[3] About 6,000 years ago, it split off from Proto-Southern Bantoid when the Bantu expansion began to the south and east.
One scholar, Roger Blench, writes: "The argument from comparative linguistics which links the highly diverse languages of zone A to a genuine reconstruction is non-existent.
The homeland of Proto-Bantu was most likely in the upland forest fringes around the Sanaga and Nyong rivers of Southern Cameroon.
However, new research revealed that was more likely the original area of Proto-Southern Bantoid, before it spread southwards into Cameroon long before Proto-Bantu emerged.
Maho offers a broad characterization of five types of Bantu concordial systems.
Guthrie's original work uses y to describe the palatal semi-vowel, which has been normalised to use the j notation.
Malcolm Guthrie later reconstructed the same 19 classes as Meeussen, but removed locative prefix numbered 23.
[15] This arrangement permits the classification of noun classes via nonlinguistic factors like perception and cognition.
[15] During the last hundred years, beginning with Carl Meinhof and his students, great efforts have been made to examine the vocabulary of the approximately 550 present day Bantu languages and to try to reconstruct the proto-forms from which they presumably came.
Among other recent works is that by Bastin, Coupez, and Mann, which assembled comparative examples of 92 different words from all the 16 language zones established by Guthrie.
[19] (The asterisks show that these are reconstructed forms, indicating how the words are presumed to have been pronounced before the Bantu expansion began.)
[20] Building on the work done by A. E. Meeussen in the 1960s, a publicly searchable database of all the Bantu vocabulary items which have been established or proposed so far is maintained by the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren in Belgium (see External links).