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64-469: Khoekhoe ( / ˈ k ɔɪ k ɔɪ / KOY -koy ; Khoekhoegowab , Khoekhoe pronunciation: [k͡xʰo̜͡ek͡xʰo̜͡egowab] ), also known by the ethnic terms Nama ( / ˈ n ɑː m ə / NAH -mə ; Namagowab ), Damara ( ǂNūkhoegowab ), or Nama/Damara and formerly as Hottentot , is the most widespread of the non- Bantu languages of Southern Africa that make heavy use of click consonants and therefore were formerly classified as Khoisan ,

128-481: A geminate consonant . For example, the Japanese name for Japan , 日本 , has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ( Nihon ) and one with four ( Nippon ). In the hiragana spelling, the three morae of Ni-ho-n are represented by three characters ( にほん ), and the four morae of Ni-p-po-n need four characters to be written out as にっぽん . The latter can also be analysed as Ni-Q-po-n , with

192-468: A syllable , that exists in some spoken languages in which phonetic length (such as vowel length ) matters significantly. For example, in the Japanese language , the name of the city Ōsaka ( おおさか ) consists of three syllables ( O-sa-ka ) but four morae ( O-o-sa-ka ), since the first syllable, Ō , is pronounced with a long vowel (the others being short). Thus, a short vowel contains one mora and

256-506: A ) Khoekhoe has four definite articles : ti , si , sa , ǁî . These definite articles can be combined with PGN markers. Examples from Haacke (2013): There are three clause markers, ge ( declarative ), kha ( interrogative ), and ko/km ( assertive ). These markers appear in matrix clauses , and appear after the subject. Following is a sample text in the Khoekhoe language. Bantu languages The total number of Bantu languages

320-501: A + i , or one long and one short vowel, ā + i ) is assigned a value of two mātrā s. In addition, there is pluta (trimoraic) and dīrgha pluta ('long pluta ' = quadrimoraic). Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into laghu ( लघु , 'light') and dīrgha / guru ( दीर्घ / गुरु , 'heavy') feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word. Thus, for example,

384-421: A V- syllable at the start). In other words, a strong claim for this language family is that almost all words end in a vowel, precisely because closed syllables (CVC) are not permissible in most of the documented languages, as far as is understood. This tendency to avoid consonant clusters in some positions is important when words are imported from English or other non-Bantu languages. An example from Chewa :

448-543: A couple of extreme examples, namely コーン茶 and チェーン店 ), the drop in pitch of a word (so-called "downstep") cannot come after any of these "special mora," a useful tidbit for language learners trying to learn word pitch accents. In Luganda , a short vowel constitutes one mora while a long vowel constitutes two morae. A simple consonant has no morae, and a doubled or prenasalised consonant has one. No syllable may contain more than three morae. The tone system in Luganda

512-668: A designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race"." The Bantu languages descend from a common Proto-Bantu language , which is believed to have been spoken in what is now Cameroon in Central Africa . An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them. This Bantu expansion came to dominate Sub-Saharan Africa east of Cameroon, an area where Bantu peoples now constitute nearly

576-414: A distant third place with 8.2 million speakers ( South Africa and Zimbabwe ), and Shona with less than 10 million speakers (if Manyika and Ndau are included), while Sotho-Tswana languages ( Sotho , Tswana and Pedi ) have more than 15 million speakers (across Botswana , Lesotho , South Africa, and Zambia ). Zimbabwe has Kalanga, Matebele, Nambiya, and Xhosa speakers. Ethnologue separates

640-524: A grouping now recognized as obsolete. It belongs to the Khoe language family , and is spoken in Namibia , Botswana , and South Africa primarily by three ethnic groups: Namakhoen , ǂNūkhoen , and Haiǁomkhoen . The Haiǁom, who had spoken a Juu language , later shifted to Khoekhoe. The name for the speakers, Khoekhoen , is from the word khoe "person", with reduplication and the suffix -n to indicate

704-504: A macron, as in ā /ʔàa̋/ 'to cry, weep'; these constitute two moras (two tone-bearing units). A glottal stop is not written at the beginning of a word (where it is predictable), but it is transcribed with a hyphen in compound words, such as gao-aob /kȁòʔòȁp/ 'chief'. The clicks are written with the Lepsius letters that were later adopted as IPA symbols. The basic (tenuis) clicks are: Sometimes ASCII characters are substituted, e.g.

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768-411: A moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word mōra , the ō is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ , corresponding here to mo-o-ra , each containing one mora. Therefore, the 5/7/5 pattern of the haiku in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables. The Japanese syllable-final n is also moraic, as is the first part of

832-407: A nasal ( /ń ḿ/ ) than on mid or low vowels ( /é á ó/ ). The tones combine into a limited number of 'tone melodies' ( word tones ), which have sandhi forms in certain syntactic environments. The most important melodies, in their citation and main sandhi forms, are as follows: Within a phrase, lexical words receive greater stress than grammatical words . Within a word, the first syllable receives

896-418: A o u/ and nasal /ĩ ã ũ/ . /u/ is strongly rounded, /o/ only slightly so. /a/ is the only vowel with notable allophony; it is pronounced [ə] before /i/ or /u/ . Nama has been described as having three or four tones , /á, ā, à/ or /a̋, á, à, ȁ/ , which may occur on each mora (vowels and final nasal consonants ). The high tone is higher when it occurs on one of the high vowels ( /í ú/ ) or on

960-516: A short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel ( é , eé ). A circumflex ( ῆ ) represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel ( ée ). Gilbertese , an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Kiribati , is a trimoraic language. The typical foot in Gilbertese contains three morae. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese. These "ternary metrical constituents of

1024-532: A syllable would have more than four otherwise. In the Old English period, all content words (as well as stressed monosyllables) had to be at least two morae long. In Sanskrit , the mora is expressed as the mātrā . For example, the short vowel a (pronounced like a schwa ) is assigned a value of one mātrā , the long vowel ā is assigned a value of two mātrā s, and the compound vowel (diphthong) ai (which has either two simple short vowels,

1088-690: Is Swahili , with 16 million native speakers and 80 million L2 speakers (2015). Most native speakers of Swahili live in Tanzania , where it is a national language, while as a second language, it is taught as a mandatory subject in many schools in East Africa, and is a lingua franca of the East African Community . Other major Bantu languages include Lingala with more than 20 million speakers ( Congo , DRC ), followed by Zulu with 13.56 million speakers ( South Africa ), Xhosa at

1152-421: Is also difficult to hear when not between vowels, so to foreign ears, it may sound like a longer but less raspy version of the contour clicks. Tindall notes that European learners almost invariably pronounce the lateral clicks by placing the tongue against the side teeth and that this articulation is "harsh and foreign to the native ear". The Namaqua instead cover the whole of the palate with the tongue and produce

1216-649: Is based on morae. See Luganda tones and Luganda grammar . In Old English, short diphthongs and monophthongs were monomoraic, long diphthongs and monophthongs were bimoraic, consonants ending a syllable were each one mora, and geminate consonants added a mora to the preceding syllable. If Modern English is analyzed in terms of morae at all, which is contentious, the rules would be similar, except that all diphthongs would be considered bimoraic. Probably in Old English, like in Modern English, syllables could not have more than four morae, with loss of sounds occurring if

1280-475: Is called monomoraic , while a long vowel contains two and is called bimoraic . Extra-long syllables with three morae ( trimoraic ) are relatively rare. Such metrics based on syllables are also referred to as syllable weight . In Japanese, certain consonants also stand on their own as individual morae and thus are monomoraic. The term comes from the Latin word for 'linger, delay', which was also used to translate

1344-497: Is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect" . Many Bantu languages borrow words from each other, and some are mutually intelligible . Some of the languages are spoken by a very small number of people, for example the Kabwa language was estimated in 2007 to be spoken by only 8500 people but was assessed to be a distinct language. The total number of Bantu speakers

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1408-564: Is estimated to be around 350 million in 2015 (roughly 30% of the population of Africa or 5% of the world population ). Bantu languages are largely spoken southeast of Cameroon , and throughout Central , Southern , Eastern , and Southeast Africa . About one-sixth of Bantu speakers , and one-third of Bantu languages, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo . The most widely spoken Bantu language by number of speakers

1472-1174: Is hampered by insufficient data. Simplified phylogeny of northwestern branches of Bantu by Grollemund (2012): A40-50-60-70: Basaa languages , Bafia languages , Mbam languages , Beti language A10-20-30: Sawabantu languages , Manenguba languages A80-90: Makaa–Njem languages B20: Kele languages B10: Myene language B30: Tsogo languages C10-20-30: Ngondi–Ngiri languages , Mboshi languages , Bangi–Ntomba languages C40-D20-D32: Bati–Angba languages , Lega–Binja languages , Bira language B80-C60-70-80: Boma–Dzing languages , Soko languages , Tetela languages , Bushoong languages B40-H10-30-B50-60-70: Sira languages , Kongo languages , Yaka languages , Nzebi languages , Mbete languages , Teke languages L10-H40: Pende languages , Hungana language C50-D10: Soko languages , Lengola language D10-20-30-40-JD50: Mbole–Enya languages , Komo–Bira languages , Shi–Havu languages Other computational phylogenetic analyses of Bantu include Currie et al. (2013), Grollemund et al. (2015), Rexova et al. 2006, Holden et al., 2016, and Whiteley et al. 2018. Glottolog ( 2021 ) does not consider

1536-666: Is likely the innovative line cladistically . Northwest Bantu is not a coherent family, but even for Central Bantu the evidence is lexical, with little evidence that it is a historically valid group. Another attempt at a detailed genetic classification to replace the Guthrie system is the 1999 "Tervuren" proposal of Bastin, Coupez, and Mann. However, it relies on lexicostatistics , which, because of its reliance on overall similarity rather than shared innovations , may predict spurious groups of conservative languages that are not closely related . Meanwhile, Ethnologue has added languages to

1600-548: Is mainly geographic. The term "narrow Bantu" was coined by the Benue–Congo Working Group to distinguish Bantu as recognized by Guthrie, from the Bantoid languages not recognized as Bantu by Guthrie. In recent times, the distinctiveness of Narrow Bantu as opposed to the other Southern Bantoid languages has been called into doubt, but the term is still widely used. There is no true genealogical classification of

1664-405: Is not always equal to the number of graphemes when written in kana; for example, even though it has four morae, the Japanese name for Tōkyō ( とうきょう ) is written with five graphemes, because one of these graphemes ( ょ ) represents a yōon , a feature of the Japanese writing system that indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized . The "contracted sound" ( 拗音 ) is represented by

1728-472: Is said to have the property of quantity sensitivity. For the purpose of determining accent in Ancient Greek , short vowels have one mora, and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus long ē ( eta : η ) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: ee . Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute ( έ , ή ) represents high pitch on the only mora of

1792-459: Is the extensive use of affixes (see Sotho grammar and Ganda noun classes for detailed discussions of these affixes). Each noun belongs to a class , and each language may have several numbered classes, somewhat like grammatical gender in European languages. The class is indicated by a prefix that is part of the noun, as well as agreement markers on verb and qualificative roots connected with

1856-476: The University of Cape Town ran a series of short courses teaching the language, and 21 September 2020 launched its new Khoi and San Centre. An undergraduate degree programme is being planned to be rolled out in coming years. Modern scholars generally see three dialects: They are distinct enough that they might be considered two or three distinct languages. There are 5 vowel qualities, found as oral /i e

1920-674: The hash (#) in place of ǂ. Nama has a subject–object–verb word order, three nouns classes ( masculine/gu-class, feminine/di-class and neuter/n-class ) and three grammatical numbers ( singular, dual and plural ). Pronominal enclitics are used to mark person, gender, and number on the noun phrases . The PGN ( person - gender - number ) markers are enclitic pronouns that attach to noun phrases . The PGN markers distinguish first, second, and third person , masculine, feminine, and neuter gender , and singular, dual, and plural number . The PGN markers can be divided into nominative , object , and oblique paradigms. (PGN + i ) (PGN +

1984-431: The (Narrow) Bantu languages. Until recently most attempted classifications only considered languages that happen to fall within traditional Narrow Bantu, but there seems to be a continuum with the related languages of South Bantoid. At a broader level, the family is commonly split in two depending on the reflexes of proto-Bantu tone patterns: many Bantuists group together parts of zones A through D (the extent depending on

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2048-671: The Greek word χρόνος  : chrónos ('time') in its metrical sense. The general principles for assigning moras to segments are as follows (see Hayes 1989 and Hyman 1985 for detailed discussion): In general, monomoraic syllables are called "light syllables", bimoraic syllables are called "heavy syllables", and trimoraic syllables (in languages that have them) are called "superheavy syllables". Some languages, such as Old English and potentially present-day English, can have syllables with up to four morae. A prosodic stress system in which moraically heavy syllables are assigned stress

2112-590: The Guthrie classification which Guthrie overlooked, while removing the Mbam languages (much of zone A), and shifting some languages between groups (much of zones D and E to a new zone J, for example, and part of zone L to K, and part of M to F) in an apparent effort at a semi-genetic, or at least semi-areal, classification. This has been criticized for sowing confusion in one of the few unambiguous ways to distinguish Bantu languages. Nurse & Philippson (2006) evaluate many proposals for low-level groups of Bantu languages, but

2176-512: The Khoekhoe of the time had a velar lateral ejective affricate , [kʟ̝̊ʼ] , a common realisation or allophone of /kxʼ/ in languages with clicks. This sound no longer occurs in Khoekhoe but remains in its cousin Korana. The clicks are doubly articulated consonants . Each click consists of one of four primary articulations or "influxes" and one of five secondary articulation or "effluxes". The combination results in 20 phonemes. The aspiration on

2240-400: The Q representing a full mora of silence. In this analysis, っ (the sokuon ) indicates a one-mora period of silence. Similarly, the names Tōkyō ( To-u-kyo-u , とうきょう ), Ōsaka ( O-o-sa-ka , おおさか ), and Nagasaki ( Na-ga-sa-ki , ながさき ) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they have two, three and four syllables, respectively. The number of morae in a word

2304-514: The adjective prefix ki- (representing the diminutive form of the word) and the verb subject prefix a- . Then comes perfect tense -me- and an object marker -ki- agreeing with implicit kitabu 'book' (from Arabic kitab ). Pluralizing to 'children' gives Vitoto vidogo vimekisoma ( Vana vadoko varikuverenga in Shona), and pluralizing to 'books' ( vitabu ) gives vitoto vidogo vimevisoma . Bantu words are typically made up of open syllables of

2368-414: The aspirated clicks is often light but is 'raspier' than the aspirated nasal clicks, with a sound approaching the ch of Scottish loch . The glottalised clicks are clearly voiceless due to the hold before the release, and they are transcribed as simple voiceless clicks in the traditional orthography. The nasal component is not audible in initial position; the voiceless nasal component of the aspirated clicks

2432-465: The author) as Northwest Bantu or Forest Bantu , and the remainder as Central Bantu or Savanna Bantu . The two groups have been described as having mirror-image tone systems: where Northwest Bantu has a high tone in a cognate, Central Bantu languages generally have a low tone, and vice versa. Northwest Bantu is more divergent internally than Central Bantu, and perhaps less conservative due to contact with non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages; Central Bantu

2496-609: The beginning of a syllable can be readily observed in such languages as Shona, and the Makua languages . With few exceptions, such as Kiswahili and Rutooro , Bantu languages are tonal and have two to four register tones. Reduplication is a common morphological phenomenon in Bantu languages and is usually used to indicate frequency or intensity of the action signalled by the (unreduplicated) verb stem. Well-known words and names that have reduplication include: Repetition emphasizes

2560-483: The concept of "language". In addition, delegates at the African Languages Association of Southern Africa conference in 1984 reported that, in some places, the term Kintu has a derogatory significance. This is because kintu refers to "things" and is used as a dehumanizing term for people who have lost their dignity. In addition, Kintu is a figure in some mythologies. In the 1990s,

2624-461: The consonants b d g are used for words with one of the lower tone melodies and p t k for one of the higher tone melodies; they are otherwise pronounced the same. W is only used between vowels, though it may be replaced with b or p according to tone. Overt tone marking is otherwise generally omitted. Nasal vowels are written with a circumflex. All nasal vowels are long, as in hû /hũ̀ṹ/ 'seven'. Long (double) vowels are otherwise written with

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2688-498: The entire population. Some other sources estimate the Bantu Expansion started closer to 3000 BC. The technical term Bantu, meaning "human beings" or simply "people", was first used by Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875), as the concept is reflected in many of the languages of this group. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for "human being" or in simplistic terms "person", and

2752-428: The first, a restriction not found with other vowel sequences such as io. That is, there is a distinction between oi, a bimoraic syllable, and io, which is two syllables. Most dialects of Japanese , including the standard, use morae, known in Japanese as haku ( 拍 ) or mōra ( モーラ ), rather than syllables, as the basis of the sound system. Writing Japanese in kana ( hiragana and katakana ) demonstrates

2816-434: The form CV or CN, with any vowel or tone, where C may be any consonant but a click, and the latter cannot be NN. Suffixes and a third mora of a root, may have the form CV, CN, V, N, with any vowel or tone; there are also three C-only suffixes, -p 1m.sg, -ts 2m.sg, -s 2/3f.sg. There have been several orthographies used for Nama. A Khoekhoegowab dictionary (Haacke 2000) uses the modern standard. In standard orthography,

2880-553: The general plural. Georg Friedrich Wreede was the first European to study the language, after arriving in ǁHui!gaeb (later Cape Town) in 1659. Khoekhoe is a national language in Namibia. In Namibia and South Africa, state-owned broadcasting corporations produce and broadcast radio programmes in Khoekhoe. It is estimated that only around 167,000 speakers of Khoekhoe remain in Africa, which makes it an endangered language . In 2019,

2944-401: The kana for n ( ん ), the "geminate consonant" ( 促音 ) represented by the small tsu ( っ ), the "long sound" ( 長音 ) represented by the long vowel symbol ( ー ) or a single vowel which extends the sound of the previous mōra ( びょ「う」いん ) and the "diphthong" ( 二重母音 ) represented by the second vowel of two consecutive vowels ( ばあ「い」 ). This set also has the peculiarity that, (barring only

3008-425: The languages in which reduplication has the opposite meaning. It usually denotes short durations, or lower intensity of the action, and also means a few repetitions or a little bit more. The following is a list of nominal classes in Bantu languages: Mora (linguistics) A mora (plural morae or moras ; often symbolized μ ) is a theoretical or perceptual smallest unit of timing , equal to or shorter than

3072-426: The largely mutually intelligible Kinyarwanda and Kirundi , which together have 20 million speakers. The similarity among dispersed Bantu languages had been observed as early as the 17th century. The term Bantu as a name for the group was not coined but "noticed" or "identified" (as Bâ-ntu ) by Wilhelm Bleek as the first European in 1857 or 1858, and popularized in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. He noticed

3136-445: The larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's identification was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups frequently self-identifying as "people" or "the true people" (as is the case, for example, with the term Khoikhoi , but this is a kare "praise address" and not an ethnic name). The term narrow Bantu , excluding those languages classified as Bantoid by Malcolm Guthrie (1948),

3200-437: The most stress. Subsequent syllables receive less and less stress and are spoken more and more quickly. Nama has 31 consonants: 20 clicks and only 11 non-clicks. Orthography in brackets. Between vowels, /p/ is pronounced [β] and /t/ is pronounced [ɾ] . The affricate series is strongly aspirated, and may be analysed phonemically as aspirated stops; in the related Korana they are [tʰ, kʰ] . Beach (1938) reported that

3264-493: The noun. Plurality is indicated by a change of class, with a resulting change of prefix. All Bantu languages are agglutinative . The verb has a number of prefixes, though in the western languages these are often treated as independent words. In Swahili , for example, Kitoto kidogo kimekisoma (for comparison, Kamwana kadoko karikuverenga in Shona language ) means 'The small child has read it [a book]'. kitoto 'child' governs

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3328-414: The older geographic classification by Guthrie relevant for its ongoing classification based on more recent linguistic studies, and divides Bantu into four main branches: Bantu A-B10-B20-B30 , Central-Western Bantu , East Bantu and Mbam-Bube-Jarawan . Guthrie reconstructed both the phonemic inventory and the vocabulary of Proto-Bantu. The most prominent grammatical characteristic of Bantu languages

3392-407: The plural prefix for human nouns starting with mu- (class 1) in most languages is ba- (class 2), thus giving bantu for "people". Bleek, and later Carl Meinhof , pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical structures of Bantu languages. The most widely used classification is an alphanumeric coding system developed by Malcolm Guthrie in his 1948 classification of the Bantu languages. It

3456-623: The reduced number of nasal vowels, nasal sequences are /ĩĩ ãã ũũ ãĩ [ə̃ĩ] ãũ [ə̃ũ] õã ũĩ/ . Sequences ending in a high vowel ( /ii uu ai au ui ĩĩ ũũ ãĩ ãũ ũĩ/ ) are pronounced more quickly than others ( /ee aa oo ae ao oa oe ãã õã/ ), more like diphthongs and long vowels than like vowel sequences in hiatus. The tones are realised as contours. CVCV words tend to have the same vowel sequences, though there are many exceptions. The two tones are also more distinct. Vowel-nasal sequences are restricted to non-front vowels: /am an om on um un/ . Their tones are also realised as contours. Grammatical particles have

3520-496: The repeated word in the context that it is used. For instance, "Mwenda pole hajikwai," means "He who goes slowly doesn't trip," while, "Pole pole ndio mwendo," means "A slow but steady pace wins the race." The latter repeats "pole" to emphasize the consistency of slowness of the pace. As another example, "Haraka haraka" would mean "hurrying just for the sake of hurrying" (reckless hurry), as in "Njoo! Haraka haraka" [come here! Hurry, hurry]. In contrast, there are some words in some of

3584-464: The result is not a complete portrayal of the family. Glottolog has incorporated many of these into their classification. The languages that share Dahl's law may also form a valid group, Northeast Bantu . The infobox at right lists these together with various low-level groups that are fairly uncontroversial, though they continue to be revised. The development of a rigorous genealogical classification of many branches of Niger–Congo, not just Bantu,

3648-473: The sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as far as we know, Gilbertese is the only language in the world reported to have a ternary constraint on prosodic word size." In Hawaiian , both syllables and morae are important. Stress falls on the penultimate mora, though in words long enough to have two stresses, only the final stress is predictable. However, although a diphthong , such as oi, consists of two morae, stress may fall only on

3712-575: The sound "as far back in the palate as possible". Lexical root words consist of two or rarely three moras , in the form CVCV(C), CVV(C), or CVN(C). (The initial consonant is required.) The middle consonant may only be w r m n ( w is b~p and r is d~t ), while the final consonant (C) may only be p, s, ts . Each mora carries tone, but the second may only be high or medium, for six tone "melodies": HH, MH, LH, HM, MM, LM. Oral vowel sequences in CVV are /ii ee aa oo uu ai [əi] ae ao au [əu] oa oe ui/ . Due to

3776-410: The term Kintu was still occasionally used by South African linguists. But in contemporary decolonial South African linguistics, the term Ntu languages is used. Within the fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into

3840-546: The term to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu , from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing "people", and the root *ntʊ̀- "some (entity), any" (e.g. Xhosa umntu "person", abantu "people"; Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people"). There is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not an ethnic group . People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms , which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for

3904-525: The three small kana for ya ( ゃ ), yu ( ゅ ), yo ( ょ ). These do not represent a mora by themselves and attach to other kana; all the rest of the graphemes represent a mōra on their own. Most dialects of Japanese are pitch accent languages, and these pitch accents are also based on morae. There is a unique set of mōra known as "special mora" ( 特殊拍 ) which cannot be pronounced by itself but still counts as one mora whenever present. These consist of "nasal sound" ( 撥音 ) represented by

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3968-453: The type CV (consonant-vowel) with most languages having syllables exclusively of this type. The Bushong language recorded by Vansina , however, has final consonants, while slurring of the final syllable (though written) is reported as common among the Tonga of Malawi. The morphological shape of Bantu words is typically CV, VCV, CVCV, VCVCV, etc.; that is, any combination of CV (with possibly

4032-406: The word "school", borrowed from English, and then transformed to fit the sound patterns of this language, is sukulu . That is, sk- has been broken up by inserting an epenthetic -u- ; -u has also been added at the end of the word. Another example is buledi for "bread". Similar effects are seen in loanwords for other non-African CV languages like Japanese . However, a clustering of sounds at

4096-557: Was introduced in the 1960s. The prefix ba- specifically refers to people. Endonymically, the term for cultural objects, including language, is formed with the ki- noun class (Nguni ísi- ), as in KiSwahili (Swahili language and culture), IsiZulu (Zulu language and culture) and KiGanda (Ganda religion and culture). In the 1980s, South African linguists suggested referring to these languages as KiNtu. The word kintu exists in some places, but it means "thing", with no relation to

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