Table 6 - uploaded by Tom Güldemann
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Proposed by Greenberg (1950, 1963) as a language family, the currently available evidence indicates that ‘Khoisan’ in a linguistic sense can be viewed, at best, as a negative entity. It comprises a diverse range of languages in southern and eastern Africa which share the typological feature of phonemic clicks, yet cannot
all be related genealogical...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... fact allows the robust reconstruction of an entire system of pronouns as given in Table 5, not just of single atomic items. This is cer- tainly not the case in the comparison entertained by Honken between Taa and Ju, as becomes evident from a superficial inspection of the Proto-Ju system in Table 6 below (see also §3.3.3). 9 Second, the adduced lexical similarities between Taa and Ju are equivocal regarding their historical interpretation: both groups are close geographically and even bordered on each other in central-eastern Namibia so that recent as well as more ancient lexical exchange between the two is a very real possibility (cf. also Güldemann & Loughnane 2012). ...
Context 2
... it goes without saying that the pronoun evidence alone is not sufficient proof for a Tuu family, Honken's (2013a) scepticism regarding its reconstructability is unjustified. Table 6 presents a comparison between the Proto-Ju system of simplex pro- nouns (after Heine & König 2013: 302) and the pronoun paradigm of ǂ' Amkoe (after Honken 2013b: 251). The structural parallelisms aside, five elements of ǂ' Amkoe can be argued to have cognates in Proto-Ju, marked by bold in Table 6; they are discussed in more detail by Güldemann (2004a: 94-98). ...
Context 3
... 6 presents a comparison between the Proto-Ju system of simplex pro- nouns (after Heine & König 2013: 302) and the pronoun paradigm of ǂ' Amkoe (after Honken 2013b: 251). The structural parallelisms aside, five elements of ǂ' Amkoe can be argued to have cognates in Proto-Ju, marked by bold in Table 6; they are discussed in more detail by Güldemann (2004a: 94-98). The forms for 1st person singular, 3rd person singular and 3rd person plural provide relatively obvious pairs, with the proviso that the two 3rd person forms of Proto-Ju, which are semantically more specific in forming the gender for own-group humans (cf. ...
Context 4
... 2000b: 8, 23), have a generic meaning in ǂ' Amkoe which does not possess a Ju-like gender system. The relation of the ǂ' Amkoe 1st person plural pronoun n-!ka-' e to some form(s) in Ju is more complex: Güldemann (2004a) proposed to analyse it as an originally complex form whose two last segments are cognate with the following Proto-Ju elements: the pronominal plural marker *!a(o) (not given in Table 6, see Heine & König 2013: 302) and the 1st person exclusive pronoun *è. The reconstruction of the pronoun system of Proto-Khoe-Kwadi, as given in Table 7, has been discussed in detail by Güldemann (2004b), including its implications for a Khoe-internal reconstruction as well as wider cross-Khoisan 9. Table 6 furthermore reveals that forms of Ju and ǂ' Amkoe within Kx'a do certainly not dis- play the type of unity found across Tuu pronouns. ...
Context 5
... relation of the ǂ' Amkoe 1st person plural pronoun n-!ka-' e to some form(s) in Ju is more complex: Güldemann (2004a) proposed to analyse it as an originally complex form whose two last segments are cognate with the following Proto-Ju elements: the pronominal plural marker *!a(o) (not given in Table 6, see Heine & König 2013: 302) and the 1st person exclusive pronoun *è. The reconstruction of the pronoun system of Proto-Khoe-Kwadi, as given in Table 7, has been discussed in detail by Güldemann (2004b), including its implications for a Khoe-internal reconstruction as well as wider cross-Khoisan 9. Table 6 furthermore reveals that forms of Ju and ǂ' Amkoe within Kx'a do certainly not dis- play the type of unity found across Tuu pronouns. Honken, nevertheless, considers Kx'a to be a family. ...
Citations
... Click consonants seem to have the longest history in the languages of the Kx'a, Tuu and Khoe-Kwadi families in southern Africa as well as in the linguistic isolates Hadza and Sandawe 7 in eastern Africa (Güldemann 2014). While click consonants are not part of the shared phonemic heritage of the Bantu language family, about half of today's CU languages are Bantu languages spoken in southern Africa. ...
Click speech sounds were first identified as consonants in the 17th century. On his voyage to India in 1627, the English traveller and historian Sir Thomas Herbert stopped in southern Africa, where he met with Khoekhoe speakers at the Cape. He noticed that clicks were regular consonants in their language and represented them as such in his travelogue (Herbert 1638). Since then, click consonants have received thorough scholarly attention by linguists, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the study of click consonants. Click speech sounds are consonants in phoneme inventories of about 301 of the approximately 6,5002 languages spoken in the world today. These few languages, henceforth referred to as click-consonant-using (CU) languages, are found in southern and eastern Africa. In this squib we propose a typology of the different uses of click speech sounds in human communication.
... The Tshwa speak a 'Central San' (Khoe) language similar to the G/ui and G//ana of the western and central Kalahari and the Naro San of the Ghanzi Ridge (Güldemann, 2008(Güldemann, , 2014Pratchett, 2020Pratchett, , 2021. The Tshwa are sub-divided into a number of different named groups, including /Aise, Ganade, and Danisan (Hitchcock, 1982;Hitchcock et al., 2016). ...
... The two main Central Kalahari San groups were the G/ui and the G//ana. The Gui and G/ana, who are two distinct ethnic groups who have considerable rates of intermarriage, both speak what is known as a Khoe-Kwadi language, and they are part of the western Khoe sub-group of the Khoe-Kwadi (Güldemann, 2014: 27, Fig. 5). At the time that Silberbauer and Campbell did the survey of the Bushmen in the Bechuanaland Protectorate as part of the Bechuanaland National Census in 1965, the G/ui and G//ana, along with the and Babalaongwe Bakgalagadi, represented the majority of the people living in the reserve. ...
... Complex predicates are a salient feature of the Kalahari Basin linguistic area (Güldemann 1998, Güldemann 2006, Güldemann & Fehn 2017 and are found across the Kx'a, Tuu, and Khoe-Kwadi families which together constitute the typological unit "Southern African Khoisan" (Güldemann 2014) (Figure 1). There is, however, no consensus on whether all languages in question have serial verb constructions (SVCs) in the narrower sense. ...
... Given the semantic opaqueness of the juncture, some authors (Chebanne & Collins 2017;Haacke 2014;Kilian-Hatz 2006 have opted to analyze this multiverbal predicate type as SVC. Other terms found in the literature are "compound verb" (Haacke 1999 for Standard Namibian Khoekhoe, Nakagawa 2006 for G|ui), "verbal compound" (Visser 2010 for Naro), "juncture-verb construction" (Fehn 2016 for Ts'ixa) and "verb-juncture construction" http://spilplus.journals.ac.za Figure 1: Historical distribution and subclassification of the three language families comprising the typological unit Southern African "Khoisan": A) Khoe-Kwadi (Vossen 1997, Güldemann 2014; B) Kx'a (Heine & Honken 2010); C) Tuu (Güldemann 2005(Güldemann , 2014) (Güldemann & Fehn 2014, Pratchett 2020. In this paper, we adopt the descriptive term "juncture-verb construction" (JVC), without preliminary claims on the relationship between Khoe JVCs and SVCs as found in languages of the Kx'a and Tuu families. ...
... Given the semantic opaqueness of the juncture, some authors (Chebanne & Collins 2017;Haacke 2014;Kilian-Hatz 2006 have opted to analyze this multiverbal predicate type as SVC. Other terms found in the literature are "compound verb" (Haacke 1999 for Standard Namibian Khoekhoe, Nakagawa 2006 for G|ui), "verbal compound" (Visser 2010 for Naro), "juncture-verb construction" (Fehn 2016 for Ts'ixa) and "verb-juncture construction" http://spilplus.journals.ac.za Figure 1: Historical distribution and subclassification of the three language families comprising the typological unit Southern African "Khoisan": A) Khoe-Kwadi (Vossen 1997, Güldemann 2014; B) Kx'a (Heine & Honken 2010); C) Tuu (Güldemann 2005(Güldemann , 2014) (Güldemann & Fehn 2014, Pratchett 2020. In this paper, we adopt the descriptive term "juncture-verb construction" (JVC), without preliminary claims on the relationship between Khoe JVCs and SVCs as found in languages of the Kx'a and Tuu families. ...
Multiverbal predicates constitute a defining feature of the Kalahari Basin linguistic area of southern Africa encompassing the Kx'a, Tuu, and Khoe-Kwadi language families. Here, we focus on a complex predicate type restricted to the Khoe-Kwadi family's Khoe branch which involves a linker morpheme and is thus referred to as Juncture-Verb Construction (JVC). While JVCs have synchronically been interpreted as Serial Verb Constructions (SVC), their origin and relationship with SVCs in the narrower sense as found in the Kx'a and Tuu families remain debated. The Kalahari Khoe languages Ts'ixa, Shua and Northern Tshwa spoken along the northeastern Kalahari Basin fringe present a convenient case study to expand the descriptive corpus on Khoe JVCs while addressing the limits of areal spread and contact influence. We show that all languages under consideration present JVCs with formal and functional properties corresponding to those found in other Kalahari Khoe languages, while also sharing features with SVCs as attested in the Kx'a and Tuu families. Both JVCs and SVCs contrast with conjoined predicates and are defined by single-eventhood. JVCs cover the same semantic domains found among SVCs of the Kx'a and Tuu families, can be subdivided into symmetrical and asymmetrical constructions, and show the same potential for lexicalization and grammaticalization, respectively.
... While many similarities between "Khoisan" languages of southern and eastern Africa can be explained by contact, the available linguistic methodology still allows for the establishment of genealogical relations between subsets of individual languages. By applying the comparative method (Supplementary Text 1) to the languages included in Greenberg's "Khoisan" unit, linguists have established three unrelated families spoken in southern Africa (Kx'a, Tuu and Khoe-Kwadi) ( Fig. 2A-C), and two isolates (Hadza and Sandawe) spoken in eastern Africa (Güldemann 2014). Within southern Africa, Kx'a and Tuu are spoken exclusively by populations with the prototypical profile of southern African foragers; Khoe-Kwadi-speaking populations are culturally and phenotypically diverse, encompassing the Khwe and other dark-skinned foragers from the northern Kalahari Basin fringe, as well as the Kwadi small-stock herders from Angola, and the Khoekhoe who form one of the most important herding traditions of southern Africa (Fig. 2C). ...
... While the origin of the Bantu migrations can be traced on the basis of the Bantu family's closest relatives from the Niger-Congo macro-phylum (Greenberg 1972), Khoe-Kwadi does not have any genealogical relatives outside southern Africa (see above). Although a possible relationship between Khoe-Kwadi and Sandawe has been discussed (Güldemann 2014;Güldemann and Elderkin 2010), the number of similarities shared between the two linguistic units is small and could alternatively be explained by chance or shared contact with a third party. Thus, it seems likely that the ancestral stock of languages from which Khoe-Kwadi diverged in East Africa has disappeared. ...
The present-day diversity of southern African populations was shaped by the confluence of three major pre-historic settlement layers associated with distinct linguistic strata: i) an early occupation by foragers speaking languages of the Kx'a and Tuu families; ii) a Late Stone Age migration of pre-Bantu pastoralists from eastern Africa associated with Khoe-Kwadi languages; iii) the Iron Age expansion of Bantu-speaking farmers from West-Central Africa who reached southern Africa from the western and eastern part of the continent. Uniting data and methodologies from linguistics and genetics, we review evidence for the origins, migration routes and internal diversification patterns of all three layers. By examining the impact of admixture and sex-biased forms of interaction, we show that southern Africa can be characterized as a zone of high contact between foraging and food-producing communities, involving both egalitarian interactions and socially stratified relationships. A special focus on modern groups speaking languages of the Khoe-Kwadi family further reveals how contact and admixture led to the generation of new ethnic identities whose diverse subsistence patterns and cultural practices have long puzzled scholars from various disciplines.
... Confronted with the difficulties of corroborating any hypothesis of relatedness, a few contemporary linguists (e.g., Güldemann 2008Güldemann , 2014Güldemann , 2018 have chosen to revert to the areal scenario of older scholars such as George Stow (1905), Dorothea Bleek (1929) and Westphal (1956, 170), in the belief that a diffusion model offers a better way of accounting for the observed data. Much like the earlier authors, contemporary advocates of the areal scenario envisage that when speakers of the original KHOE language entered the southern region, they encountered aboriginal inhabitants speaking early varieties of JU and TUU. ...
... Neither of these organisations specifies which "Khoi" language they refer to, and neither provides the precise word they claim signifies "mead" for the sake of linguistic comparison. The KHOE language family (Westphal 1971), also referred to as KHOE-KWADI when incorporating the disjunctively distributed Kwadi language (Guldemann 2004;Guldemann & Elderkin 2010), comprises two branches: Kalahari and Khoekhoe (Voßen 1997;Dimmendaal 2011;Güldemann 2014). The precise number of languages in the KHOE family is difficult to specify, because of the rapid rate of language differentiation and language extinction over the past three centuries, and because of the fluidity of dialect boundaries both past and present. ...
This brief paper aims to draw attention to the widespread and ongoing phenomenon of lexical borrowing from Khoekhoe-branch languages into regional Afrikaans. A case study of one Afrikaans plant name loaned from Khoekhoe-branch languages, karee (Searsia lancea, Searsia spp.), is used to demonstrate how post-shift phonological attrition can lead to lexical conflation, and hence to semantic extension. This paper strongly recommends that public-facing scientific organisations take greater care when providing linguistic information to lay communities, and also motivates increased study of the behaviour of click consonants in a post-shift context in order to develop a clearer understanding of Khoekhoe-branch language history.Keywords: Language history, loanwords, phonological attrition, semantic reanalysis, Khoekhoe, Afrikaans
... : The Khoe-Kwadi language family (Güldemann, 2014;Vossen, 1997); the position of Ts'ixa is debated. ...
... the Kx'a or the Tuu languages (1,8). As for the East African languages, whereas there is no demonstrable relationship between Hadza and any of the southern African Khoisan languages, there is some indication that Sandawe might be related to the Khoe-Kwadi family; however this, too, needs further corroboration (7). ...
Peoples speaking so-called Khoisan languages—that is, indigenous languages of southern Africa that do not belong to the Bantu family—are culturally and linguistically diverse. They comprise herders, hunter-gatherers, as well as groups of mixed modes of subsistence and their languages are classified into three distinct language families. This cultural and linguistic variation is mirrored by extensive genetic diversity. We here review the recent genomics literature and discuss the genetic evidence for a formerly wider geographic spread of peoples with Khoisan-related ancestry, for the deep divergence among populations speaking Khoisan languages overlaid by more recent gene flow among these groups, and for the impact of admixture with immigrant food-producers in their prehistory.
... Linguists continue to debate the above classification of Khoisan languages. Recently, Güldemann (2014) provided a clearer conceptualization of the classification of Khoisan languages based on the latest evidence of modern linguistic research. According to Güldemann (2014), in line with the current state of knowledge, five linguistic lineages should be distinguished and viewed as genealogically independent. ...
... Recently, Güldemann (2014) provided a clearer conceptualization of the classification of Khoisan languages based on the latest evidence of modern linguistic research. According to Güldemann (2014), in line with the current state of knowledge, five linguistic lineages should be distinguished and viewed as genealogically independent. The five lineages are composed of the two discrete languages of eastern Africa, Hadza and Sandawe, and three linguistic lineages in Southern Africa, namely Kx'a (which includes Ju|ʼhoan and !Xun), Khoe-Kwadi (which includes G|ui, Gǁana, and ǂAkhoe), and Tuu (which includes |Xam). ...
This chapter provides an overview of early Juǀ’hoan (one of the most famous San groups) studies, which aimed to clarify the intrinsic characteristics of human society. Previous researchers conducted synchronic analyses of Juǀ’hoan social structures and demonstrated how they had adapted to the arid, natural environment based on egalitarian principles. Key characteristics of Juǀ’hoan society, such as expansive living area and low population density, are outlined and discussed. Additionally, the author sketches the recent history of the San, most of whom are shifting to a sedentary lifestyle and concentrated living arrangements.
... !Xóõ (also spelled !Xoon) is a Tuu language with about 4,000 speakers in Botswana and Namibia (Vossen, 2013;Bradfield, 2014). The Tuu language family has in the past been classified as Southern South African Khoisan (Greenberg, 1963), whose status is controversial (Honken, 2013;Güldemann, 2014;Naumann, 2014). Researchers increasingly refer to the language as Taa, which is used by native speakers (Traill, 1985) and which follows established naming conventions (e.g., those by Haspelmath, 2017). ...
... Researchers increasingly refer to the language as Taa, which is used by native speakers (Traill, 1985) and which follows established naming conventions (e.g., those by Haspelmath, 2017). Here I follow earlier work in referring to the language as !Xóõ (Traill, 1985(Traill, , 1991(Traill, , 1994a(Traill, , 1994bBradfield, 2014;Güldemann, 2014;Naumann, 2014). The main varieties of the language are West !Xóõ and East !Xóõ (Traill, 1985, p. 10;Naumann, 2011); most research on East !Xóõ, the variety studied here, comes from work by Anthony Traill (e.g., Traill, 1985, 1986, 1991, 1994bTraill & Vossen, 1997). ...
Phonation types, or contrastive voice qualities, are minimally produced using complex movements of the vocal folds, but may additionally involve constriction in the supraglottal and pharyngeal cavities. These complex articulations in turn produce a multidimensional acoustic output that can be modeled in various ways. In this study, I investigate whether the psychoacoustic model of voice by Kreiman et al. (2014) succeeds at distinguishing six phonation types of !Xóõ. Linear discriminant analysis is performed using parameters from the model averaged over the entire vowel as well as for the first and final halves of the vowel. The results indicate very high classification accuracy for all phonation types. Measures averaged over the vowel's entire duration are closely correlated with the discriminant functions, suggesting that they are sufficient for distinguishing even dynamic phonation types. Measures from all classes of parameters are correlated with the linear discriminant functions; in particular, the "strident" vowels, which are harsh in quality, are characterized by their noise, changes in spectral tilt, decrease in voicing amplitude and frequency, and raising of the first formant. Despite the large number of contrasts and the time-varying characteristics of many of the phonation types, the phonation contrasts in !Xóõ remain well differentiated acoustically.
