A Grammatical Sketch of Herero (Otjiherero) (review)

This book is a grammatical sketch of Herero, a major Bantu language of Namibia, which is also spoken across the northern border in Angola. The book is organized in a manner typical of sketch grammars, in the present case as follows: Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (11–16); Ch. 2, ‘Phonology’ (17–28, including sections on lexical and grammatical tone); Ch. 3, ‘Morphology of the noun phrase’ (29–70, including separate sections on all parts of speech that have some kind of nominal morphology, for example, numerals, adjectives, pronouns, and demonstratives); Ch. 4, ‘Morphology of the verb phrase’ (71–96, with sections on derivational suffixes before sections on concordial and tense-aspect prefixes); Ch. 5, ‘Syntax’ (97–104); Ch. 6, ‘Texts’ (105–10); and Ch. 7, ‘List of words’ (111–18, divided into three sections—one to and one from English, and one of useful phrases). The book concludes with a bibliography (119–22) and an index (123–27), which refers to various grammatical and lexical features, for example, ‘Body parts with two sides’, ‘Juxtaposed compounds’, and ‘Syllabic structure of morphemes’.

Unlike some recent sketch grammars, the present one does not represent a point of departure for more extensive grammars, since some older work, more detailed in many respects, has long been available and is even referred to by the authors. No particular reason for creating the sketch grammar is given by the authors, but it is clearly useful for the usual quick comparison of Herero with other Bantu languages with respect to the most commonly researched and described linguistic features of Bantu. Thus, the relatively large size of the chapter on nominal morphology reflects the attention that has been customarily paid, since the inception of Bantu linguistic studies, to the complexity of the Bantu noun class system, and to its ramifications for other categories included in the noun phrase. In any case, some of the Herero features treated here are striking enough to be readily noticed by readers familiar with more distant Bantu languages. Particularly interesting and explicitly emphasized by the authors is the very last feature treated in the grammatical sketch, the structure of the object relative clause (103). In such clauses, the ‘relative concord’, based on an independent demonstrative theme and referring to the preceding head noun phrase, immediately follows rather than precedes the subject noun phrase of the embedded clause, that is, ‘the teacher [the boys WHO/M they-see] he-is-dancing’. Most Bantu languages that form the relative clause on an independent demonstrative theme would avoid such violation of the integrity of the relative clause, having the ‘relative concord’ (e.g. WHO/M) precede the entire clause, as in ‘the teacher WHO/M [the boys they-see] he-is-dancing’. The authors leave this contrast with other Bantu languages implicit, but it exemplifies the utility of this grammar for comparative use by other Bantuists. Somewhat confusing is that the authors translate the exemplar object relative clause as a fragment equivalent to ‘the teacher whom [the boys see dancing (])’ rather than as ‘the teacher whom [the boys see] is dancing’, so that it is not minimally contrastive to their preceding example of a subject relative clause, equivalent to ‘the teacher who [sees (how)] the boys are dancing’. The authors should clarify this lapse.

Among other uses, the grammar provides a coherent outline of topics to explore in a field methods course on a Bantu language. And indeed, it is noted in the preface that the sketch evolved out of a field methods course (5).