In a recent (and as yet unpublished) study of Swahili intonation (John Kelly and Joan Maw) it was pointed out that the neutral situation vis-à-vis grammar is to have one tone-group corresponding to one clause (except under certain predictable conditions), and within the tone-group to have two points of reference, named the ‘salient’ and the ‘tonic’, whose neutral positions (again except in certain predictable cases) are respectively on the first lexical item and on the last item in the clause. Any other arrangement constitutes ‘special’ intonation. Amongst other conclusions, it was tentatively hypothesized that special intonation of the multiple tone-group type seemed to correlate with marked clause structure. Marked clause structure, as defined in Maw, Sentences in Swahili, London, 1969, designated clauses with marked sequence of elements of structure, such as the Subject following the Predicator, the Complement preceding the Predicator, the Subject and Predicator separated by an Adjunct, and so on (the neutral situation being generally the sequence (A)SPC(A)); and also discontinuous clauses. The hypothesis that multiple tone-groups and marked clause structure might show correlation could only be tentative, because in the passages used for the Kelly and Maw study marked clause structure was not particularly frequent. But in the most varied text there were 36 clauses with marked sequence of elements, of which 28 had multiple tone-groups. Moreover there were only 37 clauses with multiple tone-groups in all in that text. This particular point about possible correlation was, of course, only a minor suggestion in a general description, but it seemed worth looking into more closely.

E. W. Stevick's study of Ganda (1969) is an important contribution to our understanding of a complicated tone system, both through the new data on conjugation which it makes available and through the rules which allow of a unified treatment of nominal and verbal units as they appear either alone or in the sentence. The present paper is an attempt to make use of some of the possibilities offered by Stevick's work, especially by reducing the unanalysed types of verb stems to sequences of underlying formatives to which appropriate rules can apply, and by interpreting junctures in phonological terms. Several questions, e.g. rules pertaining to enclitics, had to be left out of account; this is due to the fact that the present author had no possibility of working with an informant for this analysis (no more than for any of his previous work on Ganda).

It is, of course, for his immense contribution to linguistics and the general study of African languages that Wilfred Whiteley is known. It is sometimes forgotten that he was originally trained as an anthropologist and, moreover, retained this disciplinary thrust in his treatment of linguistic problems. In a truly extraordinary manner he was able to keep up to date with much anthropo-logical literature, a fact of considerable significance in his recent move into the field of sociolinguistics. For anthropologists as much as for linguists he is here irreplaceable. The important consolation is the existence of the initial fruits of his labours in this new field of sociolinguistics (Whiteley, 1966, 1969, 1971, in press, and many articles) and the fact that many of us are trying to respond to his great example.

It is possible to distinguish broadly four types of Swahili poetry in East Africa today.

The first type, mashairi (lit.) ‘poems’, is characterized in form by symmetrical verses which have an equal number of lines (usually not exceeding six) in each verse, and an equal number of syllables (usually not more than sixteen) in each line. This type is extremely popular with the people and with the majority of the poets: mashairi appear regularly in Swahili newspapers—Baraza, Kiongozi, Uhuru, etc.—and weekly radio programmes in Tanzania and Kenya are devoted to them. It is thus not surprising that almost every Swahili scholar is familiar with this form, and the bulk of the publications on Swahili poetry both in English and in Kiswahili are on it. Since much has been written on its prosody, I shall not discuss it further here.

The people known to both Africans and Europeans as Mbugu (Wambugu, Vambugu) live in the western Usambara mountains in Tanzania among the Sambaa. Their language, long known as posing a linguistic problem, is usually-described as having a non-Bantu lexicon and a Bantu grammatical structure. However, the actual linguistic situation is somewhat more complicated than this, as our researches (A.N.T. 1965, M.A.B. 1959) now show.

In July 1913 Dejazmatch Tafari (as the Emperor Haile Sellassie I was then styled), governor of the large Harar province of Ethiopia, issued a proclamation which was intended to counteract certain abuses in tax-collecting under which the peasants had been chafing. The text of this proclamation was recently printed in the Emperor's autobiography, but another version of the same proclamation is extant and was published in J. I. Eadie's An Amharic reader, CUP, 1924, 183 ff. Neither His Imperial Majesty nor the late Major Eadie is specific about the provenance of the text in his possession, and the only information vouchsafed by Eadie is a brief reference in the first sentence of the preface to his book that ‘the subject matter of this Reading Book was collected in Addis Abeba in 1913 from literate Amharas’.

At the beginning of this year (1973) members of the Department of African Languages at the University of Cape Town met in a daily seminar to discuss post-radical elements in predicatives [P] occurring in sentences [Ss] of the type:

Ss → [(S) + P]

where the subject [S] precedes a verbal predicate [Pv] … but not a copular predicate [Pc]. The topic of our discussions was in part the subject of Professor Whiteley's work on transitivity in Swahili, though we extended it to consider the relationship between the verbal extensions … which we will consider here … and certain syntactical preferences. In this work we were happily joined by Professor A. N. Tucker and it seemed to us that the subject of our labours was a fitting contribution to the memorial publication planned for Wilfred Whiteley by his colleagues at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. Even though my colleagues did not have the pleasure of knowing Wilfred Whiteley they wished to be joined in this tribute to a fellow Bantuist.