An Introductory Grammar Of The Sena Language

First published in 1919, this volume provides a detailed linguistic breakdown of the Bantu language family of Central and Southern Africa. Its author held in-situ expertise in Nanja, Swahili, Zulu, Giryama and Pokomo. A professor of Swahili and Bantu languages, she was the author of several books on Bantu languages and African peoples. The volume aims to depict the broad principles underlying the structure of the Bantu language family and attempts a classification of those languages. Contemporaneous with the colonization of Tanzania, many of the areas to which this volume was relevant were under British control at the time of publication.

Originally published in 1945, this volume represented the first to classify Bantu languages. This volume does not record all the dialects but makes reference to those in which some grammatical study has been done and classifies them according to mainly geographical zones. Owing to tribal migrations, individual members of a particular zone may be living among members of a different zone (as has been the case with the Ngoni, South-Eastern Zone, who are found among the Eastern Bantu), but the zone label is taken from the habitat of the majority.

Derek Nurse looks at variations in the form and function of tense and aspect in Bantu, a branch of Niger-Congo, the world's largest language phylum. His account is based on data from more than 200 Bantu languages and varieties, a representative sample of which is freely available on the publisher's website.

From the 16th century onwards, Europeans encountered languages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts, they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document, and all of them witness their authors’ attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar, to accommodate dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description, analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them, these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia, Tamil, four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil, Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora, Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context, and its linguistic context is analyzed, with particular attention to orthography, the parts of speech system, morphology and syntax. Whenever possible, pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed, together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics, and the evidence they provide for the missionaries’ attitude towards the languages they studied.

The first global history of African linguistics as an emerging autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.