George L. Huttar

Sources of Ndjuka African vocabulary

Identification of historical sources of features of a language may focus on particular items (phones, morphemes) or on particular relationships and structures (relative clauses, serial verb constructions, vowel systems). What humankind shares universally either by genes or environment may significantly constrain the latter, as Bickerton, for example, has so imaginatively explored (1981). Likewise, universais of speech production and perception put limits on the inventory of phones to be found in any human language. By contrast, the morphemes found in different languages vary considerably from language to language, within mostly phonologically imposed limits. These considerations suggest that while study of syntactic structures of, for example, some creole languages may reveal a good deal about the human language capacity in general, it is correspondingly difficult to use for identifying historical sources of those creoles. Conversely, study of the form and meaning of individual lexical items in various languages will tell us less about human language generally, but will be correspondingly easier for us to use for historical purposes. Both areas of inquiry are worthy of our serious attention. In this paper I engage primarily in the more straightforward historical question, Where do particular lexical items in Ndjuka1 come from? In particular, I am looking at those items that appear not to be of European (English, Dutch, Portuguese, French) or Amerindian (Cariban, Arawak) origin i.e., those that I consider reasonable candidates for being of African origin. Study of the lexicons of West Atlantic, or circum-Caribbean, creoles has so far identified or hypothesized two major African sources of