African Linguistics : London and Paris Trends.

Abstract

It is in more than one respect a pity that Professor Malcolm Guthrie died so soon after the publication of his magnum opus because that untimely demise deprived the connoisseurs of the battle royal which would surely have taken place between the London master and his scholarly opponents, especially the American linguists. Comparative Bantu1 certainly is a most remarkable piece of work-be if only as a tour de force of the printer's art-and also certainly not an easy one to read. Is it as revolutionary as it purported to be, vis-'a-vis, that is, the classical or Meinhovian school of Bantu linguistics? Both Meinhof and Guthrie had the same final aim, namely the reconstruction of the prehistorical ancestor to all modern Bantu languages, yet with different methods. The latter put more stress on synchronical comparisons, his 'Common Bantu' being, rather than a reconstruction of the ancestor language, like the former's UrBantu, a symbolical representation of contemporary related forms ('shapes' in his own personal terminology), and it is only after elaborating a catalogue of comparative series of which this 'Common Bantu' consists that he attempted the actual reconstruction of Bantu prehistory. According to this reconstruction-which met with the strongest criticism of both the German/South African and the American schools-ProtoBantu developed, in the lacustrine area, from a Pre-Bantu originally spoken somewhere near Lake Chad, and further on divided into two dialects which account for the differences obtaining nowadays between Eastern and Western languages. This, of course, runs contrary to the more generally accepted opinion that ProtoBantu was a West African language which probably developed on what is now the Plateau area of Nigeria and, so to speak, flew down southwards at a fairly recent date to cover up the present field of Bantu expansion (see, for instance, G. P. Murdock's Africa, New York, i959). It is, indeed, difficult to take a definite stand on Guthrie's prehistorical hypothesis. While his argument concerning the high proportion of common roots in the central area seems to give it some weight, it fails to be fully convincing when one tries to explain the ressemblance between Bantu and many of the classlanguages of West Africa, including some which are found at a considerable distance from both the present 'Bantu line' and the hypothetical Pre-Bantu focus. Also Guthrie's hypothesis postulates migratory movements which check only sketchily with most of the available anthropological and archaeological data. On the other hand both his symbolization of 'Common Bantu' and his classification of contemporary languages do seem sounder and more useful than those