Comparative millet terminologies and archeology

2012

2010

Nigeria is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, with 500+ languages and three major language phyla represented, as well as isolate languages. The historical processes underlying this diversity remain poorly understood and a rapidly increasing research base makes continual updating essential. The paper outlines current understanding of the classification and geography of languages in Nigeria, and presents a model for their historical layering. Potential archaeological correlations remain highly speculative due to the low density of well-dated sites in Nigeria.

This is an overview of the ethnoscientific vocabulary of the Tal language, part of the West Chadic A3 cluster. The Tal language has been barely studied, so the list gives a strict IPA-like transcription as well as an orthographic list. The closest relatives of Tal are Koenoem and Pyapung, also unstudied.

Afrika und Übersee, 2020

Contact between the Tarokoid languages of Sur, Yangkam, Pe, Vaghat Cluster, Tarok and some Chadic languages found in southeast Plateau State of central Nigeria and its implications for the sketching of a history for the area is the main thesis of this work. A brief outline of oral traditions of origin of the sub-groupings of Tarok language is presented and interpreted in the light of linguistic data to illustrate how the methodology works. The underlying principles of this paper are based on the theoretical premise that oral traditions can shed some light in the interpretation of linguistic data and vice versa. Lexical items found in secondary sources and an Ngas wordlist I took were examined for cognates between the Chadic languages and Tarok proper.

Linguists and archaeologists offer complementary viewpoints on human behaviour and culture in past African communities. While historical-comparative linguistics commonly deals with the immaterial traces of the past in Africa’s present-day languages, archaeology unearths the material vestiges of ancient cultures. Even if both sciences share similar core concepts, their methods, data and interpretive frameworks are profoundly different. Explaining some basic principles of historical-comparative linguistics as applied to the Bantu languages and debunking some common misconceptions are the central aims of this contribution.

This essay is an analysis of archaeological contributions to the understanding of Nigeria's cultural history between ca. 2000 B.C. and A.D. 1900 focusing on the following themes: the origins of food production; development and transformations in metallurgical traditions; the beginnings of social complexity; and the character of state formation and urbanism. The transformations in everyday material life as a result of the entanglement with the Atlantic commerce and ethnoarchaeological approaches to understanding material culture and archaeological contexts also receive attention. The essay provides pathways to some of the turning points in Nigeria's cultural history, shows the convergence and divergence of cultural historical developments in different parts of the country, and identifies the critical gaps in archaeological research agenda.

1. Introduction Ever since African historical linguistics emerged in the 19th century, it has served a double purpose. It has not only been practiced with the aim of studying language evolution, its methods have also been put to use for the reconstruction of human history. The promotion of linguistics to one of the key disciplines of African historiography is an inevitable consequence of the lack of ancient written records in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars of the African past generally fall back on two kinds of linguistic research: linguistic classification and linguistic reconstruction. The aim of this paper is to present a concise application of both disciplines to the field of Bantu linguistics and to offer two interesting comparative case studies in the field of Bantu pottery vocabulary. The diachronic analysis of this lexical domain constitutes a promising field for interdisciplinary historical research. At the same time, the examples presented here urge history scholars to be cautious in the application of words-and-things studies for the use of historical reconstruction. The neglect of diachronic semantic evolutions and the impact of ancient lexical copies may lead to oversimplified and hence false historical conclusions.

A historical, linguistic, cultural and DNA evidences of shared heritage of Igbo and Niger-Delta people's of South-South and South-East Nigeria. This work is subject to future improvements as the need arises.

Nyame akuma, 2006

Research in settlement archaeology is gaining more prominence in Nigeria. This emanates from the awareness of the fact that much can be gleaned from the past cultural, and by extension, social, environment of a people, through rigorous and multifacetted analyses of artifacts such as pottery, walling systems and iron furnaces. All of these derive from either surface collections and/or excavations (Ogundele 2004). Through this mode of academic discourse, we can begin to deepen our understanding and appreciation of aspects of inter-group relations, of flows and interconnections. This study area, Orile-Keesi and its environs, provides an excellent opportunity for testing this hypothesis.