Communiversity

I'm curious what, if any, was the immediate predecessor to the Twi that is presently spoken in Ghana. Given that the Ghana Empire collapsed nearly a millennia ago, it stands to reason that the language has changed a great deal since that time. I'm wondering if the language had strong(er) ties to languages still found in Mali, most notably the Dogon, who I'm told have maintained an interesting relationship with the Asante.

Medase.

Immediate is a relative term but, it's interesting you ask since I've signed onto a project to reconstruct Proto-Kwa. Within Kwa, there's the Tano branch of the Volta-Comoe group of languages which has two branches: Bia and Akan. The Bia branch itself has two subdivisions consisting of Nzema-Ahanta and Anyi-Bawule. I'll be working on Proto-Tano, which is, to some degree, an immediate ancestor of Akan (Twi is the name applied to two dialects of Akan: Asante Twi and Akuapem Twi).

From my understanding, an older form of Mande was the primary language of the ancient Ghana empire. Mande is thought to have branched off from Niger-Congo many millennia ago (some say 5000-6000 years ago http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/index/mande_languages/mande_family/ (http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/index/mande_languages/mande_family/)) meaning that what became the Kwa languages and what became the Mande languages in their many manifestations separated that long ago.

Your question is a good one and could be a PhD thesis in and of itself. A good start would be to take an instrument like the SIL comparative wordlist and come up with putative cognates between Proto-Mande and Proto-Kwa (assuming the latter is a coherent group, although several linguists, including myself, have reservations about this) and then (1) do a lexicostatistic study to see the percentage of cognates that exist between the two (2) identify recurrent sound correspondences where evident 3) posit systematic sound changes that get us to where the languages are now (push chains, pull chains, etc.).

All that said, when I went to Mali back in '01, I asked some Dogon people to tell me the basic numbers 1-10 in their language (Jamsay dialect of Dogon). I was struck by similarities like:

English	Dogon	Akan	Mandekan
Three	taanu	-sa	sakpa
Four	nay	-nan	nani
Five	nunhui	-num	soolu

The Mandekan forms come from: http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/PDF/Mandenkan14-15/14dwyer.pdf (http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/PDF/Mandenkan14-15/14dwyer.pdf)
Dogon reference is from here: http://gamma.sil.org/silesr/2004/silesr2004-004.pdf (http://gamma.sil.org/silesr/2004/silesr2004-004.pdf)
I'm the Akan reference ;)

The Dogon and the Akan were especially close with these, but the relation to Mandekan is there as well. I decided in the future to pursue the connections but haven't gotten a chance to do so comprehensively. Note that throughout the continent, three (3) tends to be sa or ta (Yorùbá is ẹ̀ta, Kiswahili is tatu). I think this correspondence would be a good place to start to see if the voiceless alveolar stops (t) became voiceless alveolar fricatives (s) and what caused the change.

QuoteObadele Kambon;115451 wrote: Immediate is a relative term but, it's interesting you ask since I've signed onto a project to reconstruct Proto-Kwa. Within Kwa, there's the Tano branch of the Volta-Comoe group of languages which has two branches: Bia and Akan. The Bia branch itself has two subdivisions consisting of Nzema-Ahanta and Anyi-Bawule. I'll be working on Proto-Tano, which is, to some degree, an immediate ancestor of Akan (Twi is the name applied to two dialects of Akan: Asante Twi and Akuapem Twi).

From my understanding, an older form of Mande was the primary language of the ancient Ghana empire. Mande is thought to have branched off from Niger-Congo many millennia ago (some say 5000-6000 years ago http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/index/mande_languages/mande_family/ (http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/index/mande_languages/mande_family/)) meaning that what became the Kwa languages and what became the Mande languages in their many manifestations separated that long ago.

Your question is a good one and could be a PhD thesis in and of itself. A good start would be to take an instrument like the SIL comparative wordlist and come up with putative cognates between Proto-Mande and Proto-Kwa (assuming the latter is a coherent group, although several linguists, including myself, have reservations about this) and then (1) do a lexicostatistic study to see the percentage of cognates that exist between the two (2) identify recurrent sound correspondences where evident 3) posit systematic sound changes that get us to where the languages are now (push chains, pull chains, etc.).

All that said, when I went to Mali back in '01, I asked some Dogon people to tell me the basic numbers 1-10 in their language (Jamsay dialect of Dogon). I was struck by similarities like:

English	Dogon	Akan	Mandekan
Three	taanu	-sa	sakpa
Four	nay	-nan	nani
Five	nunhui	-num	soolu

The Mandekan forms come from: http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/PDF/Mandenkan14-15/14dwyer.pdf (http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/PDF/Mandenkan14-15/14dwyer.pdf)
Dogon reference is from here: http://gamma.sil.org/silesr/2004/silesr2004-004.pdf (http://gamma.sil.org/silesr/2004/silesr2004-004.pdf)
I'm the Akan reference ;)

The Dogon and the Akan were especially close with these, but the relation to Mandekan is there as well. I decided in the future to pursue the connections but haven't gotten a chance to do so comprehensively. Note that throughout the continent, three (3) tends to be sa or ta (Yorùbá is ẹ̀ta, Kiswahili is tatu). I think this correspondence would be a good place to start to see if the voiceless alveolar stops (t) became voiceless alveolar fricatives (s) and what caused the change.

Medase pa Nau @Obadele Kambon. I'm intrigued by your research project. I look forward to hearing more about it, and learning more about the linguistic and cultural connections between these peoples and regions.

One question, what will the reconstructed proto-Kwa be utilized for? Will you attempt to resurrect it as a spoken language? Or will it simply serve the aims of scholarly inquiry?

I'll keep you updated.

I doubt it. It would be worthwhile to do something at a greater time depth (like pre-desertification Sahara/Nile Valley) to serve a greater purpose of unity on a more continent-wide scale. I'd also like to take a critical look at the sounds reconstructed via the Rosetta stone as they're conspicuously missing sounds common to other Kmtyw languages.

I agree. That would be an ambitious research endeavor.

Which sounds are you talking about? There are different ideas about what sound values certain glyphs make. The reed leaf, for instance, can be an "ee" or "a" (like hat) sound. Are you familiar with Rkhty Amen? She might be a good person to talk to about the sound values in mdw nTr.

QuoteObadele Kambon;116067 wrote: I'll keep you updated.

I doubt it. It would be worthwhile to do something at a greater time depth (like pre-desertification Sahara/Nile Valley) to serve a greater purpose of unity on a more continent-wide scale. I'd also like to take a critical look at the sounds reconstructed via the Rosetta stone as they're conspicuously missing sounds common to other Kmtyw languages.

That's THE mission as far as my linguistics work goes. Everything else is peripheral.

I'm speaking specifically about consonants found in daughter languages like labial-velars k͡p, ɡ͡b nasals like ɲ, ŋ; implosives like ɓ, ɗ, labialized velars like kʷ, ɡʷ or even 'click' sounds like x, c, q, !, etc. These are sounds that are peculiar to specific Kmtyw languages that are daughter languages. If Mdw Ntr didn't have them, the question then becomes why and how, then, did they develop in the daughter languages. I think Mdw Ntr had at least some, if not all of these in different stages of its development. The phonetics currently accepted by Egyptologists are derived from the trilingual text known as the Rosetta Stone. From that text, some of the major findings that allowed its deciphering were that the demotic and Mdw Ntr texts both used phonetic characters to spell foreign names and to spell native Kemetic words. These sounds were then matched up with the greek text, the phonetics of which were already known. The potential issue with that is look at Cuba. You have descendants of Yorùbá people - spanish speakers - who, due to the influence of the spanish language, don't/can't pronounce the kp and gb sounds. They, therefore replace them with pʷ and gʷ, respectively. I cite this example because if the greeks didn't have the sounds of Mdw Ntr, they would have likely done the same thing: replace the Mdw Ntr sounds with the closest equivalents that they could pronounce or that were even available in their phonetic inventory. The foundation of my hypothesis is that while the current putative sounds are based on greek, I think that basing them on greek is looking in the wrong direction entirely. Thus, the interesting point in doing the reconstruction, to me, will be to match up words with such sounds in the daughter languages to the Mdw Ntr which may give us something different from what has been handed down to us.
The main example I can think of is palm tree, transliterated as bai. Well, palm tree is abɛ in Akan and ɔ̀kpɛ (orthographically represented as ọ̀pẹ in Standard Yorùbá). Obenga (1993) has many other languages that have forms that look similar on the surface. With a comprehensive reconstruction, we may determine that the original sound may have been kp, gb, b or p. On my own account, for my Masters Thesis, I reconstructed an implosive labial-velar *ƙp for the sound from which both the Akan and the Yorùbá for palm tree come from which is part of a larger push chain that quite elegantly accounts for recurrent sound correspondences between Akan, Yorùbá and the Bantu languages.
This is the beginning stage of my inquiry, but I think, even in terms of material culture, the word for something like palm tree may be a very good place to start as it would have been ubiquitous pre and post Nile Valley migration and the basic word for it may have remained stable even though pronunciation may have changed over time.
I'm familiar with her but I'm not in contact with her.

Rkhty is a good person to dialog with. So is Obenga.

I like that approach. It reminds me of what Diop was doing with mdw nTr and Wolof, however I think that you're seeking to take this work to an entirely different level

I also like your critique of possible Greek influences in the interpretation of the sound values of mdw nTr. While the Coptic serves as a way of identifying these sounds, it too bears a Greek influence. I think that you're right. We can't get at the essence of mdw nTr as a spoken language without looking at it with respect to other Kmtyw languages.

QuoteObadele Kambon;116071 wrote: That's THE mission as far as my linguistics work goes. Everything else is peripheral.

I'm speaking specifically about consonants found in daughter languages like labial-velars k͡p, ɡ͡b nasals like ɲ, ŋ; implosives like ɓ, ɗ, labialized velars like kʷ, ɡʷ or even 'click' sounds like x, c, q, !, etc. These are sounds that are peculiar to specific Kmtyw languages that are daughter languages. If Mdw Ntr didn't have them, the question then becomes why and how, then, did they develop in the daughter languages. I think Mdw Ntr had at least some, if not all of these in different stages of its development. The phonetics currently accepted by Egyptologists are derived from the trilingual text known as the Rosetta Stone. From that text, some of the major findings that allowed its deciphering were that the demotic and Mdw Ntr texts both used phonetic characters to spell foreign names and to spell native Kemetic words. These sounds were then matched up with the greek text, the phonetics of which were already known. The potential issue with that is look at Cuba. You have descendants of Yorùbá people - spanish speakers - who, due to the influence of the spanish language, don't/can't pronounce the kp and gb sounds. They, therefore replace them with pʷ and gʷ, respectively. I cite this example because if the greeks didn't have the sounds of Mdw Ntr, they would have likely done the same thing: replace the Mdw Ntr sounds with the closest equivalents that they could pronounce or that were even available in their phonetic inventory. The foundation of my hypothesis is that while the current putative sounds are based on greek, like many other Kmtyw scholars, I think that basing them on greek is looking in the wrong direction entirely. Thus, the interesting point in doing the reconstruction, to me, will be to match up words with such sounds in the daughter languages to the Mdw Ntr which may give us something different from what has been handed down to us.
The main example I can think of is palm tree, transliterated as bai. Well, palm tree is abɛ in Akan and ɔ̀kpɛ (orthographically represented as ọ̀pẹ in Standard Yorùbá). Obenga (1993) has many other languages that have forms that look similar on the surface. With a comprensive reconstruction, we may determine that the original sound may have been kp, gb, b or p. On my own account, for my Masters Thesis, I reconstructed an implosive labial-velar *ƙp for the sound from which both the Akan and the Yorùbá come from which is part of a larger push chain that quite elegantly accounts for recurrent sound correspondences between Akan, Yorùbá and the Bantu languages.
This is the beginning stages of my inquiry, but I think, even in terms of material culture, the word for something like palm tree may be a very good place to start as it would have been ubiquitous pre and post Nile Valley migration and the basic word for it may have remained stable even though pronunciation may have changed over time.
I'm familiar with her but I'm not in contact with her.

QuoteHeru Djet;116080 wrote: Rkhty is a good person to dialog with. So is Obenga.

I like that approach. It reminds me of what Diop was doing with mdw nTr and Wolof, however I think that you're seeking to take this work to an entirely different level

I also like your critique of possible Greek influences in the interpretation of the sound values of mdw nTr. While the Coptic serves as a way of identifying these sounds, it too bears a Greek influence. I think that you're right. We can't get at the essence of mdw nTr as a spoken language without looking at it with respect to other Kmtyw languages.

I agree. I'll try to reach out to them once I get back to this in earnest. Truthfully, while this project is to a large degree how I got into linguistics (Dr. Mario Beatty is the one who sent me to get advanced degrees in Linguistics and Kmtyw languages), it's been on the back burner for a loooooooong while.

Right, the methodology is called the comparative method as is pretty much along the lines of what was done to reconstruct indo-eureurasiaan. Yes, the aim of this research is to be comprehensive and decisive and these hypotheses can be proved or disproved. This work was pioneered by Diop and Obenga and even my ideas on where to start are coming from Obenga's (1993) word list.