A Sandawe Grammar

Description

Publication date: 2010 Number of pages: 206 ISBN: 978-1-55671-252-4This paper is a descriptive overview of the grammar of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken in Tanzania. The first section begins with a brief description of the geographical context of the Sandawe language, followed by a short summary of previous research into the language. This is followed by a phonological overview and an explanation of the sources and presentation of the data contained in the grammar. The aim of this paper is to present a descriptive overview of the grammar of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken in Tanzania. An effort has been made to provide a wide coverage of grammar topics and, consequently, no topic is covered in as much depth as it deserves. Leaving these disclaimers aside, it is hoped, however, that this grammar fulfils both its primary goal of being a practical resource for those working on the Sandawe Bible translation project and also its secondary goal of making the knowledge gained by those in the project more widely available.In the main, no attempt has been made to relate the Sandawe grammatical phenomena described here to those found in other Khoisan languages. Nor has much attention been paid to discussing the Sandawe phenomena with respect to their possible diachronic development. Instead, the grammar presented here concerns itself with how Sandawe is currently spoken and tries to describe the language using familiar and accessible categories and terminology. In the subsections of this introduction, a brief description of the geographical context of the Sandawe language is given, followed by a short summary of previous research into the language. A phonological overview forms the next subsection and is followed by an explanation of the sources and presentation of the data contained in this grammar.