Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Agneby group (Kwa family).

Languages included: Abé [agn-abe]; Abidji [agn-abj].

DATA SOURCES

I. General

Herault 1983 = Atlas des Langues Kwa de Cote D'Ivoire. Tome 2: Listes lexicales et etudes comparatives. Sous la direction de Georges Herault. Institut de Linguistique Appliquée, Université d'Abidjan. // The second volume of this work comprises extensive (560-item) wordlists for 16 Kwa languages, as well as various comparative sketches (but no attempts at phonetic or lexical reconstruction). Particular contributors include Jérémie Kouadio Nguessan for Abé (Abbey), and Chantal Tresbarats for Abidji.

II. Abé

Kouadio 1983 = Kouadio Nguessan, Jérémie. L'Abbey. In: Atlas des Langues Kwa de Cote D'Ivoire. Tome 1: Monographies. Sous la direction de Georges Herault. Institut de Linguistique Appliquée, Université d'Abidjan, pp. 13-39. // Brief phonetic and grammatical sketch of Abé.

III. Abidji

Tresbarats 1983 = Tresbarats, Chantal. L'Abidji. In: Atlas des Langues Kwa de Cote D'Ivoire. Tome 1: Monographies. Sous la direction de Georges Herault. Institut de Linguistique Appliquée, Université d'Abidjan, pp. 41-65. // Brief phonetic and grammatical sketch of Abidji.

NOTES

General.

The Agneby subgroup of the Kwa family is currently a debatable taxon, since the proportion of direct semantic matches on the Swadesh list is remarkably small. However, this may be partially due to the lack of a properly identified system of phonetic correspondences. Current cognation indexes between Abé and Abidji are based on either phonetic similarity or a very preliminary and approximate identification of patterns, and should be approached with caution.

Morphology: Agneby languages do not feature highly productive systems of class prefixes, but preserve many such prefixes as relict phenomena (particularly Abidji and Adioukrou). Where possible, based on paradigmatic evidence (e.g., see 'foot' in Abidji), or systemic considerations, such prefixes have been segmented from the root in the database. However, there is no guarantee that all the segmentation has been performed correctly.

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin (last version: October 2011).