ABSTRACT
It was Meinhof who advocated the method of classification, principally as an outcome of the technique of comparative Bantu philology he originated. Briefly it would involve the establishing of a genealogical table for the language family. The essence of this method consists in the drawing of isoglosses on the map in order to show the distribution of Various linguistic features. Then if several of the isoglosses coincide, this may be taken as the boundary between different language areas. There is only one satisfactory way in which the closeness of the relationship between languages can be determined by means of word-lists. Lexical differences of the second kind, which have scarcely been considered at all up to this time, consist mainly of features which have a phonological or tonal significance. The phonological differentias are not concerned with the actual sounds used in speech, nor with the deduced 'sound-changes' studied in comparative Bantu philology.
