Place Names as Reservoirs of Rare Linguistic Data: the Bantu Locative Prefix i- in Southwest Tanzanian Toponyms

Abstract

Abstract Since place names almost invariably outlive the speakers of a language, they are capable of retaining knowledge in connection with a specific locality. For instance a high percentage of toponyms in Southwest Tanzania with initial morpheme i- reveal this trait. This linguistic element is associated in this study with an old locative marker i-, a debated element in Bantu linguistics. Since previous studies locate the element only around the Great Lakes zone and South Africa, it is inferred from the findings presented here that the distribution of the morpheme may be spread in other Bantu speaking areas as well. This consideration recommends revisiting all the data that reflects the distribution of the morpheme i- and other morphemes, including data from other parts of Bantu speaking regions. In order to affirm the antiquity or the contemporaneity of the roles of this morpheme, these results recommend further morphosyntatic analysis to test the behaviour of the morpheme in specific languages spoken in the study area.