Do the widespread 1sg n-/m- and 2sg b-/w- paradigms signal an African macro-family, or are they just the linguistic fingerprints of 12 000 years of contact?
Pronouns Across Africa: Shared Roots or Shared Contact?


Do the widespread 1sg n-/m- and 2sg b-/w- paradigms signal an African macro-family, or are they just the linguistic fingerprints of 12 000 years of contact?

Exploring how ultra-stable words like pronouns and numerals preserve deep traces of linguistic ancestry across continents.

A deep dive into two speculative etymologies linking the global N-pronoun to ‘knowing’—either semantically (knower = self) or phonetically (ǵn- > n-).