Neural Recovery of Historical Lexical Structure in Bantu Languages from Modern Data
We investigate whether neural models trained exclusively on modern morphological data can recover cross-lingual lexical structure consistent with historical reconstruction. Using BantuMorph v7, a transformer over Bantu morphological paradigms, we analyze 14 Eastern and Southern Bantu languages, extract encoder embeddings for their noun and verb lemmas, and identify 728 noun and 1,525 verb cognate candidates shared across 5+ languages. Evaluating these candidates against established historical resources-the Bantu Lexical Reconstructions database (BLR3; 4,786 reconstructed Proto-Bantu forms) and the ASJP basic vocabulary-we confirm 10 of the top 11 noun candidates (90.9%) align with previou...
| Authors | Hillary Mutisya, John Mugane |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 24 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 April 2026 |
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