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(Redirected from Bak language)
Atlantic language group of West Africa
David Dalby coined the term Bak from the bVk- prefix found in the personal plural forms of demonstratives in the Bak languages. The -k- is not found in other Atlantic languages.
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
Comparative vocabulary
Comparison of basic vocabulary words of the Bak languages:
^ Wilson, William André Auquier. 2007. Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification. (Schriften zur Afrikanistik, 12.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Sapir, David (1971). "West Atlantic: An inventory of the languages, their noun class systems and consonant alternations." Current Trends in Linguistics 7:45-112. The Hague: Mouton.
Segerer, Guillaume. 2010a. ‘Isolates’ in ‘Atlantic’. Paper presented at the International Workshop “Language Isolates in Africa,” Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (DDL) Lyon, 3‒4 December.