The BantuFirst team gave two talks at the jubilee 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 50 years after the first ICHL conference, which was held from 4 to 8 September 2023 at the University of Heidelberg.
The first one was part of the workshop “Interactions at the dawn of history: Methods and results in prehistoric contact linguistics” organized by Rasmus G. Bjørn (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena) and Marwan Kilani (University of Basel – Swiss National Science Foundation), the second part of a general session on “Reconstruction and periodization”.
1. “Pre-Bantu substrate in Batwa Bantu languages of the Congo rainforest: A comparative study of nasal-oral stop cluster reduction” by Koen Bostoen, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli, & Sara Pacchiarotti;
2. “Uncovering lost paths in the Congo rainforest: A new, comprehensive phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli & Koen Bostoen.
Due to a technical issue causing delay in generating of phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu, the second talk was eventually replaced last minute by the following talk:
3. “Word-final reduction of Proto-Bantu *ng as a diagnostic feature for successive divergence and convergence in West-Coastal Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata & Koen Bostoen.
