Hombert J.-M., Hyman L.M. Bantu historical linguistics theoretical and empirical perspectives

Center for the Study of Language and Information, Leland Stanford Junior University, 1999. — 606 p.Twenty-two years ago, an important conference entitled "L'Expansion Bantoue", held in Viviers, brought together an impressive array of scholars interested in the comparative and historical study of the Bantu languages and peoples. The proceedings of this colloque, published in three volumes (Hyman and Voorhoeve 1980, Bouquiaux 1980), provide an interdisciplinary synthesis of the history of the Bantu people (linguistic, archeological, and ethnographic).Since that time there has, of course, continued to be significant historical and descriptive work on Bantu languages. In post-Viviers years, however, much attention has turned to the interaction of Bantu linguistic phenomena with linguistic theory. In the late 1970's and 1980's, for instance, the theoretical study of tone was dominated by the study of African, especially Bantu tone systems. See for example the papers in Clements & Goldsmith (1984) and Hyman & Kisseberth (1998). In syntax as well, Bantu languages were at the center of development of crosslinguistic theories, especially Relational Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. See the papers in Mchombo (1993) and references cited therein. In
other words, the primarily historical, descriptive, and interdisciplinary goals of Viviers, has, at least in some circles, come to take a back seat to
theoretical concerns.There are several reasons for this. One is personal. Besides Malcolm Guthrie, who passed away in 1972, the post-Viviers period saw the loss of several important Bantuists, most notably A.E. Meeussen, Jan Voorhoeve, and Pierre Alexandre. While their students — and the many scholars who
consider themselves their apprentices — continue to work in the comparative and historical tradition which they represented, a number of us have been concerned about the training of subsequent generations to continue this work. It seemed to us that a meeting would be appropriate to discuss what we have learned in the field of Bantu historical linguistics since Viviers and particularly how joint research efforts can coordinated, taking advantage of recent developments in data organization and analysis. We of course thought of organizing a meeting that would be comprehensive and cover most of the important linguistic issues in comparative Bantu. We thought also that this would be an opportune time to present and discuss the various computational tools and lexical data bases that have been recently developed at Berkeley, Lyon, Leiden, Tervuren and elsewhere which have great promise for our future efforts. These products have — and will continue to facilitate the work of established scholars in a major way. Since we deal with about 500 languages within Bantu alone (i.e. not counting Bantoid and further relations), access to this data is crucial. Its availability is in addition an open invitation for others to join us without having to invest a tremendous amount of time in collecting and processing this vast amount of data.