Temne Short Basic Course

This book contributes to the debate over the culpability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave from various disciplinary perspectives. The general thesis that undergirds the book is that by knowing who was predisposed to benefit the most from the trade and why, prompting them to initiate it, appropriate culpability can be assigned.

Atlantic is one of the most diversified and most problematic Niger-Congo families as far as evidence for a monogenetic origin is concerned. Moreover, the group remains poorly known. Besides well-studied languages such as Fula, Wolof and Serer some sixty lesser known languages of Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are currently believed to belong to Atlantic. Many of these languages are not yet documented, and some never will - they disappeared some decades ago or are just on the verge of extinction. This book provides an overview of Atlantic south of the Wolof, Serer and Fula-speaking regions. The sections on the various Atlantic languages present information on phonology, morphology and basic syntacticpatterns by using General Linguistic Theory. Lexical material is presented in comparative wordlists. All data stem from the author's own fieldwork in the 1950s and 1960s in Guinea Bissau and Guinea.