I would like to thank the members of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities for their aid and comfort in working on this project. My special thanks to Thornton Staples, for customizing the database programs, to Susan Gants, for managing the diagrams, and to John Unsworth, for help with the markup. [back]
1. Devotees of Edward Sapir will recognize "relentless" from his description of Latin concord (1921:114). [back]
2. In these respects noun class systems are usually differentiated from noun classifier systems, such as the systems of numeral classifiers found in Chinese or Japanese. The latter are associated with more open-ended sets of classifiers, which tend to be free lexical items, and their distribution is less "grammaticalized" than noun class affixes, as choice among classifiers is often sensitive to discourse context rather than being determined by grammatical rules. I have argued elsewhere (Contini-Morava forthcoming) that semantic and discourse factors also play a role in class-based grammatical agreement in Swahili, so this distinction is not actually as clear-cut as the definition suggests. [back]
3. Actually, the number varies depending on the criteria used for defining the classes. For example, I am excluding the "locative classes", 16-18 in the traditional Bantu numbering system, because no nouns belong to these classes in Swahili. For critical discussion of criteria for defining the classes, see Zawawi (1979) and Adewole (1986).[back]
4. The numbering of the noun classes in (1) corresponds to the system of numbering traditionally used for Bantu languages, in which each noun prefix/agreement pattern is given its own number. This system was devised in order to facilitate comparison among Bantu languages, where the singular/plural pairings may vary.[back]
5. Alternatively, singular/plural prefix pairs are often used to identify noun classes. Thus the pairing m- /wa (Classes 1/2) is distinguished from m-/mi- (Classes 3/4), even though the singular prefixes are homonymous. This is the expedient used in dictionaries, which list nouns in their singular form and give the plural in parentheses. The disadvantage of this method is that some nouns have no singular or no plural. If no plural form is listed in the dictionary entry, the class of the noun is often ambiguous.[back]
6. I originally intended to use the more recent Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (Taasisi 1981), but decided against this because the Kamusi does not identify loanwords.[back]
7. The figures for the individual classes are:
Class 1 334 Class 7 490 (incomplete) Class 3 854 Class 8 2 Class 4 15 Class 9 1208 Class 5 645 Class 10 14 Class 6 60 Class 11 17 (incomplete)
plus 201 nouns whose class is unclear from the dictionary entry, e.g. kindi `squirrel' (no plural given-- Class 7 or 9?), and 119 roots listed in more than one class with the same meaning, e.g. bongo (Class 5)/ubongo (Class 11) `brain'; vita (Class 8 or 9) `war'. The most common alternation is between Classes 5 and 9, but almost all other pairings also occur. The only ones not attested so far are 1/11 and 7/9.
The database does not systematically include nouns derived by fully productive derivational processes, because their meanings are predictable. These include: agentive nouns in Class 1 derived from verbs plus suffixed -ji, e.g. mchezaji `player' (from -cheza `play'); deverbal nouns in Class 3 indicating act/manner/process, e.g. mkopo `act/process of borrowing' (from -kopa `borrow'; Class 7 diminutives, e.g. kilango `small door' (dim. of mlango, `door'); Class 5 augmentatives, e.g. lango `large door' (aug. of mlango, `door'); Class 11 abstract nouns derived from verb or adjective stems, e.g. ubaya `evil [noun]' (from -baya `bad [adj.]'). Exceptions were made in the case of derived nouns that have developed specialized, hence unpredictable, meanings, for example kikono `stump of arm; anything resembling a small hand, e.g. projecting prow of a vessel', literally `small hand' (dim. of mkono `hand').[back]
8. I should emphasize that number is being treated as a semantic, rather than morphological category here. As mentioned earlier, the noun classes are generally paired for singular and plural, so that e.g. nouns in Class 1 (with prefix m-) have a plural in Class 2 (with prefixwa-), for example mtoto `child', Class 1; watoto `children', Class 2. One might therefore assume that it is redundant to specify the number of each noun, since that can be deduced from its class affiliation. The reason I decided to treat number as a separate category from noun class affiliation is that there are a certain number of nouns that denote entities that are not amenable to enumeration, such as masses, collectivities, or abstractions. Such nouns may occur either in one of the "singular" classes, e.g. ugali `porridge', Class 11, or in one of the "plural" classes, e.g. maji `water', Class 6. Since the goal of the project is to analyze the semantic structure of the noun classes, I preferred not to assume in advance that "singular" and "plural" were part of the meanings of the class prefixes.[back]
9. For further information about this corpus and associated software, contact Arvi Hurskainen at the University of Helsinki, e-mail ahurskai@waltari.Helsinki.fi.[back]
10. The few exceptions are all nouns denoting animate beings: mdudu, the generic term for `insect', mnyama, the generic term for `animal', and a few names of animals either derived from verbs or from Class 1 nouns, e.g. mpasuasanda `nightjar' [literally, `shroud-tearer', a bird of ill omen]. It should be noted that Class 1/2 is the "human" class throughout the Bantu languages, and is also generally the most semantically transparent class.[back]
11. Where a Proto-Sabaki or Proto-Swahili form has been reconstructed by N + H, I supply the reconstructed form. Due to constraints of the present medium, I had to modify some of N + H's phonetic symbols: I means a "super-close" high front vowel; U means a "super-close" high back vowel; W means a voiced labial approximant (exact feature specification unclear, cf. N + H pp. 89ff). Where a word is listed as a loanword in SSED I indicate whether or not the source word had an initial m-.
I have not given examples of the most productive categories of nouns in this class: the names of plants and trees, of which there are 358 in the database, or the deverbal nouns indicating process/method etc., an open-ended set. The coverage of the remaining nouns is fairly comprehensive: only 53 out of 854, or approximately 6%, do not obviously fit into one or another of the categories on the chart. Examples of these include: mjango `empty, ineffectual visit, without profitable outcome' [related to -janga `grumble'?]; msapata `kind of dance' [from Portuguese sapatear, a dance]; muhuri `seal, signet, crest' [has initial m- in Arabic]; mgombwe `bull's mouth shell'; mchuzi `gravy, soup, sauce'. In some cases the noun may be derived from a verb that is now obsolete; in others there may be cultural associations that are not apparent from the dictionary definition; yet others are loanwords that may have been put in this class because of their initial m-, rather than because of their meaning.[back]
12. As mentioned in Section 2, Denny and Creider (1986:221) propose "extended solid figure" as the basic meaning for Class 3 in Proto-Bantu. They do not regard this as a metaphorical extension based on the typical shape of plants; on the contrary, they suggest that it was the shape meaning that motivated the inclusion of plants in this class, rather than vice versa (ibid.:223-4). They may have missed some of the complexities in the internal structure of Class 3 because of their small data set (the total noun sample was the approximately 300 nouns reconstructed for Proto-Bantu by Guthrie 1971, vol. 2).[back]