Band 46, Heft 2

Omotic-Mao pronouns have been deeply problematic for reconstruction, leading some scholars to suggest the forms are the result of borrowing or interference. This paper explores new evidence from the participant-reference systems in the four Mao languages (Mawes Aas’e, Ganza, Seezo, and Hoozo) to show that the Mawes Aas’e pronouns, which are the most divergent of the group, are likely the result of complex internal developments. Developments include the innovation of a dual opposition from an inclusive/exclusive distinction, fusion of reduced subject-marking enclitics with their most frequent host (an affirmative marker), the formation of new free pronouns on the basis of these host + enclitic fusions with additional, augmenting morphology to mark number, and the grammaticalization of new 3rd person pronouns from a demonstrative base with number suffixes. Evidence is both internal and comparative and supports an Omotic classification for these languages.

This paper describes the loss of -yi- in Zulu reduplication and suggests a possible connection between the loss of -yi- and the potential for obsolescence of reduplication. The data presented are collected from 79 speakers, and clearly demonstrate the loss of -yi- is stratified along sociolinguistic lines. The absence of -yi- in reduplication is categorical among urban speakers, while it is beginning to be lost among younger rural speakers. Furthermore, some urban speakers are wholly unfamiliar with reduplication, exhibiting no knowledge of the process as a morphophonological phenomenon, nor with the semantic change it effects on the verb. While Zulu is far from being an endangered language, it is unsurprising that urban and rural varieties should show structural differences, and the phenomenon discussed here constitutes one such example.

This paper discusses ideophonicity in Gizey (Chadic), viz ., the ability of a word to depict sensory experiences. The term “ideophone” is frequently attested in the Gizey literature. While ideophones are classified as a separate word class (part-of-speech), the questions of what they are (phono-semantic characterisation) and how they function (morphosyntactic characterisation) are absent from that literature. Both concerns are addressed in this paper. I first describe the morphophonological, semantic, and syntactic properties of the words classified as “ideophones”. Then, I show that, indeed, Gizey contains several ideophonic words which distribute across different word classes. Thus, ideophones do not form a separate word class in Gizey as previous literature suggests.

While the history of the Bamum language has been well documented, the particulars of its phonology and orthography have received fragmentary treatment. Our contribution to the literature is an attempt to synthesize from the works that have gone before, to pull together disparate threads that have arisen from the influences of German, French, and English traditions. We discuss in turn phonology (noting in particular discrepancies in the accounting for the vowel inventory between sources), analysis of the writing system, and frequency distribution of characters and words. Discussion on historical phonology might shed some light on the development of orthographic principles while the preliminary exploration of the observed statistical patterns of the latest phase of the script, known as A ka u ku mfɛmfɛ , would be useful for future reference. We also offer indications for directions for future research on a wider scale, that would incorporate corpus studies of both the Bamum language and the invented Shümom language that also uses the Bamum script.