Studies in Tuu (Southern Khoisan)

The first article proposes a new name for the Southern Khoisan family, based on the fact that all sufficiently attested languages show some reflex of the noun *tuu 'people'. This is a more suitable alternative to previous terms, because it not only unambiguously identifies the genealogical unit and is in line with established conventions for classificatory nomenclature, but also avoids several drawbacks of other terms, among them the heretofore unproven idea of a genealogical unit Khoisan. The second article gives more substantial and systematic evidence that Tuu alias Southern Khoisan itself is in fact a coherent genealogical entity. It first outlines basic structural features of Tuu languages showing that they constitute a robust and typologically fairly distinct language type. It goes on to show that this is associated with a sufficient amount of sound-meaning correspondences, in both grammar and lexicon, in order to warrant an interpretation in terms of inheritance from a common ancestor language. Both studies are the result of work carried out in the project 'Genetic and typological profile of the Tuu language family (alias Southern Khoisan): cataloguing and linguistic analysis of existing sources'. My sincere thanks to the 'Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft' for having sponsored this project with a research grant.