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The Baka language of Gabon and specialized vocabulary for animals| old_uid | 2645 |
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| title | The Baka language of Gabon and specialized vocabulary for animals |
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| start_date | 2007/04/17 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | 4e étage, salle Marc Bloch |
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| summary | In Gabon, the Baka language is surrounded by the Bantu languages, and more precisely by the Fang language. It stands as the only Ubangian language among the 50 languages in this country. Traditionally, the Baka are hunter-gatherers, which points to the vocabulary of animals as a specifically interesting lexical domain to study. From an analysis of about 100 terms, I expect to find three different categories of vocabulary: - items shared with the Ubangian languages - items shared with the Bantu languages - and items shared by none of the preceding two groups of languages. The first category gives us some evidence of ancient contacts with the Ubangian languages since the Baka and other Ubangian populations have not been in contact for a long time. The second category is interesting from two perspectives: a synchronic one, as one can observe the permanent contact nowadays between the Baka and the Fang (A75), and a diachronic one with connection to the Proto-Bantu. For instance, it is surprising to find words in Baka taken from a Bantu language in the domain of animals, when Pygmies are supposed to know more about this topic than Bantu speakers, because this community is the one that spends most of its time in the forest. The third expected category is very interesting because its existence could be taken as part of the evidence that a Pygmy language existed in the past. I will discuss how these items that we can’t classify may bear some historical implications in terms of migrations of different groups of population and ancient contacts between languages and their speakers, and how they give some hints to explain some irregularities in Ubangian and Bantu languages by borrowings from Baka. Finally, the aim of this presentation is to clarify the situation of the Baka language vis a vis Bantu and Ubangian languages, and to try to answer the following question: did a pygmy language exist independently? Or in others terms, was there a previous language group that would have disappeared, leaving traces in Bantu and Ubangian languages? |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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