African Linguistics

The optimal language for literature and educational materials is not the same for all Zay areas. The data gathered during the current study points to Zay as optimal for the islands on Lake Ziway and Oromo as optimal for the lakeshores. However, the Zay people living on the islands would probably be well served by Amharic literature and educational materials until most of them immigrate to the shore or the Oromo educational system causes a shift in preference to Oromo. Zay’s case is one of an endangered language that could prove to be a development success story, but only if the level of motivation for a language development project is high enough to initiate and sustain the effort.

Despite its inaccessibility (it remains untranslated and copies are hard to obtain), Vinigi Grottanelli’s Pescatori dell’Oceano indiano (1955) is generally agreed to be one of the best studies of a rural Swahili-speaking community. It’s our principal ethnographic source on the Bajuni (aka Gunya, aka Tikuu), whose traditional territory comprised a long string of coastal settlements and islands between Kismayu (Somalia) in the north and the Lamu archipelago (Kenya) in the south. And the political turmoil of recent decades in Somalia has turned it into a valuable historical document, a record of a way of life that for thousands of Bajuni has been shattered by persecution and conflict.

Bantu languages, which are spoken throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, permit wh-questions to be constructed in multiple ways, including wh-in-situ, full wh-movement, and partial wh-movement. Shona, a Bantu language spoken by about 13 million people in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, allows all three of these types. In this dissertation, I conduct the first in-depth examination of Shona wh-questions, drawing on fifty hours of elicitation with a native speaker consultant to explore the derivational relationships among these strategies.

Wh-in-situ questions have received a wide variety of treatments in the syntactic literature, ranging from covert or disguised movement to postsyntactic binding of the wh-phrase by a silent question operator. In Bantu languages, wh-in-situ questions are often taken to be derived via a non-movement relation (e.g., Carstens 2005 for Kilega, Diercks 2010 for Lubukusu, Muriungi 2003 for Kîîtharaka, Sabel 2000 for Kikuyu and Duala, Sabel & Zeller 2006 for Zulu, Schneider-Zioga 2007 for Kinande), but alternatives have rarely been considered. I demonstrate how movement-based analyses that have been proposed for wh-in-situ in non-Bantu languages make the wrong predictions for Shona wh-in-situ, which lacks word order permutation, extraction marking, island effects, and intervention effects. These properties provide support for the traditional Bantuist view that the relation between the pronunciation site of an in-situ wh-phrase and its scopal position in the left periphery is not movement; I claim that in Shona it is unselective binding.

Many Bantu languages, including Shona, prohibit wh-phrases from appearing in the canonical preverbal subject position. Wasike (2007) demonstrates that this restriction applies to topicalized non-subjects as well as preverbal subjects. I replicate these results for Shona and argue that they cast doubt on Sabel & Zeller's (2006) attempt to characterize the ban with an appeal to improper movement. I argue instead that restrictions on the distribution of wh-in-situ in Bantu are tied to restrictions on the domain for focus licensing. This claim is further bolstered by an examination of crosslinguistic variation within Bantu with respect to whether the ban on in-situ preverbal wh-subjects applies in embedded clauses. I observe a previously unnoticed generalization: languages that universally ban in-situ preverbal wh-subjects (like Zulu) have immediately after the verb (IAV) focus effects; languages that do allow in-situ preverbal wh-subjects in embedded clauses (like Shona, Lubukusu, and Kîîtharaka) also lack IAV effects.

Full wh-movement in Shona gives rise to questions that bear a certain similarity to English wh-questions. However, using a range of diagnostics including extraction marking, island effects, reconstruction effects, and the distribution of temporal modifiers, I argue that what appears to be full wh-movement in Shona actually has a cleft structure: the wh-phrase moves to become the head of a relative clause, which is selected by a copula in the matrix clause. Just as in wh-in-situ, an ex-situ wh-phrase is pronounced lower than its scopal position, and the relation between these two positions is established via unselective binding. Additional evidence for this proposal comes from the sensitivity of partial wh-movement to island boundaries below but not above the pronunciation site of the wh-phrase, a pattern that has been predicted by previous analyses (e.g., Abels 2012, Sabel 2000, Sabel & Zeller 2006) but for which empirical support has been lacking until now. I therefore unify full and partial wh-movement under a single analysis for cleft-based wh-in-situ that involves a step of relativization (independently needed for relative clauses) and a step of unselective binding (independently needed for wh-in-situ).

Nsw.t Bjt.j (King) in Ancient Egyptian: A Lesson in Paronymy and Leadership takes a fresh look into the meaning of the name Nsw.t Bjt.y (Nesut Bity “King”) in the ancient ci.Kam (Egyptian) languages using the analytical tools of anthropological linguistics and comparative cultural anthropology. Its aim is to explicate from primary sources—and from related African languages and cultures—the methods that inspire the various conceptual and emblematic associations related to ancient Egyptian kingship in particular and African kingship in general. In addition, Nsw.t Bjt.j also explores the primary functions and duties of the African king (and queen) in an effort to develop a framework for creating effective leaders in the modern African world community.

Asar Imhotep’s exploratory research has allowed him to develop what he calls the Afro-Symmetry Model to explain the mechanisms involved in the psychological formation of certain African spiritual, cultural, and artistic conceptualizations, practices, and motifs that have come to define pre-Western thought and being. One of these mechanisms is linguistic paronymy, which is a major source of African myths and rituals.

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.

The conjoint/disjoint alternation is a phenomenon in Eastern and Southern Bantu languages whereby two verb forms exist with the same tense/aspect semantics, but a difference in the relation between the verb and a following element. The forms are distinguished by their morphological and phonological marking, and their clause-final distribution: the conjoint form needs to be followed by a postverbal element. The interpretational difference between the forms lies in the associated information structure: postverbal focus takes a conjoint verb form, whereas predicate-centred focus requires the disjoint verb form, although in some languages this interpretation is only indirectly encoded in the constituency. The alternation provides an insight into the interfaces of information structure with syntax, morphology, and prosody.

Pichi belongs to the African branch of the family of Afro-Caribbean English-Lexifier Creoles. It is spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. Pichi is an offshoot of Krio, which first arrived in Bioko, the former Fernando Po, with African settlers from Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1827. It is the most widely used language of Bioko next to Spanish. No official figures exist but by extrapolation from population data, there is reason to assume that Pichi is used by at least a 100’000 people as a first and second language.

This paper focuses on the Ibani people, namely: Bonny and Opobo kingdoms. Both kingdoms were originally of one stock until the secession of Opobo in 1870 led by King Jaja. Bonny is the traditional and administrative headquarters of Bonny Local Government Area and the giant nation, Opobo is the capital of the Opobo/Nkoro Local Government Area of Rivers State. Both
Bonny and Opobo are located within the southern coastal plain of the Niger Delta. It is a seaport with humid surroundings, a lot of creeks and rivers and it occupies a strategic location at the estuary close to the Atlantic Ocean - a vantage position and hub for water-borne overseas trading.

The present paper provides a cognitive-grammaticalization analysis of the morpheme NA in Xhosa, discussing the categorial status of NA as a con-junctive coordinator (CC) and its range of polysemy and/or polyfunctionality. First, the study demonstrates that, when used in a coordinating function, NA approximates the CC prototype to a significant extent, as it complies with most of the features associated with CCs cross-linguistically. Second, the analysis of polysemy/polyfunctionality shows that NA spans large parts of the typological map posited for CC constructions. The conceptual and diachronic center of the map of NA corresponds to a prepositional comitative sense from which the other values (e.g. 'carry', possessive, temporal, modality, 'even', concessive, 'also, as well' and 'illness') and functions (e.g. predicative and adverbial) have emerged through a series of semantic extensions connected via family resemblance. In this map, the uses of NA as a nominal coordinator, comitative preposition, possessive predicator, and focal-adverbial 'also, as well' are the most prototypical. The results of the research contribute to the typological theory of CCs and their semantic-map modeling.*

Barayin is an East Chadic language spoken by around 5000 people in the Guera region of the Republic of Chad. This dissertation examines a particular type of syntactic construction in the language, serial verb constructions, from the perspectives of typological (or comparative) syntax, descriptive grammar, and the formal syntactic theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Typologically, serial verb constructions are problematic because they represent a heterogeneous set of multiverb constructions that have features that do not fit into traditional syntactic categories like subordination, conjunction and adjunction. Part A of this dissertation describes these problematic features in detail, providing a succinct overview of the literature which can serve as a resource for field linguists describing similar constructions. Part B of the dissertation gives a detailed description of the morphology, syntax and semantics of serial verb constructions in Barayin. These chapters contribute to our knowledge of the world’s languages by documenting a complex syntactic phenomenon in an area of the world where most of the languages are significantly understudied. The most common type of SVC in Barayin involves a deictic motion verb. The motion is normally (but not always) understood to take place prior to the activity or state predicated by the main verb. The formal analysis of Barayin SVCs in Lexical-Functional Grammar in Part C uses recent developments in the theory to show how argument sharing in SVCs can be represented in a connected s-structure that conforms to the standard mechanisms of LFG. The approach is compared to two previous analyses of complex motion predicates in other languages which appeal to a non-standard formal mechanism to model complex predicates.

Wilhelm H. I. Bleek first came to Natal in 1854 with Bishop J. W. Colenso's party to assist with translation of the English bible into Zulu.  A young Prussian linguist, he was the founder of southern African linguistics.  Bleek's doctoral dissertation at the University Bonn, submitted in 1851 as De Nominum Generibus Linguarum Africae Australis, Copticae, Semiticarum Aliarumque Sexualium was written in Latin, and based on a few texts that he had been able to obtain from missionaries in the Cape and from European libraries. This dissertation dealt with the problem of how the more abstract grammatical 'gender' classes of the African languages might be related to ‘sexual’ gender categories (masculine and feminine) in European languages.  Although broadly comparative, it also attempted to provide the first grammars of Nama and Xhosa.  Bleek’s earliest work was the first philosophical and comparative approach to African languages in relation to cultural categories: what we would today call a socio-linguistics.  Indeed, his work on gender as both a grammatical and cultural category anticipated by at least a century similar work by linguists and feminists.  This work formed the basis for his later Grammar of South African Languages published in 1863, a work which formed the basis for all subsequent grammars of Bantu languages and still forms the basis on which all of these languages are described and taught today.  By coining the term ‘Bantu’ as the universal label for a large family related languages and cultures, he paved the way for ideas of pan-African identities and histories, comparative studies in ethnology and linguistics, and helped to make later ethnographic studies possible

This paper critically contributes to the question of what a descriptive approach can contribute to the clarification of the linguistic status of Sheng. As a starting point I take my own experience of the transparency of the transcripts of conversations amongst young people from Eastleigh (Nairobi) which were labeled “Sheng”. From this follows a methodological and conceptual critique of the available literature on Sheng that aims at operationalizing the notion of linguistic practice and language as resource. As one possible alternative I suggest to make use of a repertoire based approach to language description and applying a corpus linguistic perspective to the data. From that point of view, however, categorial distinctions between Swahili, Nairobi Swahili and Sheng lose relevance. Taking (Standard) Swahili as a descriptive background,
the results show that the verbal complex is marked by a surprisingly high degree of Swahili linguistic proficiency and some innovation. Restructuring and reduction is mainly visible within the nominal phrase. Therefore the results support the literature with regard to the nominal phrase, albeit from the background of a more “disinterested” data collection. In addition, processes of innovation and restructuring are displayed through the instability of the phenomena that become visible in the corpus. Finally, I suggest understanding Sheng primarily as the name given to urban/urban youth practices of which linguistic practices are but one aspect.

Adamorobe Sign Language is the sign language used in the village of
Adamorobe in
Ghana. This sign language has evolved as a result of the high hereditary
deafness incidence in this village. Adamorobe has approximately 1400
inhabitants, more than 30 of whom are deaf.
The main spoken language in the village is Akan, a Kwa language. This
thesis aims to give a description of aspects of Adamorobe Sign Language
(AdaSL) and to compare these with other sign languages as well as with
Akan. It attempts thus to contribute to our knowledge of possible structures
in human language and in languages in the visual modality in particular.
More than spoken languages, the sign languages studied so far show
structural similarities.
These corresponding structures seem to be motivated by the
communicative channel used by sign languages – that is, the visual-spatial
modality. However, the well-studied sign languages not only share their
modality, but they also occur in corresponding, rather specific social
conditions. Thus, most of well-studied are relatively young, they are used by
rather large Deaf communities, have an atypical acquisition pattern and a
history of suppression. Home sign languages –sign languages of deaf people
who do not regularly communicate with other deaf people- arise in radically
different circumstances and are therefore much more divers in structure. It is
commonly assumed that large sign languages have arisen from the merger of
several home sign languages as documented in the case of Nicaragua Sign
Language.
The considerable structural variety in home sign languages and the
relatively great similarity between large sign languages suggest that
languages develop along a unidirectional path leading to structural
convergence. Sign languages arisen and used in hearing communities also
appear to have a different structure. However, the differences in the social
settings of these three types of sign languages differ to such an extent that it
is hard to establish which ones are really relevant. The differences in social
settings between AdaSL and large sign languages are relatively small and
enable us to evaluate the influence of these differences. Thus like the large
sign languages AdaSL has a community of deaf people and a comparable
time depth.
A significant but well defined difference concerns the
intergenerational transmission. In large deaf communities transmission is
hampered by the fact that most deaf children are born in hearing families. In
Adamorobe a deaf child is surrounded by signing relatives from early on. In addition, there seems to be a difference in the experience of deafness, in
particular in the lack of a distinct Deaf community.
The chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 of this thesis give a comparative description of a
number of AdaSL aspects. In chapter 2 it becomes clear that if we compare
AdaSL to NGT, a large sign language, the former uses considerable sign
space, has many lexical signs with a non manual element and a small set of
unmarked hand shapes. AdaSL rather resembles home sign and young sign
languages in these respects.
Chapter 3 deals with the lexicon, specifically the semantic fields of
relationship, colour, numbers, time and names. The lexicon appears to be
strongly influenced by Akan considering the frequent use of mouthings and
loan translations.
Chapter 4 describes various ways of expressing form and size in
AdaSL. In a number of ways AdaSL diverts significantly from what is
common in the large sign languages so far studied. This is particularly
notable in the use of so called measure stick signs. These measure stick signs
are also used by hearing people in Ghana and other parts of Africa.
Moreover AdaSL has standard signs to indicate a relative size which do not,
as seems to be the case in other sign languages, adapt to the absolute size of
the entity in question.
Chapter 5 describes expressions of motion. A structure that seems to
be common in almost any large sign language is the so-called classifierconstruction.
Whereas handle classifier constructions typically express
externally controlled motion, entity classifier constructions typically express
internally controlled motion. AdaSL rarely uses handle classifier
constructions to express externally controlled movements. Moreover, AdaSL
appears not to make use of a system of entity classifiers.
In AdaSL the usual way to indicate movement is through ´directionals´.
These movement signs (which can be spatially modified) each express a
basic movement pattern of movement regarding the cause of the movement
e.g. TOWARDS or ENTER. They may occur in a series with a sign expressing
manipulation (e.g. TAKE) or expressing a way of moving (such as RUN), thus
specifying the Cause of the movement.
From the descriptive chapters a pattern of features typical of AdaSL
arises. These are discussed in chapter 6.

PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS OLDER VERSION OF THE DICTIONARY UNLESS NECESSARY. DOWNLOAD THE NEW 2022 UPDATED AND EXPANDED VERSION - ABOVE ON ACADEMIA.EDU. Following the unexpected discovery in Egypt in September of new unequivocal evidence for the existence of some of the digraphs, a  second proofed, revised and expanded edition is now out.
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By decision of the author and in agreement with the publisher (SAIS) the book is freely put at the disposal of the academic community on 24/10/2017.

In short : The book attempts to demonstrate firstly that digraphs, ancestors of the diphthongs of Coptic, exist in Ancient Egyptian. Secondly, it provides a methodology to vocalize 1795 Ancient Egyptian words.

The book offers a first vocalised dictionary of the Ancient Egyptian language in three parts:  Part I - A dictionary organised according to transliteration (with hieroglyphic term), thereafter English and additional data (vocalisation; source; Coptic descendant(s); notes; main shifts for each term listed, etc.); Part II - A simplified ‹English/Vocalisation/Ancient Egyptian› dictionary; Part III - The dictionary reclassified by V/C/T ratio, i.e. Missing vowel(s) / Apparent consonants and semi-consonants / Total number of phonemes per term. The latter dictionary and attached statistical tables and graph revealing the fundamental discovery that for 55% of Ancient Egyptian words only a single vowel needs to be resituated. The same tables and graph also revealing markingly the phonological frontiers existing between Ancient Egyptian and foreign terms [Extract from the publisher's page : http://saisbooks.co.uk]. Paperback. 424 pages, including 58 pages of presentation, analyses and summary of conclusions. Two statistical graphs and numerous tables, including four for over sixty two Ancient Egyptian phonemes and their equivalent shifts in Coptic. London (UK), 2016. ISBN 978-0-9527827-0-1. £ 79.

This somewhat preliminary report follows the same lines as my previous report on East Sudanic (2015). It summarizes all of my lexicostatistical work (mixed with elements of etymological analysis) on the various potential members of the «Nilo-Saharan» phylum, whose goals are to clarify their internal relationships and assess whether a «Nilo-Saharan», in any form, is detectable on the level of comparison between the most stable segments of the basic lexicon (approximately the same way that one could detect Indo-European by comparing the basic lexicon of even the most radically divergent present day Indo-European languages, or the same way that even such controversial taxa like «Indo-Uralic» and «Altaic» also receive some lexicostatistical support). Like Greenberg, I follow a «step-by-step» methodology in trying to progressively assemble larger taxonomic blocks from smaller ones. The crucial difference, which becomes more and more important as one goes deeper in time, is that the methodology tries to reconstruct the optimal equivalent for the required Swadesh meaning on each taxonomic level and then proceed to compare it further, instead of allowing to compare any form from any modern language with a wide range of meanings semantically connected to the Swadesh meaning. This is a serious safeguard against «garbage parallels», caused by sheer accidence or by linguistic contacts between parts of the family (e. g. West Nilotic languages of the East Sudanic family with Moru-Maɗi languages of the Central Sudanic family). The first part of this report establishes the lexicostatistical validity of the large «Central Sudanic» block, which seems to be only very slightly younger than East Sudanic. At the next stage, two more families are identified: Saharan and Koman-Gumuz. Stage 3 is a comparison between all four of these families; and finally, Stage 4 assesses the chances of all the remaining small taxa (Berta, Kunama, Fur-Amdang, Maba, Kuliak, Songhay, Krongo-Kadugli, Shabo) to be affiliated with any of the larger groups. Final conclusions are listed in the last section of the document.

This essay attempts to define the ancient Egyptian word txn "Tekhen" (Obelisk) through an analysis of the Kalenjiin language of East Africa. It also explores alternate pronunciations for the object (i.e., bnbn and mn) using other African languages such as Yoruba, ciLuba, and Hebrew (Semitic). As a result of our analysis, we gain deep insights into the ancient Egyptian conceptualization of creation, first principles, and philosophy concerning man's participation in the ongoing evolution of the universe.

A vernacular style of French spoken in informal situations of communication by the youth in Cameroon, Camfranglais is characterized by the insertion of foreign words from English, Pidgin English and, to a lesser extent, other Cameroonian languages and French words  that have undergone a morphological and /or semantic change. If oral uses of this code have been well described, its strong presence on the Internet has prompted us to study its forms and functions in a corpus of everyday writing, which consists of excerpts gathered from forums and blogs. We analyze the lexical, morphosyntactic and graphic features of this code, its pragmatic functions in interaction, as well as the symbolic values and social functions associated with it in the representations of their writers.

Style vernaculaire de français majoritairement parlé par les jeunes au Cameroun, dans des situations de communication informelles, le camfranglais se caractérise par l’insertion de mots étrangers issus de l’anglais, du pidgin-english et, dans une moindre mesure, d’autres langues camerounaises, ainsi que de mots français ayant subi un changement morphologique et/ou sémantique. Si les usages oraux de ce code ont bien été décrits, sa forte présence sur Internet nous a incitée à en étudier les formes et les fonctions dans un corpus d’écrit ordinaire, constitué d’extraits de forums et de blogs. Nous analysons donc les caractéristiques lexicales, morphosyntaxiques et graphiques de ce code, ses fonctions pragmatiques en interaction, ainsi que les valeurs symboliques et les fonctions sociales qui lui sont associées dans les représentations des scripteurs.

Mots clés : camfranglais, parler jeune, écrit d’Internet, variation stylistique, argot, langue française, Cameroun.

Ce tout premier dictionnaire de la langue mambay vient compléter A grammar of Mambay, ouvrage du même auteur paru en 2011. Il s’appuie sur une décennie de travaux menés par de nombreux collaborateurs sous l’égide du Comité de Développement de la Langue Mambay (COLAMA) et de la SIL International. Rattaché au groupe linguistique adamaoua (famille niger-congo), la langue Mambay est parlée par environ 15.000 locuteurs répartis sur les rives du fleuve Kebbi au Cameroun du nord et au Tchad du sud-ouest. Véritable grenier des mots, pour reprendre le titre mambay (Mah ro’ dag ti Mambay), ce dictionnaire en recense plus de 3.400, qu’accompagnent des définitions en français de même qu’un index français–mambay comptant pour sa part 4.000 termes. S’ajoutent au dictionnaire à proprement parler un aperçu grammatical largement accessible ainsi qu’un précis d’orthographe concrétisant les efforts de standardisation entrepris par les membres du COLAMA. Le lecteur peut par ailleurs consulter un index scientifique permettant l’identification de la faune, dont celle de nombreuses espèces de poisson. Figurent enfin en annexe une sélection de textes mambay empruntés à divers genres, un « inventaire » de thèmes culturels, des images du pays mambay ainsi qu’un abécédaire. Bien plus qu’un simple dictionnaire de langue mambay, cet ouvrage constitue une contribution majeure à la documentation de l’héritage linguistique et culturel de ses locuteurs.

Recent attempts to prove the simplicity of Creoles with respect to non-Creoles have, like preceding ones concentrated on describing the assumed paucity of selected surfacephenomena in quantitative terms. None of these accounts has taken into consideration that typically, Creoles are languages in contact. In the multilingual speech communities of West Africa but equally so in other regions, Creoles are in contact with lexifier superstrates, with historically unrelated non-lexifier superstrates and with a host of adstrate and substrate languages. This paper attempts to provide answers to two questions. (1) Can we reconcile the complexity of the mixed grammar and lexicon of a language like Pichi withthe notion of simplicity given that code-mixing of the type presented here forms an integral partof the linguistic system of the language? (2) Can we reconcile the restructuring (or “elaboration” in terms of the simplicity hypothesis) of Pichi grammar and lexicon through code-mixing within the short time-span of a hundred and seventy years with the notion that the youth of Creoles makes them simpler than non-Creoles?

In recent work, idioms have in many traditions been assimilated to the study of metaphor. An idiom such as 'spill the beans' is understood against the conceptual metaphors, THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE ENTITIES for instance. Such a treatment implies that idioms are processed online, calling up in their production the conceptual metaphors which support them. In this article an alternative treatment is put forward whereby idioms are lexical in nature. The argument has two parts. First, the constituent collocates of idioms share a number of key grammatical properties with non-idiomatic lexemes. Even in their idiomatic usage they must in some sense be normal lexemes. Secondly, at the same time, idioms are shown to be distinctive in terms of their discourse properties, in particular the fact of idiomaticity restricting the referentiality of idiomatic nouns. Drawing broadly on ideas developed within psycholinguistic treatments of idiomaticity, a model of idioms is developed whereby idioms are seen as lexically compositional against a rich polysemy of their stipulated, constituent lexemes. While, it may be inferred, metonymic and meta-phoric associations led to the lexical polysemy of the constituent collocates, metonymy and metaphor play no necessary role in their online production and processing. The argument is developed on the basis of a detailed discussion of idioms in Nigerian Arabic. The data derives from a large, oral corpus (400,000 words), in which the conventional nature of idiomaticity is underscored by the quantitative preponderance of idiomatic meanings among basic body part nouns such as ṛaas 'head' and gaḷb 'heart'.

Loan words from a Language into another Language do not only bear the phenomenon of the borrowing of new mental Schemes and new cultural Patterns. It also yields very often  what can be called a SEMANTIC SHIFT in the use of these loan words. 
The linguistic phenomenon of semantic shift can be desribed as the use of a loanword in the target language with a light different meaning and sense when compared to the source language. 
The results of the semantic shift are wether the corruption of the original ontological universe that the loanword  previously belongs to in the source language, or the creation of a new ontological universe for that loanword in the target language according to the new linguistic need.
This paper illustrates these two results by showing how ancient classical Hebrew has borrowed several words and expressions from Ewegbe very probably during the Pharaonic Period in Ancient Egypt where Ewegbe was used in some very closed circles of Holy Initiations as a liturgical and ceremonial Language.

This thesis is the first linguistic analysis of Baraïn [bva], an East Chadic (Afroasiatic) language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Republic of Chad. The study focuses on the fundamental phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of the language. Baraïn has sixteen consonants (no implosives) and five vowels. It uses contrastive length and three levels of contrastive tone. No syllables are super-heavy. Morphophonological processes include asymmetrical patterns of voice spreading in consonant clusters and vowel backness harmony. Major class lexical items are minimally bimorphemic. Nouns are unbound roots with covert grammatical gender. However, gender is only distinguished in singular forms. Verbs are bound roots with an underlying tone melody. A small class of verb roots consist of a single consonant (and tone). Two classes of verbs have distinctive argument structures: labiles and causatives. Objects, indirect objects, and some oblique arguments can be indexed by verbal agreement, but not subjects. Six distinct tense, aspect, and mood categories are marked by suffixes and one auxiliary. There are ten categories in the pronominal and agreement systems, but the first person plural inclusive markers are all bimorphemic. The language is head-initial and the unmarked syntactic order is SVO. Question words are in situ. Negation is sentence-final. The appendices include a proposed orthographic system and seven interlinearized texts taken from recorded natural speech.

2. Background
2.1 Demographic information
2.1.1 Location: Coastal region of Sierra Leone (West Africa)
2.1.2 Sociohistorical place within Sierra Leone
2.1.3 Endangered status
2.2 Sherbro language
2.2.1 Genetic affiliation: Mel, Niger-Congo
2.2.2 Dialects
2.2.3 Previous study of Sherbro
2.2.4 Atlantic language literature consulted for this study