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The Languages Of Africa
''The Languages of Africa'' is a 1963 book of essays by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, in which the author sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today. It is an expanded and extensively revised version of his 1955 work ''Studies in African Linguistic Classification'', which was itself a compilation of eight articles which Greenberg had published in the ''Southwestern Journal of Anthropology'' between 1949 and 1954. It was first published in 1963 as Part II of the ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', Vol. 29, No. 1; however, its second edition of 1966, in which it was published (by Indiana University, Bloomington: Mouton & Co., The Hague) as an independent work, is more commonly cited. Its author describes it as based on three fundamentals of method: * "The sole relevance in comparison of resemblances involving both sound and meaning in specific forms." * "Mass comparison as against ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life. After graduating from James Madison High School, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Language
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead language, dead Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large Text corpus, corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts, decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century. Egyptian is one of the List of languages by first written accounts, earliest written languages, first being recorded in the Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4000 years. Its classical language, classical form is known as Middle Egyptian, the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which remained the literary language of Egypt until the Egypt (Roman province), Roman period. By the time of classical antiquity the spoken language had evolved into Demotic (Egyptian), Dem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Central Sudanic
Central Sudanic is a family of about sixty languages that have been included in the proposed Nilo-Saharan language family. Central Sudanic languages are spoken in the Central African Republic, Chad, South Sudan, Uganda, Congo (DRC), Nigeria and Cameroon. They include the pygmy languages Efé and Asoa. Blench (2011) suggests that Central Sudanic influenced the development of the noun-class system characteristic of the Atlantic–Congo languages. Urheimat The homeland of Proto-Central Sudanic is thought to be within the Bahr el Ghazal. Classification Half a dozen groups of Central Sudanic languages are generally accepted as valid. They are customarily divided into East and West branches. Starostin (2016) Starostin (2016)George Starostin (2016) ''The Nilo-Saharan hypothesis tested through lexicostatistics: current state of affairs'' finds support for Eastern Central Sudanic (Lendu, Mangbetu, Lugbara, etc., concentrated in the northeast corner of DR Congo) but not for the wes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eastern Sudanic
In most classifications, the Eastern Sudanic languages are a group of nine families of languages that may constitute a branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Eastern Sudanic languages are spoken from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania. Nubian (and possibly Meroitic) gives Eastern Sudanic some of the earliest written attestations of African languages. However, the largest branch by far is Nilotic, spread by extensive and comparatively recent conquests throughout East Africa. Before the spread of Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic was centered in present-day Sudan. The name "East Sudanic" refers to the eastern part of the region of Sudan where the country of Sudan is located, and contrasts with Central Sudanic and Western Sudanic (modern Mande, in the Niger–Congo family). Lionel Bender (1980) proposes several Eastern Sudanic isoglosses (defining words), such as ''*kutuk'' "mouth", ''*(ko)TVS-(Vg)'' "three", and ''*ku-lug-ut'' or ''*kVl(t)'' "fish". In older classifications, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nilo-Saharan
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the centre; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east. As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile Basin and the Central Sahara Desert. Eight of its proposed constituent divisions (excluding Kunama, Kuliak, and Songhay) are found in the modern countries of Sudan and South Sudan, through which the Nile River flows. In his book ''The Languages of Africa'' (1963), Joseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was a genetic family. It contains the languages which are not included in the Niger–Congo, Afroasiatic o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sandawe Language
Sandawe is a language spoken by about 60,000 Sandawe people in the Dodoma Region of Tanzania. Sandawe's use of click consonants, a rare feature shared with only two other languages of East Africa – Hadza and Dahalo, had been the basis of its classification as a member of the defunct Khoisan family of Southern Africa since Albert Drexel in the 1920s. Recent investigations however (Güldemann 2010) suggest that Sandawe may be related to the Khoe family regardless of the validity of Khoisan as a whole. A discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998). Language use is vigorous among both adults and children, with people in some areas monolingual. Sandawe has two dialects, northwest and southeast. Differences include speaking speed, vowel dropping, some word taboo, and minor lexical and grammatical differences. Some Alagwa have shifted to Sandawe, and are considered a Sandawe clan. SIL International began work on Sandawe in 1996 and to date (2004 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hadza Language
Hadza is a language isolate spoken along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania by around 1,000 Hadza people, who include in their number the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. It is one of only three languages in East Africa with click consonants. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous, with most children learning it, but UNESCO categorizes the language as vulnerable. Name The Hadza go by several names in the literature. 'Hadza' itself just means 'human being'. 'Hadzabe' (''hazabee'') is the plural, and 'Hadzapi' (''hazaphii'') means 'they are men'. 'Hatza' and 'Hatsa' are older German spellings. The language is sometimes distinguished as 'Hadzane' (''hazane'') 'of the Hadza'. 'Tindiga' is from Swahili ''watindiga'' 'people of the marsh grass' (from the large spring in Mangola) and ''kitindiga'' (language of the same). 'Kindiga' is apparently a form of the same from one of the local Bantu languages, presumably Isanzu. 'Kangeju' (pronounced ''Kangey ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Central Khoisan Languages
The Khoi languages are the largest of the non-Bantu language families indigenous to Southern Africa. They were once considered to be a branch of a Khoisan language family, and were known as Central Khoisan in that scenario. Though Khoisan is now rejected as a family, the name is retained as a term of convenience. The most numerous and only well-known Khoi language is Khoikhoi (Nama/Damara) of Namibia. The rest of the family is found predominantly in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. The languages are similar enough that a fair degree of communication is possible between khoikhoi and the languages of Botswana. The Khoi languages were the first Khoisan languages known to European colonists and are famous for their clicks, though these are not as extensive as in other Khoisan language families. There are two primary branches of the family, ''Khoikhoi'' of Namibia and South Africa, and ''Tshu–Khwe'' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Except for Nama, they are under pressure from national ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afroasiatic Languages
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent. Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a ''de facto'' group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. The languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hamitic
Hamites is the name formerly used for some Northern and Horn of Africa peoples in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races which was developed originally by Europeans in support of colonialism and slavery. The term was originally borrowed from the Book of Genesis, where it is used for the descendants of Ham, son of Noah. The term was originally used in contrast to the other two proposed divisions of mankind based on the story of Noah: Semites and Japhetites. The appellation ''Hamitic'' was applied to the Berber, Cushitic, and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family, which, together with the Semitic branch, was thus formerly labelled "Hamito-Semitic". However, since the three Hamitic branches have not been shown to form an exclusive ( monophyletic) phylogenetic unit of their own, separate from other Afroasiatic languages, linguists no longer use the term in this sense. Each of these branches is instead now regarded as an indep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hottentot Language
The Khoekhoe language (), also known by the ethnic terms Nama (''Namagowab'') , Damara (''ǂNūkhoegowab''), or Nama/Damara and formerly as Hottentot, is the most widespread of the non-Bantu languages of Southern Africa that make heavy use of click consonants and therefore were formerly classified as Khoisan, a grouping now recognized as obsolete. It belongs to the Khoe language family, and is spoken in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa primarily by three ethnic groups: Namakhoen, ǂNūkhoen, and Haiǁomkhoen. History The Haiǁom, who had spoken a Juu language, later shifted to Khoekhoe. The name for the speakers, ''Khoekhoen Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...'', is from the word ''khoe'' "person", with reduplication and the suffix ''-n'' to indicate the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nilo-Hamitic Languages
Paranilotic is a group of languages proposed by Carl Meinhof. Karl Lepsius had established the Nilotic languages as a family, with Western, Eastern, and Southern branches. Meinhof proposed that only Western were truly Nilotic, and that Eastern and Southern, which he called Nilo-Hamitic, were a mixture of (Western) Nilotic and Hamitic languages (in particular, modern Cushitic), based on racial and other non-linguistic considerations. Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on ... reverted to Lepsius's classification, as part of an attempt to remove racial classifications from African linguistics. However, Tucker and Bryan's (1956, 1966) influential surveys resurrected Meinhof's proposal under the name ''Paranilotic'', and that name is still sometimes found, especia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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