L. W. Lanham

The tonemes of Xhosa

SYNOPSIS All gliding and level tones in Xhosa are members of three pitch phonemes (tonemes). Phonemes of prosody are not distinctive per se to the same extent as segmental phonemes, and few Xhosa tones can be identified tonemically when examined out of context. Even when taken in context the tonemic interpretation of Xhosa tones depends heavily upon the recognition of certain features present in the speech continuum which have a raising or lowering effect, or distort the shapes of tonemic norms. In this connection the recognition of the “tonal step” is vital because it is only within this unit that pitch contrasts are maintained. At the morphological level tonemes function within a system of tonal morphemes which can be analysed and described apart from that involving segmental morphemes.

Linguistic relationships and contacts expressed in the vocabulary of Eastern Bushman

SYNOPSIS The dialect spoken by the Bushmen of the Eastern Transvaal contains not only words borrowed from Zulu‐Swazi, English and Afrikaans, but also reflects an older contact with Sotho and Tsonga speaking tribes. The link between these Bushmen and the ‡khomani of the Southern Kalahari is, linguistically, extremely close.

The copulative construction in Bantu with special reference to Zulu

SYNOPSIS The copulative construction in Bantu presents many puzzling and unusual features to the European student. Much of the obscurity which surrounds the construction is a result of the efforts of earlier grammarians to force it into the same pattern as the common type of construction in European languages with an ever present verb “to be”. This paper represents an endeavour to fit Bantu, and the peculiarities of its copulative construction, into the broader picture of the language families of the world, in applying the more universal features of the construction to it. It is found that Bantu fits quite easily into this “universal” pattern of the construction and, in fact, has not evolved to any great extent from the ancient form of it. This form, which is still quite common to‐day, consists of the mere juxtaposing of the subject and its copulative predicate, withou t any change to the latter or any “copula” verb between them. A suggestion is made regarding the origin and function of the invariable cop...