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  • An introduction to African languages by G. Tucker Childs
  • Derek Nurse
An introduction to African languages. By G. Tucker Childs. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 265. ISBN 11588114228. $59.95.

G. Tucker Childs sets out his aims and framework in a brief preface. His primary goal is ‘to provide an introduction to the linguistic study of African languages’, ‘to characterize the languages of Africa in a succinct and concise manner’, making ‘the facts accessible to the unfamiliar reader’ (ix). The framework used is a ‘descriptive-structural-typological one, as opposed to a formal-theoretical approach’. Lest the reader get the impression that the book might be theoretically thin, it is not; it is theoretically well informed. C assumes ‘some knowledge of language structure … but nothing beyond that acquired in a first-year linguistics course’. Still, that is not always true. The book is ‘organized by linguistic domain … and each chapter can be read independently’, and it is claimed that the book could be used as a ‘text for a course in African languages’. For each domain C has selected ‘features that are unique to Africa’. Finally, another important goal of this book is to ‘introduce the reader to some of the fascination and even to some of the controversy involved in African linguistics’ (ix).

Ch. 1 discusses reasons for studying African languages and offers an interesting historical background to the general study of African languages. It also sets the tone for the book by [End Page 199] introducing a string of anecdotes and a personal note. C has spent a lot of time in several parts of Africa and is passionate about his task. This shines through in the book.

Ch. 2, ‘Classification of African languages’, outlines the four African phyla, and deals with approaches to African classification, and with some local problems. This chapter has a wealth of maps, tables, and figures, a fine feature characterizing the whole book (also a superb CD, with many things readers have probably heard about but never heard). The chapter concentrates on methods, so readers seeking a detailed classification have to look elsewhere. Although the preface claims the contents of a first-year linguistics course would suffice as background, C has a habit of assuming more knowledge on the reader’s part than is probably the case. He often jumps into topics and explains the issues only indirectly as he goes along. Sometimes the obvious is not explicitly stated. For instance, nowhere in this chapter is it said that the validity of Niger-Congo, the world’s largest phylum, has never been demonstrated using conventional methods (the comparative method), and neither is it said explicitly that one of the main reasons it is hard to prove the existence of Khoisan as a phylum is that the comparative method cannot properly be applied because so much lexical material has been eroded by many thousands of years of time.

Ch. 3, ‘Phonetics and phonology’, has to choose from among the considerable range of possible topics. Prominent are clicks, prenasalized segments, syllable structure, vowel height and ATR vowel harmony, and tone (grammatical tone, tonogenesis, tone rules, downdrift, and downstep), with tones constituting half of the chapter. Since advances in tonal theory have been closely intertwined with work on African languages over the last thirty years, the length of the chapter is justified. This is a good chapter and the topic dear to the author’s heart. It mixes what is to be expected with the less conventional, such as talking drums, word games and tone, and labial flaps.

Ch. 4, ‘Morphology’, is short (twenty pages, the same length as the whole section on tones). It deals with Arabic nonconcatenative morphology, the intricate noun/gender class systems of Niger-Congo and especially Bantu, TMA (tense, mood, aspect) expression in Niger-Congo and especially Bantu, and Niger-Congo verb extensions and argument structure. I found this chapter a little disappointing: what is done is done well, but there are omissions. The section on TMA largely deals with the morphological structure of the verb and how TMA categories are expressed, but says almost nothing about the semantic content of these categories or how they fit into...

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