Some reflections on genetic relationship in a group of West African Niger-Congo languages
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Bernd Heine
Abstract
The linguistic history of the Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken in southeastern Ghana and the southern half of Togo, has been the subject of detailed research for more than a century. Nevertheless, there are still problems both with the external and the internal classification of the group. The present paper provides a state of the art overview of this research field. It is argued that linguistic reconstructions that can claim to provide credible hypotheses on genetic relationship patterns among languages are best based on the application of the comparative method.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The Ghana-Togo Mountain languages: Introduction
- Divergence and convergence among the Ghana-Togo Mountain languages
- Some reflections on genetic relationship in a group of West African Niger-Congo languages
- Sub-classifying the languages of the Lower Volta Valley: Towards redefining Kwa
- Motion in serializing languages revisited: The case of Avatime
- The non-terracing tone system of Lolobi-Siwu
- Expressiveness and system integration: On the typology of ideophones, with special reference to Siwu
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The Ghana-Togo Mountain languages: Introduction
- Divergence and convergence among the Ghana-Togo Mountain languages
- Some reflections on genetic relationship in a group of West African Niger-Congo languages
- Sub-classifying the languages of the Lower Volta Valley: Towards redefining Kwa
- Motion in serializing languages revisited: The case of Avatime
- The non-terracing tone system of Lolobi-Siwu
- Expressiveness and system integration: On the typology of ideophones, with special reference to Siwu
