Philologica Volume 1, pt. 2; journal of comparative philology - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 Excerpt: ...bieti, market, bienadso, door. With these Donga Jukun forms may be compared the Wukari forms tana, ndo, riff. But this interpretation appears to be excluded in such forms as wi-nyi, elephant, where wi means animal. In these cases the prefix noun clearly plays the part of a determinant; we find numerous analogies in the languages of East Asia. The determinant has a more general meaning than the noun to which it is attached &. the whole may be termed a classificatory compound. In other cases we have to deal with what may be called a coordinate compound. There is in the Mande &. other groups a root kû, stone, replaced further east by tia which is also found in some far western languages like Temne (asar = stone) or in Mendi & a few neighbouring tongues, in Togoland Semi-Bantu &. some of the eastern languages by fu (Mendi, kotu, Bagrima, tôd). In Yoruba we find the form okuta, in which two of these roots seem to be found, while in the Basa &. Nupe form taku the elements appear to.be reversed. How old the Bantu prefixes may be we do not know; but there is no reason to suppose that they go back to the beginnings of language. The tones of Sudanic languages on the other hand present every appearance of venerable antiquity &. can hardly be anything but much older than the Bantu prefixes, the more so as tones play a part in Bantu languages remote from the Sudanic area &. must in all probability have fallen into desuetude in such languages as are lacking in them precisely owing to the use of prefixes, which made them unnecessary for diacritical purposes. But little attention has so far been paid to these duplex stems in Sudanic or indeed any family of languages, but it seems possible that by a systematic investigation of them we m...