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Some Notes on the Pronunciation of the Kanuri Language of West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Extract

By the courtesy of the Commissioner for the Nigerian Section of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, I was able to make the following notes on Kanuri, after about a dozen sittings with a native of Kano, in 1924, and a few more in 1925. The native, whose name is Arigana, spoke no English other than a few isolated words such as yes, good morning, come, sit, etc. I knew no Kanuri at all, nor Hausa, which he could also speak. Mr. Nicholson, who was in charge of the natives in 1924, explained to Arigana what I wanted, and I worked on the following plan. I had Kanuri Readings, by P. Askell Benton, and Koelle's Grammar of Kanuri. In the first of these books several stories are written in a Koman script, with a word for word and a free translation, a Kanuri-English and English-Kanuri vocabulary, the latter a particularly full one. Between the summers of 1924 and 1925 I also used Noël's Petit Manuel de Francais-Kanuri and von Duisberg's Kanuri-Sprache.

Type
Papers Contributed
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1926

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References

1 A centralized vowel is one in which the highest part of the tongue is neither front nor back, but retracted from a front, or advanced from a back position.