Khoisan languages

В статье суммированы результаты пятилетней работы автора над материалом койсанской семьи языков в сравнительно-историческом освещении. После краткого изложения основных проблем, связанных с койсанской реконструкцией
(недоказанность существования койсанской семьи как таковой; уникальность фонологических систем современных койсанских языков; нехватка новых языковых данных и неадекватная транскрипция старых), автор приходит к выводу, что только тщательная реконструкция ряда промежуточных праязыков (северно-койсанский, южно-койсанский, центрально-койсанский и т. п.) может позволить приблизиться к окончательному ответу на вопрос о возможном родстве всех языков этой предположительной макросемьи.

The paper offers a brief but hopefully clarificatory account of the three language families generally referred to by linguists as Southern African Khoisan, and outlines ongoing and unresolved linguistic debates concerning relationships between the three families. The need is emphasised for linguists to move away from pre-theoretical assumptions based on the colonial construct of “race”, and—in the context of investigating diachronic language change—to include consideration rather of the social status of different speaker communities in relation to one another.

This study contributes to the documentation and description of the diversity of Kalahari Khoe languages in eastern Botswana. Kalahari Khoe languages have highly complex pronominal systems with extensive paradigms of portmanteau morphemes encoding person, gender, and number categories. This study focuses on Thabala Tchoe, an entirely undocumented Kalahari Khoe language. Features of the Thabala Tchoe pronominal system set it apart from descriptions of closely and more distantly related languages. In this paper, I offer a formal and functional analysis of these features, which include honorifi c and focus sensitive pronouns, and innovative forms which offer contemporary evidence for the historical development of the complex pronominal system. This analysis is explored against the background of historical contact patterns between different Kalahari Khoe speech communities and Tswana merafe, or 'clans', in region.

Книга представляет собой первый том масштабного исследования по созданию новой рабочей модели генетической классификации языков и языковых семей африканского континента, которая могла бы представить серьезную альтернативу для т. н. «стандартной модели» классификации африканских языков, разработанной Дж. Гринбергом более чем полстолетия тому назад и с тех пор неоднократно подвергавшейся критике за недостаточную основательность.
В первый том исследования вошла вводная часть — подробное описание методологии построения классификации, в которой синтезированы элементы классического сравнительно-исторического метода, «многостороннего сравнения» Гринберга и квантитативный подход к языковому материалу; в основе классификации лежит лексикостатистический анализ данных базисной лексики, подкрепленный тщательной этимологической обработкой. Вторая часть первого тома апробирует описанную методику на материале самой малочисленной и, во многих отношениях, «загадочной» из гипотетических макросемей Гринберга — койсанской (бушменско-готтентотской).
Книга предназначена для внимания специалистов по общему, сравнительно-историческому и типологическому языкознанию; африканистов самых различных профилей; и широкого круга читателей, в той или иной степени интересующихся теоретическими, методологическими и практическими аспектами реконструкции лингвистических аспектов предыстории человечества.

A number of different languages in outside of the Indo-European family were analyzed based on how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to learn them. They were then rated on a purely impressionistic 1-6 scale of easiest to most difficult. Extensive phonological, morphological, syntactic and even semantic analysis was done for many of these tongues to highlight areas of difficulty for English learners. Very long: 101 pages.

Linguistique et Langues Africaines (LLA) [African Languages and Linguistics] is an international journal for African linguistics, whose main goal is to contribute to a better knowledge of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa, be they vernacular, vehicular or creole, with the exception of local varieties of European languages. We are open to recent trends and all theoretical approaches. The selected articles may be chiefly concerned with linguistic domains (e.g. phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicography and semantics), or include an anthropological component. Contributions providing comparative or typological approaches are also welcome. Junior researchers (e.g. PhD students) are encouraged to submit their contributions to LLA.

Linguistique et Langues Africaines is particularly interested in publishing analyses based on fieldwork data as well as studies relating to little documented or endangered languages and cultures. The journal is also open to contributions that are less concerned with theory, such as working documents or firsthand data; such research will appear in a special “notes and documentation” section. Our journal also includes book reviews.

The languages of the journal are English and French, as well as other major European languages (please consult the editors). Submissions to “Linguistique et Langues Africaines” undergo a double-blind peer review by experts who are not members of the editorial board.

The second issue of our journal is scheduled for the end of 2016.

This is the seventh addendum to my manifesto "Rapid Progress in the Genetic Classification of the World’s Languages ". It contains a list of almost 200 useful books I've collected about the world's Language families. It is obviously not exhaustive, and it includes books only (not papers or online resources).

Khoesan languages are considered an endangered language family. This study investigates how language attitudes influence language vitality intergenerationally in a case study of two Khoesan languages, namely !Xun and Khwedam. The case study investigates two extended families, one of !Xun, one of Khwedam speakers, respectively, in Platfontein, South Africa. Language attitudes are defined according to the tripartite model first suggested by Baker (1992:15) consisting of (1) knowledge (contextual knowledge), (2) emotion (emotional reactions) and (3) behaviour (behavioural predispositions). Language attitudes were determined through an ethnographic approach that included interviews and observations over a period of two years. Moreover, extra-linguistic factors were considered in the assessment of language attitudes in this study. Results reveal that both the !Xun and the Khwe family expressed in-depth knowledge of the social, political, historical and economical significance of their mother tongues. Emotional reactions towards their mother tongues were strongly positive for both speech communities. However, among the !Xun the ancestral language was especially revered. This difference in attitudes may reflect differences in the family trees of the two extended families investigated: The !Xun family consists of five generations with a number of family members who are older than 60 years residing in Platfontein. In contrast, this older generation is absent in the Khwe family.
Perceived language use as accounted for by participants and as observed in the field, revealed that speakers of both languages predominately used their mother tongue in and around the home. A change in lifestyle from nomadic hunter gatherers to a ‘westernised’ sedentary life resulted in the loss of cultural practices, such as traditional wedding ceremonies and traditional trance dance healing practices. Lifestyle changes, furthermore introduced ‘new’ language settings, such as formal education, formal employment, government services, church, media and technology, which are largely inaccessible in Khoesan languages. Hence, strong positive language attitudes towards their mother tongue may not suffice to secure the vitality of !Xun and the Khwedam spoken by these families. Without intervention, a language shift to Afrikaans, the socially and politically dominant language in the area, is likely to occur in these families.

The term Khoisan, alternatively spelled “Khoesan,” is used by contemporary linguists as a convenient blanket term for the non-Bantu and non-Cushitic click-using languages of Africa and does not imply the existence of any familial relationships between the member groups. Some scholars include two isolate click languages of Tanzania, namely, Hadza and Sandawe, within the scope of a so-called “Macro-Khoisan,” although there is little evidence to suggest that these two languages are related even to each other, let alone to any of the southern African languages. This chapter begins by setting out the shifting speaker numbers and distributions of the diverse and often trans-nationally located Khoisan languages of southern Africa, as far as these have been reliably estimated for the present day on the basis of population surveys, and as far as they can be reasonably projected for the relatively recent, largely colonial period on the basis of historical records. The discussion then draws on comparative linguistic evidence (in both a narrow and wider sense) to assess various popular beliefs concerning the older, undocumented past of the Khoisan languages, which are often romantically imagined to be the last vestiges of some primordial African substrate – and the possibility of an alternative scenario is briefly sketched. The chapter concludes with a few brief notes on the uncertain future of these highly endangered African languages in an era of conflicting economic, political, and social-cultural demands.

The Khoekhoe language, a member of the Khoisan family, was widely spoken by Southern Africa pastoralists and hunters-gatherers a few centuries ago. Apart from varieties still spoken in the 20th century (such as Nama in Namibia), very little is known of the dialect spoken by the Cape Khoekhoe. This paper is a critical edition of four manuscript wordlists collected at the end of the 18th century by Robert Jacob Gordon, then commandant of the Dutch garrison at the Cape. These lists refer to several local varieties of the Cape Khoekhoe language, collected just before it became extinct, and display two distinct systems of clicks rendering.

"Slaves, Khoikhoi and Dutch Pidgins at the Cape, c. 1590-1720: A Critical Investigation of the Socio-Historical Foundations of the Convergence Theory for the Genesis of Afrikaans"

This study is a critical investigation of the socio-historical foundations of the Convergence Theory for the genesis of Afrikaans, as developed by Hans den Besten. It is done within the theoretical framework of the study of Creole genesis as suggested by the gradualists (John Singler, Jacques Arends and Philip Baker) and the Complementary Theory of Salikoko Mufwene. These approaches stress the use of socio-historical material. In line with this the work of historians on aspects of the early Cape society, c. 1590-1720, especially the number, distribution, origins and mutual contact between the three main groups at the Cape, viz. the Khoikhoi, slaves and European settlers, is used. Material from primary sources such as travel descriptions is also used. This historical material is used to test and nuance the Convergence Theory. It is shown that the central proposition of this theory, viz. the existence of a stable pidgin among the Khoikhoi and slaves in the period before 1713, is not tenable. Moreover, many of the details of the theory still offers a useful framework for the study of the history of Afrikaans and that the rejection of a stable pidgin does not dispute the important role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans.
The study consists of five main chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the development of Afrikaans historical linguistics and shows how two basic views developed about the role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the development of the gradualist hypotheses and Mufwene’s Complementary Theory against the background of theories of Creole genesis. The methodology, techniques and examples of the work of these theorists are stressed. Chapter 4 gives an overview of what the Convergence Theory entails and points out the problems which can be levelled against it from a socio-historical viewpoint. Chapter 5 is a detailed exposition of those historical aspects of Cape society, c. 1590-1720, that are of importance in the evaluation of the Convergence Theory. The demography of the Cape and mutual contact between the Khoikhoi, Europeans and slaves are emphasised, although other factors, such as the rise of the free-black community and the role of education, are also considered. The analysis is supported by quantitative data of historians on the number and origins of slaves (Addendum 8). Chapter 6 considers the criticisms that were levelled against the Convergence Theory in the light of the historical data presented in chapter 5. It is shown which aspects of the theory are unacceptable and which should be nuanced. Finally a short comparative perspective with two other Dutch colonies is given to show how decisive a role Khoikhoi and slaves played in the genesis of Afrikaans. Apart from quantitative data, the Addendum also contains a corpus of utterances in any form of Dutch or English by Khoikhoi and slaves in the period 1590-1720 which were noted in the course of this research project.

Noch nie haben vom Aussterben bedrohte Sprachen so sehr im Mittelpunkt linguistischer Forschung gestanden wie in den vergangenen zehn bis 15 Jahren. Seitdem sich die UNESCO das Thema zu Eigen gemacht hat, sind in Europa und Übersee verschiedene Förderprogramme ins Leben gerufen worden, die sich zum Ziel setzen, Bestandsaufnahmen, linguistische Dokumentationen und Initiativen zu unterstützen, um »endangered languages« zu bewahren oder sogar wiederzubeleben. Überall in der Welt sind seither Dutzende von Forscherteams unterwegs, um mit Computern, Tonbandgeräten und Video-Kameras Aufnahmen von Sprachen zu machen, von denen zu erwarten ist, dass sie das Ende dieses Jahrhunderts nicht »überleben« werden. Auch an der Universität Frankfurt stehen bedrohte Sprachen im Fokus linguistischer Forschung, wobei so unterschiedliche Weltgegenden wie der Kaukasus, Afrika, Sibirien und Südostasien im Mittelpunkt stehen

Perhaps one of the saddest consequences of the demise of traditional Khoikhoi societies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the loss of their languages. Contemporary reports by visitors abound with references to how difficult the Khoi language was to learn, while at the same time commending the Khoikhoi for their ability to learn European languages. By about 1700, only half a century after Dutch colonisation, most Khoikhoi living in the colonised areas of the Western Cape could speak some form of Dutch in addition to their own language. However, the rapid spread of European settlers deeper into the interior, on the one hand, and the acculturation of the Khoikhoi and their inclusion in the colonial polity and economy, on the other hand, meant that by the end of the eighteenth century Khoi was spoken only on the fringes of the Cape colony. Cape Khoi was increasingly replaced by (a form of) Dutch as the first language of the native inhabitants of the Cape. Thus, on his tour of Southern Africa in 1803-1806, Heinrich Lichtenstein could observe that ‘on the borders alone are some Hottentots to be found who speak their own lariguage; but among them several foreign words are introduced, spoken with the Hottentot accent and snort’. Cape Khoi was by this stage rapidly dying out.

Presentation on morphosyntactic variation in Southeastern Ju (Kx'a) varieties with special focus on the formal marking of topic in different lects. Proposes the grammaticalisation of equational copulas as a possible origin of topic markers that are a feature of the left-dislocation construction in some varieties - including more distantly varieties on the Namibia-Angola border.

Presentated at the 6th International Symposium on Khoisan Languages and Linguistics (2017).

This is the eighth - and LAST - addendum to my manifesto "Rapid Progress in the Genetic Classification of the World’s Languages ". It provides a one-page overview of my understanding of the current status of reconstruction and consensus about the world’s language families.

This preliminary report puts together the results of both binary and multi-lateral lexicostatistical comparison (with elements of etymological and distributional analysis) of the following language groups that have been included, under the taxonomy of Joseph Greenberg and subsequent «long-rangers», into a hypothetical «Khoisan» family (or, rather, «superfamily»): (a) North Khoisan (= Ju), (b) ǂHoan (= Eastern ǂHoan, ǂHõã), (c) !Kwi (= !Ui, !Wi, South Khoisan I), (d) Taa (= South Khoisan II), (e) Khoekhoe, (f) Kalahari Khoe (= Non-Khoekhoe), (g) Kwadi, (h) Sandawe, (i) Hadza (= Hatsa, Hadzabe).

Afrikaans is the mother tongue of a sizeable group of speakers in the Republic of Namibia, where it also serves as a lingua franca among speakers of different languages. This article investigates the establishment, spread and use of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in precolonial and colonial Namibia until the annexation by South Africa in 1920, when the language achieved official status. Afrikaans was introduced to Namibia at the turn of the 19th century by the Oorlams, Westernised Khoikhoi groups who mostly used a form of Dutch for communication. During this same period, missionaries started to labour among the Oorlams and the indigenous Nama of South and Central Namibia, which led to greater stability in the local communities. Due to the greater socio-economic and political power of the Oorlams, their language became the prestige language which was increasingly used by both the Nama and other groups with whom they came into contact. During 1810–1840 Afrikaans spread as a lingua franca over a large part of Namibia due to the hegemony of the Oorlams. From this period until the German annexation during the 1880s, Afrikaans was widely used for diplomacy, teaching, religion and trade by both mother-tongue and non-mother-tongue speakers. Although the German annexation led to the loss of certain higher function for Afrikaans, the language remained being widely used as a lingua franca, a position which was strengthened by the arrival of the Basters and European farmers from South Africa from the 1870s onwards. The latter event increased the number of speakers of Afrikaans and spread its use over an even wider geographic area. By the time of the South African annexation of Namibia, Afrikaans was already widely used as a lingua franca in a large number of functions, which ensured the longevity of the language in that country.

This article discusses present-day Khoisan activism in Cape Town, South Africa. The main actors in this movement are people who were historically classified as Coloured, and today speak Afrikaans and/or English as their first language. They are descendants of the European settlers, the diverse slave population and, importantly, the indigenous Khoisan who inhabited the area today known as Cape Town before colonial settlement. The discussion in this article is based on a range of sources: in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals who are actively involved in activities aimed at the restoration of Khoisan cultural and linguistic heritage; recordings of ceremonies and other performative events; blogs and tweets; published and archived sources (newspapers); linguistic landscape data; and artistic performances. We argue that Khoisan activism expresses a deep-seated desire for an identity – linguistic, political and cultural – that is both historically rooted and meaningfully created in the present. Khoisan activism is not only a political program but also an aesthetic-artistic as well as heteroglossic performance, and as such allows for new ways of conceptualizing language revitalization.

The present paper analyzes the exoticness of Khoekhoe-sourced ideophones as a possible factor that stimulated the introduction of certain phonological novelties to the sound system of Xhosa. Having analyzed Khoekhoe-sourced ideophones of Xhosa for five exotic features postulated crosslinguistically (aberrant sounds and configurations of sounds, length, tones and harmony), the author concludes the following: due to their intense phonological exoticness and the crosslinguistic propensity for unaltered borrowing, Khoekhoe-sourced ideophones may have played a relevant role in the Khoekhoe-Xhosa transfer. The efficiency of this transfer seems to be correlated with the frequency of a given exotic feature in the donor Khoekhoe lexemes.

This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship concerned with the ‘language isolates’ of the world. ‘Isolated’ languages are languages without any known relatives, languages which are not demonstrably part of any ‘language family’, with Etruscan, Basque, and Ainu being arguably some of the best-known examples of such ‘linguistic orphans’. The language-specific materials collected here are arranged geographically, and each language-chapter is preceded by a short introduction to the linguistic situation of the language(es) involved and, if not given in anthologized works themselves, to the current state of research and past and present scholarly debates. The volumes are preceded by a problem-oriented general introduction, which deals with the basic concepts and methodological principles of language classification, the present state and the nature of ongoing controversies, an epistemiological typology of language families, and, in the light of this, a theoretical justification of the concept of isolates as well as the choice of languages covered in the volumes.

Some of the gathered works are general introductions to their object language (in terms of sociolinguistics, attestation, documentation, history of scholarship, guides to published studies, overviews of linguistic characteristics), others highlight and discuss particularly salient and interesting typological characteristics of an isolate (some of them are breakthrough studies for the understanding of a particular language), and others focus on the very status of the language under discussion as an isolate in the first place. Some isolated languages are still very much alive; at least one of them, Korean, is a major national language. The majority of the languages and small families covered here are endangered, and some will certainly cease to be used during the coming decades. Thus, isolated languages are particularly interesting objects for students of language endangerment, but they are also prime research objects for linguistic descriptionists, for, when they are gone, not only will another of the 6,000 or so human languages have disappeared, but, in those cases, whole linguistic lineages (and their ways of coping with the world) will be gone forever.

MA dissertation  (2009)  by Amilinda Nagel, containing valuable historical material on  Cupido Kakkerlak, the historical Khoi figure (erstwhile missionary, in sincretistic ways crossing the boundary between indigenous Khoi beliefs and Christianity as taught by the missionaries in the nineteenth century). Brink as novelist turns Cupido into an Afrikaans character, Kupido Kakkerlak, in his novel BIDSPRINKAAN, published in English as PRAYING MANTIS.

This work contains meticulous historical research, pertinent for the twenty first century and the sincretistic nature of the South African nation and its peoples. it also offers valuable insight into the nature of South African society in the nineteenth century, especially in the hinterlands of the country, and between missionaries and the indigenous Khoi people.

This dissertation investigates the position of South Africa's 'First Peoples', the Khoehkoen and Bushmen, in relation to discourses of language, transformation, and higher education. It firstly presents the argument that the dominant thought paradigms in Afrikaans, the home language of most Khoekhoen and Bushmen South Africans and those descended from them, through which questions related to change and transformation are theorised are insufficient. To this end, the dissertation draws on Carli Coetzee's (2013) notion of 'accent', and theorises linguistic accentedness as a frame through which to analyse, and conceptualise, change and transformation in contrast to linguistic human rights and linguistic citizenship. The dissertation secondly analyses the various debates and concrete suggestions around the transformation of Afrikaans as a language. The lens of linguistic accentedness points to the current debates and suggestions as being unconducive to deep and sustained transformationspecifically in relation to Oranjerivierafrikaans, the dialect continuum of Afrikaans most associated with 'First People' speakers. Thirdly, the dissertation presents an overview of the available literature on Oranjerivierafrikaans, and using this literature, presents examples of how Oranjerivierafrikaans can be harmonized linguistically in order to elevate its status and functions, and specifically increase the hearability of Khoesan linguistic influences on Afrikaans.

This is quite simply a practical research aid, consisting of a detailed, chronologically arranged list of contents (with page numbers) of the notebooks in which Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd documented /Xam and other !Ui languages. Similar lists may well have been compiled in the past, but since these are not generally available I have decided to post this one.  It facilitates searching through the material, and also provides insight into the processes of the two linguists and the development of their work over time. A short bibliography is included.

Southern African indigenous groups, traditionally hunter-gatherers (San) and herders (Khoekhoe), are commonly referred to as “Khoe-San” populations and have a long history in southern Africa. Their ancestors were largely isolated up until ∼2,000 years ago before the arrival of pastoralists and farmers in southern Africa. Assessing relationships among regional Khoe-San groups has been challenging due to admixture with immigrant populations that obscure past population affinities and gene flow among these autochthonous communities. We re-evaluate a combined genome-wide data set of previously published southern Africa Khoe-San populations in conjunction with novel data from Khoe-San individuals collected in Xade (Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana) prior to their resettlement outside the reserve. After excluding regions in the genome that trace their ancestry to recent migrant groups, the genetic diversity of 20 Khoe-San groups fitted an isolation-by-distance model. Even though isolation-by-distance explained most genetic affinities between the different autochthonous groups, additional signals of contact between Khoe-San groups could be detected. For instance, we found stronger genetic affinities, than what would be explained by isolation-by-distance gene flow, between the two geographically separated Khoe-San groups, who speak branches of the Kx’a-language family (ǂHoan and Ju). We also scanned the genome-wide data for signals of adaptive gene flow from farmers/herders into Khoe-San groups and identified a number of genomic regions potentially introduced by the arrival of the new groups. This study provides a comprehensive picture of affinities among Khoe-San groups, prior to the arrival of recent migrants, and found that these affinities are primarily determined by the geographic landscape.

Although Bleek and Lloyd archival material of ǀxam (Bushman) folklore, oral history, and customs has been studied from a number of different disciplinary dispositions, a thorough linguistic analysis and description of |xam has not yet been done. What has, however, emerged in research into the archive since the 1990’s, has been a challenge to the perception of the archive as internally coherent and bound purely to the ǀxam language – Afrikaans, the intermediary language of communication between Bleek, Lloyd and the ǀxam, at least initially, has proven to have played a much larger role in the transcription and translation process than previously thought. This article reviews the existing literature of studies concerned with Afrikaans’ relation with the archive and argues for composing a corpus of all the extant Afrikaans linguistic data which can be gleaned from it – and, importantly, to use this data to create a sketch of the variety of Afrikaans known as Orange River (also Gariep or North Western) Afrikaans as it was spoken in the 19th Century Cape frontier. Through this, the understudied variety of Orange River Afrikaans could be described with greater accuracy, and the possible influences of ǀxam, and Khoesan languages more generally, on the development of Afrikaans could be better understood.

This paper is the first one in an intended series of publications on lexicostatistical relations between several linguistic groupings that have all been assigned by Joseph Greenberg to the hypothetical Khoisan macrofamily. Here, we examine the numbers and natures of various matches between the basic lexicon of two such groupings: the closely related cluster of Ju (North Khoisan) dialects and the Eastern ǂHoan language, formerly considered an isolate but now widely regarded as the closest, and only non-controversial, genetic relative of Ju. Based on both superficial and etymological analysis of the data (including the reconstruction of a Swadesh wordlist for Proto-Ju), we conclude that there are from 32% to 44% matches between Proto-Ju and ǂHoan (depending on the degree of strictness required from phonetic correspondences), which is translatable to a time depth comparable with such families as Fenno-Ugric and Kartvelian. Additionally, the distribution of cognates between the various stability layers of the basic lexicon is analyzed, leading to the conclusion that the matches are indeed indicative of genetic relationship rather than areal contact.

Hunting sign systems as used by San groups in Southern Africa have only recently received increased scientific attention. To date, it is not yet completely clear whether they constitute alternate sign systems in the sense of Kendon (1988) or rather inventories of gestures that are not analyzable into smaller meaning-bearing and meaning-distinguishing units. The sign-like gestures of |'uen, the hunting sign system used by the ||Ani-Khwe, have been shown to be phonologically analyzable which implies language status. This paper investigates the morphology of multimorphemic sign-like gestures of |'uen in the framework of sign language compounding. Answering the question whether these multimorphemic sign-like gestures in fact constitute sign language compounds or paraphrases will thus contribute to the controversy over whether the system as a whole constitutes an (alternate) sign language or a gesture inventory.

This paper examines ǂĀkhoe Haiǀǀom, a Khoe language of the Khoisan family spoken in Northern Namibia. I document the way questions are posed in natural conversation, the actions the questions are used for and the manner in which they are responded to. I show that in this language speakers rely most heavily on content questions. I also find that speakers of ǂĀkhoe Haiǀǀom address fewer questions to a specific individual than would be expected from prior research on Indo European languages. Finally, I discuss some possible
explanations for these findings.

The paper summarises the major theories concerning the classification of African languages and presents ‘trees’ for the major phyla, together with current controversies. It discusses whether the Pygmies once had a language, now lost, and proposals for the external affiliation of African language phyla, in particular with the proposed Nostratic. The final section considers whether an archaeological interpretation of African language phyla is possible.

The verb system of ǀXam was extremely complex. In this presentation, the focus will be only on the deficient verbs (List A) and some of the auxiliaries (List B). The latter are included since deficient verbs frequently undergo further stages of grammaticalisation, in the course of which they can become components of the auxiliary. The presence of such verbs in ǀXam was noticed by Wilhelm Bleek, and the sixteen deficient verbs illustrated and discussed here –following a brief explanation of what they are– will be mainly the ones he identified. When it comes to the epistemic modalities reflected in both lists, it will be apparent that it is difficult to tease apart such distinctions as Probablity, Possibility, Certainty and Belief. This is largely because the translations offered by Bleek and Lloyd tended to merge into one another, and typically involved the repeated use of words such as ‘truly’, ‘altogether’, ‘surely’, ‘probably’, ‘really’ and ‘seems’. (It might be wondered whether we are not perhaps dealing with evidential strategies here, but it seems preferable to be cautious about invoking this concept, at least for the moment.) A further difficulty is that Bleek’s transcriptions were not consistent, and sometimes differed from those provided by Lloyd. Before closing, a brief survey will be undertaken of some of the related languages within TUU, to seek out any similar patterns of use and even potentially cognate items. Here it will need to be kept in mind that a deficient verb used in one language may show up in a related language as a verb that is potentially cognate, but which is used instead as an auxiliary, or with a different grammatical meaning.