Students decipher one of most obscure languages on Earth

SAN FRANCISCO -- Nzadi is one of the most obscure tongues in the world. That's exactly why a University of California, Berkeley class has embraced it.

"There's nothing like the joy of discovering a language from scratch," said Cal linguistics Professor Larry Hyman.

The 10 students in his course, Introduction to Field Methods, are focusing on Nzadi this semester -- the first such effort in any college or university to examine this remote member of the Bantu linguistic family.

"It's a chance to study a language that nobody has studied before," said graduate student researcher Thera Crane. "That opportunity does not come around very often."

Nzadi is spoken by thousands of people in fishing villages along the Kasai River in Congo, a country with about 220 languages.

The students in Hyman's class have two goals. They want to figure out how to analyze an unfamiliar language and they plan to document Nzadi -- a tongue so unknown that it cannot be found in the Ethnologue, a compendium of almost 7,000 languages across the globe.

The first objective is crucial for researchers doing field work. As Crane put it: "How would you learn a language if you knew nothing about it?"

Hyman also would like to produce a grammar by the end of the semester that could be published. Each student would be responsible for a chapter.

The methodology course is offered from time to time, but has never before featured such an esoteric tongue -- the result of sheer serendipity. Hyman decided on Nzadi when he heard that a native speaker was living in Berkeley.

That speaker, Simon Nsielanga Tukumu, grew up in the Congolese village of Bundu in a family of fishermen. He was ordained there in July as a Jesuit priest, and is now working toward a master's degree in ethics at the Graduate Theological Union, a few blocks from the university.

He is also a linguistic consultant in Hyman's class.

"I'm a little bit surprised to speak Nzadi in Berkeley," said Nsielanga, 38. "For me, it's a way of bringing awareness to Americans that there is this language spoken in the Congo but not known by many people."

Christina Agoff, 21, who is taking the course, said, "Most people don't understand how unusual it is to have a speaker of such an obscure language. And most of my classes have been theoretical. I wanted to get some practical work. It's so much different than our other classes. It makes it like the real world."

In the class, which meets three mornings a week, Nsielanga and Hyman teach students how to grasp the essence of a language that exists in written form only in an unpublished 768-item word list that a Belgian scholar submitted to UC Berkeley's Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary, co-founded by Hyman in 1994.

"We're trying to discover how the grammar works, how to figure out what the sounds are, how you put words together to form sentences," Hyman said.

One Wednesday morning, the students -- all linguistics majors -- asked Nsielanga for the Nzadi equivalent of various words, such as house, eyebrow, place, firewood, jaw and skin.

For Nsielanga, who hopes to someday get a master's in political history and perhaps teach, the class is instructive.

"This is a starting point for writing a history of the Nzadi people," he said. "And this class gives me strength to know how to teach."

For Hyman, 61, it's a way to explore his endless fascination with languages, especially the 500 or so Bantu tongues, and unravel the mysteries of one still untouched by any sort of scrutiny.

Hyman, who spent two years in Cameroon, specializes in tones, which are crucial in a language such as Nzadi.

"We have something much more special this time," Hyman said. "We'll be putting Nzadi on the map and it will be valuable."

He added that Nsielanga has asked people in his village to gather proverbs, which could tie the class further to this distant part of the world.

"It's a part of Africa not very well known at all -- like it's out of the 'African Queen' or something," Hyman said.

A sampler of Nzadi words:

Iba = man

Okar = woman

Wa = village

Ikie = egg

Dzi = eye

Ote = tree

Iman = stone

Ntsur = animal

Mbva = dog

Out = night

Mpful = bird

Etwa = bag

Nda = hunger

Ebam = kidney

Man = ground

Mbvwa = path

(E-mail Patricia Yollin at pyollin(at)sfchronicle.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)