Everything about Phuthi Language totally explained
Phuthi (
Síphùthì)is a
Nguni Bantu language spoken in southern
Lesotho and areas in
South Africa adjacent to the same border. The closest substantial living relative of Phuthi is
Swati (or
Siswati), spoken in
Swaziland and the
Mpumalanga province of South Africa. Although there's no contemporary sociocultural or political contact, Phuthi is linguistically part of a historic
dialect continuum with
Swati. Phuthi is heavily influenced by the surrounding
Sotho and
Xhosa languages, but retains a distinct core of lexicon and grammar not found in either Xhosa or Sotho, and found only partly in Swati to the north.
The documentary origins of Phuthi can be traced to Bourquin (1927), but in other oblique references nearly 200 years from the present (Ellenberger 1912). Until recently, the language has been very poorly documented with respect to its linguistic properties. The only significant earlier study (but with very uneven data, and limited coherent linguistic assumptions) is Mzamane (1949).
Geography and demography
It has been estimated that around 20 000 people in
South Africa and
Lesotho use Phuthi as their home language, but the actual figures could be much higher. No census data on Phuthi-speakers is available from either South Africa or Lesotho.
Phuthi is spoken in dozens (perhaps many dozens) of scattered communities in the border areas between where the far northern
Eastern Cape meets
Lesotho: from Herschel northwards and eastwards, and in the
Matatiele area of the northeastern
Transkei; and throughout southern
Lesotho, from
Quthing in the southwest, through regions south and east of
Mount Moorosi, to mountain villages west and north of Qacha (
Qacha's Nek).
Within Phuthi, there are at least two dialect areas, based on linguistic criteria: Mpapa/Daliwe vs. all other areas. This taxonomy is based on a single (but very salient) phonological criterion (presence/absence of
secondary labialisation). Mpapa and Daliwe (
Sotho Taleoe [taliwe]) are villages in southern Lesotho, southeast of
Mount Moorosi, on the dust road leading to Tosing, then on to Mafura (itself a Phuthi-speaking village), and finally Mpapa/Daliwe. Other Phuthi-speaking areas (all given in
Lesotho Sotho orthography) include Makoloane [makolwani] and Mosuoe [musuwe], near
Quthing, in south-western Lesotho; Seqoto [siǃɔtɔ] (
Xhosa Zingxondo, Phuthi
Sigxodo [sigǁɔdɔ]); Makoae [makwai] (Phuthi
Magwayi) further to the east; and a number of villages north and west of
Qacha's Nek. (Qacha is the main southeastern town in Lesotho, in the
Qacha's Nek District). Phuthi-speaking diaspora (that is, heritage) areas include the far northern
Transkei villages of Gcina [gǀina] (on the road to the Tele Bridge border post) and Mfingci [mfiŋǀi] (across the Tele River, opposite Sigxodo, approximately).
Political history
The most famous Phuthi leader in the historical record was the powerful Chief Moorosi (born in
1795), who died in unclear circumstances on
Mount Moorosi (
Sotho Thaba Moorosi) in
1879, after a protracted nine-month siege by the
British, '
Boers' (for example Afrikaner) and
Basotho forces (including the military participation of the
Cape Mounted Riflemen). This siege is often referred to as "Moorosi's Rebellion". The issue that triggered the siege was alleged livestock theft in the Herschel area. In the aftermath of the siege, Phuthi people dispersed widely over what is contemporary southern Lesotho and the northern
Transkei region, in order to escape capture by the colonial powers. It is for this reason, it has been hypothesised, that Phuthi villages (including Mpapa, Daliwe, Hlaela, Mosifa and Mafura -- all to the east of
Mount Moorosi, in
Lesotho) are typically found in such topographically mountainous regions, accessible only with great difficulty to outsiders).
After the siege of "Moorosi's rebellion", many Phuthi people were captured, and forced into building the bridge (now, the old bridge) at
Aliwal North that crosses the Senqu (
Orange River). Prior to
1879, Moorosi had been regarded as a very threatening competitor to commonly acknowledged father of the Lesotho nation, Chief
Moshoeshoe I. Even though currently represented to some extent in the Lesotho government in
Maseru, subsequent to the 1879 uprising, the Phuthi people essentially fade from modern Lesotho and Eastern Cape history.
Classification
Phuthi is a
Bantu language, clearly within the southeastern Zone S (cf. Guthrie 1967-1971). But within southern Africa Phuthi is viewed ambivalently as being either a
Nguni or a
Sotho-Tswana language, given the very high level of hybridity displayed at all subsystems of the grammar (lexicon, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax).
But Phuthi is genetically—along with
Zulu,
Xhosa,
Ndebele and
Swati—certainly a
Nguni language. Thus, it should be numbered in the S.40 group within Zone S, following
Guthrie's classification. Further, given the range of lexical, phonological and even low-level phonetic effects that appear to be shared almost exclusively with
Swati, Phuthi can be classified uncontroversially as a
Tekela Nguni language, that is, in the subset of
Nguni that includes
Swati, some versions of
Southern Ndebele, and the Eastern Cape remnant languages,
Bhaca and
Hlubi.
The standard claim (for example Mzamane 1949) that Phuthi displays very heavy contact and (anti-Nguni) levelling affects from its long cohabitation with Sotho (for a period perhaps in excess of three centuries) is confirmed in the contemporary lexicon and morphology. There is, for example, a very high level of 'lexical doublets' for many items, for many speakers. There are also regional effects: the Mpapa Phuthi dialect (the only one to retain labialised coronal stops) leans much more heavily towards Sotho lexicon and morphology (and even phonology), whereas the Sigxodo dialect leans more towards Xhosa lexicon and morphology (and even phonology).
Phonology and morphology
Sustained field work in 1994/1995 among speech communities in Sigxodo and Mpapa (southern
Lesotho) resulted in the discovery of a surprisingly wide range of phonological and morphological phenomena (including the nine that follow here), aspects of which are unique to Phuthi (within all of the southern Bantu region).
Click consonants
Phuthi has a system of
click consonants, typical for nearly all
Nguni, at the three common articulation points: dental, alveolar and alveolateral. But the range of click release types, or 'accompaniments' is relatively impoverished, with only four: plain, aspirated, voiced, nasalised).
Swati, by comparison, has essentially only one click type (dental [|]), but five (or even six) release types. The reduced click range in Phuthi is partly related to the complete phonological absence of prenasalised consonant NC sequences.
Vowel harmony
Two
vowel harmony patterns propagate in opposite directions: perseverative super
close vowel height harmony (left-to-right); and anticipatory
ATR/RTR tenseness harmony, invoking
mid vowels [eo ɛ ɔ] (right-to-left). In the first, 'super
closeness'—also a
Sotho vocalic property—in root-final position triggers suffix vowels of the same supercloseness value. In the second, all mid vowels uninterruptedly adjacent to the right edge of a phonological word are lax ([RTR]); all other mid vowels are tense ([ATR]).
Vowel imbrication
Vowel imbrication is the vowel harmony-like morphophonological phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. Vowel imbrication in two-syllable verb roots is effectively fully productive in Phuthi, that is,
-CaC-a verb stems become
-CeC-e in the perfective aspect (or 'perfect tense').
Labialisation
Labialised coronal consonants [tftfw dv dvw], that is, consonants with distinct heterorganic (fricated) secondary articulation, generally found to be exceedingly rare in
Bantu languages).
Tone
Either of two surface
tone distinctions, H (high) or L (low), is possible for each syllable (and in certain limited cases rising (LH) and falling (HL) tones are possible too). There is a subtype within the L tone category: when a syllable is 'depressed' (that is, from a depressor consonant in the
onset position, or a morphologically or lexically imposed depression feature in the syllabic
nucleus), the syllable is produced phonetically at a lower pitch. This system of tone depression is phonologically regular (that is, the product of a small number of phonological parameters), but is highly complex, interacting extensively with the morphology (and to some extent with the lexicon). Phonologically, Phuthi is argued to display a three-way High/Low/toneless distinction. Like all Nguni languages, Phuthi displays phonetically rising and falling syllables, always related to the position of a depressed syllabic nucleus.
Depressed consonants
In line with a number of southern Bantu languages (including all
Nguni,
Venda,
Tsonga and
Shona), and also all
Khoisan languages of southwestern Africa), a significant subset of the consonants in Phuthi are '
depressors' (or '
breathy voiced'). These consonants are so named because they've a consistent depression effect on the pitch of an immediately successive H (high) tone. In addition, these consonants produce complex non-local phonological tone-depression effects.
Swati and Phuthi have similar properties in this respect, except that the parameters of the Phuthi depression effects are significantly more complex than those documented thus far for Swati.
Tone/voice interaction
Significantly complex
tone/
voice interactions have been identified in Phuthi. This phenomenon results in what is analysed at one level as massive and sustained violations of locality requirements on a H tone domain arising from a single H tone source, for example surface configurations of the type HLH (in fact H L* H) are possible where all H syllables emanate from a single underlying H source, given at least one L syllable being depressed. Such tone/voice configurations lead to grave problems for any theoretical phonology that seeks to be maximally constrained in its architecture and operations.
The last two phenomena are non-tonal
suprasegmental properties which each take on an additional morphological function in Phuthi:
Morphological use of vowel height
The 'super
closeness' property also active in the first
vowel harmony type (above) is active in at least one paradigm of the Phuthi
morphological system (the axiomatic negative polarity of the copula: "There is no..."). A morphological use for a vocalic property (here: supercloseness) doesn't appear to be recorded elsewhere for a Bantu language.
Morphological use of breathy voice/depression
The vocalic property
breathy voice/depression is separated from the set of consonants that typically induces it, and is used grammatically in the morphological copulative — similar to the Swati copula — and elsewhere in the grammar too (for example in associative prefixes formed from 'weak' class noun prefixes 1,3,4,6,9).
Phrases
» Ngivisisa siKguwa kanci tejhe - I understand a little English
Ngiyakutshadza - I love you
» Ngiyalitshadza likhaya lakho lelitjha - I love your new home
Ngiyatitshadza tijha takho letitjha - I like your new dogs
» Ngiyatitshadza titfoga takho letitjha - I like your new sticks
Alphabet
The Phuthi alphabet:
vowels
Bibliography
Bourquin, Walther (1927) 'Die Sprache der Phuthi'. Festschrift Meinhof: Sprachwissenschaftliche und andere Studien, 279-287. Hamburg: Kommissionsverlag von L. Friederichsen & Co.
Donnelly, Simon (1997) 'Aspects of Tone and Voice in Phuthi'. (MS.) U. Illinois PhD dissertation.
Donnelly, Simon (1999) 'Southern Tekela is alive: reintroducing the Phuthi language'. In K. McKormick & R. Mesthrie (eds.), International Journal of the Sociology of Language 136: 97-120.
Ellenberger, David-Frédéric. (1912) History of the Basuto, Ancient and Modern. Transl. into English by J.C. Macgregor. (1992 reprint of 1912 ed.). Morija, Lesotho: Morija Museum & Archives.
Guthrie, Malcolm. (1967-1971) Comparative Bantu: An Introduction to the Comparative Linguistics and Prehistory of the Bantu Languages. (Volumes 1-4). Farnborough: Gregg International.
Msimang, Christian T. (1989) 'Some Phonological Aspects of the Tekela Nguni Languages'. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Africa, Pretoria.
Mzamane, Godfrey I. M. (1949) 'A concise treatment on Phuthi with special reference to its relationship with Nguni and Sotho'. Fort Hare Papers 1.4: 120-249. Fort Hare: The Fort Hare University Press.Further Information
Get more info on 'Phuthi Language'.
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