LINGUIST List 9.113

Fri Jan 23 1998

Disc: Chadic, Tangale, Tarok

Editor for this issue: Elaine Halleck <elainelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Navorsingseenheid vir Eksperimentele Fonolo, Chadic, Tangale, Tarok

Tangale is a Western Chadic Language spoken South of the Nigerian
Plateau North of River Benue. Tarok was classified under Plateau 7 by
Greenberg, seems to be linguistically as well a geographically between
the Plateau und the Jukunoid languages. Spoken in the very close
vicinity of Tangale.

The article by Skip Robinson on Tarok is misleading insofar as it
descibes the reduplicative construction as possessive 3rd person
singular. In fact it describes a construction which better should be
translated with 'his own'. In some Plateau languages reduplication is
used to mark a special kind of pluralization 'a great number of
individual items of Xes' e.g. People went home to their respective
houses in contradsitinction ot "the houses of the village" Since I am
far off from my books I can give only impressionistic bibliographic
data: Gerhardt, Ludwig (1986 approximately): Zur Morphologie des
Kwoi. In A9frikanistische) A(rbeitspapiere). Cologne/Koeln For more
examples and more languages. Leonidas Sibomana has written a series
of articles on Tarok in Afrika und Uebersee either in the late
eighties or earlz nineties, where he discusses reduplication. My
e-mail adress is lgerhrrz.uni-hamburg.de. I'll be back in Hamburg at
the end of February.