History and Linguistics (1755 hits)

Aada koy detngna woni (Fulfulde)

Lammii ay dekkal demb (Wolof)

Speech is what gives shape to the past

 

The African sees a link between history and language. This view is common to Bantu, Yoruba and Mande. But that is not its originality.

 

Indeed, an Arab or a Greek before the time of Thucydides would certainly agree with the Fulani dictum that 'narrative is where we meet the past': Hanki koy daarol awratee.

 

What is special about the link between history and language in the African tradition lies in the view of history and language to which that tradition, on the whole, has adhered.

 

Language and thought are often identified, and history is seen not as science but as wisdom and as an art of living.

 

History aims at knowledge of the past. Linguistics is a science of language and speech. Historical narrative and historical works are contents and forms of thought. Language itself is the medium and prop of such thought.

 

Thus, obviously, linguistics and history each have their domain, their particular subject-matter and their methods. Nevertheless, there is interaction between them, at least from two points of view.

 

Language as a system and tool of communication is a historical phenomenon. It has its own history. As the medium of thought, and that of the past and knowledge of the past, it is the channel and the most important source of historical evidence. Thus linguistics, used here in its widest sense, covers an area of research which supplies history with at least two kinds of data: first, linguistic information properly speaking; and secondly, evidence which might be termed supra-linguistic. Linguistics can be used to see beyond the evidence of thought, beyond the conceptual apparatus used in a language and the oral or written evidence, to the history of men and their civilizations.

 

Once the problem is thus defined, it is easier to see what common ground there is between the historian and the linguist working on Africa.