AFRICAN LINGUISTIC PREHISTORY AND THE NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF VOCABULARY

Abstract

Theories of African prehistory rely heavily on linguistic evidence, primarily on the numerical analysis of vocabulary. In these analyses the nature of the relationship between languages is determined according to the proportion of cognate vocabulary they share. But an unknown proportion of this shared vocabulary may have been borrowed rather than inherited by ancestral languages. To minimise the proportion of borrowed items special vocabulary samples have been proposed including only ‘basic’ items which, it is claimed, are less likely to be borrowed. This paper reports on recent work to evaluate the force of this claim.