2010
362 pp.
1 colour photo, 1 colour map, 8 b/w maps, 10 oscillograms, 4 diagrams, 46 tables
Text language: English
The First International Symposium on Khoisan Languages and Linguistics in Riezlern/Kleinwalsertal, Germany was organized by Bernd Heine (University of Cologne) and Rainer Vossen (Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main) in January 2003. This symposium turned out to be the first of a – in the meantime – well established series of regular academic meetings on Khoisan linguistics. Worldwide leading scholars attend these meetings on invitation.
“The genealogical affiliation of the non-Bantu and non-Cushitic click languages of Africa is still under debate, in particular whether they all form a coherent linguistic lineage referred to as ‘Khoisan’. The Khoe family […] plays an important role in this respect, for several reasons. In general, it has a special place in the history of African linguistic classification, because its Khoekhoe branch, formerly known as ‘Hottentot’, was intricately associated with Meinhof’s ‘Hamitic theory’ and was decisive in showing its ultimate untenability. Khoe is important within Khoisan, too, because it is the largest linguistic unit of a clearly genealogical nature and comprises the majority of attested languages subsumed under Khoisan. One consequence of this is that attempts towards Khoisan-internal classification beyond the level of obvious families have to focus on the properties of Proto-Khoe, which may reach back in time ca. 2000 years.” (Güldemann & Elderkin in this volume).
The articles of the volume deal with aspects of three different linguistic fields, i.e. language description (Miller, Kilian-Hatz, König, Visser, Kiessling, Ono), genetic classification (Güldemann & Elderkin, Sands) and sociolinguistics (Batibo, Chebanne and Brenzinger).