“Every Language Is an Archive”: On Historiography and Linguistic Evidence

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Notes

1. See Christopher Ehret, Southern Nilotic History: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of the Past (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974); A Historical Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan (Cologne: Köppe Verlag, 2001); An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History 1000 BC to AD 400 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

2. For a comprehensive primer, see Terry Crowley, An Introduction to Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

3. Theoretical overviews of this approach include: James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Jay Lemke, Textual Politics: Discourses and Social Dynamics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

4. One of the earliest works along these lines was Edward Sapir, Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1916); other groundbreaking sources include, inter alia, Jan Vansina, “The Uses of Process Models in African History,” in The Historian in Tropical Africa, ed. Jan Vansina and Robert Maury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 375–89, and “The Uses of Ethnographic Data as Sources for History,” in Emerging Themes of African History, ed. Thomas Ranger (Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1968), 97–124; Christopher Ehret, “Linguistic Evidence and Its Correlation with Archeology,” World Archeology 8.1 (1976): 5–18, and “Historical Inference from Transformations in Cultural Vocabularies,” Sprache und Geschichte in Africa 2 (1978): 189–218; David Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender and Social Identity in the Great Lakes to the 15^th Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

5. Vansina, “The Use of Process Models,” 375–89; Christopher Ehret, “Linguistics as a Tool for Historians,” in Hadith, ed. Brian Ogot (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), vol. 1, 119–33; Christopher Ehret and Martin Posnansky, eds., The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1982).

6. Cf. Christopher Ehret, “Language Change and the Material Correlates of Language and Ethnic Shift,” Antiquity 62 (1988): 565–70; Stuart Ambrose, “Archeology and Linguistic Reconstruction in East Africa,” in Ehret and Posnansky, The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History, 104–57; B. Heinek and D. Nurse, eds., African Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

7. Cf. Jay Spauding, “The Old Shaiqi Language in Historical Perspective,” History in Africa 17 (1990): 283–92; Christopher Ehret, “The Demographic Implications of Language Change and Language Shifts,” in African Historical Demography, ed. Christopher Fyfe and David McMaster (Edinburgh: Center for African Studies, 1981), vol. 2, 153–82.

8. Cf. Jan Vansina, How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), intro. to chap. 1.