CARL MEINHOF (1857-1944)

The Growth of Comparative Bantu Philology

C. M. Doke

Probably the greatest figure in Comparative Bantu philology is Carl Meinhof (1857-1944) of Hamburg, whose two comparative works, Grundriss einer Lautlehre der Bantusprachen (1899) and Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen (1906), marked a new scientific approach, and brought all the care of real scientific research to bear upon the subject.

Meinhof was born on July 23,1857, at Barzwitz in Kreis Schlawe in Pommern, where his father was pastor. After studying in Halle, he became a gymnasium teacher for seven years, and then for seventeen years a pastor at Zizow in Pommern. Meinhof had come into contact with African Natives in his youth, some of whom had been sent to Germany from various mission fields. His interest in African languages was thus aroused. At one period a Duala man was sent to him for German tuition, but he took the opportunity of learning Duala from him. He assiduously studied the published works dealing with African languages and became an ardent disciple of Lepsius, whose ‘Standard Alphabet’ he accepted, and advocated to the day of his death.

In 1899 he published in Leipzig the first edition of his epoch- making Grundriss einer Lautlehre der Bantusprachen. In this Meinhof, using for his detailed analyses the Bantu languages of Pedi (Northern Sotho), Swahili, Herero, Duala, Konde and Sango, demonstrated the laws of sound-shifting between these languages, all of which, with the exception of Pedi, were in then German colonial territory. Unlike his predecessors, Appleyard, Bleek and Torrend, Meinhof did not take as his ground-form for comparison any of the living Bantu languages, be it Xhosa as Bleek or Tonga as Torrend ; but, following a most detailed study of Bantu phonology, he postulated an original parent Bantu language, an Ur-Bantu, from which the modern Bantu languages have sprung. Since Bantu languages have only been reduced to writing since the advent of the White man, with the one exception of Swahili which has been written in Arabic script for a few centuries, we have not got historical evidence of soundchanges or vocabulary or grammatical development which we can study. Meinhof was forced to work backwards, and what he has demonstrated in this book cannot, in the circumstances, be other than a hypothetical reconstruction. Other investigators may differ from him in points of detail, but it cannot be denied that his hypothetical forms provide a sound and useful basis for comparative work.

He postulates three basic vowels, a, i, u, with two light mixed-vowels,¹ e, o, and two heavy mixed-vowels, f, û ; these latter parti- cularly being the cause of certain drastic sound-changes. His basic consonants are as follows :

to which he adds the derived sounds :

So satisfactory have been these postulations that Meinhof has not found it necessary to make any alteration in this basis, though the 2nd edition of his work appeared eleven years later, and the 3rd, his English Bantu-Phonology, as recently as 1932.

The book opens with a chapter on Orthography in which he sets out his table of consonants according to Lepsius. Certain modi- fications, to meet special Bantu needs, were made in this system by Meinhof in the later editions. The orthographic principle followed was that of a basic symbol, e.g. t, with diacritic modifications, e.g. with subscript tilde, dot or circumflex ; and this system has been followed by most German recorders of Bantu languages. The system has its advantages in that for practical purposes in an individual language the diacritic may sometimes be omitted ; it has, however, been strongly held that the principle of separate symbols for different phonemes, as advocated by the International Phonetic Association, is more scientifically correct and upon this point Professor Meinhof differed strongly from the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, from the Executive Council of which he withdrew soon after its inception.

In the next chapter he set out his thesis concerning Ur-Bantu. After this follow detailed comparative analyses of each of the six Bantu languages specially studied. In the Bantu-Phonology² of 1932, the languages chosen for this study were altered to Pedi, Zulu, Swahili, Konde and Kongo.

Too much importance cannot be attached to this work. The phonetic analyses in this book became the pattern, not only for much subsequent work by Meinhof, but for that of many other German researchers, numbers of whom were pupils of his. The work he did on Ur-Bantu roots was continued and expanded later by O. Dempwolff³ and W. Bourquin⁴ and provides the basis for valuable comparative root studies.

In 1902 Meinhof went to Zanzibar for research on a stipend from the Government. From 1903-1909 he taught at the Seminar in Berlin, and from 1909 onwards was on the staff of the Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg. While in Berlin he was responsible for the remarkable series of ‘ Linguistische Studien in Ostafrika ’ which were published in the Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen, Suaheli, Sambala, Namwezi and Sukuma appearing in 1904, Digo, Nika and Pokomo in 1905, Bondei, Zigula, Mbugu and Mbulunge in 1906, Dzalamo and Ndorobo in 1907, Makua and Yao in 1908.

Meinhofs work at this time was not confined to Bantu languages. In 1905 he published in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenland¡sehen Gesellschaft a considerable paper entitled ‘ Hottentottische Laute und Lehnworte im Kafir,’ and a further work on Hottentot, his Lehrbuch der Namasprache appeared in 1909.

Meanwhile, in 1906, Meinhof published the companion volume to his ‘ Lautlehre,’ under the title of Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, a reconstruction of the grammatical forms of Ur-Bantu. Though this book has not attracted the attention accorded to his Lautlehre, MeinhoPs Grammatik is a work worthy of deep study by students of Bantu. In it he deals with the basic structure of the Noun, setting out the hypothetical forms for 21 class prefixes and indicating as far as possible the significations of these classes. Meinhof had a much greater amount of first-hand material to work upon than Bleek, and he used it to good advantage in this work. He had pointed out in his Lautlehre (1899) that Bleek had not included the prefix iγi which he numbered 19 ; in his Grammatik he now added two further prefixes, viz. the augmentatives, uγu- and ίγΐ-. More recent investigations have added to Meinhof’s 21, two more classes : 15a, uku- and 20a, αγα-, Meinhof s treatment of the development of the pronouns, with his deductions regarding the Ur-Bantu forms, reveals masterly handling, and a real scientific approach to the subject. He particularly deals with three considerations : (i) What common derivation have the pronouns of the various Bantu languages ? (ii) What connection is there between the absolute pronouns and the ‘ conjunctive ‘ (i.e. verbal concords) ? and (iii) What connection is there between the ‘ personal ‘ (i.e. absolute) and the possessives ? The rest of the book is of less importance than these first two chapters. He then deals with the Numeral, the Verb (in too cursory a fashion), the ‘ Particle ‘ (a strange mixture of oddments including conjunctions and interjections), and gives a short section on Syntax. To this are added an appendix of examples and a full index.

Soon after Meinhofs appointment to the Seminar für Kolonialsprachen in Hamburg, he founded the well-known Journal, Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen. From its inception in 1910 Meinhof was editor, and through all the years he stimulated the production of valuable papers mainly on African languages. Contributions from his own pen have been numerous and varied. Between 1915 and 1919 he published a large amount of language material entitled ‘ Sprachstudien im aegyptischen Sudan ;י this dealt with many languages, all non-Bantu, divided under four heads : Präfixsprachen, Sudansprachen, Nubischen Dialekte, and one Hamitensprache. The loss of the German colonies at the end of the Great War resulted in a change of title with this journal, which became the Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen. The journal, which was suspended during the Nazi War period, has provided an outlet for the contributions of most of the best-known writers on African languages, and is a scientific paper of great value.

In 1910 Meinhof wrote a popular little introduction to African languages entitled Die Moderne Sprachforschung in Africa, which was translated by Miss A. Werner and published in 1915 as An Introduction to the Study of African Languages. During this period he produced several little language handbooks : Herero (1909), Swahili (1910) and Duala (1912).

In 1912 appeared his great study, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, a book of great importance to students of Hamitic languages.

In 1927, when 70 years old, Meinhof who had been presented with a Festschrift in honour of his years of scholarship, visited South Africa with Frau Meinhof and lectured at the Universities. Even then he could not keep from research and visited a mission where he could contact Korana Hottentots. This resulted in his publishing in 1930 Der Koranadialekt des Hottentottischen. He had previously published a grammatical outline and vocabulary of one of the Southern Bushman dialects.

All this intense study and linguistic output earned for Meinhof the premier place among exponents of Bantu philology, and his comparative studies have secured a lasting position in the equipment of all serious students of Bantu.

Meinhof died in Germany in 1944, before the end of the Second World War.

Source : C. M. Doke, ‘ The Growth of Comparative Bantu Philology,’ Contributions to the History of Bantu Linguistics (Johannesburg, 1961), pp. 70-73. By permission of the Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, South Africa, and the author.

1 I.e. vowels of secondary derivation, due to a coalescence of some type.

2 Edited by N. J. van Warmelo.

3 ‘Ostbantu-Wortstämme,’ in Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen, VII.

4 Neue Ur-Bantu-Wortstämme, Berlin, 1923.

In Memory of Carl Meinhof

C. M. Doke and G. P. Lestrade

African Studies pays tribute to the memory of the greatest student of African languages and to the man whose name will ever be remembered as the greatest hitherto in the study of Comparative Bantu Philology. News of the death of Carl Meinhof has only recently reached us ; but we understand that he died in Hamburg in April, 1944, and his wife a few months later.

Carl Meinhof was born on July 23, 1857, and was in his eighty-ninth year. He continued to contribute to his journal, the Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen Sprachen, to the end ; the March 1944 number of which, recently to hand, contains a notice written by him.

We are glad to be able to publish in this number of African Studies an appraisement of MeinhoPs linguistic contribution from the pen of Professor G. P. Lestrade, and personal tributes from three of his students, Dr. W. M. Eiselen, Professor B. I. C. van Eeden and the Rev. W. Bourquin.¹

C. M. Doke

MEINHOF’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OUR KNOWLEDGE OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES

By G. P. Lestrade

It would be extremely difficult to overestimate the value of the work done by Meinhof in the field of African linguistics. In its combination of quantity and quality, of range and depth, it holds a unique place. In the course of his fortunately long career—though the life of a man such as he must, to his friends and admirers, always seem too short—this great scholar engaged in the most numerous and varied activities for the promotion of the science which he had made his life’s work, and with which his name must always remain prominently and gratefully associated. In his extensive researches and publications—kept up, we know, until the very eve of the latest world war, and continued, we may feel sure, during that war as it was during the previous one—he penetrated into every corner of the African linguistic field, and made, besides, more than one contribution of value to African studies other than linguistic, and to linguistic studies other than African. In his work as a teacher and guide of others interested in African languages and allied subjects, he gathered round him, both in his own school in Hamburg, and in places geographically far removed from that Mecca of the African linguist, an ever-growing band of pupils and collaborators, whom he inspired, stimulated, and in every way aided in the quest for knowledge of the African and his tongues ; and, with Meinhof at its head, and as its chief forum the journal which he founded as the Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen (renamed the Zeitschrift für EingeborenenSprachen when Germany had lost her colonies), the Hamburg school took and long retained the lead in African linguistic science, and, to say the very least, remained unquestionably in the very front rank when other schools of African languages became active elsewhere. Last but certainly not least, Meinhof was among the earliest and the greatest protagonists for the recognition of the importance of the study of African languages. Right from the days when none was doing more than he to turn the world’s somewhat inchoate body of knowledge concerning African speech into a science, down to the time when it was vouchsafed to him to see African linguistics an acknowledged academic discipline and to know himself an international figure therein, Meinhof fought for a realization of the value of African language-study, both from the practical angle of the part it can and must play in the government and administration of Africa, and from the theoretical contribution it could and should make to the world’s understanding of the nature of human speech in general.

South Africa, fortunately for itself, is able to count among its linguists several of MeinhoPs former pupils and collaborators ; and some of these are contributing elsewhere in the present number of this journal, articles of a more personal nature on the man whose memory every Africanist must honour. In the remainder of the present article an attempt will be made only to give some appréciation, however sketchy and otherwise inadequate, of the significance of Meinhofs work—and, moreover, of only part of that work, namely such of his publications as the writer has had access to.

Meinhof’s work on the Bantu languages may perhaps be considered as his greatest contribution to African linguistics ; and of this work perhaps the most important part was in the fields of phonetics, phonology and morphology, especially on the comparative side. The sounds of such Bantu languages as he took for study were subjected by him to finer and deeper analysis than, in most instances, had been the case before ; and in transcribing them uniformly in the accurate system of phonetic representation which he had taken over from the great Orientalist Lepsius, but which he had extended and adapted to meet the special problems of African phonetics, he laid the best if not indeed the only foundation for comparative phonetic and phonological studies. Again it was he who, having determined with accuracy and upon a comparative basis the existing sounds of Bantu languages of sample value as regards number and variety, subjected those sounds to enquiry of a more thoroughgoing kind than had ever been undertaken before, with a view to determining the laws that had determined the nature of these existing sounds, and the more original sounds from which they had in all probability been evolved. The results of this analysis were, inter alia, the discovery of more and wider-reaching special and general phonological laws, and the obtaining of more extensive and deeper insight into the phonetic structure of the hypothetical original Bantu parent-language, than had ever been done before. The data upon which Meinhof worked in this connection, and the conclusions he reached in this aspect of his labours, were embodied, on the one hand, in special studies of goodly number and range of individual Bantu languages (among which, in the South African area, Northern Sotho, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu found a place) ; and, on the other hand, in what many would regard as Meinhofs magnum opus, the Grundriss einer Lautlehre der Bantusprachen. This first saw the light in 1899 ; a second revised and improved edition was issued in 1910 ; and an English version, again revised, and also enlarged, appeared in 1932. This book has become an indispensable vademecum for the comparative Bantuist : Meinhofs methodical apparatus, particularly the framework of his Ur-Bantu, forms an invaluable system of reference for all work in the comparative philology of these languages ; the demonstration of the use of this apparatus in the hands of the master-craftsman is a classic in the literature of the subject ; and the results he presents are fundamental.

Meinhofs contributions to our knowledge of Bantu morphology are second in importance only to his work on the phonetics and phonology of this language-family. Even in primarily phonological publications, such as the Grundriss, and similar studies of individual Bantu languages not dealt with in that work, a considerable amount of morphological material is to be found ; and the morphological side is predominant in MeinhoPs introductory practical manuals for the study of certain Bantu languages. In addition to such special studies, there appeared in 1906 another comparative work, the Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, a worthy pendant to the Grundriss. In his morphological work, as indeed in his phonological, Meinhof was able to profit by the labours of others, notably Bleek, the ‘ Father of Bantu Philology ‘ ; but, with more and better information upon which to draw, with better techniques at his disposal, and perhaps also because he was endowed with better linguistic insight, he improved enormously upon Bleek’s results, as far as these went ; and he was also able to go a great deal further than Bleek had done. It may well be that some of MeinhoPs views regarding the morphology of the Bantu languages, particularly as to the classification of certain parts of speech and as to the nature of certain formative elements, will be superseded by those of a younger school of grammarians, just as a number of his own displaced in their time certain of the more old-fashioned concepts adhered to by Bleek and other of his predecessors. But the part Meinhof played in the development of modern ideas regarding the nature of Bantu grammar was of first-rate significance, and much of his work in this connection seems likely to live on in the very form in which he cast it.

Until the number of Bantu languages concerning which there is at least some approach to an adequate amount of information is very many times greater than at present, and until, moreover, the science of linguistics in general, and of Bantu linguistics in particular has evolved more certain and more widely-accepted techniques for the purpose than has hitherto been the case, questions concerning the genealogical classification of the Bantu tongues can be answered only very imperfectly and with the utmost reserve. The difficulties in the way of an answer to the question of the origin of these languages are even greater, especially when it is remembered that even in the case of language-families about which incomparably more information is available than we have about the Bantu, there is no sort of finality regarding their ultimate origins. Meinhof realized to the full the hazardous though tantalizing nature of such problems, and their study does not occupy a great place in his work. But he did not avoid them altogether ; and his answers, modestly-couched as they are, would appear to be based on surer ground than those vouchsafed in some other quarters. In particular, his theory of a Sudanic substratum of vocabulary has had a reasonably satisfactory amount of corroboration. As to the origin of Bantu morphological phenomena, Meinhof’s suggestion of the significance of Fui in this regard still remains the most plausible of the theories that have been advanced.

As has been indicated earlier, Meinhof by no means confined himself to the Bantu tongues. Indeed, he touched at one time or other upon all the indigenous language-families of the continent. In this connection, his contributions to our scanty knowledge concerning Bushman, and to the still relatively slender stock of information regarding Hottentot, are of special interest to us in South Africa. In the former field, we are indebted to him for a competent outline-grammar of one Bushman dialect, and a stimulating article on the relationship between Bushman and Hottentot. In the latter he gave us, inter alia, a full-length text-book of Nama and a thoroughgoing treatise on Korana (the latter one of the fruits of his only visit to our country), besides other material on Hottentot scattered through his other work, notably the chapter on Nama in his comparative study of Hamitic languages, and the Hottentot material in his study of Xhosa. So far there has been no notable advance on MeinhoPs work in the Hottentot field, save in the one aspect of phonetics.

The group of African languages to the study of which, next to the Bantu, Meinhof made the most important of his contributions was the Hamitic. In 1912 there appeared Die Sprachen der Hamiten, in which, for the first time, it was shown that these languages, which previous investigators had at the most claimed as constituting a group, actually formed a family, and in which the characteristics of that family were traced in a masterly manner. The wide and sparse geographical distribution of the members of this family, from Morocco to Somaliland and from Algeria to the Cape, and the remarkable divergences that exist between them in many respects, contrasting sharply with the obvious uniformity of the Bantu languages, made the proof of their underlying unity a particularly difficult one, and it is not the least of MeinhoPs achievements that he should have been able to wrest that proof so convincingly from the stubborn material. Meinhofs work on the Hamitic languages has, besides its importance for the family with which it primarily deals, however, certain very special significance in regard to at least two other families, the Bantu and the Semitic. As far as the first of these latter is concerned, there is offered to us here a body of evidence for the likelihood of a genealogical affinity between Bantu and Hamitic, through the twin demonstration that Ful, although constituting a very special case, must be included in the Hamitic family, and that, at the same time, it exhibits features which cannot be overlooked in any attempt to explain certain phenomena in the Bantu family. With regard to Semitic, Meinhof has, in several fundamental articles and in the last known to us of his books pointed out the remarkable parallels between the Hamitic and the Semitic families, and shown how a number of formerly obscure problems encountered in the latter could be explained in terms of phenomena met with in the former. His familiarity with Hebrew and Arabic lent still further weight to the authority of his evidence on such matters.

Though he left the field of Sudanic languages mainly to Westermann and other investigators, he himself in no way neglected these tongues. Both before and after the publication of Westermann’s Die Sudansprachen, Meinhof engaged in investigations and put out publications concerning this family also. The fruits of these researches are contained partly in his books and articles dealing more generally with African linguistic problems, and partly in a number of special studies, pride of place among these latter being held by the series published in the Zeitschrift during the years 1916-20 on various languages of the Egyptian Sudan. The mass of detail which these publications add to our knowledge of Sudanic, and the insight they afford us into its nature, afford convincing proof of the author’s high competence as a Sudanist.

Besides all the above named more or less specialized work, Meinhof also produced various linguistic studies of a more general kind. Some of these were primarily intended for the more advanced scholar, others for the more modest student or even the interested layman. Of the latter, the best-known and perhaps also the best is the book Die moderne Sprachforschung in Afrika, later also issued in English as An Introduction to the Study of African Languages. Scholarly and yet not pedantic, full of meat yet easily digestible, this work has served many a beginner as a first and most pleasant introduction to his subject ; and not a few Africanists of longer standing have refreshed their memories and synthesized their professional knowledge by a perusal of its pages. In this latter connection also mention should be made of the articles Meinhof was wont to publish from time to time, summing up the progress made in African linguistics, and indicating some of the main problems yet to be tackled. To more than one investigator the sober guidance together with the explicit or implicit challenge contained in these articles rendered stimulating and valuable service in their work.

Meinhof, as we have seen, was instrumental in demonstrating the significance of the study of one of the African language-families for the solution of problems arising in one of the great language-families outside Africa. In the course of his career he took more than one opportunity of pointing out to philologists in general the importance of African linguistic phenomena as regards the science of language at large. Phonetic, phonological and morphological features of African tongues were each taken by him in turn to show that the general linguist cannot now afford to be ignorant of the African language-field. Finally, he summed up the experience of a lifetime spent in the study of language in Die Entstehung flektierender Sprachen, which appeared towards the close of his active career, in which he gave proof, if any were necessary, that he was not only a great African linguist, but also a great linguist, without any limiting qualification.

That the study of African languages has aspects and values other than theoretical, and is of importance for disciplines other than the philological, was a frequent theme with Meinhof. In dealing with questions of nomic orthography, in discussing the development of these languages of primitives so that they might express those new ideas which the impact of a higher culture had brought into their sphere, in assessing the relative factors in the linguistic situation in an area, he on more than one occasion showed his sound sense of the practical. Again, in insisting, with apt proof, upon the theoretical significance of language-study for allied disciplines such as anthropology, and upon its practical necessity in colonial administration, he rendered valuable service in obtaining for the science at least some measure of the recognition it deserves in those other fields.

Great as was Meinhof’s output in the linguistic field, even this does not exhaust the sum of his publications. He found time and energy for work in other spheres of knowledge as well. Thus, besides occasional articles, we have from his pen several volumes in which he gathered together material that had come his way on non-linguistic topics : in folklore, Die Dichtung der Afrikaner and Afrikanische Märchen, in primitive law his Afrikanische Rechtsgebrauche, in primitive religion his Afrikanische Religionen. He himself would have been the first to insist that these were but parerga to his greater work, and that they must be regarded only as such. But, as with the Sprachforschung so with these books, many a beginner could do worse than derive his first notions concerning their respective subjects from them, many an advanced scholar has read them with profit.

This all too brief and sketchy article cannot hope to have done anything like justice to its theme : it can hope that it may have given, to those who do not know Meinhof’s work well, some idea of the volume, the variety, and the supreme importance of that work ; and that it may be adjudged, by those with better knowledge of the subject, a not entirely inadequate tribute to the great figure whose passing all Africanists will profoundly regret.

Source : C. M. Doke and G. P. Lestrade, ‘ In Memory of Carl Meinhof,’ African Studies 5.73-77 (1946). By permission of the Witwatersrand University Press, Johannes- burg, South Africa, and Professor Doke.

¹ [Editor’s note : The three personal tributes mentioned are omitted here.]