Full Description
The Cangin languages of Senegal remained hidden from linguists for years, and have only recently been seriously documented. This book traces the history of the Cangin languages, and presents a reconstruction of Proto-Cangin through careful application of historical linguistic methods. This is one of few in-depth historical treatments of a West African language family, and takes into account all existing sources, including previously unpublished data from my own work on Noon. The reconstruction of Proto-Cangin reveals a number of important features now obscured in the modern languages, including a surprisingly rich inventory of noun class prefixes, which are of great importance to the study of the world's largest language family, Niger-Congo. Included is a catalogue of over 600 Proto-Cangin reconstructions.
Contents
List of Tables
Symbols and Abbreviations
1 Introduction
1.1 The Cangin Languages
1.2 Sources
1.3 Comparison with Drolc (2005)
2 Phonology
2.1 Consonants
2.2 Vowels
2.3 Phonotactics and Borrowing
2.4 Summary of Sound Changes
3 Nominal Morphology
3.1 Noun Class Morphology
3.2 Determiners
3.3 Numerals
3.4 Derivational Suffixes
3.5 Summary
4 Verbal Morphology
4.1 Pronouns
4.2 Inflectional Morphology
4.3 Derivational Suffixes
4.4 Summary
5 Cangin in an Areal and Niger-Congo Context
5.1 Phonology
5.2 Noun Class
5.3 Verbal Derivational Suffixes
5.4 The Place of Cangin within Niger-Congo
5.5 Conclusion
Appendix 1: Proto-Cangin Lexical Reconstructions
Appendix 2: Outside Cognates
References
Index
