History and the Testimony of LanguageUniversity of California Press, 2011 - 274 pages This book is about history and the practical power of language to reveal historical change. Christopher Ehret offers a methodological guide to applying language evidence in historical studies. He demonstrates how these methods allow us not only to recover the histories of time periods and places poorly served by written documentation, but also to enrich our understanding of well-documented regions and eras. A leading historian as well as historical linguist of Africa, Ehret provides in-depth examples from the language phyla of Africa, arguing that his comprehensive treatment can be applied by linguistically trained historians and historical linguists working with any language and in any area of the world. |
Contents
Writing History from Linguistic Evidence | 22 |
e Early divergences | 25 |
11 | 33 |
Historical inference from Transformations in the vocabularies | 51 |
Historical inference from Word borrowing | 82 |
Linguistic dating | 105 |
society and Economy in the Early Holocene | 135 |
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Common terms and phrases
Afrasian African Classical Age African History Agäw archaeological areas aer bantu languages branch cattle central century Chadic cognation communities consonant core vocabulary correlations crop cultivation culture Dahalo dawida dialects divergence earlier early East African Eastern Cushitic Egyptian Ehret Ern Sahelian Ethiopian Ethiopian Highlands Ethiosemitic languages example glottochronology goat grain guages Highland idem iraqw Kalenjin Kenya kind Kiswahili Kunama language evidence lexical lexicon linguistic evidence linguistic stratigraphy livestock loanwords Ma’a Maasai maize Mashariki median Mijikenda millennium bCE nilo-saharan northern noun omotic original oen particular pattern percent period peripheral basic Proto Proto-Afrasian Proto-Ethiosemitic Proto-saharo-sahelian Proto-sahelian Proto–northern sudanic Proto–south Ethiosemitic region regular sound root word saghala sahara Sahelian Kir semantic semitic shambaa social society Songay sound change south Ethiosemitic southern Cushitic southern Cushitic languages Southern Nilotic speakers spoken spread stratigraphy subgroup swahili Taita Cushitic Taita Hills Tanzania taxonomies term tobacco verb Waswahili word borrowing