Classes 110 and 12 were paired, the first member of the pair was for singular nouns, the second for plural nouns. While english doesnt really have noun classes other than singluar and plural, french could be said to contain four noun classes masculine singular, masculine plural, feminine singular, feminine plural which each have their own agreements for adjectives etc. Patterns and developments in the marking of diminutives in. In the second section of the chapter, i will present the syntax of swahili. The class 2 noun basemane boys governs the subject concord ba in the verb ba ka bala they may read 1, as well as the class prefix ba in the adjective bagolo big 2, and the demonstrative pronoun ba, preceding the adjective 3. Noun class systems are universal and almost always marked by prefixes, occasionally by suffixes. The dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be. Suba language being a bantu language has a noun class system typical of the other bantu languages and because the language has hardly any. Isizulu course work in the department of african languages at the university of pretoria by linkie mohlala supervisor.
Sesotho, like all other bantu languages, uses a set of noun classes and each noun belongs to one of the classes. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages. The noun class that a noun belongs to is indicated by a prefix. Linguistic evidence regarding bantu origins the journal. San diego linguistic papers 5 2015 71120 noun class agreement and the elements of the noun phrase in gitongainhambane r. The classification of african languages by joseph h. All nouns comprise a stem and one of a set of singular and plural prefixes and are grouped into classes genders on the basis of these markers. Classes 34 for plants, trees and natural phenomena. The study focuses on the noun class system, and to get an apt description of this system, it will be necessary t o.
I will then describe the verbal complex, taking each morpheme in turn and describing its form and possible functions. Ha is a d60 bantu language spoken in western tanzania, closely related to rundi and. Bantu words in american english terms you should know for week 11 part 02 are. In the next subsections, sagala will be situated both geographically and in relation to other languages spoken in its neighbourhood.
This linguistic trail of crumbs marks one of the greatest human migrations ever undertaken. This agreement can also be described as an extensive system of concord. 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. In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. Most words in a bantu sentence are marked by a prefix indicating the category to which. The term noun class system has traditionally been used to refer to nominal classification systems as found in nigercongo, as in e. A noun class system is a grammatical system that some languages use to overtly categorize nouns. The similarity between dispersed bantu languages had been observed as early as in the 17th century. New developments in the classification of bantu languages. The ha noun class system revisited university of helsinki.
A corpusdriven account of the noun classes and genders in. Bantu languages, iii methods of classification and iv the bantu languages classified. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. All nouns comprise a stem and one of a set of singular and plural. Johnston later went on to produce an extensive study of bantu and semibantu pointing out these connections without clarifying the implications for genetic relationships or. Rugemalira 2007 has examined the syntactic structure of the noun phrase in bantu languages more in detail. What is a noun class sil glossary of linguistic terms. All nouns are assigned to a noun class, where the number of noun classes varies between 12 and 20. Studies in african linguistics volume 39, number 1, 2010.
Noun classification, definiteness, number, possession. Zulu, for example, has nine pairs of singular and plural prefixes. Bantu words in american english montclair state university. West mrican languages exhibited nounclass features analogous to those classified as bantu johnston 1886. The bantu languages are conventionally classified by a letter and a number e. They are spoken by more than 150 million people in central, eastern and southern africa. Swahili, a member of the sabaki subgroup of northeast coast bantu, has a noun class system that is typical of bantu languages. The xhosa language, as all the bantu languages, is structured around the noun.
Section 3 demonstrates the use of the bantu noun class system and its concordial agreement system. The morphosyntactic properties of bantu languages, in particular of southeast bantu languages, are often described as being fairly uniform across different languages. Pdf noun class agreement and the elements of the noun. Kiswahilis vowel harmony there are 9 noun classes in kiswahili. Noun class system and agreement patterns in logba ikpana.
This is a comparative study of the noun class grammatical gender systems in the bantu languages, the largest group of languages found in africa. Manyika is a dialect of shona, a bantu language spoken in zimbabwe and mozambique. When noun class is expressed on other parts of speech in addition to nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender. One of the bestknown features of the bantu languages is their noun class system. Bantu noun class systems can be roughly characterized in the following typological terms. While the grammatical structure of the proto bantu noun class system is welldefined, any. 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. For every noun class, there is a corresponding gender class prefix. Adjectives, be verbs, and determiners in manyika shona.
Classes 56 for objects that come in pairs or larger groups. Im not asking about the origin of grammatical gender. Mata university of california, san diego introduction gitonga gitonga is a bantu language spoken in southern mozambique in the inhambane area, which is located on the coast about 400 kilometers northeast of maputo. In analyz ing wordforms, the system applied uti lizes swatwol, a morphological pars. Each noun class has both a singular and a plural form, to make 18 total. First, noun classes tend to be realized as grammatical morphemes rather than independent lexical items.
In many atlantic languages the initial consonant of the noun takes alternates according to the noun class prefix with which it occurs. Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class system. Middle passage bantu languages slang black english africanamerican vernacular english play the dozens. Given the residual semantics of the bantu noun class system, do children use meaning to learn the noun class system demuth 2000. First, it appears that both singular and plural noun class prefixes are segmented as. In this study, it is just looked at briefly what elements can cooccur in the noun. I also offer a stateoftheart of existing research on sagala and explain the goals of this study. Like many bantu languages, manyika has a noun class system, which affects the morphology and phonology of many parts of speech including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and determiners. The olusuba noun class system science publishing group. For example, the vast majority of southern and eastern bantu languages have an elaborated noun class system with about 1520 formal distinctions, complex verb.
The name bantu refers to a subfamily comprising between 500 and 680 languages, spoken by some 240 million people in subsaharan africa nurse and philippson, 2003. Kwa and a noun class system that is similar to the bantu languages. It is probably the origin of rap and has its own origin in the. Pluralizing nouns across agglutinating bantu languages acl. Originally, bantu languages had over 20 noun categories. Naki shows nasals in classes 6a, 18a, and an apparent class 6, which has plural semantics.
Patterns and developments in the marking of diminutives in bantu 345 with some 350500 languages spoken across much of central, eastern and southern africa, the bantu languages provide an ideal lens for the examination of linguistic variation, as well as processes of. The bantu attribute noun class prefixes and their suffixal. Nonetheless, noun class systems are grammatically productive in most bantu languages, and semantically productive to some. Gkeenberg 0 f the more recent attempts at the classification of african languages which followed the pioneer period of lepsius, muller, and cust, the one which has gained widest currency in this country, and therefore the one which. Nouns are divided somewhat arbitrarily between these classes, although a few of them contain nouns which mostly fall into clear categories. The nominal gender prefixes are shown below, with the protobantu i.
Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class system and the underlying semantic strands. Greenberg 1963a classifies them among the kwa subgroup b of the. The reflexes of the protobantu noun class prefixes of the form mu, mi, and maare compared in 84 bantu. Bantu languages are characterised by articulated noun class systems and complex verbal morphology. I am asking where is the earliest example of the term gender used to describe classes of nouns. Another distinctive feature of bantu languages is the system of agreement or concordance between noun modifiers and the noun i. The name was coined to represent the word for people in loosely reconstructed protobantu, from the plural noun class prefix bacategorizing. Included below is a chart of the protobantu noun class semantic classifications for comparison to the semantic classifications of the nyanja noun classes which follow it. In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers. The glossing in 1 indicates the agreement preprefix ppf and the class prefix cl on nouns and adnominal modifiers. The noun class systems in the bantu languages is characterized by, among other things, the existence of a number of noun classes which pair into singular. The concept of noun classes is similar, except while romance languages have 23 genders, bantu languages can have up to 23 noun classes. A common feature of bantu languages is nominal gender class agreement.
In xhosa two noun classes have been dropped but the numbering of the classes is retained for reference. Swahili noun classes noun classes ngeli za kiswahili nouns in kiswahili are grouped into various noun classes because of two main reasons. Section 4 discusses the semantics of the protobantu noun class. A comparative study of bantu noun classes institutionen. Covered in detail below are the classes 1 to 6, but not 7 to 9 as they are grammatical in nature rather than semantic, class 7 is the class of diminutives, class 8 are. 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. Further, these noun classes are not only expressed on nouns and adjectives, but also on verbs, prepositions, and more. The findings include the discovery of two new genders in northern sotho i.
The main factors of ambiguity in this language group can be traced to the noun class structure on one hand and to the bidirectional wordformation on the other. It is accompanied by a separate map in which the bantu languages are numbered in accordance with the system described in the fourth section. Bemba, like most bantu languages, has a very elaborate noun class system which involves pluralization patterns, agreement marking, and patterns of pronominal reference. Most bantu languages have around 1518 noun classes which can be distinguished by nominal noun class prefixes, paradigmatic relationships between classes e. The synchronic phonology and nominal morphology of sagala. A comparison of approaches to word class tagging in this sentence, three structural relationships can be identified.
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