Language and You - With H.M. Kapau

'PROTO-BANTU': THE ANCESTOR OF BANTU LANGUAGES
[By Humphrey M. Kapau - The Mast]

There is a mother language that ‘birthed’, ‘breastfed’ and ‘weaned’ all Bantu languages. Linguists refer to her as 'Proto-Bantu language'. Sadly, she passed away about 5000 years ago before any language expert could even sit down to study her linguistic looks (May Her Linguistic Soul Rest in Eternal Peace. She is deeply missed in African linguistics). Nevertheless, she left behind one priceless gift: a group of highly identical children we now call 'Bantu languages'.

Looking at the grammatical beauty of Mama Proto-Bantu’s daughter languages like Swahili; Sotho; Bemba; and Tonga, she was definitely a linguistic Bethsheba. And well…we know all Bantu languages once called her ‘mum’ because they all have highly related words/vocabulary items that are similar in appearance/form and meaning (e.g. ‘ntu’ for ‘person’ in all Bantu languages). Linguists call such words of similar appearance and meaning across languages as ‘cognates’. And by the way… how linguists deal with cognates across languages to assume similarities and shared parentage of those languages (as is the case of Bantu languages and Proto-Bantu) is the same way scientists use available evidence (e.g. fossils) to establish that dinosaurs once roamed the surface of the earth. So…words with similar appearance and meaning in all languages (i.e. cognates) are linguistic fossils by which linguists establish the ancestry/parentage of languages.

Using cognates and a linguistic 'carbon-14 dating' technique called linguistic reconstruction, linguists began suspecting that all Bantu languages (e.g. Swahili, Nkoya, Lozi and Subiya) must have come from the same mother language because these daughter languages carry a similar ‘phenotype’ (i.e. an external characteristic of a genotype) like the use of the word ‘ntu’ to refer to ‘person’. The uniformity in vocabulary is so consistent such that it is easy for Bantu language speakers to understand each other. Genes don’t lie and that was how Proto-Bantu was discovered.

Because no literature could be found directly related to Proto-Bantu except for conclusions based on striking similarities among her children (Bantu languages), linguists nicknamed her ‘Proto-’ to mean she is an hypothetical mother language/ancestor language; and ‘–Bantu’ because all Bantu languages are believed to have come from her (Botne,1971). That was how she came to be known as ‘Proto-Bantu’. Where was the home village of Proto-Bantu? What were her linguistic looks? This article discusses Proto-Bantu language’s theories of origin and her reconstructed linguistic characteristics.

1. Proto-Bantu’s home village

Little is also known about her immediate language family though some linguists like Greenberg (1955) have argued that Proto-Bantu had a bloodline linked to a royal family of African languages called the Niger-Kordofanian language family which is the largest language family in the world. Today, this language family covers the entire sub-Saharan Africa, prevalent in countries such as Nigeria, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ghana, DRC, South Africa, Uganda, eSwatini, Lesotho, Burundi and Angola (Greenberg,1963; Chanda, 2007).

The home village of Proto-Bantu is believed to have been in West-Central Africa around an area known today as Cameroon (Gerrit,2011). Prior to her presence in West Africa, there are theories as to how she found herself there. Some scholars argue that Proto-Bantu came from the Mediterranean region before spreading to Africa. Theories believing in this view are known as Mediterranean theories of Bantu language origin and spread, and were championed by scholars such as the German linguist Carl Meinhoff and British linguist Harry Johnson (Bryant,1965). The second view focuses broadly on Asia as the source of Proto-Bantu, with emphasis on the river Tigris and Euphrates areas. This view is collectively known as the Asiatic theory to Proto-Bantu origins. However, two theories have emerged as being more sensible with regard to the origins of Proto-Bantu. One is by Joseph Greenberg and the other by Malcom Guthrie. Greenberg (1955) argues that Proto-Bantu originated from the Cameroon/Nigerian border before spreading towards the south and east parts of Africa. On the other hand, Malcolm Guthrie (1970b) establishes that Proto-Bantu originated from a Nucleus in the Congo Basin. Guthrie (1970b) is further supported by Pelican (1962:17) who notes: “the earliest Bantu-speaking peoples may have been hunters and fishermen and moved along the Congo and encountered and adopted the cultivated plants of the earliest traders and migrants from the South-East Asia.” As Chanda (2007) concludes, most scholars support Guthrie and Greenberg’s view.

2. Key linguistic features

Although Proto-Bantu language has never been found, the fact that Bantu languages have the following common features means (that) Proto-Bantu had them too, for, like humans, languages have traceable recessive and dominant linguistic genes (Guthrie, 1948; Greenberg, 1955).

To start with, we know Proto-Bantu language existed because all her children (i.e. Bantu languages) and grandchildren (i.e. Bantu dialects) have words that are similar in appearance/form and meaning. These words, as hinted earlier on, are technically called ‘cognates’ in linguistics. For example, in Lozi (also called Bantu language ‘K21’), Tonga (aka ‘M64’) and Swahili (aka ‘G42’), the word for cultivating is ‘kulima’. Similarly, Bemba (aka M42) and Kaonde (aka L40/L41) use the word ‘ukulima’ and ‘kujima’, respectively. Have you noticed the stunning similarities among all these languages? It seems they share the letters –LIM– to relate to anything to do with cultivating. Such core letters of a word in Proto-Bantu upon which sibling Bantu languages such as Lozi and Bemba formed their word for ‘cultivating’ are called ‘reflexes’. On the other hand, the actual words formed from those core letters –LIM– (e.g. ‘ukuLIMa’ in Bemba; and ‘kuLIMa’ in Swahili) across all the daughter Bantu languages are called cognates (Guthrie, 1948).

Using cognates such as ‘kulima’, linguists know that the vocabulary of Proto-Bantu had a word for ‘cultivating’ which had the letters –LIM–. A similar trend is reflective in almost all everyday words of Bantu languages. For example, words for body parts (eyes, legs, etc) and everyday activities like sleeping and eating have similar spellings and meaning across all Bantu languages. It means they share a common ancestor: Proto-Bantu.

Also, have you noticed that Bantu languages have particular prefixes that indicate the plural and singular for things like people, trees, animals, objects appearing in pairs (e.g. eyes and legs) and small things? For example, the prefix (a type of affix put before a word) ‘mu-’ is used to refer to one person while ‘ba-’ or ‘a-’ is used to connote many people or to show respect (e.g. in Lozi, ‘mu-tu’ = person; ‘ba-tu’ = persons/respect for one person). The list of such paired affixes is called a ‘nominal class system’ or ‘noun class system’ while languages having such a system of affixes are termed ‘class languages’. This is why we say Bantu languages are class languages. It appears even Proto-Bantu had a class system of paired prefixes to indicate plurality and singularity of things.

Furthermore, the paired prefixes for singular and plural can even dictate which other affixes can be used with them in a sentence depending on whether the thing in the sentence is a person, a tree, an animal and so forth. For example, when referring to a person, you cannot use prefixes meant for an animal (e.g. in Bemba, you cannot say ‘imwanakashi imusuma’ but can only say ‘umwanakashi umusuma’ to mean ‘a beautiful woman’). This phenomenon is known in linguistics as ‘concord’ or ‘agreement’. Based on the behaviour of concord in Bantu languages, it is believed that Proto-Bantu had the same linguistic ‘genes’.

Additionally, all Bantu languages use an almost same number of vowels. Most Bantu languages use five vowels but there are some few Bantu languages which use seven. Owing to this, linguists assume that probably Proto-Bantu had seven vowels and that some of her daughter languages adopted only five vowels from the seven (e.g. Zambian languages) while a few other Bantu languages inherited all the seven vowels (e.g. Kikuyu, Nyamwezi languages).

Lastly, tone is another striking feature among all Bantu languages which made linguists suspect that these languages probably shared the same ancestor language. In any Bantu language, most words mean different things depending on how you play with your tone (e.g. depending on tone, ‘lila’ can mean ‘cry’, ‘intestine’ or ‘mud-plastering of a hut’ in Lozi). For this, linguists suspect that Proto-Bantu probably had high and low tone because from the two types of tone, you can easily create other types of tone (Crystal,1991).

Next week, I will look at why and how Bantu languages are grouped into zones, groups and given code names like ‘M64’; ‘K21’; and ‘M42’ to mean Tonga, Lozi and Bemba languages, respectively. The week after, I will take you to biolinguistics (i.e. a field of linguistics specially concerned with the genetics of language) to explore language development in the womb throughout the gestation age (i.e. pregnancy period). Thank you for your unwavering support. Remember: your comments will soon be published in The Mast newspaper.

(Special thanks to the University of the Western Cape Media Team for sponsoring and marketing this article for public consumption. The article is also available on ‘The Mast’ website and highlighted on the UWC website).

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The author is a systemic functional linguist and Special Research Fellow (PhD) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His other research fields include neurolinguistics, forensic linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, African languages and literature. He has also taught language at UNZA. Contact: [email protected]; WhatsApp: 0956315380.

HOW MOTHER TONGUES DELAY FORGETFULNESS IN OLD AGE
[By Humphrey M. Kapau - The Mast]

It is common to hear an old person utter statements like: “where did I put my glasses? Did I shut the car doors? Wait a minute, is today Thursday or Friday?” Others even forget their vehicles at work and board a bus, thinking they never came for work using their own transport. Upon reaching home and seeing an empty garage, that is when they remember that they left their car at work. I know of one senior citizen (a Tonga from Monze) who even declared the shoes he was wearing as missing in action (MIA) and he began searching for them everywhere, declaring a state of emergency similar to that of Idi Amin Dada, only that it was in his house. He only realised he was wearing the shoes after stepping on hot coals. For a moment, he thought he was fire resistant until he looked down and saw his faithful German-made pair of shoes braving the hot coals.

Undoubtedly, forgetfulness is inevitable in old age due to an aging brain. However, besides delaying it through healthy living (e.g. healthy food and exercising), how does the mastery of a mother tongue in childhood help delay forgetfulness in old age? To answer the question, join me for an interesting journey through psycholinguistics. For this article, the word ‘mother tongue’ is defined as the language we were first introduced to when we were born, also called the first language (L1) (Nordquist, 2019). Before we look at the role of mother tongues in delaying memory loss in old age, we first need to define what memory is.

What is memory?

The human memory is concerned with aspects of life which help a person maintain rational contact of occurrences in the past, present and future. In achieving this responsibility, memory has to do with the following three basic functions: organisation and storage of knowledge; retention of information; and retrieval of information.

Traditionally, memory has three parts, namely, Sensory Memory (also known as the Sensory Information Store [SIS]); the Short Term Memory (also called the Primary Store [PS] or Intermediate Store [IS]); and the Long Term Memory (also referred to as the Secondary Store [SS]). In the light of the aforesaid, forgetting can be defined as our inability to retrieve information previously held in our memory – be it from our Sensory, Short Term or Long Term memories (see Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968).

Below are ways in which mother tongues help delay memory loss in old age:

1. Most mother tongue concepts survive in old age

In a study conducted by the Polish-American linguist Uriel Weinreich in 1953, he established that in individuals with concretised mother tongue knowledge acquired during childhood (e.g. simultaneous bilinguals and early sequential bilinguals), the mother tongue (e.g. Namwanga) tend to establish a broader mental concept storage from which our second language (e.g. English) merely taps (Weinreich, 1953). This is made possible by our ability to absorb concepts as early as we are born using the first language we are exposed to. Using sensory receptors dotted all over our bodies, childhood concepts we were first introduced to were absorbed using different sub-types of our Sensory Memory. What we saw (e.g. a spoon) was absorbed by the iconic sensory memory; what we heard (e.g. sound of thunder) was received by the echoic sensory memory; what we touched (e.g. fur) was recorded by the haptic sensory memory. What we tasted and smelled was also recorded although no specific name is given to the two sub-types of sensory memory (Mathew and Morton, 2012). Once approved by the sensory memory, our childhood concepts and experiences were pushed to the Short Term Memory for approval or discarding. Eventually, approved information was pushed to the Long Term Memory whose memory stamina is long-lasting and valuable in old age. Even as we acquire a second language such as English, the concepts we acquired in childhood using the first language tend to be solidified and survive the test of time (even in old age) compared to concepts in the second language.

Further evidence that mother tongues can delay memory loss in old age arises from findings where patients hit by a Cerebral Vascular Accident (i.e. stroke) usually first recover their mother tongue (L1) before recovering their second language (L2). This law of language recovery is called Ribot’s Law and confirms that mother tongues tend to be deeply rooted in our brains compared to second languages.

2. We usually think in a mother tongue even in old age

Since most of our early life experiences and concepts are coded in a mother tongue (especially among simultaneous bilinguals and early sequential bilinguals), we tend to continue thinking and view the world from the perspective of our mother tongue even in old age. For those of us who regard English as our second language, it is the reason we sometimes construct English sentences from the perspective of our mother-tongue (e.g. we sometimes say ‘the car is crying’ to mean ‘the engine is running’; and say ‘Messi has gone to the ball’ instead of saying ‘Messi has gone to a football match’).

One of the reasons we tend to think in a mother tongue is because most of our childhood experiences are stored in the Long Term Memory (LTM) using the first language (e.g. Namwanga) and when retrieving them for communication, they remain closely attached to that language’s linguistic and paralinguistic structures.

Moreover, we first learn how to do basic things like how to wash our hands using our first language and this information is stored in a special type of LTM called procedural/implicit memory for a lifetime. For events and facts obtained during our childhood, they tend to be stored forever in the LTM sub-type memory called the declarative/explicit memory while our childhood knowledge of who did what, why, when and how they did it is engraved in the LTM sub-type memory called the episodic memory. These experiences also carry with them emotions and our brain is capable of storing these emotions for a lifetime through a sub-type of LTM called the emotional memory (see Kendra, 2020). As we grow old, we easily relate to this childhood information because it is more engraved in us than concepts acquired later, hence the L1 playing a critical role in remembering.

Additionally, as we age, our sensory memory declines, reducing entry of newer experiences and forcing us to use concepts mostly acquired in our childhood age bracket. This is why the elderly find it hard operating new gadgets but love sticking to old things, including choice of conversations (e.g. they will not talk much about the New Dawn government but instead take you to how they met Hi**er in 1939 and Kaunda in 1953). Actually, funny as it might sound, the firm grounding of mother tongue in our brains is the reason we unconsciously cry in our mother tongue whenever we receive a good beating. Therefore, although memory loss in old age is inevitable due to an aging brain, “the language we are born hearing, however young, has a strange way of staying with us, thereby eluding the onset of memory loss in old age” (Cohut, 2019:3).

3. Mother tongues provide ground to fight Alzheimer’s disease

The disease of progressive forgetfulness in old age is called Alzheimer’s disease (see Crystal, 1991). Research has shown that learning a mother tongue at an early age before mastering a second language is a cardinal prerequisite to reducing Alzheimer’s disease (Cohut, 2019). How? Our first language is responsible for providing initial surface area upon which languages learnt later in life are cognitively placed. With new languages coming in, our brains learn to multitask in concepts stored in different languages. Such a scenario keeps the brain flexible and active, thereby effectively slowing down the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s disease (Cohut, 2019).

4. Mother tongues trigger neural linguistic competition

Recent research has also shown that mother tongues provide good competition for second language because the language regions of the brain called the frontal and temporal regions (specifically the left supramarginal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus) are always activated and expanded when they are faced with competition of speech sounds from another language, thanks to the prior presence of mother tongues in our brains (Gardner, 1980; and Marian, 2017). In neuroscience, ‘activation’ refers to the rapid increase in the excitability of the nervous system (to which the brain is a part) in relation to a particular task such as mother tongue acquisition in this case (Decéty, 2004; p.15).

The neural linguistic competition arises from continuous antagonism between what we already know in a mother tongue and conflicting experiences that the second language brings. In psychology, such a conflict of concepts and experiences in our mind is known as cognitive dissonance, conceptual conflict, disequilibrium or simply cognitive conflict (Mathew and Morton, 2012) and it forces a child to form newer mental structure/scheme for conflicting experiences (Piaget, 1972; Gardner, 1980). The result of such competition is like taking your brain to the gym: it exercises its cognitive muscles, thereby delaying brain aging and forgetfulness. This childhood neural linguistic competition helps consolidate information and increases its lifespan such that it is easier to remember most of them in old age.

Well, hope you enjoyed today's article. Remember to give me feedback and your comments will be published in the special edition of The Mast newspaper.

[Special thanks to the University of the Western Cape Media Team, South Africa, for marketing this article and the column].
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The author is a systemic functional linguist and Special Research Fellow (PhD) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His other research fields include neurolinguistics, forensic linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, African languages and literature. He has also taught language at UNZA. Contact: [email protected]; 0956315380.

THE POLITICS OF 'LANGUAGE' AND 'DIALECT'
[By Humphrey M. Kapau - The Mast newspaper]

There is a full scale war going on in linguistics. It is a war older than the diplomatic and combat war between the USA and some nations in the Middle East. It is a war of definitions regarding what should be called a ‘language’ and what must be termed a ‘dialect’. Although linguists view ‘language’ as a system by which we communicate ideas and emotions while ‘dialect’ is seen as a variant of a given language (Sapir, 1921), there is no objective difference between the two because the common goal of both is communication.

The inconclusive battle of definitions has not only divided linguists but also individuals and communities because a ‘dialect’ is viewed as inferior and a subset of a ‘language’. The war has left scars all over the planet.

To explore the unending debate on what should be referred to as a ‘language’ and what must be relegated to being a ‘dialect’, today I will take you to a society-centred field of linguistics known as sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is simply “the study of language in relation to society” (see Hudson, 1996: p4; and Wadhaugh, 1996/2006: p13).

Let us look at the commonest criteria used to distinguish between a ‘language’ and a ‘dialect’ and the weaknesses of each one of them.

1. Geographical space

Some scholars have argued that one of the ways to distinguish between a language and a dialect is in terms of geographical space (Devlin, 2018). It is said that a language covers more geographical space than a dialect. A dialect on the other hand is seen as a regional variety of language, spoken by a subset of a given people. In this view, languages are viewed as national while dialects as regional and often spoken by few people. This difference is problematic on two grounds. Firstly, space is not always a perfect way to distinguish between language and dialect. It is actually possible to have two people in Mwinilunga who speak a unique code that can amount to a language but their linguistic environment is confined to their pineapple farm. Would we say theirs is a dialect just because their space is on a farm? Secondly, what really is meant by more geographical space? This term is very relative and can be contentious. For example, if a dialect of Lenje language spreads across Zambia compared to its mother the Lenje language, would we call the spreading Lenje dialect to be a language because it is geographically broader than its mother language Lenje? Also, what about languages spoken in small regions of, say, a country? This creates a weakness in using geographical space to distinguish between a language and a dialect.

2. Ability to understand each other

Other linguists argue that people speaking variants of the same language tend to understand each other. When such happens, we say the two dialects are in a state of mutual intelligibility (Wadhaugh, 1996/2006). For example, one speaking Mumbwa Kaonde and the one speaking Solwezi Kaonde will be able to communicate with each other easily. Similarly, Mongu Lozi is significantly different from Sesheke and Kaoma Lozi yet they will understand each other, just as town Bemba would display major differences from Luapula and Kasama Bemba but mutually intelligible. When such happens, we say they are speaking dialects of the same language. Metaphorically speaking, dialects are viewed in this case like isotopes of the same element of the periodic table (more like saying one is speaking Chlorine-35 which is like Plateau Tonga; and the other is speaking Chlorine-37 which is like Valley Tonga yet both are forms/isotopes/’dialects’ of chlorine element, namely, the Tonga language). Though sharing the same mother/‘element’ language (Tonga), you cannot substitute one Tonga dialect/‘isotope’ with the other as they exist only in a particular environment. In this case, a dialect tend to be an altered version of its mother language mainly in areas of pronunciation, vocabulary and word structure but the two speakers will be able to understand each other (Devlin, 2018).

The aforementioned distinction comes with its own problems. For example, Bantu languages are highly related languages but that does not mean they are dialects of each other. To say Lozi is a dialect of Sotho or Tswana, and that Bemba is a dialect of Lamba on the basis of speakers using these languages being able to understand each other in communication would be disastrous.

Furthermore, how do you explain this: the dialects of Chinese language are not so similar for speakers to understand each other yet they have not earned the title of language? This is weird because one criterion used to distinguish a language from a dialect is the geo-linguistic proximity of the codes of communication under scrutiny. The closer the dialects are, the similar they become and likely to be dialects of the same language. The farther they are from each other, the more likely they will be different from each other. Such a phenomenon is known as dialectal continuum/dialect chain in linguistics (see Bloomfield, 1935; Hocket, 1958). Though dialectal continuum happens, why shouldn’t we call lost, distant dialects as languages? In the case of Chinese whose dialects are not similar for speakers to understand each other, why are the Chinese dialects still called dialects and not independent languages? Yet, some languages that are very similar to each other like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are termed distinct languages, not dialects (Devlin, 2018). Don’t you think the distinction between language and dialect is largely political? I would love to hear your views on this.

3. Status and function of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’

Probably out of intellectual frustration, one prominent sociolinguist ended up summarising the difference between a language and a dialect by saying that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (Weinreich, 1953:47). That is to say, although a language is a dialect and a dialect is a language, a language is a promoted dialect with dialects under it. Agreeably, by assigning language more status than a dialect, a language becomes a privileged mother dialect under which other dialects fall by way of linguistic similarities to the mother dialect (the so called ‘language’). This view is quite satisfactory because it admits that there is no clear basis for calling one code of communication as ‘language’ and the other as ‘dialect’ except that of consensus by a given people to maintain order.

Though the above view makes sense, it is fertile ground for language battles among a given people because language is a possession and any possession has emotions attached to it. To declare a neighbouring community’s variant as superior is a fastest way of creating tribal tension, wars and even genocide. Let no one cheat you, we all have that extra affection to our languages because we feel we own language, just as the spirit of our language owns us. Would you agree that Zambia only has 73 tribes but less than 73 languages because some tongues used by some tribes are dialects of other ‘major’ languages? Trust me, do not attempt to answer this question in public or you will attract pangas/machetes to your neck. Don’t say I never warned you. Worse for Africa, the Berlin Conference (1884 – 1885) created nations of political convenience, not ones based on linguistic maps. That we even co-exist as a multilingual, multi-ethnic (and now multi-racial) Zambia is a miracle.

4. Developed literature

Lastly, other linguists and people say that a language has a developed literature such as dictionaries and learnt in school while a dialect usually lacks this literature and is peripherised in use (Devlin, 2018). This is another differentiation of convenience because what happens in cases where the so called dialect develops more literature? With the growing awareness of the value of the language we speak (be it a dialect or language), more and more communities and people are beginning to write/learn their languages. If years from now some dialects develop more literature than some so called languages, should we promote the dialects to language status and demote the languages to dialect status? An emerging practical example of this is Sepedi (a language spoken in South Africa) whose purported dialect is Khelobedu spoken in Limpopo. The native speakers want the dialect Khelobedu to be 'promoted' to the status of language so that they learn it in schools. Should Khelobedu be taught in schools, will be be called a 'language' or a 'dialect'?

No doubt, to distinguish between a language and dialect especially on the basis of developed literature is like someone trying to hide themselves from the public by hiding behind their own finger. It is laziness in critical thinking and, to some extent, a display of extraordinary cowardice.

To what extent do you think ‘dialects’ exist if at all they do? How best should we view them without others feeling marginalised? Today’s topic was meant to raise more dust than settle it. Let me know your thoughts by contacting me. Next week, I will to look at how mother tongues help delay forgetfulness in old age. I am sure you are appreciating the broad, rarely talked about nature of linguistics. Thanks for your continued feedback which will be published here.

[This article is also available on The Mast website).

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The author is a systemic functional linguist and Special Research Fellow (PhD) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His other research fields include neurolinguistics, forensic linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, African languages and literature. He has also taught language at UNZA. Contact: [email protected]; 0956315380.