Induktiver Aufbau des Urbantu (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Induktiver Aufbau des Urbantu by Otto Dempwolff Anthony P. Grant Induktiver Aufbau des Urbantu. By Otto Dempwolff. Ed. and rearranged by Ludwig Gerhardt and Justus Roux. (Archiv afrikanistischer Manuskripte 5.) Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 1998. Pp. 116. Otto Dempwolff (1871–1938) is mostly remembered nowadays for his work on comparative Austronesian (or more accurately, on the reconstruction of Malayo-Polynesian) which he produced in the last years of his life. However, his linguistic work ranged much more broadly and deeply than this. Working in Africa and the Pacific as a doctor of tropical medicine in the Wilhelmine colonial service, and later as a professor of what we would now call Austronesian languages at the University of Hamburg, he collected and organized field materials on an impressive range of African, Austronesian, and other languages (including the compilation of a valuable Tok Pisin dictionary from around 1905 which is still in manuscript form in Hamburg). His Austronesian endeavors have [End Page 637] largely overshadowed his Africanist work (he looked at Nama in addition to Bantu languages). This book enables an important, and previously unpublished, part of D’s Africanist work to be seen for the (admittedly) somewhat superseded but still impressive achievement that it is. The introduction, illustrated with a photograph of a manuscript page of the present work and another of D himself, and rounded off with his curriculum vitae, is interesting and puts the following materials into a historical context. The core of this book (15–94) is D’s notes for a University of Hamburg lecture course (which he delivered twice, in 1930–31 and in 1935) on the reconstruction of Proto-Bantu, complete with his own reconstructions. D was familiar with Carl Meinhof’s work in the same field, but he was a surer diachronist than Meinhof. D used several Bantu languages as data sources, but most of the material in the notes consists of comparisons between Swahili and Zulu, often also with evidence from (Se)pedi and Herero. D’s work is divided into 58 sections. After a few sections of introduction to the comparative method for the benefit of the students, with examples from Romance languages, it concentrates on reconstructing the historical phonology and morphology (including the noun-class system) of D’s conception of Proto-Bantu, which is admittedly limited by the concentration on two or three languages and the lack of use of data from Grassfields Bantu varieties and other westerly Bantu languages. Phonology, then morphology, are presented, with much use of tables and thus considerable clarity of exposition. Pages 95–114 present later variants of Sections 40–50 and Section 56, and the final two pages present a bibliography to the work as a whole. The Bantu data are not as D gave them; the editors have normalized transcriptions, adding tone-marks and noun-class divisions where necessary, thus giving the work amore modern appearance than it would have originally had, and they have also added a large number of explanatory footnotes. Although historical developments in Bantu studies make this little more than a curio, on a historiographical level it is a valuable publication as (inter alia) a relatively early demonstration of the regularity of sound correspondences in groups of related and unwritten languages, and we may hope that others of D’s manuscripts will eventually be published. Anthony P. Grant University of Manchester Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America