WEBBALL : n° 20685, type : Book, mots-clés : saf;rsa;lng;grm;bnt;s.42;
Langue(s) traitée(s) : Zulu (00462).    Langue du texte : en

Wanger, P. Willibald (1927). Scientific Zulu grammar. Stuttgart : W Kohlhammer Verlag. xix, 346 pp.

Notes : “This book has been carried out with scholarly approach in many respects. Dealing with phonetics and the noun, it contains much new material and many valuable suggestions. The detailed treatment of Zulu prefixal formatives is especially meritorious. It is a valuable book of reference. It is seriously marred, however, by its arbitrary statement of ‘phonetic laws’, occupying pages 9 to 43, by which, for purposes of etymological gymnastics, any one sound is proved to be equal to practically any other. As an instance of this faulty treatment of sound-shifting, Wanger shows ‹z› to be equal, in turn, to ‹c›, ‹gcw›, ‹d›, ‹nd›, ‹hl›, ‹dhl›, ‹nhl›, ‹j›, ‹nj>, ‹m›, ‹p›, ‹q›, ‹nq›, ‹s›, ‹t›, ‹ts›, ‹tsh›, ‹v› and ‹y›. Building on such impossible premisses as these, Wanger then introduced extensive comparisons with ancient Sumerian, further spoiling his grammar with the thesis of a Sumerian derivation for Zulu and indeed all Bantu” (Doke 1945:78f). Three volumes were apparently planned but only one seems ever to have been published.

Date de la dernière modification : 2007-08-27