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Third, the supposedly borrowed words tend to be fundamental vocabulary, those
terms which are putatively least suspect to borrowing. Fourth, “some common Bantu
words are found widely in West Sudanic, others are not found at all.” This situation is
most easily explained if we consider the former to be Proto-Niger-Congo terms, while the
latter are shared innovations unique to Bantu. If Bantu is not a part of Niger-Congo, it
would be difficult to explain how the former terms were borrowed throughout West
Sudanic. Greenberg’s fifth reason is that the supposed transitional languages are fact
Bantu. This issue will be dealt with in the next section.
C.3.2 Narrow vs. Wide Bantu
A second way in which Greenberg differs from Guthrie is in the question of what
exactly constitutes Bantu. He points out that certain supposedly transitional languages in
the northwest Bantu border area resemble Bantu more closely than they do the other
Benue-Congo languages; he cites Bamum, Bali, Banen, and Jarawa as examples. He
claims that “these languages show lexical innovations characteristic of Bantu languages
as against the remaining Benue-Congo languages.” Unfortunately, he does not provide
examples. Greenberg considers these languages to fit in the northwestern subgroup of
Bantu which includes Duala and Yaunde.
Williamson (1971, cf. Watters 1989) picks up on this wider use of the term
“Bantu”. She distinguishes between “Wide Bantu”, which is slightly more inclusive than
Greenberg’s use of Bantu, and “Narrow Bantu”, which is essentially Guthrie’s Bantu.
Wide Bantu is the same as Watter’s Southern Bantoid in the chart above.
The question which concerns us here is not which grouping should receive the
label “Bantu”, but whether either Wide or Narrow Bantu as defined do indeed form a
genetic unity. As mentioned above, Greenberg claims that his Bantu shows shared
innovations, but he does not provide examples, so establishing Wide Bantu as a genetic
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