Browsing by Author "Nurse, Derek"

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    The history of Sonjo and Engaruka: a linguists' view
    (Fosbrooke, 1992) Nurse, Derek; Rottland, Franz
    We have for several years worked together on the history of the Sonjo language and community. The results will appear as 'Sonjo: Description, classification, history' in volume 12/13 of Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika. During the writing of the article, we relied almost entirely on materials available to us outside the Sonjo area. It was only afterwards that we had the opportunity to actually undertake fieldwork in Sonjo by accompanying John Sottton in late 1992. it is intended for historian, not technical linguists. It focuses on those aspects of Sonjo which bear on Engaruka. Linguists can only deal with living people and their language, and Engaruka ruins have course neither. Sonjo is not just nearby, archeologically similar, and a link in a length and continuous chain of habitation, but is, from a linguistic viewpoint, the nearest relevant, identifiable and dateable entity.
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    Language and history on Kilimanjaro, the pare mountains, and the Taita hills.
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 1977) Nurse, Derek
    This study attempts to trace the linguistic history of three communities in N.E. Tanzania and S.E. Kenya, the Chaga, the Pare, and the ‘Taita’. Chapter I introduces the languages concerned, describes the general background, and outlines aims and methods. Chapter II uses lexicostatistics methods to establish a classification for all the Bantu-speaking peoples of E. Africa, After discussing the methodology and some of its limitations, it sketches the results, which largely correspond to those achieved by the author and a former colleague at the University of Dar es Salaam. Having thus set the framework, it then looks in more detail at the positions of Chaga, Pare, and ‘Taita’ within that framework. Whereas the isolated position of Changa emerges relatively clearly from these statistical methods, Pare and ‘Taita are less easily dealt with. Taking Guthrie’s framework of Proto-Bantu consonants and vowels, Chapter III examines the phonological changes that have taken place between the hypothetical proto-language and the present. It tries to see generalities affecting many languages and language groups, and it also mentions minor development peculiar to individual languages. Changa and the main ‘Taita’ dialect, Saghala, and Pare, are felt to be outliers of a large linguistic grouping which covers E. Kenya and much of Tanzania. Chapter IV compares the structural elements involved in the verb systems of the three ‘languages’ and their neighbours. While recognizing that there are certain difficulties inherent in the us of these elements for historical purposes, the chapter comes to conclusion similar to those reached in Chapter III. Chapter V deals with the evidence afforded by loanwords for historical contact. ‘Loanword’ is defined, and the methodology described. It is likely that the Bantu-speaking inhabitants of Central and Eastern Kenya, and N.E. Tanzania have long interacted, and were preceded by, and perhaps until recently lived alongside, considerable numbers of non-Bantu speaking peoples. In Chapter VI the conclusions from the foregoing four chapters are assembled, and compared with the results of other linguists, and with the evidence from nonlinguistic sources.