Abstract
Threats of imminent extinction motivate language documentation; they also allow place name neglect. This paper examines settlement names within Africa’s Edoid group. Village nomenclature converges on a restricted range of conventions; however, interethnic contact has led to non-Edoid toponyms for three villages. Two derive from the trade language Hausa. A third links to Igbo blacksmiths supporting rainforest penetration with iron tools, as is evident in cognate vocabulary. Iron use most naturally follows a pastoral era outside the rainforest, which number prefixes on herd-animal nouns support. Toponymic studies thus remind us of the benefit accrued when documentation looks beyond “the single ancestral code.”
Highlights
The threat of imminent extinction has motivated language documentation studies and allowed for neglect of place names
The stability and persistence of place names are amply illustrated for many areas of the world (Burenhult and Levinson 2008, Senft 200, Nash 2013)
Nominal inflection suggests an even earlier stage of prehistory for EOI and loan words bolster the nature of contact with Igbo, a non-Edoid neighbor
Summary
The threat of imminent extinction has motivated language documentation studies and allowed for neglect of place names. From them emerged the Benin Kingdom of pre-colonial West Africa (Bradbury 1957, 1973) Our understanding of this kingdom derives in large measure from oral history (Egharevba 1934), the highly stylized bronze casting and ivory carving of the 14th through 17th centuries (Crowder and Abdullahi 1979, Ben Amos 1980) and archaeological investigation of its capital, Benin City, where earthen embankments and palace grounds have been uncovered (Connah 1975, Darling 1998). These assessments point to the Kingdom’s patrilineal, hereditary kingship and centralized palace government (Ogbomo 1997). In the south-central region, they occupy geographic areas in the transition zone where rain forest and savanna intermix
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