The Emergence of Tense in Early Bantu

Examination of a set of non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages shows that most are aspect-prominent languages, that is, they either do not encode tense —the majority case— or, as the quotation indicates, there is reason to think that some have added tense to an original aspectual base. Comparative consideration of tense-aspect categories and morphology suggests that early and Proto-Niger-Congo were aspect-prominent. In contrast, all Bantu languages today encode both aspect and tense. The conclusion therefore is that, along with but independently of a few other Niger-Congo families, Bantu innovated tense at an early point in its development. While it has been known for some time that individual aspects turn into tenses, and not vice versa, it is being proposed here is that a whole aspectbased system added tense distinctions and become a tense-aspect system.