We have two aims here. One is to provide an inventory and typological overview of the commonest pre-stem and suffixal tense-aspect markers across Bantu. We examine geographical distribution, phonological and tonal shape, and general semantic range. The other is to ask which of these might be assigned to Proto-Bantu, some 5000 years ago. We use a database of 100 languages, comprising 85 from all Guthrie's groups (A10, A20, etc) plus another 15 from his 15 zones. The most widespread pre-stem markers are: /a/, which comes in several tonal and vowel-length variations, representing 'past' in most languages and 'non-past' (possibly older focus (
The work of historical and comparative linguists has long interested
African
historians. By classifying languages into families, linguists provide models
of
their historical development that may point to historical events and processes
that occurred among peoples speaking those languages. Once classified,
linguists can then reconstruct earlier forms of present languages, thus
providing direct evidence of words, their meanings and historical influences
in the past. Finally, linguists seek to explain innovations that are revealed
in
their reconstructions by pointing to a combination of internal linguistic
developments and different forms of contact that occurred among speakers
of different languages.Simple classification, based largely on counting cognate words in related
languages (a technique known as lexicostatistics), is still a very common
activity, however, and thus the one most historians rely on, but lexicostatistics gives only a very limited, and often deceptive, view of language
history. Historians should thus be aware of its limitations as well as
the
potential of a number of important techniques now employed by linguists,
including the Comparative Method, reconstruction of ancestral languages,
and contact models.
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