Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Kwadi group (Central Khoisan family).

Languages included: Kwadi [kwd-kwd].

DATA SOURCES

Güldemann & Elderkin 2010 = Güldemann, Tom; Elderkin, Derek. On ex\-ternal genealogical relationships of the Khoe family. In: Matthias Brenzinger, Christa König (eds.). Khoisan Languages and Linguistics. Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium. January 4-8, 2003, Riezlern/Kleinwalsertal. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 15-52. // A paper that convincingly demonstrates the Khoe affiliations of Kwadi. Contains a large amount of data extracted from the unpublished manuscripts of the late E. O. J. Westphal, collected either by himself or by A. de Almeida.

Westphal 1966 = Westphal, Ernst O. J. Linguistic research in SWA and Angola. In: Die ethnischen Gruppen Südwestafrikas. Wissen\-schaft\-li\-c\-he For\-sch\-ung in Südwestafrika, Bd 3. Windhoek: Südwestafrikanische Wissen\-schaft\-liche Gesellschaft, pp. 125-144. // Relatively short paper that contains a valuable, albeit very small, comparative vocabulary section, with data on multiple "Khoisan" idioms personally collected by the author, including a few lexical items from Kwadi.

Westphal 1971 = Westphal, Ernst O. J. The Click Languages of Southern and Eastern Africa. In: Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Hague/Paris: Mou\-ton, pp. 367-420. // A comparative survey of the linguistic properties of various "Khoisan" groups. Incorporates a small amount of data on Kwadi, including pronominal and noun paradigms.

Westphal Ms. = Several manuscripts included in E. O. J. Westphal's online archive, now available for general use at the official site of the University of Cape Town at: http://srvrhldig001.uct.ac.za/. Most of the information has been extracted from the handwritten Document No. 000020103 (mss_bc1143_c4_1.pdf); the authorship of the document, however, is by A. de Almeida rather than Westphal himself.

NOTES

1. General.

Kwadi is an extinct language, once spoken in the Southwestern coastal regions of Angola. The only available data on Kwadi come from the records that were collected by linguist E. O. J. Westphal and anthropologist Antonio de Almeida in the mid-XXth century; since most of them have remained officially unpublished, up until recently the only source of knowledge were very brief amounts of data published in two papers by Westphal (1966, 1971), which serve as the default sources for the current wordlist. With Westphal's archives finally digitalized and made accessible by scholars at the University of Cape Town, additional data have finally surfaced, enough to trigger some serious comparative research [Güldemann & Elderkin 2010].

Unfortunately, the data still remain insufficient to compile a reliable 100-wordlist: only about 50 slots can be filled in with relative certainty, which is still enough to confirm a close genetic link between Kwadi and "regular" Khoe languages, but hardly enough to properly determine the degree of that closeness (particularly in the glottochronological sense). We still deem it useful to put up whatever can be recovered of the data, since Kwadi may be an important "missing link" between Khoe and the much more removed Sandawe.

Data that were collected by A. de Almeida are generally more numerous than Westphal's, but also less reliable in terms of phonetic accuracy of transcription. However, since quite a few basic lexicon items are only known in Almeida's transcription, we have no choice but to include them, sometimes even in the status of the main entry. Almeida's data are distinguished from Westphal's either with the notation (Alm.) (if taken from [Güldemann & Elderkin 2010], or marked as [Westphal Ms.].

2. Transliteration.

Generally, Westphal and de Almeida employ the same orthographic conventions to render Kwadi phonetics and phonology (a complete description of which is lacking; we do not really know the total number and nature of either the click or non-click phonemes of the language). The major differences between their notation and UTS transliteration are limited to the notation of non-click phonemes and are as follows:

UTS	Westphal / de Almeida
cʰ, kʰ	ch, kh
ʒ	dz
č	tš
ɲ	ny
kʸ, tʸ	ky, ty
tɬʼ	ƛʼ
ʔ	'
Vː	VV
Vˤ	V̨

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin (last update: December 2012).