35.2476, Review: Lexical Reconstruction in Central Chadic: Wolff (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2476. Wed Sep 11 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2476, Review: Lexical Reconstruction in Central Chadic: Wolff (2023)

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Date: 11-Sep-2024
From: Troy Spier [tspier2 at gmail.com]
Subject: Phonetics, Phonology: Wolff (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.581

AUTHOR: H. Ekkehard Wolff
TITLE: Lexical Reconstruction in Central Chadic
SUBTITLE: A Comparative Study of Vowels, Consonants and Prosodies
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Troy Spier

SUMMARY

Conceptualized as a significantly expanded, exhaustive successor to
Wolff (2022) and building upon some forty years of research, Lexical
Reconstruction in Central Chadic is truly an astronomical undertaking.
Beginning with Gravina’s (2015) database and expanded through other
scholarship on the family, this project covers 5,500 words
corresponding to 228 roots in sixty-six linguistic varieties from
almost twenty Central Chadic subgroups. This volume contains six
chapters of various lengths (from just over one page to 248 pages) and
is accompanied by thirteen figures, thirty-one sets of isoglosses
represented in tabular format (described as “maps” in the book), and
almost two hundred detailed tables to exemplify the historical changes
discussed.

Chapter 1 opens by presenting three ‘extrinsic’ and four ‘intrinsic’
reasons for the poor state of Chadic historical linguistics. Although
the terminology is somewhat dubious, hence the usage of single
quotation marks, the reasons offered are quite sound. With reference
to the former, there are comparatively few linguists working on this
family, most Chadic linguistic varieties are minoritized, and a number
of geopolitical factors negatively impact accessibility to the regions
where these linguistic varieties are spoken. On the other hand, the
latter offers a tone reminiscent of Newman (1998) in its explication
of linguists’ lack of belief in the comparative method, unwillingness
to recognize the “typological peculiarities” (in the words of the
author) of Chadic, doubt concerning vocalic phonology and
reconstruction of this part of the phonemic inventory, and failure to
consider root augmentation in historical/comparative work. Put another
way, the current limitations on our understanding of Chadic
linguistics have little to do with the linguistic varieties themselves
but, instead, with the linguists who have worked on them. To
demonstrate the last of these reasons, the author introduces the
reader to twelve common, diachronic processes to illustrate otherwise
non-transparent/non-obvious reconstructions. Next, the author presents
his objectives and methodological approach for the present study,
highlighting the four levels of analysis, both synchronic and
diachronic, used in representing all the data highlighted. Finally,
before discussing the outline of the remainder of the book, this
chapter notes that there are some limitations arising from the data;
as such, sound correspondences—as opposed to sound changes—are
discussed, and, while reconstruction can elucidate the structure of
the family, this isn’t the author’s primary goal.

Chapter 2 describes the (morpho)phonology of Proto-Central Chadic. It
starts with five typologically important features addressing segmental
units; the phonemic status of vowels within the phonological
inventory, making comparisons to Gravina’s (2015) work;
non-concatenative morphology (“root-and-pattern” in the book) and the
position of vowels within it; the frequency of root augmentation; and
multi-level prosody (viz. palatalization, labialization, nasalization,
and glottalization). The phonological inventory is reconstructed for
both vowels and consonants, and approximants are segregated from
consonants on the basis of an underlying [±syll] feature. On the other
hand, the phonetic/phonemic distinction of vowels is addressed at
length, and the author acknowledges that one difficulty in
reconstruction is the variation and inconsistency in transcription
where as many as two to five vowels are transcribed with one grapheme.
Ultimately, he concludes that */a/ manifests as [a, ә]; */y/, as [y,
i]; and */w/ as [w, u]. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining
and schematizing four types of prosody to link the reconstructions to
present-day reflexes. The treatment of the schwa receives considerable
treatment here and in later chapters, too.

Chapter 3 offers a broad overview of five groups of diachronic,
phonological changes in Central Chadic, including deletion,
desegmentalization and prosodification, consonantal metathesis,
conditioned changes based on linguistic and social factors, and
petrification and fusion in roots. Though the fourth of these contains
the greatest coverage, each is addressed in turn both quantitatively
and qualitatively, and a number of notes are added for explanatory
purposes after analyses that either (a) require further detail or
support or (b) stand in opposition to one another not in the final
reconstruction but, rather, in the trajectory to achieve that result.

Chapter 4 is the longest chapter in the book, by far, and could serve
as a separate book on its own merit. In fact, it is in this chapter
that over one hundred examples of phonological and morphophonological
processes are introduced, defined, and exemplified in Central Chadic,
illustrating its simultaneously agglutinative and inflexional nature.
Although sixteen sections are demarcated, the first of these subsumes
the greatest amount of space and foregrounds sound changes affecting
consonants (e.g. delabialization, lenition, rhotacism, (de)voicing,
and fortition), primarily by working through individual phonemes by
place of articulation and their attested forms in present-day
linguistic varieties. While enumerations discuss particular changes
and linguistic exemplars, tables are employed to demonstrate the
trajectory of the change among the relevant linguistic varieties under
consideration. Next, the conversation shifts to the canonical
structures of roots and consonant clusters before shifting toward the
attested manifestations of common prefixes and suffixes and
reduplicative processes as instances of root augmentation. The chapter
concludes by proposing a tentative ordering of some of these changes
to situate them chronologically.

Chapter 5 analogizes the morphophonological structures that connect
Central Chadic to Proto-Afroasiatic. It begins with a brief
conversation surrounding early twentieth-century ideas that
distinguished “Chado-Hamitic” from “Chadic” while reinforcing the
supposed relationship between racial identity and language. This
background is necessary to support the author’s position outlined in
the first chapter that assigns significant blame to linguists
themselves. Put another way, he identifies five
characteristics—concerning phonological inventories and nominal and
verbal morphology—often used to separate Central Chadic artificially
from Afro-Asiatic more broadly. Finally, this chapter considers
non-concatenative morphology, examines particular phonological
features impacting or impacted by this morphology within the family,
and speculates on the status of the determiner in Proto-Afroasiatic.

Chapter 6, at approximately one page in length, is the shortest
chapter of the book. It does not attempt to summarize the content from
the other chapters but, rather, to present six guidelines for projects
in historical or comparative linguistics on the Chadic family. Some of
these are common to historical linguistics more broadly, such as
examining individual languages before reconstructing individual
subgroups before reconstructing the larger family itself. On the other
hand, others are specific to Chadic, e.g., to verify that linguistic
varieties assigned to Chadic are, indeed, Chadic in the first place;
to interrogate the synchronic and diachronic relationship among form,
function, and meaning before reconstructing the proto-grammar; and to
plot phonological and lexical isoglosses on maps to apprehend with
greater precision the sociohistorical factors that may have
contributed to the present-day, attested structures of these
linguistic varieties in the regions under consideration.

EVALUATION

Writing this book was clearly a labor of love, and the author should
be firmly recognized not only for his profound contribution to Chadic
linguistics, but also for the humility through which he has presented
and qualified his own findings. In truth, it has been quite some time
since this reviewer has read a book in which the author describes the
perceived shortcomings of his or her earlier work before proposing the
reasons that the present book serves as a remedy. Additionally,
despite the fact that this work proposes reconstructions that are, in
a sense, ‘correctives’ to the earlier database in Gravina (2015), the
author always maintains a professional, courtesy tone that does not
feel condemnatory or divisive. These are attributes that should be
more widely encouraged in academic circles, and the author has clearly
set the precedent for such discourse here.

In terms of content, this book is nothing short of a magnum opus that
advances our collective understanding quite significantly. The
methodology is sound, the examples are numerous, the prose is robust
and typographically well structured, and the coverage is exhaustive
when one genuinely considers the extent of the data included. If even
simply to provide an overview of the different perspectives, a limited
discussion on tonal phonology would have been welcome. On the other
hand, the organization of the content has not resulted in a text that
is truly accessible to most readers; indeed, this reviewer had to be
extremely judicious while reading so as not to confuse or conflate
subsections that, distinguished by very little white space, may ‘run’
together. Part of this stems from the fact that individual chapters
are extremely unbalanced in length, and some of this originates in the
reality that the fourth chapter could have been published as a
separate monograph entirely. For this reason, some restructuring of
the fourth chapter into (perhaps) three smaller chapters and the
collapsing of the fifth and sixth chapters into one would have
resulted in greater ease for the reader. Indeed, the latter of these
two makes rhetorical sense, given that the fifth chapter examines the
Proto-Afroasiatic antecedents of Central Chadic while the sixth
chapter presents a transparent set of guidelines for future
scholarship on this family. In this way, examining the distant past
and the long-term future would have coalesced in a manner as to
‘unify’ the author’s difficult task in reflecting on and acting upon
thousands of years of linguistic history. This is, of course, not
inherently the fault of the author, but more so a reflection of the
sheer breadth of data and the various levels of analysis offered.

REFERENCES

Gravina, Richard. 2015. Proto-Central Chadic Reconstructions.
https://www.webonary.org/centralchadic/

Newman, Paul. 1998. “We Has Seen the Enemy and It is Us: The
Endangered Languages Issues as a Hopeless Cause.” Studies in the
Linguistic Sciences, 28(2): 11-20.

Wolff, H. Ekkehard. 2022. A Historical Phonology of Central Chadic:
Prosodies and Reconstructions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Troy E. Spier is Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at
Florida A&M University. He earned his MA and Ph.D. in Linguistics at
Tulane University, his B.S.Ed. in English/Secondary Education at
Kutztown University, and a graduate certificate in Islamic Studies at
Dallas International University. His research interests include
language documentation and description, discourse analysis, corpus
linguistics, and linguistic landscapes.



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