Bantu languages

Sarufi ya Kiswahili cha Ngazi ya Kwanza na Kati -- By OSWALD ALMASI,
MICHAEL DAVID FALLON, and NAZISH PARDHAN WARED -- This book is intended for University students who are interested in learning the Swahili language at the Introductory and Intermediate levels. It consists of 40 teaching chapters. (This book was made available at the following website: https://www.pdfdrive.com/swahili-grammar-for-introductory-and-intermediate-levels-sarufi-ya-kiswahili-cha-ngazi-ya-kwanza-na-kati-d181490632.html)

English translation of a Bemba novelette by Stephen A. Mpashi, published in 1957 by Oxford University Press. The booklet gives a slice-of-life picture of urban life on the Copperbelt during Zambia's (then Northern Rhodesia) pre-independence days. (Class Notes: Zambian Literature in Translation -- University of Wisconsin, 1975)

The paper discusses verse written in Chichewa, the national language of Malawi, that is published in Malawian newspapers, specifically the weeklies; the Weekend Nation and the Malawi News. The paper contends that the verse appearing in these newspapers are topical, essentially socio-political commentary that at the time of publication preoccupies the Malawi nation. Because the newspaper as a medium is populist the verse itself tends to be populist as well. This entails that the verse is largely ephemeral and its interest to a large extent lies not in its intrinsic quality but rather in the implications it may hold for the development of Chichewa poetry.

Los lingüistas más eminentes que han estudiado el tiempo verbal aceptan que se ha de trazar una distinción entre los dos sistemas de tiempo verbal, es decir, el tiempo verbal absoluto y el relativo. En el caso de los tiempos verbales absolutos la interpretación temporal de los acontecimientos se realiza mediante una codificación temporal (el centro deíctico). El centro deíctico actúa como origo para la interpretación temporal de los acontecimientos. Sin embargo, en el caso de los tiempos verbales relativos la interpretación temporal de los acontecimientos no se realiza directamente mediante una codificación temporal, sino mediante un punto de referencia específico que se sitúa en una relación particular con el tiempo codificado (el centro deíctico). A pesar de la publicación de varias gramáticas de las lenguas bantúes en los últimos años, los lingüistas especializados en dichas lenguas aún no distinguen de forma sistemática entre los tiempos verbales absolutos y relativos. Los dos aspectos del tiempo verbal que se estudiarán en este artículo serán la descripción de las diferencias entre los tiempos verbales absolutos y relativos y la denominación individualizada de las formas del tiempo verbal. El interés (por lo que se refiera a datos lingüísticos) se centrará en el zulú, una lengua bantú, una lengua sitiada en la zona sureste del África bantú-hablante. El zulú es la lengua de Sudáfrica con un mayor número de hablantes nativos (llegando a un total del 22,9% de la población) y es una de las once lenguas oficiales del país junto a (en orden decreciente de hablantes nativos) el xhosa (17,9%), el afrikaans (14,4%), el sotho del norte (9,2%), el inglés (8,6%), el tswana (8,2%), el sotho del sur (7,7%), el tsonga (4,4%), el swazi (2,5%), el venda (2,2%) y el ndebele (1,5%).

By Robert Cancel -- It is surprisingly difficult to tell a good story about storytelling. It is harder still to make the storytellers themselves come alive, helping their in situ oral performances flourish in text on a printed page. Robert Cancel achieves both of these goals, and more still. Storytelling in Northern Zambia is a masterful book in which Cancel grapples with collection, representation and fieldwork ethics, and a work that showcases the agency of his interlocutors (from the Foreword).

Despite its inaccessibility (it remains untranslated and copies are hard to obtain), Vinigi Grottanelli’s Pescatori dell’Oceano indiano (1955) is generally agreed to be one of the best studies of a rural Swahili-speaking community. It’s our principal ethnographic source on the Bajuni (aka Gunya, aka Tikuu), whose traditional territory comprised a long string of coastal settlements and islands between Kismayu (Somalia) in the north and the Lamu archipelago (Kenya) in the south. And the political turmoil of recent decades in Somalia has turned it into a valuable historical document, a record of a way of life that for thousands of Bajuni has been shattered by persecution and conflict.

The early history of nautical technology in the western Indian Ocean and adjoining parts of the African coast is poorly understood. In the absence of evidence from shipwrecks, it has hitherto been based largely on the uncertain interpretation of a few documentary references and speculation surrounding technological parallels and assumed lexical resemblances. This paper examines some of the linguistic evidence in a more rigorous way, by undertaking a cross-dialectal comparison of names for watercraft and terms for outriggers in Swahili (Kiswahili), a Bantu language spoken on the islands and in scattered communities along the western seaboard of the Indian Ocean. The resulting analysis provides a new outline of the development of Swahili nautical technology and maritime culture, highlighting the key role played by particular boat forms, and the relative importance of indigenous innovation and different external influences, including the elusive impacts of Austronesian seafaring.

By John Gwengwe (1970)--A classic anthropological composition in Chichewa, written in a dynamic vernacular style. It includes study questions that invite readers to explore its various traditional topics more fully in the light of contemporary life in SE Africa today, some 50 years after this significant little book was published. My apologies for the marred reproduction from an old student copy. Part 'A' is found here: https://www.academia.edu/40161823/KUKULA_ndi_MWAMBO--_Brought_Up_With_Traditional_Customs_part_A_

(Présentation à Bunia, RDC lors d'une conférence pour marquer la Journée Internationale de la Langue Maternelle, 21 février 2022) Un résumé des résultats préliminaires d'un projet de recherche, mené oct-nov 2021, pour récolter les données de référence sur l'état d'alphabétisation parmi les Vanuma (Wanyali-Tchabi).

Le vanuma (<vau>, D.30) se parle dans la Province de l'Ituri, au nord-est de la République Démocratique du Congo. Malgré une petite population et des pressions démographiques, les Vanuma commencent à lire et écrire leur langue. Les trois langues dans le répertoire communautaire sont le français (langue nationale), le swahili (langue régionale), et le vanuma.

Pour mieux planifier les efforts en alphabétisation et éducation parmi les Vanuma, il a fallu
  - découvrir les aspirations et les besoins ressentis en ces égards;
  - éclaircir les pratiques actuelles en lecture et écriture des trois langues,
------------
Preliminary summary of the results of research in 2021 to inform literacy efforts among the Vanuma people of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The study sought to
- establish a baseline of reading and writing ability in French, Swahili and the local language (Vanuma, <vau>, D.30)
- discover felt needs and aspirations with regard to literacy and education

By W.A.R. Gorman, London: Longmans,1950; apologies for the poor photocopy job--not mine!
(This text was made available at the following website: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557edb36e4b0c3993dee95d1/t/57a505f1d1758e28c29dbf4e/1470432776321/Simple%2BSilozi.compressed.pdf)

This is a draft of a collection of Chimiini proverbs. The first author [CWK] began collecting Chimiini proverbs in the 1970s with the assistance of the late Mohammad Imam Abasheikh. He resumed collecting, together with the second author [BH], from 2009 to the present, primarily with the indefatigable help of Gelani Mohamed Diini. This draft lacks fully developed introductory materials, but does contain most of the proverbial lore that we gathered. Each proverb is written in a practical orthography and also in an orthography that more accurately represents one of the possible pronunciations of the proverb. The orthographic problem that Chimiini poses is that with respect to the features of vowel length and accent, the pronunciation of each word in a sentence depends on the "phrasing" of the sentence (i.e. the way in which words are grouped together in phrases).

Resumo: Discute-se neste artigo as possibilidades para a construção de corpora bilíngues quimbundo-português-quimbundo para o estudo de fenômenos de contato linguístico entre essas duas línguas. Faz-se uma aproximação entre as áreas da Linguística de Corpus e da Linguística Africana, enfatizando-se o caso dos contatos linguísticos presentes nos corpora em vista. Defende-se que o quimbundo e o português têm uma relação histórica que permite a elaboração de um corpus escrito a partir de sua tradição descritiva iniciada no século XVII e de um corpus de fala decorrente de projetos de pesquisa recentes que se ocupam de variedades vernaculares do português e sua relação com a língua africana deste estudo. Para tanto, buscou-se fazer um estudo do estado da arte da descrição do quimbundo e do português angolano com o objetivo de demonstrar a necessidade e viabilidade da produção de corpora bilíngues escrito e de fala quimbundo-português-quimbundo. Espera-se que a produção de corpora bilíngues quimbundo-português-quimbundo possa contribuir para o conhecimento da situação de contato visualizado entre as duas línguas, pautando-se em material empírico necessário para o entendimento da real situação de contato entre essas línguas de Angola além de embasar com dados empíricos hipóteses como a de um continuum afro-brasileiro de português. Palavras-chave: corpora bilíngues; quimbundo; português; contato linguístico; Angola. Abstract: This article discusses the possibilities for building Kimbundu-Portuguese-Kimbundu bilingual corpora in order to studying language contact phenomena between these two languages. An approximation is made between the areas of Corpus Linguistics and African Linguistics, emphasizing the case of linguistic contact in the corpora in

Bantu languages, which are spoken throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, permit wh-questions to be constructed in multiple ways, including wh-in-situ, full wh-movement, and partial wh-movement. Shona, a Bantu language spoken by about 13 million people in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, allows all three of these types. In this dissertation, I conduct the first in-depth examination of Shona wh-questions, drawing on fifty hours of elicitation with a native speaker consultant to explore the derivational relationships among these strategies.

Wh-in-situ questions have received a wide variety of treatments in the syntactic literature, ranging from covert or disguised movement to postsyntactic binding of the wh-phrase by a silent question operator. In Bantu languages, wh-in-situ questions are often taken to be derived via a non-movement relation (e.g., Carstens 2005 for Kilega, Diercks 2010 for Lubukusu, Muriungi 2003 for Kîîtharaka, Sabel 2000 for Kikuyu and Duala, Sabel & Zeller 2006 for Zulu, Schneider-Zioga 2007 for Kinande), but alternatives have rarely been considered. I demonstrate how movement-based analyses that have been proposed for wh-in-situ in non-Bantu languages make the wrong predictions for Shona wh-in-situ, which lacks word order permutation, extraction marking, island effects, and intervention effects. These properties provide support for the traditional Bantuist view that the relation between the pronunciation site of an in-situ wh-phrase and its scopal position in the left periphery is not movement; I claim that in Shona it is unselective binding.

Many Bantu languages, including Shona, prohibit wh-phrases from appearing in the canonical preverbal subject position. Wasike (2007) demonstrates that this restriction applies to topicalized non-subjects as well as preverbal subjects. I replicate these results for Shona and argue that they cast doubt on Sabel & Zeller's (2006) attempt to characterize the ban with an appeal to improper movement. I argue instead that restrictions on the distribution of wh-in-situ in Bantu are tied to restrictions on the domain for focus licensing. This claim is further bolstered by an examination of crosslinguistic variation within Bantu with respect to whether the ban on in-situ preverbal wh-subjects applies in embedded clauses. I observe a previously unnoticed generalization: languages that universally ban in-situ preverbal wh-subjects (like Zulu) have immediately after the verb (IAV) focus effects; languages that do allow in-situ preverbal wh-subjects in embedded clauses (like Shona, Lubukusu, and Kîîtharaka) also lack IAV effects.

Full wh-movement in Shona gives rise to questions that bear a certain similarity to English wh-questions. However, using a range of diagnostics including extraction marking, island effects, reconstruction effects, and the distribution of temporal modifiers, I argue that what appears to be full wh-movement in Shona actually has a cleft structure: the wh-phrase moves to become the head of a relative clause, which is selected by a copula in the matrix clause. Just as in wh-in-situ, an ex-situ wh-phrase is pronounced lower than its scopal position, and the relation between these two positions is established via unselective binding. Additional evidence for this proposal comes from the sensitivity of partial wh-movement to island boundaries below but not above the pronunciation site of the wh-phrase, a pattern that has been predicted by previous analyses (e.g., Abels 2012, Sabel 2000, Sabel & Zeller 2006) but for which empirical support has been lacking until now. I therefore unify full and partial wh-movement under a single analysis for cleft-based wh-in-situ that involves a step of relativization (independently needed for relative clauses) and a step of unselective binding (independently needed for wh-in-situ).

Ideophones are typically described as "marked words that depict sensory imagery" (Dingemanse 2011, 25). This paper addresses ideophone data from three Luhya languages: Llogoori, Lunyore, and Lutiriki (Bantu, Kenya). Our primary claim is descriptive: we show that there is a closed class of (previously undescribed) Luhya ideophones. We illustrate how the Luhya data is consistent with what is known about ideophones cross-linguistically, and give a preliminary semantic analysis of the Luhya ideophones as degree intensifiers.

@Book{LaTeCH-SHELTR:2009, editor = {Lars Borin and Piroska Lendvai}, title = {Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education (LaTeCH -- SHELT\&amp;amp;R 2009)}, month = {March}, year = {2009}, address = {Athens, Greece}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W09-03} } @InProceedings{goerz-scholz:2009:LaTeCH-SHELTR, author = {Goerz, Guenther and Scholz, Martin}, title = {Content ...

The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) initiated this project to harmonise and standardise orthographic/spelling conventions of cross-border languages of Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Considering the relatedness of Bantu languages, adapted versions of this orthography have been done for Bantu languages across borders of Southern, Central and Eastern Africa. This publication marks an important milestone in the development of African languages for the mass education and development of Africans by coming up with a single spelling system for cross-border languages of Africa. Even speakers of smaller and non-official languages can use this orthography/spelling system or adapt it for their own local use by adding sounds, consonants in particular, that have not been captured in this volume.

By Mushashu Kopano--a fictional short story, translated from the original Lozi text by Daniel Kunene (Zambia Publications Bureau--1957, 1961, 1967). My apologies for the poor print quality, a spirit-ink duplication that dates from 1974. (I have noted later that the text is almost unintelligible in many places, so if there are enough requests, I can try to have it retyped--ew.)

L’ancien royaume Kongo a non seulement donné son nom au fleuve et aux deux pays modernes dont ce cours d’eau constitue une frontière naturelle, mais aussi à la langue bantoue qui fut et est toujours parlée sur son territoire. Ce qui est généralement appelé le kikongo renvoie en fait à un ensemble de plusieurs langues étroitement apparentées, plutôt qu’à un seul et unique parler.

This book is about the rich tourism potential of Busoga, the epicenter of Uganda. Like the promised land, Busoga is endowed with lots of touristic sites that you should not miss. The on-going stand off in the Kyabaziga institution should not deny you of a life time enjoyment of the Nile Cradle's spectacular spectacle. There is more than you have read or heard. Come and see for yourself.

By MTHIKAZI ROSELINA MASUBELELE
Summary -- While translation can be studied with a view to throwing light on a number of aspects in life, in this thesis translation has been researched with a view to outlining the development of written Zulu from its earliest stages, using twelve texts of the Book of Matthew. The Book of Matthew has been chosen in this undertaking because it was the first book of the Bible to be translated into Zulu and was thought to be the most apposite instrument with which the development of written Zulu could be measured. The polysystem theory and the descriptive
approach to translation studies are the theoretical models that inform the arguments presented in this study. Polysystem theory sees translated literature as a system operating in the larger social, literary and historical systems of the target culture, while with the descriptive approach translations are regarded as facts of the target culture. Against this premise the focus of this study is mainly on the twelve translations of the Book of Matthew and no comparisons between
source and target texts are undertaken here. Corpus-based research provided tools such as WordSmith Tools 3.0 for linguistic analysis. Biblical texts were obtained, scanned and presented in electronic format ready to be analysed. From the findings drawn, written Zulu developed all the way through Bible translation, with some translations revealing slight developments and others showing enormous ones. As the findings of this study reveal, Zulu developed gradually, as evidenced by the change to conjunctive writing which occurred over a considerable period, along with the appropriate representation of Zulu speech sounds and grammar conventions. It could also be established at what point during the development of the language, processes such as consonantalisation and palatalisation were introduced into the written language. It is also clear that words of Greek and Hebrew origin were brought into the Zulu language through Bible translation. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that it is feasible to use
corpus-based research for analysis in the indigenous languages of South Africa.
(This dissertation was made available at the following website: http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/1149/thesis.pdf?sequence=1)

The present paper provides a cognitive-grammaticalization analysis of the morpheme NA in Xhosa, discussing the categorial status of NA as a con-junctive coordinator (CC) and its range of polysemy and/or polyfunctionality. First, the study demonstrates that, when used in a coordinating function, NA approximates the CC prototype to a significant extent, as it complies with most of the features associated with CCs cross-linguistically. Second, the analysis of polysemy/polyfunctionality shows that NA spans large parts of the typological map posited for CC constructions. The conceptual and diachronic center of the map of NA corresponds to a prepositional comitative sense from which the other values (e.g. 'carry', possessive, temporal, modality, 'even', concessive, 'also, as well' and 'illness') and functions (e.g. predicative and adverbial) have emerged through a series of semantic extensions connected via family resemblance. In this map, the uses of NA as a nominal coordinator, comitative preposition, possessive predicator, and focal-adverbial 'also, as well' are the most prototypical. The results of the research contribute to the typological theory of CCs and their semantic-map modeling.*

This paper explores the way time is lexically expressed in Setswana. Using data from a Setswana corpus, the study isolated instances of temporal reference for linguistic analysis. The paper demonstrates that Setswana uses varied devices such as temporal adverbs (e.g. maabane 'yesterday' and phakela 'in the morning') and spatial metaphors (e.g. pele 'ahead, before, in front, first' and morago 'behind, after, at [the] back') to express time. Even though Setswana has adapted metric ways of showing time such as calendar months and days, the discussion shows that temporal reference in traditional Setswana was event-based (e.g. based on movements of the sun and seasonal change). The study shows that Setswana lexical expressions of time are bound up with the ways in which Setswana speakers conceptualise time.

By M. V. B. MANGOCHE
The purpose of this note book is not to teach Chichewa. Rather it is to help those English speaking visitors who come to Malawi, and who would wish to add a little more to their happiness during such visits by occasionally conversing with the people in their own tongue. Such ability, it is hoped, will enable the visitor to enjoy himself and acquire the necessary holiday freedom, without the limitations of the interpreter, or the bias or misunderstandings and prejudices of his friends.
(This booklet was made available at the following website: https://www.pdfdrive.com/a-visitors-notebook-of-chichewa-d184654975.html)

Tense and Aspect are morphological features and in some languages like English, they are marked mainly by inflection on the verb. In Bantu languages, the verbal element is characteristically conflated to mark tense and aspect and more often than not, the morphemes marking tense and aspect cannot be isolated. In many instances, they are tonally marked. Thus, a lexical verb may mark three or even more distinctions whose semantic realization is only through tonal variation. Similarly, Case realization is unique compared to for example English that marks possession on the noun and gender distinction on pronouns. This study will examine these features in Lulogooli, a Bantu language spoken in Western Kenya. Lulogooli has only two gender distinctions; male and female but does not use pronouns to mark them. This study proposes to sample data from the Lulogooli bible translation to show why and how improper use of these three grammatical categories leads to mistranslation. The analysis will also contribute to the significance of understanding language typology to translators so as to aid accuracy and effectiveness in translation. The study posits the significance of aspects of linguistic analysis to translation.