Malcolm Guthrie

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Malcolm Guthrie (born February 10, 1903 in Hove , England , † November 22, 1972 in London ) was a British linguist who dealt in particular with the Bantu languages . He is one of the most important bantuists of the 20th century.

Life path

After studying metallurgy, he turned to theology and ordained for several years in the Rochester Baptist Church . In 1932 he went to Kinshasa in the Congo as a Baptist missionary . There he devoted himself next to his missionary work to the study of local Bantu languages , in particular the common language Lingala . In 1940 he returned to England and in 1942 was appointed Senior Lecturer (lecturer) for Bantu languages ​​at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). 1942–1944 he undertook extensive research trips to East, Central and South Africa, during which he collected the material for his doctoral thesis The Tonal Structure of Bemba ; with this work he received his doctorate in 1945. From 1950 to 1968 he headed the Africa department of SOAS, in 1951 he was appointed to the newly established chair for Bantu languages, and in 1970 he retired . Since 1968 he was a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy . Guthrie died in 1972.

Gemeinbantu, Protobantu and Urheimat

With his first comparative language studies (1948–1955) Guthrie replaced the dominance of the German Africanist Carl Meinhof, who died in 1944, in bantu studies, which he had practiced for almost 50 years. He worked with new structuralist methods and sharply separated diachronic and synchronous linguistic phenomena. Since the Bantu languages ​​do not have any older written fixations (the exception is Swahili with texts in Arabic script since the 10th century , other Bantu languages ​​were only written based on the Latin alphabet from the middle of the 19th century ), it was extremely difficult to establish a genetic structure of about 500 languages ​​and to develop a Proto-Bantu language. Guthrie proceeded in two steps: first he collected almost all of the words and morphemes in all Bantu languages ​​available to him, bundled them into around 2000 word equations and, on the basis of these extensive comparisons, determined the sound equivalent in the individual Bantu languages. He called the sum of these word and morpheme equations Gemeinbantu (synchronous phase). From this he tried in a second step to deduce the sound history of Bantu and Proto-Bantu (diachronic phase).

From the regional distribution of the Bantu roots, he drew the conclusion that the original home of the Bantu languages ​​was south of the equatorial rainforest - he called this area in the Congo region the Bantu nucleus - and that all the Bantu peoples had migrated from there to their current settlement areas. This hypothesis has been proven wrong; today Eastern Nigeria and Western Cameroon are generally regarded as the original home of Bantu. (Compare the article Bantu languages , section "Original home and expansion".)

The Guthrie Zones

As early as 1948 Guthrie had designed his system of a practical, geographically oriented division of all Bantu languages, which he expanded and refined until 1970. He divided the Bantu languages ​​into 16 groups ("zones"), which he designated with the letters A - S (without I, O, Q), for example Zone A is the group of Bantu languages ​​from Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea . Within each zone the languages ​​are grouped in units of ten, for example A10 = Lundu-Balong group and A20 = Duala group of zone A. The individual languages ​​are numbered in each group of ten; for example A11 = Londo and A12 = Lue, dialects can be denoted by lower case letters, e.g. B. A12a. Guthrie's classification is primarily based on geography ; based on current knowledge, it hardly has any genetic significance. However, it is still generally used as a reference system for the Bantu languages. (See also the article Bantu languages , section "Bantu languages ​​according to Guthrie zones". There all major Bantu languages ​​are divided into their respective Guthrie zones.)

Aftermath

Guthrie was a withdrawn loner and did not share his ideas with other researchers until a work or book was published. He only took part in the international specialist discussion in African Studies and Bantuistics through his works, he had hardly any well-known students. Its aftermath has remained relatively weak, it cannot be compared with the formative power of Carl Meinhof , who shaped Bantu studies and large parts of African studies for 50 years. Guthrie's concept of the common Bantu and his practical classification system for Bantu languages, which is still used today as a standard reference, have survived .

Important works by Guthrie

  • 1943 The Lingua Franca of the Middle Congo. (Meant is Lingala.) Africa 14.
  • 1948 The Classification of the Bantu Languages. London. (Reprint 1967)
  • 1948 Bantu Word Division. London.
  • 1948 Gender, Number and Person in Bantu Languages. BSOAS 12.
  • 1953 The Bantu Languages ​​of Western Equatorial Africa. London.
  • 1956 Observations on Nominal Classes in Bantu Languages. BSOAS 18.
  • 1959 Problèmes de génétique linguistique: la question du Bantu commun. Paris.
  • 1960 Teke Radical Structure and Common Bantu. AS 1.
  • 1961 Bantu Sentence Structure. London.
  • 1962 Bantu Origins: a Tentative New Hypothesis. JAL 1.
  • 1962 Some Developments in the Prehistory of the Bantu Languages. YEAR 3.
  • 1962 A Two-stage Method of Comparative Bantu Study. AS 3.
  • 1967-71 Comparative Bantu. An Introduction to the Comparative Linguistics and Prehistory of the Bantu Languages. 4 volumes. Farnborough.

Abbreviations of the trade journals:

  • Africa = Africa. Journal of the International Institute of African Languages ​​and Cultures. London 1928ff.
  • ALS = African Language Studies. London 1960ff.
  • BSOAS = Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. London 1940ff.
  • JAH = Journal of African History. London 1960ff.
  • JAL = Journal of African Languages. London and Hertford 1962-72.

See also

literature

  • Herrmann Jungraithmayr, Wilhelm JG Möhlig: Lexicon of African Studies. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-496-00146-1 .
    (The Guthrie, Malcolm article in this dictionary is an important basis and source for this article.)
  • Derek Nurse, Gérard Philippson (Ed.): The Bantu Languages. Routledge, London / New York 2003.
  • Hazel Carter: Malcolm Guthrie, 1903-1972 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 59 , 1974, pp. 473-498 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 5, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Guthrie, Malcolm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British linguist
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hove , England
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1972
Place of death London