In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A grammar of Chingoni by Deo Ngonyani
  • Benji Wald
A grammar of Chingoni. By Deo Ngonyani. (Languages of the world/Materials 425.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2003. Pp. v, 110. ISBN 3895868469. $53.40.

Deo Ngonyani refers to his work as a ‘sketch grammar’ of Chingoni (also known as Ngoni), a Southern Tanzanian Bantu language closely related to the author’s first language, Ndendeule. It is organized in a typical manner for sketch or outline grammars, so that general phonological and morphological features and the most basic syntactic features of a language can be easily found by interested readers. This is a particular convenience for Bantuists interested in comparing the most commonly surveyed Bantu features across languages. The grammar includes chapters on phonology (7–26), morphology (27–73), and syntax (74–90), and concludes with a text (95–99), greetings (99), references (100–101), and a wordlist (102–10).

The phonology chapter contains information on tone and tonal changes. The morphology chapter, the longest (due to the morphological complexity of the Bantu noun and verb, and its syntactic implications, such as class concord), contains extensive paradigms along with many examples of phrase- and sentential-level syntax in which the morphological structures under discussion are contextualized. Noteworthy is the inclusion of the Chingoni text with three levels of interlinear analysis below each line: segmentation into Chingoni morphemes, an English morpheme gloss of the Chingoni segmentation, and an idiomatic English translation of each line of Chingoni text. The wordlist at the end gives Chingoni words in alphabetical order and part of speech for each entry followed by the English gloss. The wordlist does not include all words used in the grammar, or even in the sample text. The selection is mainly of basic words, but the manner of selection is not explained.

The grammar is a reflection of N’s general concern with documenting the languages of Southern Tanzania, a group of languages for which much further description and analysis are needed. As N explains in §1.2, ‘Objectives of the grammar’, the work is offered with the comparative Bantuist in mind, particularly with respect to the subclassification of Chingoni and other Southern Tanzanian languages within Bantu.

Benji Wald
New York, NY
...

pdf

Share