Holden Clare Janaki
Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2002 Apr 22;269(1493):793-9. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2002.1955.
Linguistic divergence occurs after speech communities divide, in a process similar to speciation among isolated biological populations. The resulting languages are hierarchically related, like genes or species. Phylogenetic methods developed in evolutionary biology can thus be used to infer language trees, with the caveat that 'borrowing' of linguistic elements between languages also occurs, to some degree. Maximum-parsimony trees for 75 Bantu and Bantoid African languages were constructed using 92 items of basic vocabulary. The level of character fit on the trees was high (consistency index was 0.65), indicating that a tree model fits Bantu language evolution well, at least for the basic vocabulary. The Bantu language tree reflects the spread of farming across this part of sub-Saharan Africa between ca. 3000 BC and AD 500. Modern Bantu subgroups, defined by clades on parsimony trees, mirror the earliest farming traditions both geographically and temporally. This suggests that the major subgroups of modern Bantu stem from the Neolithic and Early Iron Age, with little subsequent movement by speech communities.
语言分化发生在言语社群分裂之后，其过程类似于孤立生物种群的物种形成。由此产生的语言具有层次关系，类似于基因或物种。因此，进化生物学中发展起来的系统发育方法可用于推断语言树，但需要注意的是，语言之间在一定程度上也会发生语言元素的“借用”。利用92个基本词汇项目构建了75种班图语和班图类非洲语言的最大简约树。树上字符的拟合度很高（一致性指数为0.65），这表明树模型能很好地拟合班图语的演变，至少对于基本词汇来说是这样。班图语树反映了大约公元前3000年至公元500年间农业在撒哈拉以南非洲这一地区的传播。由简约树上的分支定义的现代班图语亚群在地理和时间上都反映了最早的农业传统。这表明现代班图语的主要亚群起源于新石器时代和早期铁器时代，此后言语社群的迁移很少。
