A Grammar of Nzadi [B865]: A Bantu Language of Democratic Republic of CongoThis publication presents the first documentation of Nzadi, a Bantu language spoken by fishermen along the Kasai River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is the product of extensive study by the authors and participants in field methods and group study courses at the University of California, Berkeley, and consists of ten chapters covering the segmental phonology, tone system, morphology, and sentence structure, followed by appendices on the Nzadi people and history and on Proto-Bantu to Nzadi sound changes. Also included are three texts and a lexicon of over 1100 entries, including a number of fish species. Prior to this work, Nzadi had not even been mentioned in the literature, and at this time still has no entry as a language or dialect in the Ethnologue. Of particular interest in the study of Nzadi is its considerable grammatical simplification, resulting in structures quite different from those of canonical Bantu languages. Although Nzadi has lost most of the inherited agglutinative morphology, there are still recognizable class prefixes on nouns and a reflex of noun class agreement in genitive constructions. Other areas of particular interest are human/number agreement, tense-aspect-mood marking, non-subject relative clause constructions, and WH question formation. This succinct, but comprehensive grammar provides broad coverage of the phonological, grammatical and semantic properties that will be of potential interest not only to Bantuists, Africanists and those interested in this area of the DRC, but also to typologists, general linguists, and students of linguistics. |
Contents
Abbreviations | 1 |
The Sound System | 11 |
Tone | 31 |
The Noun | 57 |
The Noun Phrase | 75 |
Tense Aspect Mood and Negation | 119 |
8 | 147 |
9 | 175 |
Cultural beliefs | 248 |
Sociocultural activities | 252 |
The burial ceremony | 253 |
ProtoBantu Nzadi Sound Corresponences | 255 |
Vowels | 263 |
Reduction patterns and relative chronology | 267 |
Tones | 268 |
TEXTS | 271 |
Common terms and phrases
¹é adzá akáár bàán baar Bandundu Province Bantu languages bç â bisyllabic búl byen child consonant copula downstep dzé fufú e-PRESENT eat fufu examples fish sp forms genitive H tone HL o-láà ibaa Ilebo infinitive ípe iyó Kasai River lexical máán main clause mantEtE mápE marker mbum mbvá món monosyllabic muur mwa&àn mwàán nápE nasal ńdé ndé ó ndzç ndzó NEG.PAST Ngbee noun class noun phrase ntswé ó bvê o-bántsa o-kaa o-láà to cook o-lyaa to cry o-sá object occur okáár okal ómɔtúk oNkàán PAST eat PAST give past tense PB Nzadi Gloss PERF person plural post-verbal subject prefix PRES pronoun Proto-Bantu reduplication relative clauses river sám SBJV seen sentences singular súm syllable tonal tone pattern Tukumu verb stems vowel WH questions WH.PAST woman