Bantu languages

“ On the contrary, though there is a certain physical resemblance among those tribes who speak clearly-marked Bantu dialects (the Babangi of the upper Congo, the people of the Great Lakes, the Ova-herero, the Ba-tonga, Zulu-Kaffirs, Awemba and some of the East Coast tribes) , there is nevertheless a great diversity in outward appearance, shape of head and other physical characteristics, among the negroes who inhabit Bantu Africa. Some tribes speaking Bantu languages are dwarfs or dwarfish, and belong to the group of Forest Pygmies. Others betray relationship to the Hottentots ”

“ Heathenism is degrading, and under its influence everything is going backwards. We are led by the evidence of the language to look for a better, nobler origin of the race, rather than to consider it an evolution from something infinitely lower. The Bantu languages are as far removed from others of the continent as English is from Turkish or Chinese. ”

“ It is far from impossible that the present prominence of the South African or Bantu family may be secondary, due to the great expansion under favouring circumstances of a race once having no more importance than belongs now to many of the Central African races, and speaking a tongue which differed from theirs only as theirs differed from one another. None of the Central African languages is a prefix-language in the same degree as the Bantu, and in many of them prefixes play no greater part than in the world’s languages in general ”

“ The vowels of the Bantu languages are always of the Italian type, and no true Bantu language includes obscure sounds like ö and ü. Each word must end in a vowel (though in some modern dialects in Eastern Equatorial, West and South Africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal consonant, generally a nasal) . No two consonants can come together without an intervening vowel, except in the case of a nasal, labial or sibilant. [8] No consonant is doubled. ”

“ Each tribe speaks a different language or dialect of Bantu, the chief groups being described in the article Bantu Languages. Swahili, a Bantu tongue with an admixture of Arabic, &c., is understood by many tribes besides those which have been under the direct influence of the Zanzibar Arabs, and it is the most general means of communication. The religion of the Congo tribes is difficult to define. ”

“ The exception alluded to may be a method of forming the preterite tense, which seems to be shared by a great number of widely-spread Bantu languages. This may be illustrated by the Zulu tanda, love, which changes to tandile, have loved, did love. This -ile or -ili may become in other forms -idi, didi, -ire, -ine, but is always referable back to some form like -ili or ile, which is probably connected with the root li or di (ndi or ni) , which means “to be” or “exist.” ”

“ Many different dialects are spoken by the Bantu tribes, Swahili being the most widely known (see Bantu Languages) . Their religion is the worship of spirits, ancestral and otherwise, accompanied by a vague and undefined belief in a Supreme Being, generally regarded as indifferent to the doings of the people.
The task of civilizing the natives is undertaken in various ways by the numerous Protestant and Roman Catholic missions established in the colony, and by the government. ”

“ In reality, they are just fifty millions of Negroes whose speech belongs to one of the many language families of 'Negro type'; only in this case the language family instead of being confined in its range to a hundred villages or two hundred square miles, is spread over the southern third of Africa—say over 3,500,000 square miles—from the Cameroons, the Northern Congo, the Nyanzas, and the Mombasa coast to Cape Colony and Natal" (p. 25) , Bantu languages are spoken by peoples of diverse physical types. ”

“ In the north-west of the Bantu field, in the region between Cameroon and the north-western basin of the Congo, the Cross river and the Benue, there is an area of great extent occupied by languages of a “semi-Bantu” character, such as Nki, Mbudikum, Akpa, Mbe, Bayoñ, Manyañ, Bafut and Banshō, and the Munshi, Jaráwa, Kororofa, Kamuku and Gbari of the central and western Benue basin. The resemblances to the Bantu in certain word-roots are of an obvious nature; and prefixes in a very simple form are generally used for singular and plural, but the rest of the concord is very doubtful. ”

“ There is clearly a world of difference between a prefixing language like Cambodgian, which limits itself, so far as its prefixes (and infixes) are concerned, to the expression of derivational concepts, and the Bantu languages, in which the prefixed elements have a far-reaching significance as symbols of syntactic relations. The classification has much greater value if it is taken to refer to the expression of relational concepts [100] alone. In this modified form we shall return to it as a subsidiary criterion. ”

“ There are countless tribes of Bantu, each tribe having its own language, yet there was originally a primeval Bantu mother-tongue, from which all the dialects of this immense region are undoubtedly derived. The idioms of this family are generally known as the alliteral class of languages. North of the Bantu are the Negroes proper, occupying the greater part of Africa between 5° and 15° north latitude. The negro tribes are multitudinous, and, though alike in their main physical features, are diverse in their speech. ”

“ It will be seen by a glance at this map that the areas in which are spoken Bantu languages of typical structure and archaic form are somewhat widely spread. Perhaps on the whole the most archaic dialects at the present day are those of Mount Elgon, Ruwenzori, Unyoro, Uganda, the north coast of Tanganyika and of the Bemba country to the south-west of Tanganyika; also those in the vicinity of Lake Bangweulu, and the Nkonde and Kese dialects of the north and north-east coasts of Lake Nyasa ”

“ Throughout Africa, north of the Bantu border line, the traveller meets with numerous languages widely different and mutually incomprehensible whereas with a knowledge of one Bantu language it is not difficult to understand the structure and even the vocabulary of others. ”

“ Thus (in the purer forms of Bantu languages) muntu means “a man,” bantu means “men,” kintu means “a thing,” bintu “things,” kantu means “a little thing,” tuntu “little things,” and so on. This term Bantu has been often criticized, but no one has supplied a better, simpler designation for this section of Negro languages, and the name has now been definitely consecrated by usage. ↑ In Luganda and other languages of Uganda and the Victoria Nyanza, and also in Runyoro on the Victoria Nile, the word for “fowl” is enkoko. In Ki-Swahili of Zanzibar it is kuku. In Zulu it is inkuku. ”

“ Some form of speech like Fula, Kiama (Tern) , or Kposo of northern Togoland, or one of the languages of the lower Niger or Benue, may have been taken up by ancient Libyan, Hamite or Nilotic conquerors and cast into the type which we now know as Bantu,—a division of sexless Negro speech, however, that shows no obvious traces of Hamitic (Caucasian) influence. We have no clue at present to the exact birth-place of the Bantu nor to the particular group of dialects or languages from which it sprang. ”

“ Cf. the Bantu use of nyama ("meat") for "an animal." (A.W.)
[45] Is this a survival of the African institution of "sureties" (Yao, ngoswe, see Duff Macdonald, I. 118) , or "sponsors," who arrange the marriage? I am not sure whether the custom exists among Negro as well as Bantu tribes. (A.W.)
[46] Cf. Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, No. xiv., and note, p. 233. (C.S.B.)
[47] See the story of Tangalomlibo in Torrend, Comparative Grammar of S. African Bantu Languages, p. 319, where the cock is chosen as messenger, when the ox and goat are rejected. ”

“ There is one point in which the Bantu somewhat unaccountably compare favourably with the Sudanese. In all other regions the spread of culture has tended to bring about linguistic unity, as we see in the Hellenic world, where all the old idioms were gradually absorbed in the "common dialect" of the Byzantine empire, again in the Roman empire, where Latin became the universal speech of the West, and lastly in the Muhammadan countries, where most of the local tongues have nearly everywhere, except in Sudan, disappeared before the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages. ”

“ At the present day the population is, as a rule, of a black or chocolate-coloured Negro type, and belongs, linguistically, entirely and exclusively to the Bantu family. The languages spoken offer several very interesting forms of Bantu speech, notably in the districts between the north end of Lake Nyasa, the south end of Lake Tanganyika, and the river Luapula. ”

“ Bantu is the plural of mu-ntu, the general term for a human being common, with hardly any modification, to the languages spoken throughout South Africa, "from the Keiskamma River to the equator on the east, and from Walfish Bay to the Old Kalabar River on the fifth parallel of north latitude in the west"—that is, to the whole of the southern half of that vast continent, with the sole exception of the territories occupied by the Hottentot and Bushman tribes. The term Bantu, it should be added, is mainly used by the natives when speaking of themselves in contradistinction to white people. ”

“ The Bantu race and languages cannot be an evolution from something inferior; they are a degradation from something superior. Coastwards there are traditions of change and movement on the part of the people; in the east and on the south marauding tribes and slave-hunters have devastated large tracts of country, but there is no sign of general movement on the part of the Bantus.
The traditions of countries along the coast where white men have long settled speak of much greater, more powerful kingdoms in the past ”

“ About a third of humanity to-day speaks some form of Indo-European. A quarter talks some dialect of Sinitic stock. Semitic, Dravidian, Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu have each from about fifty to a hundred million speakers. The languages included in these eight families form the speech of approximately ninety per cent of living human beings. ”

“ Here we may lump them together not so much as a family as a miscellany. [85] There is one great group of languages in Africa, from a little way north of the equator to its southern extremity, the Bantu, and in addition a complex of other languages across the centre of the continent about which we will not trouble here. [86] There are also two probably separate groups, the Dravidian in South India, and the Malay-Polynesian stretched over Polynesia, and also now including Indian tongues. ”

“ The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is alone in an advanced state, those of the Semitic idioms, of the Finno-Ugrian tongues and of the Bantu dialects of southern Africa are still in a backward condition; and the other families of speech existing in the world, with the exception of the Malayo-Polynesian and the Sonorian of North America, have not as yet been treated scientifically. ”

“ Upon the plea of combating the spread of Mohammedanism, the missions have, except at the coast, declined to teach the Swahili language, which is the lingua franca of East Central Africa, and have perpetuated and are still endeavouring to perpetuate a host of tribal languages, which, although interesting as linguistic curiosities, prove a barrier to civilisation and progress. ”

“ Central Zambezia Group, mainly in use on the north side of the great river, and including the Tonga, Ila and Lenje tongues and their dialects. This group is related to the Luba languages of Southern Congoland and to the tongues of the Bangweulu basin and of the Luangwa valley. They are all beautiful-sounding and expressive languages, representing Bantu speech in an attractive form. ”

“ Bishop Smyth and John Mathews have published a vocabulary and short grammar of the Xilenge (Shilenge) language of Inhambane (S.P.C.R., 1902) . The journal Anthropos (Vienna) should also be consulted. (H. H. J.)
↑ Bantu (literally Ba-ntu) is the most archaic and most widely spread term for “men,” “mankind,” “people,” in these languages. It also indicates aptly the leading feature of this group of tongues, which is the governing of the unchangeable root by prefixes. The syllable -ntu is nowhere found now standing alone, but it originally meant “object,” or possibly “person.” ”

“ African: short vocabulary communicated by Dr. Barth to the Geographical Society.
Baniwa.
A variety of native S. American dialects, allied to Chimanos, vernacular between Brazil and Venezuela. ☞
Banjak.
Name of an island off Sumatra. The natives have two dialects:— (1) the primitive language called Batta, and (2) the Malay of Sumatra. See Maruwi.
Bantek or Bantik.
An Alfuru dialect vernacular in N. Celebes.
Bantu.
African: Dr. Bleek’s name for a very large class of languages, including the Kayo, Bunda, Zangian, and Mozambique branches. ”

“ The Manyema (Baenya) group includes most of the corrupt Bantu dialects between the western watershed of Tanganyika and the main stream of the Luapula-Congo, extending also still farther north, and comprising (seemingly) the languages of the Aruwimi basin, such as Yalulema, Soko, Lokele, Kusu, Tu-rumbu, &c. On the west the Manyema group is bounded by the languages of the Lomami valley, which belong to groups Nos. 15 and 16; on the east the Manyema genus merges into the much purer Bantu dialects of groups Nos. ”