Uralic Languages

All but three of the thirty-nine Uralic languages are endangered, most of them seriously so; of the family’s ten main branches, only two have members considered safe (Finnish and Estonian of the Fennic branch, plus Hungarian). This chapter surveys a selection of phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of the Uralic languages; the emphasis is on presenting aspects that are usually ignored, oversimplified, or misrepresented. Among the topics broached are vowel harmony; consonant gradation, which in the Uralic context is of four distinct kinds, three of them quite old; less-than-agglutinative (i.e. fairly fusional features of several languages); problems of phonological reconstruction; the inflection of personal pronouns; person marking on nouns and Subject, Agent, and Object marking on verbs; and kinds of relative, complement, and support clauses.

Bantu Lexical Reconstruction

Lexical reconstruction has been an important enterprise in Bantu historical linguistics since the earliest days of the discipline. In this chapter a historical overview is provided of the principal scholarly contributions to that field of study. It is also explained how the Comparative Method has been and can be applied to reconstruct ancestral Bantu vocabulary via the intermediate step of phonological reconstruction and how the study of sound change needs to be completed with diachronic semantics in order to correctly reconstruct both the form and the meaning of etymons. Finally, some issues complicating this type of historical linguistic research, such as “osculance” due to prehistoric language contact, are addressed, as well as the relationship between reconstruction and classification.

Langues bantoues de l’entre Congo-Ubangi (RD Congo): documentation, reconstruction, classification et contacts avec les langues oubanguiennes

This PhD thesis consists of the documentation, reconstruction and classification of ten Bantu langages (bolondó, bonyange, ebudzá, ebwela, libóbi, lingͻmbε, mondóngó, monyͻngͻ, mosángé, págaɓéte) spoken in the geographical area between the Congo and Ubangi Rivers in the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study examines the interaction between these languages and seven neighboring Ubangian languages (gbánzírí, gͻbú, maɓó, mbānzā, monzͻmbͻ, ngbandi, ngbaka-mīnāgendē). By means of a lexicostatistical study which determines the degree of lexical similarity between the languages under study, a phylogenetic classification has been established which integrates these languages in the larger sample of 401 Bantu languages used by Grollemund et al. (2015). This quantitative approach has generated Neighbor-Net and Neighbor-Joining networks as well as Bayesian trees, which indicate the internal sub-groups of the Bantu family in general, and more specifically of the Bantu languages of the central Congo basin to which the Bantu languages spoken between the Congo and Ubangi Rivers belong. Subsequently, we have undertaken a descriptive and comparative study of the those languages as well as a study of regular sound correspondances with regard to Proto-Bantu. They possess certain foreign phonemes that have not been reconstructed to Proto-Bantu, such as implosives and labiovelar stops, which have the status of distinct phonemes. The study of these specific sounds suggests that they were borrowed from the neighboring Ubangian languages. The lexical comparison also revealed an interaction between Bantu and Ubangian languages. Certain lexical borrowings were transferred from Bantu to Ubangian, while others moved in the opposite direction. Through the comparative method, we have obtained a phonological reconstruction of the hypothetical ancestor language of these langues. This Proto-Congo-Ubangi Bantu split into two sub-branches, i.e. Proto-Congo Bantu and Proto-Ubangi Bantu.

Langues bantoues de l’entre Congo- Ubangi (RD Congo): documentation, reconstruction, classification et contacts avec les langues oubanguiennes

This PhD thesis consists of the documentation, reconstruction and classfication of ten Bantu languages (bolondo , bonyange, ebudzà , ebwela, lib bi, ling mb , mond ng , mony ng , mos ngé, pagabéte) spoken in the geographical area between the Congo and Ubangi Rivers in the north- western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study examines the interaction between these languages and seven neighboring Ubangian languages (gb nz r , g b , ma , mb nz , monz mb , ngbandi, ngbaka-m n gend ). By means of a lexicostatistical study which determines the degree of lexical similarity between the languages under study, a phylogenetic classi cation has been established which integrates these languages in the larger sample of 401 Bantu languages used by Grollemund et al. (2015). This quantitative approach has generated Neighbor-Net and Neighbor-Joining networks as well as Bayesian trees, which indicate the in- ternal sub-groups of the Bantu family in general, and more speci cally of the Bantu languages of the central Congo basin to which the Bantu languages spoken between the Congo and Ubangi Rivers belong. Subsequently, we have undertaken a descriptive and comparative study of the those languages as well as a study of regular sound correspondances with regard to Proto-Bantu. They possess certain foreign phonemes that have not been reconstructed to Proto-Bantu, such as im- plosives and labiovelar stops, which have the status of distinct phonemes. The study of these spe- ci c sounds suggests that they were borrowed from the neighboring Ubangian languages. The lexical comparison also revealed an interaction between Bantu and Ubangian languages. Certain lexical borrowings were transferred from Bantu to Ubangian, while others moved in the opposite direction. Through the comparative method, we have obtained a phonological reconstruction of the hypothetical ancestor language of these langues. This Proto-Congo-Ubangi Bantu split into two sub-branches, i.e. Proto-Congo Bantu and Proto-Ubangi Bantu.