Bak languages
The Bak languages are a group of typologically Atlantic languages of Senegal and Guinea Bissau linked in 2010 to the erstwhile Atlantic isolate Bijago. Bak languages are non-tonal.
| Bak | |
|---|---|
| Bak–Bijago | |
| Geographic distribution | Senegal, Guinea Bissau |
| Linguistic classification | Niger–Congo
|
| Subdivisions |
|
| Glottolog | cent2230[1] |
Bijago
Bijago is highly divergent. Sapir (1971) classified it as an isolate within West Atlantic. However, Segerer (2010) showed that this is primarily due to unrecognized sound changes, and that Bijago is in fact close to the Bak languages. For example, the following cognates in Bijago and Joola Kasa (one of the Jola languages) are completely regular, but had not previously been identified:
| Gloss | Bijago | Joola Kasa |
|---|---|---|
| head | bu | fu-kow |
| eye | nɛ | ji-cil |
Segerer reconstructs the ancestral forms as *bu-gof and *di-gɛs, respectively, with the following developments:
- *bu-gof
- > *bu-kof > *bu-kow > fu-kow
- > *bu-ŋof > *bu-ŋo > (u-)bu
- *di-gɛs
- > *di-kis > *di-kil > ji-cil
- > *ne-ŋɛs > *ne-ŋɛ > nɛ
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References
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Central Atlantic". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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