Archaeology and Language IV

Language Change and Cultural Transformation

Roger Blench, Matthew Spriggs, Roger Blench, Matthew Spriggs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134816231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Archaeology and Language IV examines a variety of pressing issues regarding linguistic and cultural change. It provides a challenging variety of case-studies which demonstrate how global patterns of language distribution and change can be interwoven to produce a rich historical narrative, and fuel a radical rethinking of the conventional discourse of linguistics within archaeology.

Part I

RETHINKING LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION

1

The languages of Africa: macrophyla proposals and implications for archaeological interpretation

ROGER BLENCH

INTRODUCTION

The question of the genetic classification of the language phyla of the world, from being a marginal study outside mainstream linguistics, has again begun to command considerable attention from both professional linguists and researchers in related disciplines. There appear to be two major forces behind this change in attitudes: the potential for correlation with genetics, notably mitochondrial DNA, and the opening of the former Soviet Union to the world.

Hypotheses generated by DNA studies need to be confirmed by other types of evidence, and language groupings offer broader, older and more coherent structures than archaeology. Moreover, in sampling terms, more is known about languages and their affiliations than archaeology in almost all parts of the world. Geneticists have therefore looked to macrophyla classifications as evidence for their continent-spanning hypotheses (e.g. Excoffier et al. 1987; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994).

At the same time, the tradition of genetic linguistics in the former Soviet Union, with its often idiosyncratic methods, had remained almost unknown to western scholarship until the frontiers began to open. A concern with large-scale language groupings and long-range comparison has been the thrust of much of this tradition. Although many of the actual results of these researches are properly treated with scepticism by scholars in the western tradition, access to publishing has meant that classification has been placed firmly back on the agenda of linguists. Indeed, the now notorious conflicts over Greenberg’s ‘Language in the Americas’ underlines the newly developed importance of classification.

One consequence has been to reopen many existing questions relating to both the internal classification and the external affiliations of African languages. Older proposals claiming that the major African language phyla are to be united with other, non-African phyla, have again been given prominence. At the same time, what can only be described as disarray rules in relation to the internal arrangement of the principal phyla.

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the present situation, and to present to archaeologists and prehistorians what can be salvaged from this academic chaos in terms of cross-disciplinary interpretation. It sets out some recent views of the traditionally recognized phyla and explores some recent more wide-ranging and speculative theories. Although DNA studies have been important in returning language classification to the agenda, they are dealt with here only in passing (see summaries in Ruhlen 1992; Renfrew 1991, 1994).

CLAIMS ABOUT RECONSTRUCTION

The recent revival of macrophylum theory has led to some striking claims for the reconstructibility of lexical items of cultural and historical significance in African language phyla. Most notable in the context of this chapter are the claims made for Afroasiatic, for example in Militarev (1990) or Orel and Stolbova (1995). According to these authors, almost a full set of terms connected with both agriculture and livestock production can be reconstructed for Afroasiatic. However, a detailed investigation of terms for domestic animals in Afroasiatic (Blench in press, b) could not substantiate these claims. An investigation of Proto-Omotic by Bender (1988) suggested that the only terms for crops that could be reconstructed in Omotic were those that were already part of the native flora of Ethiopia.

A similar problem has arisen in the case of Nilo-Saharan. Not only is the internal structure of the phylum much disputed, but opposing claims have been made about the reconstruction of food crops. Ehret (1989, 1993, in press) has claimed that cultivated plants are reconstructible to a high (i.e. ancient) level. Bender (1991b, 1996a) has been unable to substantiate such reconstructions.

This poses an important methodological question: if different linguists have opposing views about reconstructions, can others make use of their results? The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that extreme caution is necessary when using reconstructions of lexical items carrying such a heavy interpretive load. Obviously, serious researchers claim to exercise such caution; the existence, however, of major disagreements must suggest that very different notions of the comparative method coexist. The strategy for dealing with this is:

1. no reconstructions can be accepted without data tables;

2. reconstructions based on isolated occurrences of words must be regarded with extreme scepticism.

These probably seem quite restrictive demands that would exclude the imaginative approach sometimes necessary in historical linguistics. However, where a cultural revolution so major as, for example, the inception of agriculture is being implied, a necessary scepticism is essential.

THE LANGUAGE PHYLA OF AFRICA

In contrast to the New World and Papua, the composition of the major language phyla of Africa is generally agreed within the scholarly community (Blench 1993a, 1997). Their internal classification remains disputed, as does the position of various isolates. However, given that Africa has the highest absolute number of languages of any continent, their classification remains a considerable achievement. Figure 1.1 shows a sketch of the approximate distribution of the major language phyla.

Figure 1.1 Approximate distribution of the major African language phyla

Source: Blench

Isolated languages

The existence and classification of language isolates in Africa ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• General acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Introduction
• Part I Rethinking language classification
• Part II Interpreting change
• Index