Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I
Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I
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水晶球里的班图人，我
DOI：
10.2307/3171750
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发表时间：
1979
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
J. Vansina
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Vansina
超过三分之一的非洲地区居住着讲相关语言的人，这些语言属于班图语家族。一个多世纪以来，人们已经认识到这一点。早在 1886 年，哈里·约翰斯顿就认为这种情况是与一种真正的单一祖先语言（后来称为 UrBantu 或 Proto-Bantu）分化的结果。不可避免的问题出现了：一种语言或一组密切相关的方言如何能够在如此广阔的地区传播？班图人扩张的事实仍然是非洲历史上的一个重大谜团。许多人已经上钩解决这个问题。我在这里的主要目标是重述这个长达一个世纪的调查的显着特征，并以此来对当前形势进行评估。考虑到现有数据的性质和稀缺性，许多提议的重建都是推测性的，因此班图扩张的研究也是推测性历史和推测的一种练习。可用的数据各不相同，并且来自不同的学科，结果告诉我们在跨学科研究中可以做什么和不能做什么。在讲述中，我希望展示上个世纪欧美思想史的主要主题对这个问题有多少不同的考虑，以及学术传统一旦建立，在多大程度上指导和限制了所提出的解决方案。
More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it. My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.