Carl Friedrich Michael Meinhof (23 July 1857 – 11 February 1944) was a German

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and one of the first linguists to study

African languages The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SI ...

Early years and career

Meinhof was born in Barzwitz near Rügenwalde in the Province of Pomerania,

Kingdom of Prussia The Kingdom of Prussia (, ) was a German state that existed from 1701 to 1918.Marriott, J. A. R., and Charles Grant Robertson. ''The Evolution of Prussia, the Making of an Empire''. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. It played a signif ...

. He studied at the

University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (; ), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The University of Tübingen is one of eleven German Excellenc ...

and at the

University of Greifswald The University of Greifswald (; ), formerly known as Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald, is a public research university located in Greifswald, Germany, in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Founded in 1456, it is one of th ...

. In 1905 he became professor at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin. On 5 May 1933 he became a member of the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...

Works

His most notable work was developing comparative

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

studies of the

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...

, building on the pioneering work of Wilhelm Bleek. In his work, Meinhof looked at the common

such as Swahili and Zulu to determine similarities and differences. In his work, Meinhof looked at

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

es with all Bantu languages having at least 10 classes and with 22 classes of nouns existing throughout the Bantu languages, though his definition of noun class differs slightly from the accepted one, considering the plural form of a word as belonging to a different class from the singular form (thus leading, for example, to consider a language like French as having four classes instead of two). While no language has all 22 (later: 23) classes active,

Venda Venda ( ), officially the Republic of Venda (; ), was a Bantustan in northern South Africa. It was fairly close to the South African border with Zimbabwe to the north, while, to the south and east, it shared a long border with another black hom ...

has 20, Lozi has 18, and Ganda has 16 or 17 (depending on whether the locative class 23 ''e-'' is included). All Bantu languages have a noun class specifically for humans (sometimes including other animate beings). Meinhof also examined other African languages, including groups classified at the time as Kordofanian, Bushman,

Khoikhoi Khoikhoi (Help:IPA/English, /ˈkɔɪkɔɪ/ Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''KOY-koy'') (or Khoekhoe in Namibian orthography) are the traditionally Nomad, nomadic pastoralist Indigenous peoples, indigenous population of South Africa. They ...

, and

Hamitic Hamites is the name formerly used for some North Africa, Northern and Horn of Africa peoples in the context of a Scientific racism, now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races; this was developed originally by Europeans in suppo ...

. Meinhof developed a comprehensive classification scheme for African languages. His classification was the standard one for many years (Greenberg 1955:3). It was replaced by those of

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...

in 1955 and in 1963. His ideas influenced the notation of African-language phonetics as advanced in the mid-nineteenth century by the Egyptologist

Karl Richard Lepsius Karl Richard Lepsius (; 23 December 181010 July 1884) was a German people, Prussian Egyptology, Egyptologist, Linguistics, linguist and modern archaeology, modern archaeologist. He is widely known for his opus magnum ''Denkmäler aus Ägypten ...

and gave rise to what some called the "Meinhof-Lepsius system" of

diacritical A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

markers. In 1902, Meinhof made recordings of East African music. These are among the first recordings made of traditional

African music The continent of Africa is vast and its music is diverse, with different regions and nations having many distinct musical traditions. African music includes the genres like makwaya, highlife, mbube, township music, jùjú, fuji, jaiva ...

Controversial views

In 1912, Carl Meinhof published ''Die Sprachen der Hamiten'' (The Languages of the Hamites). He used the term

. Meinhof's system of classification of the Hamitic languages was based on a belief that "speakers of Hamitic became largely coterminous with cattle herding peoples with essentially Caucasian origins, intrinsically different from and superior to the 'Negroes of Africa'."Kevin Shillington, ''Encyclopedia of African History'', CRC Press, 2005, p.797 However, in the case of the so-called

Nilo-Hamitic languages Paranilotic is a group of languages proposed by Carl Meinhof. Karl Lepsius had established the Nilotic languages as a family, with Western, Eastern, and Southern branches. Meinhof proposed that only Western were truly Nilotic, and that Eastern an ...

(a concept he introduced), it was based on the typological feature of gender and a "fallacious theory of language mixture." Meinhof did this in spite of earlier work by scholars such as Lepsius and Johnston demonstrating that the languages which he would later dub "Nilo-Hamitic" were in fact

Nilotic languages The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples. Etymology The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile river, Nile River or to the Nile region of A ...

with numerous similarities in vocabulary with other Nilotic languages. Merritt Ruhlen, ''A Guide to the World's Languages'', (Stanford University Press: 1991), p.109

Family

Carl Meinhof was the great-uncle (the brother of the grandfather) of Ulrike Meinhof, a well known German journalist, who later became a founding member of the

Red Army Faction The Red Army Faction (, ; RAF ),See the section "Name" also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang ( ), was a West German far-left militant group founded in 1970 and active until 1998, considered a terrorist organisat ...

(RAF), a

left-wing Left-wing politics describes the range of Ideology#Political ideologies, political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole or of certain social ...

militant group operating chiefly in

West Germany West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...

in the 1970s and 1980s.

References

*Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. ''Studies in African Linguistic Classification.'' New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. *Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. ''The Languages of Africa.'' Bloomington: Indiana University Press. *Meinhof, Carl. 1906. ''Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen.'' Berlin: Reimer. * Pugach, Sara. 2004. "Images of race and redemption: The Protestant missionary contribution to Carl Meinhof's ''Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen''",
Le Fait Missionaire: Social Sciences and Missions
' 15 (December 2004), 59–96.

External links