Congo-Saharan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • The Congo-Saharan macro family is shown in brown
  • Congo-Saharan is an African macro family founded by Edgar Gregersen , which combines the two language families Niger-Congo and Nilo -Saharan , established by Joseph Greenberg , into a genetic unit . This hypothesis has so far only been accepted by a minority of Africanists.

    Greenberg's classification of African languages

    According to Greenberg's final work The Languages ​​of Africa from 1963, all African languages belong to one of the four large families Afro-Asian , Nilo-Saharan , Niger-Congo and Khoisan . While the first three are now generally recognized as genetic units , the Khoisan is today more of an area linguistic union with typological similarities.

    Gregersen's Congo-Saharan Hypothesis

    A few years later (1972) Edgar Gregersen presented his study Congo-Saharan , in which he combined Niger-Congo and Nilo -Saharan to form a new genetic unit Congo-Saharan .

    What initially looked like a step backwards on the positions of Carl Meinhof - he called the group of languages ​​that are now included in the Niger-Congo (excluding Bantu languages ) and Nilo-Saharan languages, "Sudanese languages" - turned out to be a linguistically quite serious attempt out to found a new great African language unit.

    The main arguments

    Gregersen's main arguments were:

    Support from other researchers

    Hans G. Mukarovsky also took the view (1966, 1977) that the Songhai is related to the Mande languages. He combined the Mande languages ​​and the Songhai into a fifth African language family, which he called "Western Sahelian". He rejected a union of the two large families along the lines of Gregersen.

    Gregersen received support from several other researchers. Denis Creissels also noted considerable similarities between the Mande languages ​​and the Songhai in 1981 and considered Gregersen's Congo-Saharan hypothesis to be likely. Raymond Boyd (1978) documented lexical similarities between the Adamawa-Ubangi languages and various branches of Nilo-Saharan. M. Lionel Bender became an advocate of the Congo-Saharan language in 1981 after his own research, possibly with the inclusion of Omotic , which in the meantime (1969) had been separated from the Cushitic languages ​​by Harold C. Fleming and established as the sixth primary branch of Afro-Asian . Roger M. Blench (1995) supported the Congo-Saharan hypothesis by showing further lexical and phonological parallels. He does not see the Niger-Congo as being on a par with the Nilo-Saharan language, but rather as a parallel branch of the Central Sudanese and Kadugli within the Nilo-Saharan language.

    Lack of acceptance

    In general, it can be said that Gregersen's Congo-Saharan hypothesis has triggered some interesting studies on this topic, but the majority of Africanists continue to assume two independent African language families Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, although the latter is by no means yet used by all researchers has been fully recognized as a genetic unit by Greenberg .

    A particular difficulty arises from the fact that the proto-languages of Niger-Congo have not yet been reconstructed, of Nilo-Saharan only recently (Ehret 2001). A language comparison on the proto-language level is therefore not possible, as was done by Sergei Anatoljewitsch Starostin for the Dene-Caucasian and by Aharon Dolgopolsky for the Nostratic . Another problem is the great time depth: for the two proto-languages ​​Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan an age of at least 10,000 years is assumed, then a Proto-Congo-Saharan would have to go back at least 15,000, if not 20,000 years. Many researchers doubt whether phonetic, grammatical or lexical similarities between the two language families can still be proven after such a long time.

    literature

    African languages

    • Joseph Greenberg: The Languages ​​of Africa. Mouton, The Hague and Indiana University Center, Bloomington 1963.
    • Bernd Heine and others (ed.): The languages ​​of Africa. Buske, Hamburg 1981.
    • Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse (eds.): African Languages. An Introduction. Cambridge University Press 2000.

    Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan

    • John Bendor-Samuel (Ed.): The Niger-Congo Languages: A Classification and Description of Africa's Largest Language Family. University Press of America, Lanham, New York / London 1989. (The only comprehensive representation of the Niger-Congo and its subunits, the classification partially out of date.)
    • Lionel M. Bender: The Nilo-Saharan Languages: A Comparative Essay. Lincom Europa Verlag, Munich 1997.
    • Christopher Ehret: A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan . Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Cologne 2001.

    Congo-Saharan

    • Merritt Ruhlen: A Guide to the World's Languages. Classification. Arnold, Stanford 1987.
    • Edgar Gregersen: Congo-Saharan. Journal of African Languages, 1972.

    See also