Ndebele (review)

This volume sketches the structure of the Zimbabwe dialect of Ndebele, an Nguni language (Bantu). It is a product of a field methods course at Harvard University, where ten student contributors worked with a single speaker. Besides the editors, these contributors were Emily Alling, Luce Aubrey, Gorm Amand, Dominica Baran, Maryann Cockerill, Balkiz Öztürk, Gülsat Aygen, and Ju-Eun Lee. The 77 pages of discussion are divided into sections on phonology, morphology, and syntax, and an interlinear text.

The phonological inventory of Ndebele includes a five-vowel system, consonantal contrasts at four places of articulation for nasals, voiced stops, voiceless aspirated stops, ejective stops, and prenasalized voiced stops. Only four click phones are listed in this work, though twelve are evidently distinguished by the orthography. High and low tones are listed but not marked for most of the book. The presence of stress is also noted, although we are not informed of its phonetic correlates. A few phonological processes are noted.

Morphology of nouns and verbs is covered in detail, constituting almost half the book. Ndebele has a complex system of noun class marking and agreement of an adjective with its governing noun. The contributors also discuss the intricate verb morphology typical of Bantu languages, with sections on stem extensions such as causative, applicative, reciprocal, passive, and so forth (including ‘randomness’ and ‘thoroughness’). Bantu specialists will inevitably be disappointed at the lack of depth of many of their favorite topics, but the breadth of coverage is impressive. Much of the information is given in lists and tables rather than in actual data.

The syntax section begins with a discussion of nonverbal sentences, including those with copulas and nominals and adjectives serving as predicates. Word order scrambling in an NP is discussed. The section on complex sentences, including conjunctions and subordinate and relative clauses, is the most detailed of the book. This is directly followed by the most shallow section of the book, nine lines (including headings) of ‘discourse phenomena’.

The editors are to be commended for including a well-glossed interlinear text, coauthored by the language consultant, Bekezela Ncube, to illustrate Ndebele as a whole. It is long enough to exemplify a variety of Ndebele structures. Numerous footnotes explain phenomena not discussed in the main text or places where an unpredicted pattern occurs.

The book shows a lack of close editing in several areas. Besides typos, the authors report a five-way contrast in one place when only four are illustrated, they mislabel íntunɮe and ínɬanzɪ as a minimal pair, there are several subject-verb disagreements such as ‘Example are’, and there are missing references. It also suffers from numerous claimsmade without supporting evidence (one often wonders why one analysis was made rather than another) and what may be a tendency to try to fit Ndebele into European molds and terminology, as when the authors mention ‘case’ (they claim a ‘default case’ is used for subjects, objects, and indirect objects, but not for locatives).

Still, Ndebele has very little documentation, especially compared to the related Zulu, and this work should be appreciated by scholars interested in languages of the region.