Abstract: | Koelle's Kano Hausa vocabulary, in spite of admitted scribal defects, sheds light on the direction and relative chronology of a number of well-established historical processes, both phonological and morphological, the more salient of which include weakening of syllable-final obstruents and nasals, frication, and changes in derivational verbal extensions and paradigmatic subject pronouns. Koelle's word-list represents a form of Kano Hausa which was spoken almost 150 years ago. Koelle gives entries for all but one of the 280 or so English glosses, in some cases listing more than one form, and making a total of over 300 different items. The corpus provided is evaluated and contrasted with Modem Kano Hausa from the point of view of phonology, morphology/syntax, and finally lexicon. Ref. |