Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

Trebor Jung said:

> [A question: Why does Swahili not have tones, like all the other Bantu
languages?]


I think the most likely answer is that the Swahili spoken today is a koine.


NB: It has been hypothesized that Swahili evolved from a pidgin/creole and
that that's why it has a reduced phoneme inventory (which continues to
shrink even today -- implosives are not represented orthographically, and
they're often either absent or random), no tones, a simplified noun class
system and no morphophonology to speak of -- compared to pretty much all
other Bantu languages. If it did evolve from a pidgin/creole, then it
would have to have had prominent Bantu substrates (among others, including
Farsi and Arabic) as well as a Bantu lexifier. I'm not sure it's a
hypothesis that can be falsified, and I think it's a tough one to take on
faith. I like the koine hypothesis because it only requires us to believe
that pre-Swahili evolving into Swahili was in constant contact with
(probably a wide variety of) other languages, that pre-Swahili evolving
into Swahili was an economically useful and widespread variety, and that
the evolution of Swahili involved a process of major simplification of the
language. From what we know of the history and prehistory of East Africa
and of the nature of Bantu, I find it pretty easy to believe all those
things.


-- Mark

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