Pieter De Coene‘s historical PhD research project titled Kubandwa in the southwestern Great Lakes, 15th century – 1930s. A case-study in the historical dynamics of public healing under the co-supervision of Gillian Mathys, Felicitas Becker, Jean-Marie Nduwayo (Burundi University), and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) is now co-hosted by BantUGent. Welcome, Pieter!
Edward Ntonda (Université Paris-Nanterre) and Aron Zahran (INALCO Paris) join the BantUGent research group as joint PhD students. The two of them conduct research on the Chikunda language as part of the ANR-funded Orikunda project led by Rozenn Guérois (LLACAN Villejuif & BantUGent associate). At UGent, their their doctoral project will be co-supervised by Koen Bostoen and Maud Devos. More information can be found here. Welcome to Aron & Edward.
FWO has awarded Nina van der Vlugt (°1998) a PhD fellowship for fundamental research for her doctoral project titled “Divergence and convergence in the Shona languages: contact, migration, and change in a subgroup of Southern African Bantu“, which she will carry out at BantUGent under the co-supervision of Koen Bostoen and Hilde Gunnink. Nina has BA and MA degree in Linguistics from Leiden University. Welcome, Nina! A short summary of her planned PhD research can be found below.
The Shona languages of Southern Africa form a large, closely-related and relatively well-studied group of Bantu languages. Despite a wealth of synchronic data on these language varieties, the history of Shona languages and their speakers is not well-understood. I will test a new proposal that would revolutionize the understanding of Shona’s linguistic history by recognizing what has been referred to as a ‘spread-over-spread’ event, bringing into question its position within Southern Bantu. Even though lexicon-based classifications strongly support a close relationship between Shona and Southern Bantu, many common Southern Bantu phonological and morphological innovations are not shared with Shona. Earlier studies suggest that Shona might be more closely related to Bantu languages of Malawi. Further, initial evidence suggests that successive layers of language contact in Shona correspond to large-scale contact events: the Great Zimbabwe empire, the Indian Ocean trade network, and European colonialism. In this study, I investigate this ‘spread-over-spread’ scenario in three ways: by initiating the reconstruction of Proto-Shona, by establishing the position of Shona languages within the Bantu family via lexicon-based phylogenetics, and by untangling successive phases of language contact in Shona. This research adds to the understanding of the genesis and evolution of Shona languages and their position in Bantu, as well as the early history of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa.
A new age, that of the successful application of generative AI in lexicography, has dawned. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver summarises the state of the art using ChatGPT. This new research was published in the International Journal of Lexicography under the Diamond Open Access model, and is thus available to all for free, here https://academic.oup.com/ijl/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ijl/ecad021/7288213. Noteworthy is that the Addendum to the article was prompt-engineered by Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, and entirely written by ChatGPT. Be amazed …
To commemorate 40 years since its inception, the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) is organising a two-week online lecture series. Presenters are past presidents of EURALEX. The first speaker in the series was Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, on Wednesday 4 October 2023.
More info here https://euralex.org/euralex-40th-anniversary-lecture-series/
Screenshots of the event, attended by close to 60 for the formal lecture, 25 for the after-party:
1. Q & A during the formal lecture (with messages from all over the world)
2. Q & A during the after-party (all in on ChatGPT)
The European Research Council (ERC) awarded 400 young researchers with a prestigious Starting Grant, including five researchers at Ghent University. One of them is Sara Pacchiarotti from our BantUGent research group to do the groundbreaking research proposed in her CONGUBANGI project whose summary is below.
The Congo-Ubangi watershed in the northern margins of the Congo rainforest is home to a complex mosaic of genealogically and structurally diverse languages spoken by small-size communities with different material cultures and subsistence specializations. Straddling the borders of three modern countries in Central Africa, i.e., Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, and the Central African Republic, it is a major hotbed of linguistic, cultural, and genetic diversity with a deep history of human occupation. Despite the myriad of insights it could generate about language evolution and deep human past, it is poorly known due to difficulty of access and an astonishingly intricate configuration. CONGUBANGI will realize a breakthrough in our understanding of how linguistic diversity correlates with cultural and genetic diversity and why it originated and persisted in this specific ecoregion for millennia through an interdisciplinary approach involving linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. Understanding the genesis of a central area in the continent where mankind originated represents a unique opportunity to learn about our shared human history of evolution, migration, and diversification, and their impact on human language, a faculty unique among all forms of animal communication. Beyond research, CONGUBANGI will replicate world-wide efforts to preserve local linguistic diversity in a region where it is threatened to extinction by multiple uniformizing pressures, so that it can be made permanently available for posterity.
Along with several colleagues from the UGent ΔiaLing research group, BantUGent was present with three talks at the jubilee 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 50 years after the first ICHL conference, which was held from 4 to 8 September 2023 at the University of Heidelberg.
The first one was part of the workshop “Interactions at the dawn of history: Methods and results in prehistoric contact linguistics” organized by Rasmus G. Bjørn (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena) and Marwan Kilani (University of Basel – Swiss National Science Foundation), the second part of a general session on “Reconstruction and periodization”.
1. “Pre-Bantu substrate in Batwa Bantu languages of the Congo rainforest: A comparative study of nasal-oral stop cluster reduction” by Koen Bostoen, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli, & Sara Pacchiarotti;
2. “Uncovering lost paths in the Congo rainforest: A new, comprehensive phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli & Koen Bostoen;
3. “An evolutionary loner in Southern African Bantu: The classification of Yeyi” by Hilde Gunnink, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri & Koen Bostoen.
Due to a technical issue causing delay in generating of phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu, the second talk was eventually replaced last minute by the following talk:
4. “Word-final reduction of Proto-Bantu *ng as a diagnostic feature for successive divergence and convergence in West-Coastal Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata & Koen Bostoen.
At the 3rd Conference of the Language Association of Eastern Africa, which was held at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, on 15 and 16 August 2023, Dr. Minah Nabirye presented a paper titled ‘Made in Uganda’, and Prof. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver dealt with its counterpart: ‘Broken in Uganda’. While Minah focused on solutions to overcome bottlenecks in producing language materials for Lusoga, Gilles-Maurice took a more critical stance with three Lusoga case studies to point out the rampant kleptocracy at Uganda’s National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), which hampers any meaningful empowerment of the African languages.
Minah Nabirye: Made in Uganda
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: Broken in Uganda
Menha Publishers at 3rd LAEA
In celebration of the conclusion of the Bantu Syntax and Information Structure project, a 2-day conference took place in Leiden on 8 and 9 June 2023 in hybrid format. BantUGent was represented with a talk by Manoah-Joël Misago†, Ernest Nshemezimana, Koen Bostoen & Sara Pacchiarotti on The applicative and the focalization of event location in Rundi(Bantu JD62).
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