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Selected Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics edited by Doris L. Payne and Jaime Peña ISBN 978-1-57473-420-1 library binding v + 203 pages publication date: 2007 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Koen Bostoen Bantu Plant Names as Indicators of Linguistic Stratigraphy in the Western Province of Zambia 16-29 (complete pdf) This paper presents a comparative study of some food plant names in the Bantu languages of the Western Province of Zambia: millet (Pennisetum glaucum + Eleusine coracana), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), maize (Zea mays), cassava (Manihot esculenta), and the (dwarf) mobola plum tree (Parinari curatellifolia/capensis). Some of these plants are indigenous and have been exploited for millennia. Others were introduced more recently. The variable distributional patterning of their lexical isoglosses informs us on the linguistic stratigraphy of the WP and illustrates how its current languages were originally divided by several linguistic frontiers, but have gradually integrated into a common linguistic area. |