A Khoekhoegowab Dictionary With An English Khoekhoegowab Index

This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and questions, including language and sociality, social and political history, multilingual government, and educational policies. In doing so, they present significant original research, ensuring that the work will remain a key reference point for the subject. This ambitious and wide-ranging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of southern African languages, sociolinguistics, history and politics.

The preservation of South Africa’s indigenous languages – the extinct Bushman and Khoikhoi languages in particular – is a pressing concern. Voices Past and Present serves as a comprehensive, scholarly and practical source for documenting and preserving some of them. The subcontinent of Africa has been inhabited by Bushman, Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking peoples for thousands of years, and, for the past few centuries, also by European-speaking peoples. Contact between these peoples brought about changes in the different languages. As a result, modern languages are no longer identical to the original ones, many of which, especially in the case of the Bushman and Khoikhoi languages, have become extinct. Words used in ancient times and recorded long ago often bear no resemblance to their modern counterparts. In this book, Peter E. Raper provides a detailed investigation of the earliest recordings of words available. Words from Old Cape dialects are compared for correspondences in sound and meaning to words from 29 Bushman languages and dialects, as well as to words from Nama, Koranna, Griqua, !Xuhn, !Xoon, Khwe and N/uu. Voices Past and Present provides an extensive corpus of words that can be further utilised for the purpose of shedding light on the specific languages from which the recorded words (and names) were derived, on historical distribution of the various groups, on the classification of the different languages and peoples, for determining relationships or otherwise between the different languages, potentially identifying components of place-names and ethnonyms from ancient and extinct languages, and elucidating other matters that have long vexed scholars who have complained about a lack of recorded data.

Click Consonants is an indispensable volume for those who want to explore cutting-edge research on the linguistics of this remarkable yet oft-overlooked class of consonants.

Is Africa a linguistic area (Heine & Leyew 2008)? The present volume consists of sixteen papers highlighting the linguistic geography of Africa, covering, in particular, southern Africa with its Khoisan languages. A wide range of phenomena are discussed to give an overview of the pattern of social, cultural, and linguistic interaction that characterizes Africa's linguistic geography. Most contributors to the volume discuss language contact and areal diffusion in Africa, although some demonstrate, with examples from non-African linguistic data, including Amazonian and European languages, how language contact may lead to structural convergence. Others investigate contact phenomena in social-cultural behavior. The volume makes a large contribution toward bringing generalized theory to data-oriented discussions. It is intended to stimulate further research on contact phenomena in Africa. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.

J.D. Lewis-Williams, one of the leading South African archaeologists and ethnographers, excavates meaning from the complex mythological stories of the San-Bushmen to create a larger theory of how myth is used in culture. He extracts their “nuggets,” the far-reaching but often unspoken words and concepts of language and understanding that are opaque to outsiders, to establish a more nuanced theory of the role of these myths in the thought-world and social circumstances of the San. The book -draws from the unique 19th century Bleek/Lloyd archives, more recent ethnographic work, and San rock art;-includes well-known San stories such as The Broken String, Mantis Dreams, and Creation of the Eland;-extrapolates from our understanding of San mythology into a larger model of how people create meaning from myth.