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From: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Subject: Re: Swahili
Message-ID: <DxHy7s.Any@scn.org>
Sender: news@scn.org
Reply-To: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Organization: Seattle Community Network
References: <5125og$hnm@agate.berkeley.edu>  
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 03:11:51 GMT
Lines: 29


In a previous article, coby@euler.Berkeley.EDU (Coby Jacob) Lubliner) says:

>I wonder if the lack of tonality in Swahili, apparently untypical for
>its family, is due to its having become an intertribal lingua franca,
>and if the dialect actually spoken by the original Swahilis on the 
>Tanzanian coast is also non-tonal.
>
>Coby
>
For that matter, how *sure* are we that there really *were* any "original 
Swahilis" in a tribal sense?  Pidginization/creolization processes could 
account for loss of tonality in a mixed-Bantu-source-cum-Arabic-contact-
contextual vocabulary, and who's to say afterwards, barring written 
evidence, that there was a linguistically or anthropologically unitary 
tribe underneath it all?  Was there a pre-pidginization Tok Pisin-speaking
ethnos in New Guinea?  How about a pre-pidginization Chinook Jargon-
speaking tribe in what became NW US/SW Canada?  (In these last two cases 
I'm pretty sure the answer is no.  In the case of Swahili I have no basis 
for judging, I'm just putting the question out there for the better 
qualified to opine upon...)

Leland

--
Liland Brajant ROS'                "Sed krom se iuj el la  homoj  malsategas,
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