Review article: messages from (not so distant) relatives in the Nuba Mountains: on how (not) to reconstruct Proto-Bantu

• Published in: Journal of African languages and linguistics Vol. 44; no. 2; pp. 241 - 281
• Main Author: Dimmendaal, Gerrit J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht De Gruyter 01.10.2023; Walter de Gruyter GmbH
• Subjects: African languages; areal features; Bantu; Bantu languages; Case marking; ergative alignment; Indo-European languages; Katloid; Kordofanian languages; Language reconstruction; Language typology; Morphosyntax; Niger-Congo languages; Proto languages; subject inversion; Syntactic structures; Tocharian languages; Niger; Nuba Mountains
• ISSN: 0167-6164; 1613-3811
• DOI: 10.1515/jall-2023-2012

The rich morphological systems and discourse-based syntactic structures of a range of modern Bantu languages have attracted the attention of many linguists. The present contribution takes articles in a volume on the reconstruction of Proto-Bantu grammar edited by Bostoen et al. (2022. On Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar, Niger-Congo Comparative Studies 4. Berlin: Language Science Press. 808 pp. ) as a basis, in order to address the origin of these grammatical properties. More specifically, historical as well as synchronic features of Bantu languages are compared with Tima, a related language spoken in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan, and classified as a member of the Kordofanian family within Niger-Congo by Greenberg. Contrary to a popular view, it is claimed here that subject inversion and corresponding (extended) ergative alignment marking with transitive verbs is not only a property of Tima as a Niger-Congo language, but also of several Niger-Congo languages classified as Bantu. Tima consequently may perform a role similar to that of Tocharian in the history of Indo-European studies. The present contribution also raises methodological issues related to lexicon-based Bayesian phylogenetics as against Greenberg’s method of multilateral comparisons, and the historical-comparative method. In addition, it addresses the question of the extent to which the spread of typological features coincides with so-called “belts” postulated in the typological literature on African languages.