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Linguistic Evidence for the Influence of the kanuri on the Hausa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Joseph H. Greenberg
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Extract

The present study is intended both as a substantive historical contribution, and as an illustration of the possibilities and the limitations of one particular type of historical inferences that can be drawn from language, namely, the study of words borrowed from one language into another. Two other basic linguistic sources for culture-historical conclusions are not considered here, those based on the relationships and distribution of languages as such, and those based on the reconstructed vocabularies of particular Ursprachen, that is, the ancestral speech-forms of specific groups of genetically related languages. These latter two methods are not excluded either for dogmatic or methodological reasons, but simply because they do not yield relevant results for the particular problems being considered, although they are very useful in other connexions. It should, however, be mentioned that, as will appear at a number of points in the discussion, a valid linguistic classification furnishes an indispensible framework for nearly all inferences drawn from linguistic data including the interlinguistic contact phenomena which are the subject of the present study.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , July 1960 , pp. 205 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1960

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References

1 Greenberg, J. H., ‘Arabic Loan-Words in Hausa’, Word (1974), III: 85–97.Google Scholar

2 For example, Westermann, D., Geschichte Afrikas (Köln, 1952), 127, 129Google Scholar and Fage, J. D., An Introduction to the History of West Africa (Cambridge, 1995), 34.Google Scholar

3 Rattray, R. S., Hausa Folk-Lore, Customs, Proverbs (2 vols., Oxford, 1955), II, 6.Google Scholar

4 Trimingham, J. S., Islam in West Africa (Oxford 1959), 7.Google Scholar

5 For details, see Greenberg, J. H., Studies in African Linguistic Classification (New Haven, 1955).Google Scholar

6 Examples include Hausa sár-(kí) ‘king’ =Akkadian îarru ‘king’, Egyptian śr ‘high official’; Hausa fùré: ‘flower’=Hebrew p∂ri ‘fruit’; Hausa k'd:rá: ‘cry out’=Scmitic qara?a lsquo;call’.

7 However, F. W. Parsons, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, to whom I am indebted for comments regarding this paper, informs me that, contrary to the dictionaries available to me, kullum can mean ‘every day’ in Hausa. In this case, the methodological point still stands, but the specific example cited here is invalid since no decision can be made.

8 Intervocalically the phoneme b appears as a voiced bilabial continuant in the dialect of Kanuri described by Lukas. This sound is written v by Lukas. The transcription used here is phonemic and transcribes this phoneme as b in all positions.

9 A borrowing into Hausa directly from the Arabic verbal noun qira:';at—is highly unlikely since this would be taken over normally as Kìrá:'à and because of the parallelism vith the noun for ‘writing’.

10 Palmer, H. R., Sudanese Memoirs (3 vols., Lagos, 1928), III, 89 assumes that birni in Hausa is a loan-word from Arabic. Its use as a proper name for the Bornu capital that was established after the centre of the empire shifted from Kanem suggests that it is originally a Kanuri word.Google Scholar

11 Guns were acquired by Idris Alooma from Tripoli. Hogben, Cf. S. J., The Muhaminadan Emirates of Nigeria (Oxford, 1930), 39–40.Google Scholar

12 For a list of these terms and their occurrences in other languages in Nigeria see Westermann, op. cit. 159–60.