The Prehistorical Implications of Guthrie's Comparative Bantu. Part II: Interpretation of Cultural Vocabulary

Abstract

The second part of this article opens with a general caveat about the use and misuse of linguistic evidence. Guthrie, on the other hand, presented his data in a way which leaves subsequent scholars free to arrive at their own interpretations. The complexity of his data makes it difficult to achieve a necessary overview, however, and a stylized grid is therefore proposed, enabling the relative distribution of individual items of Common Bantu vocabulary to be plotted and compared. This is particularly important in the case of cultural vocabulary, where geographical distribution is normally related to levels of historical origin or diffusion. Groups of these vocabulary grids, based on Guthrie's corpus of data and his referential zones, are assembled and presented for the following semantic areas: fishing and watercraft, metal-working, pottery, livestock and cultivation (including cereals). Much of the remainder of the article is devoted to an exposition of the way in which these grids may be interpreted historically, including the need to distinguish—as far as possible—between likely cognates and likely loan-words. Attention is drawn to the possibilities (i) that Bantu languages may have begun to diverge substantially in linguistic terms before they began to move widely apart from their secondary and tertiary nucleus south of the forest, and (ii) that there may have been a differential layering, or overlapping waves, of Bantu expansion in the east.