed prefixes to 19, but added an additional locative prefix numbered 23. Malcolm Guthrie later reconstructed

2028-506: The people interviewed by Bleek was !Kweiten-ta-Ken . Many of the |Xam-speakers interviewed by Bleek and Lloyd were related to one another. Bleek and Lloyd learned and wrote down their language, first as lists of words and phrases and then as stories and narratives about their lives, history, folklore and remembered beliefs and customs. Bleek, along with Lloyd, made an effort to record as much anthropological and ethnographic information as possible. This included genealogies, places of origin, and

2080-488: The project to learn "Bushman" language and record personal narratives and folklore, became aware of the presence of a group of 28 ǀXam prisoners (San from the central interior of southern Africa) at the Breakwater Convict Station and received permission to relocate one prisoner to their home in Mowbray so as to learn his language. The prison chaplain, Revd Fisk, was in charge of the selection of this individual –

2132-499: The proto-language of its "uniform character." This is evident in Karl Brugmann 's skepticism that the reconstruction systems could ever reflect a linguistic reality. Ferdinand de Saussure would even express a more certain opinion, completely rejecting a positive specification of the sound values of reconstruction systems. In general, the issue of the nature of proto-language remains unresolved, with linguists generally taking either

Proto-Bantu language - Misplaced Pages Continue

2184-532: The same 19 classes as Meeussen, but removed locative prefix numbered 23. Hendrikse and Poulos proposed a semantic continuum for Bantu noun classes. Numbers identifying noun classes in the table are referenced from the above table giving a reconstruction of nominal classes. This arrangement permits the classification of noun classes via nonlinguistic factors like perception and cognition. Hendrikse and Poulos have grouped singular and plural classes (such as classes 1 and 2) together, and created "hybrid positions" between

2236-561: The thinking at the time being that all African languages were connected. After graduating in Bonn, Bleek returned to Berlin and worked with a zoologist , Dr Wilhelm K H Peters , editing vocabularies of East African languages . His interest in African languages was further developed during 1852 and 1853 by learning Egyptian Arabic from Professor Karl Richard Lepsius , whom he met in Berlin in 1852. Bleek

2288-468: The upland forest fringes around the Sanaga and Nyong rivers of Southern Cameroon. It was formerly thought that proto-Bantu originated somewhere in the border region between Nigeria and Cameroon. However, new research revealed that was more likely the original area of Proto-Southern Bantoid, before it spread southwards into Cameroon long before Proto-Bantu emerged. Proto-Bantu is generally reconstructed to have

2340-636: The varying categories (such as the placement of class 14). Classes 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 13 are generally accepted as being the plural forms of noun classes in Proto-Bantu. Classes 14 onward do not have a plural form defined as concretely as classes 1–13 do. Meeussen proposed pairings of 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10, 11/10, 12/13, 14/6, 15/6, and "probably" 19/13. Guthrie proposed pairings of 1/2, 1a/2, 3/4, 3, 5/6, 5, 6, 7/8, 9/10, 9, 11/10, 12/13, 14, 14/6. Maho combines pairings by De Wolf, Meeussen, and Guthrie, offering alternative pairings such as 3/10, 3/13, 9/4, 11/4, 12/4, 14/4, 14/10, 15/4, 19/4, and 19/10. During

2392-506: The work done by A. E. Meeussen in the 1960s, a publicly searchable database of all the Bantu vocabulary items which have been established or proposed so far is maintained by the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren in Belgium (see External links). Proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics , a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which

2444-405: Was August Schleicher ; he did so for Proto-Indo-European in 1861. Normally, the term "Proto-X" refers to the last common ancestor of a group of languages, occasionally attested but most commonly reconstructed through the comparative method , as with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic . An earlier stage of a single language X, reconstructed through the method of internal reconstruction ,

2496-470: Was Bleek's patron during his time as Governor of the Cape . The two had a good professional and personal relationship based on an admiration that appears to have been mutual. Bleek was widely respected as a philologist , particularly in the Cape. While working for Grey he continued with his philological research and contributed to various publications during the late 1850s. Bleek requested examples of African literature from missionaries and travellers, such as

2548-462: Was a German linguist . His work included A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages and his great project jointly executed with Lucy Lloyd : The Bleek and Lloyd Archive of ǀxam and !kun texts. A short form of this eventually reached press with Specimens of Bushman Folklore , which Laurens van der Post drew on heavily. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek was born in Berlin on 8 March 1827. He

2600-642: Was appointed official linguist to Dr William Balfour Baikie 's Niger Tshadda Expedition in 1854. Ill-health (a tropical fever ) forced his return to England where he met George Grey and John William Colenso , the Anglican Bishop of Natal , who invited Bleek to join him in Natal in 1855 to help compile a Zulu grammar. After completing Colenso's project, Bleek travelled to Cape Town in 1856 to become Sir George Grey's official interpreter as well as to catalogue his private library. Grey had philological interests and

2652-488: Was spent interviewing only six individual |Xam contributors. Bleek wrote a series of reports on the language and the literature and folklore of the |xam-speakers he interviewed, which he sent to the Cape Secretary for Native Affairs. This was first in an attempt to gain funding to continue with his studies and then also to make Her Majesty's Colonial Government aware of the need to preserve San folklore as an important part of

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2704-644: Was the eldest son of Friedrich Bleek , Professor of Theology at Berlin University and then at the University of Bonn , and Augusta Charlotte Marianne Henriette Sethe. He graduated from the University of Bonn in 1851 with a doctorate in linguistics, after a period in Berlin where he went to study Hebrew and where he first became interested in African languages . Bleek's thesis featured an attempt to link North African and Khoikhoi (or what were then called Hottentot) languages –

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