Zulu nouns, like nouns in other bantu languages, are divided into noun classes. The striking difference in the number of classes posited for proto bantu and individual bantu languages is due to the counting system and the status of certain classes. Download noun ecourseware course materials in pdf for. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. For example, swahili utilizes over noun classes, the equivalence of a romance language having genders. These grammar worksheets help kids learn to recognize and use nouns.
Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first experiences from runyakitara fridah katushemererwe ms thomas hanneforth. Parts of the bantu area include languages from other language families see map. If you dont have adobe acrobat reader, click here to get it for your computer. Researchers in bantu languages agree that that noun class features are determined by grammatical number, semantics, that is. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Noun classes in the grassfields bantu borderland can expand the words and meanings of symbols that are often seen daily.
Bantu language is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted over 20 times. Subcategories this category has the following 140 subcategories, out of 140 total. The hindu newspaper pdf free download 22 april 2020. There are about 250 bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and. Although noun classes are not easy to grasp they reveal the beauty and depth of the language like nothing else. Class prefixes as specifiers in southern bantu springerlink.
There are about 520 languages in the bantu family, 670 languages in the southern bantoid branch which includes bantu, and 1,532 in nigercongo. It includes 26 chapters that address such specific business. Did the protobantu verb have a synthetic or an analytic structure. Johnston later went on to produce an extensive study of bantu and semi bantu pointing out these connections without clarifying the implications for genetic relationships or. Bantu languages article about bantu languages by the free. As a result, an immediately following l will be deleted by mr, as shown in 25c. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu.
Categories with terms derived from bantu languages in various specific languages. However, the sotho languages sesotho, setswana, sepedi permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of unmarked phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. Cbse class 6 english grammar kinds of noun in the previous lesson you learnt that noun is the name of a person, place, animal or things. All nouns comprise a stem and one of a set of singular and plural. Introduction to the phonology of the bantu languages. Proto bantu had 19 classes, most of which have been conserved in its descendant languages, though some classes have been lost in a number of them. The basis of bantu literature africa cambridge core. Providing descriptive and typological information about the bantu languages of southern africa, this volume brings together a set of expert contributors and is divided into two parts.
Bemba, like most bantu languages, has a very elaborate noun class system which involves pluralization patterns, agreement marking, and patterns of pronominal reference. Pages in category bantu languages the following 32 pages are in this category, out of 32 total. These classes are much more numerous than the genders of. In changana, each noun things, animals, abstracts etc. Some restrictions on sesotho null noun class prefixes. 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. Some scholars have proposed other forms, especially for cl.
Though the extent to which the system operates varies greatly, it is nonetheless found in some form in languages. The lecture notes section lists the lecture files as per the topics covered in the course. Phonotactic clues to bantu noun class disambiguation phonotactic clues to bantu noun class disambiguation braver, aaron. Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first. Fsm2 and the morphological analysis of bantu nouns first experiences from runyakitara fridah katushemererwe ms thomas hanneforth information technology department of computational linguistic faculty of computing and institute of linguistics information technology university of potsdam, germany. Linguistic ties between ancient egyptian and bantu. Uncover language learning resources, listen to industry podcasts, dive into memory and methods, scan polyglot news sources and much more. The main characteristic of changana are the noun classes which are common for all bantu languages. All naming words such as boy, girl, delhi, cow, tiger, scale etc. An analysis of noun classes in tikar, a benuecongo language spoken in west central cameroon, looks at patterns in the noun class system, concord system possessives, demonstratives, demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, thirdperson pronouns, relative pronouns, copula, adjectivals, and numerals with an eye to determining whether tikar is a bantoid language or not.
Marktplatz is a german language course developed by deutsche welle with strong focus on business german. Noun classes are similar in concept to grammatical gender in many european languages, as the noun class determines how other words are inflected in concordance with the noun. Classes 110 and 12 were paired, the first member of the pair was for singular nouns, the second for plural nouns. West mrican languages exhibited noun class features analogous to those classified as bantu johnston 1886. Kiswahilis vowel harmony there are 9 noun classes in kiswahili. Bantu online resources, jacky maniacky, 7 july 2007, including list of bantu noun classes with reconstructed protobantu prefixes in french ehrets compilation of classifications by klieman, bastin, himself, and others pp 20409, ucla.
In rr and luganda, such a phenomenon is not possible. New developments in the classification of bantu languages and. All structured data from the file and property namespaces is available under the creative commons cc0 license. Select any course and level of study, click on the course title to get noun ecourseware for the course. Some authors use the term grammatical gender as a synonym of noun class, but others consider these different concepts. The answer key can be found at the end of the document page 85. Nonetheless, noun class systems are grammatically productive in most bantu languages, and semantically productive to some degree. Noun class prefixes are obligatory in most bantu languages.
Observations on normal classes in bantu languages volume 18 issue 3 malcolm guthrie. Rugemalira 2007, with the addition that the speaker is free to move the demonstrative to prenominal position without apparent change in. Bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of the present day country of cameroon. 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. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the attributive noun classes, as well as their suffixal counterparts, firstly in bantu, and secondly in zulu. Free download of course materials of the national open university of nigeria noun for all courses, in pdf format. The system of noun classes is probably the characteristic most widely found in nigercongo languages and best known to those interested in language phenomena. Isizulu course work in the department of african languages at the university of pretoria by linkie mohlala supervisor. Certain bantu languages today are developing as literary media, not only for official, educational, correspondence or publicity purposes, but for the more aesthetic side of life, for mental and spiritual culture. Grammatical and lexical comparison of the greater ruvu.
What is a noun class sil glossary of linguistic terms. First, nouns are grouped into more than ten marked noun classes. Section 2 outlines the reconstructed proto bantu noun class system and shows how some modern bantu languages, as well as more distantly related languages, have lost several noun class distinctions while preserving others. The bantu languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of africa from southern cameroon eastward to kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent. Each word must end in a vowel though in some modern dialects in eastern equatorial, west and south africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal.
Did the protobantu verb have a synthetic or an analytic. The 250 or so narrow bantu languages are conventionally divided up into geographic zones first proposed by malcolm guthrie 19671971. A noun class system is a grammatical system that some languages use to overtly categorize nouns. Free language brings together the best in language education from across the world. View bantu linguistics research papers on academia. The protoforms of the prefixes of classes 910 in bantu languages have invariably been represented as nnmeeussen 1967. As the source of bantu languages is generally argued to be in southwest adamawa, new data on bantu and related languages is important to the. Just as gender accord is required in many indoeuropean languages e. Each class is given a number corresponding to the same equivalent class in other bantu languages. The investigation will be done with reference to aspects such as the following. The bantu attribute noun class prefixes and their suffixal.
Swahili nouns are, like those in other bantu languages, noted for a system of semantically based classing, which affects not only nouns but also their modifiers adjectives, numbers, demonstratives and verbs. This study is based on a convenience sample of about fourty areally differentiated bantu languages. The bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is swahili. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages comprising those of zanzibar, mozambique, the zambesi, kafirland, benguela, angola, the congo, the ogowe, the cameroons, the lake region, etc. Swahili noun classes noun classes ngeli za kiswahili nouns in kiswahili are grouped into various noun classes because of two main reasons. Learning how to license null nounclass prefixes in. Jul 03, 2003 geographically, bantu languages are spoken in the southern half of africa.
Naki shows nasals in classes 6a, 18a, and an apparent class 6, which has plural semantics. A comparative analysis of runyankorerukiga and luganda. Database working in terms of a genetic tree diagram, reconstructing features of any intermediate node in the tree, in this case pb, ideally requires examining evidence. Bantu languages simple english wikipedia, the free. There are five principal factors in bantu languages which contribute to ambiguous analysis of word tbrms. 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. In bantu languages, every noun belongs to a noun class.
Learn bantu language with free interactive flashcards. Irene tucker sil international 2001 contents on classifying bantu languages general referential classifications historical classifications appendix the bantu languages of africa the bantu languages of africanorthwestern area references on classifying bantu languages general. It not only helps the students use the language but also gives detailed information regarding the language. Classifiers therefore are one among several systems of overt linguistic categorization of nominals as. Grammatical and lexical comparison 3 nurse and philippson 1980, for reasons unclear, do not fully resolve the internal classification of the smallest groups, and the seuta 8 languages are not included in gonzales 2002 study. The exact place of bantu in this framework is controversial, and there is no comprehensive overview of bantu. Language and culture swahili is a bantu language of the nigercongo family and has a typical, complicated bantu structure. Phonotactic clues to bantu noun class disambiguation. Download free pdf english books from nouns at easypacelearning. Forms and functions of noun modifying clauses in bantu. Relative clauses display similar structures across a number of bantu languages. With more than 2,400 courses available, ocw is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge. Crucially, this is not a case of where the unmarked h of other bantu languages has been reinterpreted as a marked h in this language. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages.
The phenomenon, in fact, is even more constrained and unproductive than in romance notable exceptions are attested in some bantu languages, e. Each noun class has both a singular and a plural form, to make 18 total. However, which nouns can be modified by these relative clauses is not uniform across the relevant languages, when we apply the binary classification of inner relations and outer relations. English books for download pdf nouns easypacelearning. New developments in the classification of bantu languages.
In the morphosyntactic domain, classifiers can be distinguished from concordial systems such as gender best known from indoeuropean languages and noun class systems of bantu languages. Section 3 demonstrates the use of the bantu noun class system and its concordial. For instance, in kagulu, noun class 5 triggers agreement of noun class 5 yet this noun is animate petzell. Many bantu languages employ strict grammatical agreement i. Modes of compounding in bantu, romance and chinese 207 several theoretical and empirical analyses, comparatively, nn compounding in bantu languages has been largely neglected. Cbse class 6 english grammar kinds of noun cbse tuts. Guthrie, the classification of the bantu languages 1948, repr. Nov 29, 2015 bantu languages are spoken largely east and south of presentday cameroon. Bantu languages, a group of some 500 languages belonging to the bantoid subgroup of the benuecongo branch of the nigercongo language family. We argue that a set of facts about the plural nominal class prefixes in southern bantu languages shows that some plural prefixes spell out a phrasal constituent, a specifier bottoming out in a classifierlike noun.
Introduction studies of the noun in bantu languages have traditionally concentrated on the morphology of the noun with its elaborate class. A survey report for the bantu languages by derek nurse cartographer. The structure of the bantu noun phrase researchgate. Uncovering symbiotic affinities and relationships in vocabulary sharman, fergus on. A comparative grammar of the south african bantu languages. Studies in african linguistics 157 semantic reality of. Genetically, they form part of benuecongo, itself a part of the huge nigercongo phylum. In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, or visit the webmasters page for free fun content.
Ha is a typical bantu language with 16 noun classes and complex verbal morphology. Files are available under licenses specified on their description page. Guthrie classification of bantu languages wikipedia. Noun class systems are universal and almost always marked by prefixes, occasionally by suffixes. Choose from 51 different sets of bantu language flashcards on quizlet. The semantic content of class in bantu languages has syntactic significance only to the extent that it corresponds to the semanticsyntactic features of the noun, and to that. Unfortunately, the free pdf download is no longer available and you can only read and print the html document. These were assigned letters as and divided into decades groups a10, a20, etc. A bantu language of kenya jelle cammenga, bernd heine, wilhelm j. This leads us to adopt a theory of lexicalization that leads to the conclusion that all nominal class prefixes in southern bantu lexicalize specifiers of this sort, and we argue.