Vowel harmony and the morphophonology of the verb ending *-ide in the Kikongo Language Cluster (West-Coastal Bantu)

A historical-comparative analysis

Abstract

This article presents a historical-comparative analysis of the morphophonological effects of the verb ending *‑ide, i.e. imbrication and vowel lowering, in the Kikongo Language Cluster. It focuses on the kind of vowel lowering that is to be distinguished from progressive Vowel Height Harmony (pVHH) as triggered by mid vowel roots. Kikongo stands out in being the sole Bantu group to include languages that miss pVHH but display vowel harmony in the presence of *‑ide. After having identified cross-linguistic patterns of variation and uniformity in the morphonological effects of *-ide in four relatively well-described Kikongo languages that do not undergo pVHH, we examine the geographic distribution of those patterns across the KLC and observe a south-north bias, especially in the spread of vowel lowering.

The morphophonological effects of *-ide are far more widespread than pVHH, both in terms of geography and genealogy, which makes reconstructing lowering of *‑ide to Proto-Kikongo (PK) far more likely than would have been the reconstruction of pVHH. We conclude that *-ide in PK, i.e. when not imbricated into a preceding morpheme, did indeed always have two identical vowels, but that it was either *-idi or *‑ele depending on the root vowel. In other words, we reconstruct a bisyllabic final suffix whose V₁ and V₂ are identical and whose intermediary consonant is coronal.

We account for the non-lowering of *-ide, occurring mostly in the northern part of the KLC, as an innovation resulting from the push back of this morphophonological alternation. We argue that those WK, NK and KK languages which miss *-ide vowel lowering lost it due to analogical levelling aiming at paradigm uniformity. Likewise, some SK and NK languages constrained its effects following the emergence of pVHH. Thus, rather than being a conservative relic area not affected by *‑ide vowel lowering, the northwestern part of the KLC (and Kihungan in the far east) is an innovative region where much of the morphophonology of *‑ide inherited from PK was dismantled. The variation observed today across the KLC is explained by varieties being more or less progressive in their tendency towards disactivating the morphophonology of *-ide.