Talk:Khoisan languages

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Kalahari question

I'm pretty sure the article is wrong on claiming that Khoisan languages are only spoken in the Kalahari. There are Nama-speakers living in the Central Namib, for instance, and Damaraland (where they speak Damara, a very similar language), and I'm pretty certain there are Khoisan speakers in South Africa's Namaqualand, which is by no means part of the Kalahari.

I've changed the article to reflect this, based on Barnard (1988). Col pogo 19:58, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Huh, I go away for two years and the article once again claims that Khoisan languages are restricted to the Kalahari. If we're counting Nama as part of this language group then that claim is demonstrably untrue. Col pogo (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:43, 8 October 2009 (UTC).

How do they greet each other? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.162.131.130 (talk) 10:16, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Kwadi

A line in this article claims Kwadi is one of the two most widely spoken Khoisan languages. The article on Kwadi, however, says it has been extinct for some 25 years at least ... doesn't seem to agree, does it, since there are some more languages that, however small, are still alive and sometimes kicking. I'm not quite a Khoisan specialist, so it's up to someone else to correct this, but it seems to me quite obvious that another Khoisan language is second in the list of most widely used ones. [above comment posted by 145.97.196.186 Jan 11, 2005 - MD]

Thanks for pointing this out! I removed the erroneous statement from the article an will look for a reliable source to find out which ones are really most widely spoken. Thanks again! — mark ✎ 14:57, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Additional information. The false statement was added June 16th, 2004 in this diff by User:Robinh (seems a bona fide user to me) and subsequently wikilinked in this diff (Sep 30, 2004). — mark ✎ 15:06, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Nama (Khoekhoegowab) is the only widespread Khoisan language in southern Africa, with over 100 000 speakers. However, Sandawe also has several 10s of thousands; one estimate has 70 000, though it is not widespread in the geographic sense like Nama. kwami 20:58, 2005 August 31 (UTC)

Actually, recent Ethnologue figures are 233k Nama/Damara plus 16k Hai||om, for a cool quarter million. More recent estimates for Sandawe are 40,000. kwami 22:18, 2005 August 31 (UTC)

Xhosa - question

Hi! Can someone answer my question about incosistency asked on the Discussion page of the article "Xhosa"? Thanks. --Eleassar777 17:05, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Regarding clicks…

Is there any objective reason, beyond tradition, not to classify the common K and T sounds as clicks? -Ahruman 13:22, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh yes, of course. [k] and [t] have only one point of articulation, whereas clicks always have two. Furthermore, [k] and [t] are pulmonal, while clicks are not (they're ingressive). And I'm sure there are even more reasons. — N-true 17:46, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Merged talk page

I'm reorganizing the list per Heine & Nurse, Sands, etc. Ethnologue leaves a lot to be desired here. I'm also removing the Hai//om language altogether, as I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. It's variously described as extinct or spoken by 16,000 people, as being a Ju lect, a separate branch of Khoe family, or one of many dialects of Nama. Until we figure out if there even is a Hai//om language, and how it should be classified, it's best just to leave it off the list. (It's not "unclassified" either: that category is for languages which are unclassified despite reasonably good evidence, such as ‡Hoa, which used to be considered Southern KS merely because it has labial clicks, but which is now being reevaluated. ‡Hoa may actually turn out to be Northern, in which case Northern would have two branches, the Ju dialect cluster, and ‡Hoa.

I've also removed Vasekela and 'Akhoe, due to lack of evidence that these "languages" even exist. --kwami 04:45, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Good work, though I'm not sure if I agree with the deletions. The Ethnologue is a mess regarding Khoisan, that's for sure. You might like Treis (1998) (see the citation over at Khoisan languages). She tells us (467) that Vasekele is a Bantu term for an Angolan !Xŭŭ variety corresponding to Snyman's (1997) Cubango/Cunene !Xŭŭ. Furthermore, Hai||om is a distant member of the Nama/Damara/Namidama dialect continuum (ibid. 470); she notes that the Hai||om formerly spoke a Northern Khoisan language and that a wordlist compilated by Werner shows the proximity to !Xŭŭ (1906:260-268). A good source on Hai||om seems to be Haacke et.al. 1997 'Internal and external relations of Khoekhoe dialects: a preliminary survey', in Haacke & Elderkin (eds.) Namibian Languages: Reports and Papers (Namibian African Studies, 4). Köln: Köppe. — mark ✎ 20:05, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. That's the impression I had of Hai||om from reading between the lines, but I wasn't sure. Since it doesn't sound like it's its own language either way, but is frequently found in lists, I'll make a clarifying note at the bottom of the page. As for the other two names, there's nothing special about them except that they happen to be in Ethnologue. Since there are literally scores of alternate names for Khoisan languages, and every reference is likely to have a couple not found on this page, I think they should be left out. Unless we want to try to list every alternate name, which would be a real mess. kwami 23:51, 2005 May 17 (UTC)

Ungwatsi

Along the lines of editing languages, I was wondering if anyone has a definitive answer on what language the Bushman actor N!xau (G!kau, Gcao, etc.) speaks in "The Gods Must Be Crazy". In the article on the actor, it's identified as the non-existent "Ungwatsi". From naming similarities, I would have assumed that it was a poor anglicization of Kwadi, but if Kwadi is extinct, that can't be. Any thoughts? Rcharman 16:40, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Certainly not Kwadi. (That would be something!) The Namibian newspaper article linked from the wiki article says he spoke Ju/'hoansi. That would make sense, with him being Namibian. Also, the name Gcao Coma would presumably correspond to [g|ao k|oma], not "G!kau", which is nonsense in any transcription I've ever seen. kwami 18:26, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I concur. Also, Ungwatsi looks like a probable result of garbled transmission of Ju/'hoansi. — mark ✎ 19:32, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

merge?

It's always bothered me that this has been a separate article. Granted, we wouldn't list all IE languages under the main article, but we do list all the branches, with a few representative languages from each. In the case of a small family like KS, that's pretty much the same thing. Any objection to making this a section of the main article? kwami 00:01, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Good idea! I support it. The Khoisan languages article is quite short, so it won't become too lengthy or anything. — N-true 01:53, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. (I suggested this a couple years ago, and there've been no objections.) kwami 21:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Doubt

Doubt is expressed in the article about all branches, with phrases like "not clear" and "doubtful". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.41.51.240 (talk) 09:57, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Who supports Khoisan?

There is some question out there as to whether any Khoisan specialists support the idea, first put forward by Greenberg, that Khoisan represents a genetic unity, in contrast to the view that it is a Sprachbund of some sort. The issue here is clearly not whether the arguments for Khoisan being a genetic unity are good or bad but whether (a) any linguists and (b) any Khoisan specialists support the view that it is. The first question can be answered in the affirmative: Christopher Ehret and Anthony Traill, among others, clearly support Khoisan. The second question can also be answered in the affirmative: one can cite Bonny Sands (1998a and 1998b), which George Starostin (2008:448) summarizes as follows (accurately, based on the glance I have taken at Sands's 1998 article):

A rigorous study has been also conducted by B. [Sands 1998], who, having run the available evidence through a series of lexicostatistical, phonological, semantical, and other tests, eventually comes to the conclusion that, while Sandawe definitely displays a significant number of shared features with the rest of Khoisan, Hadza does not, and is therefore less probable to be genetically related to these languages. Nevertheless, such a possibility is not altogether dismissed, and in Appendix 2 to her monograph, Sands still gives a bunch of Hadza items that, according to her opinion, could look like potential correlates to similar words in other Khoisan languages.

The Khoisanist Henry Honken (1988, 1998) also takes a position in favor of Khoisan.

I hope this goes some way toward a definitive determination on this issue.

The question then arises as to what the prevailing view is in Khoisan studies. This is a more delicate question. As usual, there is no census of linguists' views. In addition, a high proportion of linguists concerned may feel the evidence is more or less strong in one direction or the other but not feel they either can or must take a definitive position. They may also differ on the prospects for resolving the uncertainties. Also, as in other fields, many specialists may work on aspects of the languages and cultures concerned without taking up the genetic question. There may be no record of their opinions, if any, on the genetic question in the literature.

Starostin's (2003) appreciation of the current situation is as follows:

Despite all the obvious progress that comparative Khoisan linguistics has undergone over the last half century, no Khoisanologist would deny that crucial questions in this field still remain unanswered. (Basic answers to these questions actually serve as the starting point in any particular area of comparative linguistics.) Not only are we still deprived of a strict and fully credible set of phonological correspondences among the present-day Khoisan languages, we do not even seem sure about whether a genetically related "Khoisan" family actually exists, and whether the "Khoisan" family is any more than a fantasy of some people deluded by the peculiar phonological closeness of most of these languages.

The extreme point of view on this problem, propagated chiefly by the late Ernst Westphal in works such as [Westphal 1965] and [Westphal 1980], is not very popular today, for obvious reasons. While these and other works rightly emphasize the current lack of substantial evidence proving the existence of a genetic relationship between the several established groups of 'Bushman', this by no means gives Westphal a right to claim that such a relationship definitely does not exist. Furthermore, such an approach can hardly be called constructive when it comes to actually explaining what evidence there is. This is well understood by modern day scholars; therefore an approach of "moderate scepticism" rather than "decisive denial" is much more popular in Khoisanology today. The difference between the two approaches is summarized well in [Traill 1986], an article in which Anthony Traill both presents the reader with a good selection of comparative material and explains the problems related to its interpretation.

VikSol 04:18, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know much about Honken, he may well support KS, but Sands definitely does not. Of course she doesn't deny that it could be true, but her working theory based on lack of evidence is that it isn't. The literature in the field is about individual families and the areal influences between them. No-one talks about "Khoisan" as an actual family. The most you get is Güldemann linking Sandawe with Khoe, something which even some of his colleagues have dismissed for its methodology. (It looks good to me, actually, but the point is that even Khoe-Sandawe is not broadly accepted.) kwami (talk) 07:43, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

It seems unlikely there would be a connection as the Khoe languages (and Khoe pastoralists who absorbed some San people, probably most of the Khoe genes are from assmilated San) came from East Africa about 2000 years ago (connected to the Sandawe) and the San had been separated from other people about 100,000 years. Thus unless languages from East Africa replaced the languages of the San at an earier date (entirely possible) then any similarities would be due to borrowing and influence of the languages on each other. From the relationship of the people I'd guess at Khoe-Sandawe having a distant relationship with Hadza and the Northern and Southern San having a distant relationship, but due to the split being too long ago and most of the indigenous languages being lost it is very difficult to prove —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.152.221.121 (talk) 10:35, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

AFAIK Traill has changed his opinion on this. Ehret is not a Khoisanist and isn't well respected among historical linguists. That leaves Honken, vs. just about everyone else. kwami (talk) 11:38, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

If they're valid then it is because the East African Khoe people's language replaced those of the San when they moved into Southern Africa which seems to be the case, as whatever language the San spoke would have been further than all other languages ever and they were separated so long there may not have been a common origin of the languages they spoke (assume they spoke proper languages). Just a question of whether they're San languages with a Khoe superstratum or one group of Khoisan languages with some having a San substratum217.42.125.6 (talk) 21:56, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Different idea

Roman Stopa, in 1972, proved the Bushman langages are related to Indo-European ones. His methods are similar to those of others in academic circles. See the article on Roman Stopa in the Polish Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.3.117 (talk) 08:48, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

No, he did NOT. His theories are considered fringe, and therefore not eligible for Wiki. An experienced linguist should keep a watch on this point so that this 'source' is not used. HammerFilmFan (talk) 22:36, 13 March 2011 (UTC)HammerFilmFan

Names in Ruhlen 1987

Redirects have been made for all the spellings found in the Ruhlen appendix, since the correspondences weren't always obvious. — kwami (talk) 04:33, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Bantu and Khoisan

It strikes me that all indigenous "non-Bantu" languages in and around southern Africa have clicks. Would really only several families of click languages have survived the Bantu expansion and no languages without clicks? Or might there be some 'obscure' "Bantu" languages that are in fact not really Bantu? --JorisvS (talk) 18:19, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

The Bantu languages are all pretty similar, so something would have to be practically undescribed to be mistaken for Bantu. The pre-Bantu languages which survived are in an area with a climate that doesn't support Bantu crops (the rains come at the wrong time), and the Bantu languages with click are on the periphery of that area. If it weren't for that geographic accident, presumably all of the languages of southern Africa would be Bantu, and none of them would have borrowed clicks. — kwami (talk) 20:18, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

So why would all the languages originally spoken in those areas not conducive to Bantu farming have had clicks? Are there any undescribed Bantu languages? --JorisvS (talk) 20:30, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Anyone care to speculate? Or know about undescribed Bantu languages? --JorisvS (talk) 08:35, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

There are lots of scarcely attested Bantu languages, and who knows, some of them might turn out to not actually be Bantu.

Clicks were presumably an areal feature of eastern and southern Africa before the Bantu expansion, but they were replaced by Bantu everywhere that farming was practical. Asking 'why there' is a bit like asking why languages of southern China have tone. There's actually quite a bit of speculation about the origin of clicks, but there's very little evidence to go on. — kwami (talk) 21:08, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Khoi-San or Khoisan???

Map reads Khoi-San. Article is Khoisan. Which one is wrong? 81.156.138.154 (talk) 15:54, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

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"Khoisan" family chart

"Khoisan" is obsolete as a family. It's retained as a convenience, rather like "Papuan". There is not a single Khoisanist who accepts it. The last to do so, Henry Honken, reversed his stance before he died. Gueldemann, who was just cited as support for the claim, emphatically rejects it. At most, Sandawe might be related to Kwadi-Khoe, and the Tuu and Kx'a families might be related (if they're not just a sprachbund, which currently seems more likely). No-one who works with the languages accepts the rest. You need to go to lang-rangers like Starostin, who does not work w the languages, to find support.

The Khoisan proposal has never been well supported. Greenberg lumped non-Bantu click languages together just because they had clicks, and non-specialists followed him because he was Greenberg, not because he'd provided any convincing evidence. But even that's been pretty much abandoned now. Giving a chart of putative relationships will mislead our readers into thinking there is evidence for those relationships. I wouldn't mind if the lines for the rejected proposals were removed. — kwami (talk) 08:53, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: You're tilting at windmills. The graph, the caption, and the sources it's based on, clearly present the dashed-line clades as conjectural. I don't see anything wrong with showing them here, since this article is about the obsolete family. It discusses the same links that the image presents visually and the level of support for them. We can assume that our readers are capable of reading the text that accompanies an image. – Joe (talk) 10:29, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Actually, one of the heavy-dashed clades is considered established (Kx'a), another (Kwadi-Khoe) is generally accepted though the evidence isn't great (no pronouns were recorded, for example), while the other two are serious proposals but AFAIK not generally accepted. The light dashes are not seriously held anymore. — kwami (talk) 10:35, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

I like your edits to the caption. If you have a source that supports that assessment of the level of consensus for the groupings, I can edit the image to make a clearer distinction between the "heavy dashed" and "light dashed/dotted" lines (de-emphasizing the latter). – Joe (talk) 10:37, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

The Routledge Language Family Series, Rainer Vossen (ed.) The Khoesan Languages (2013) is a good overview. But the submission deadline for the chapters was 1999, so it's not as up to date as its publication date suggests. Honken does the intro to classification. He may have still considered KS valid at that point, though he'd abandoned that position by 2010. He does say, however, that "Hadza is currently regarded as an isolate by nearly everyone", and in his review of Greenberg (1966), quotes him as saying "Sandawe and Hatsa will be shown to be related" to KS -- in other words, even Greenberg admitted that he had not shown this. Meanwhile, Westphal (1963) didn't accept a relationship between any of the branches, or even the validity of !ui-Taa. (Though the data at the time was so poor that it would've been hard to demonstrate that family. It was really only the discovery, after the fall of Apartheid, that Nǁng was still spoken and was investigated that !Ui-Taa was put on a firmer footing and renamed Tuu.) Anyway, if you read that chapter and the others in that volume, you'll see that Khoe and now !Ui-Taa (Tuu) are universally accepted. Proto-Khoe has been reconstructed. Ju is just a dialect cluster, and so was never in question.

Kwadi: Gueldemann (2010) "Kwadi: from family-level to family-internal isolate", argues for a Khoe-Kwadi connection. I have never seen anyone dispute it. The problem is that the data for Kwadi is so poor that it's difficult to be certain. (My mistake above. We do have evidence for pronouns.) Gueldemann seems to accept the relationship as established, but in his papers seems to rather defensively argue that the data really is sufficient. So a heavy, long-dashed line might be appropriate there simply because of the paucity of evidence, or if you prefer a solid line because AFAIK no-one has argued against it.

Kx'a: Heine & Honken (2010) "The Kx'a family: A New Khoisan Genealogy" is widely accepted as demonstrating this family, which had been suspected for decades. Again, I don't know anyone who has contested it, and since the data is good, I'd give this a solid connecting line.

Khoe-Sandawe: Much of the putative evidence for Macro-Khoisan is actually between Khoe and Sandawe. Elderkin and Gueldemann argue for a relationship. Vossen is skeptical. This is one of those connections that looks quite promising, but not to the point of being completely convincing. It hasn't been demonstrated the way Kx'a and Tuu have been. A (heavy) dashed line would be appropriate here, I think.

Tuu-Kx'a: I can't remember who's proposed this. It's a minority view, and a proposal: AFAIK no-one claims it's been demonstrated. The general response is that this appears to be an areal connection, not a genealogical one, though it remains possible that the families will turn out to be related at a deeper level than all the mutual borrowings that have been presented as evidence for a connection. Definitely a dashed line, probably a light one.

SAK: This was Greenberg's proposal and is now seen as spurious. So a dotted line, as currently connects Hz and Sandawe.

Macro-KS: Even Greenberg didn't claim to have demonstrated this, so again a dotted line. But in addition he didn't propose a connection between Hadza and Sandawe, so Macro-KS should have three branches, with the Hz-Sandawe connection removed.

I'd change or remove the current branching in Khoe and Ju as well. For Khoe you could have Khoekhoe and Kalahari Khoe branches, joined by a solid line, as that's a clear bifurcation, but Nama-Damara is an ethnic distinction, not a linguistic one. !Kung and Ju|'hoan are practically synonyms. Separating them would be like separating Walloon and French in a family tree of Indo-European. I can only assume that Tishkoff did that because she mentions those nations in her genetics study and wanted to place all the names in the tree. These branches in the chart don't reflect branches in the families. Also, the Haiǁom have shifted from Ju to Khoe, so including it is confusing. Tuu should retain its two branches, though the representative language of the lower one is Nǁng -- Nǀu is just a dialect of Nǁng. I've read that the distance between the branches is about that of the the two branches of Germanic, but there's a clear bifurcation here. — kwami (talk) 22:33, 1 February 2019 (UTC)