Nobiin language
This article needs additional citations for verification. (June 2009) |
Nobiin | |
---|---|
Halfawi, Mahas | |
Nòbíín | |
Native to | Egypt, Sudan |
Region | Along the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan |
Ethnicity | Nubian |
Native speakers | 680,000 (2023)[1] |
Early form | |
Coptic script (Old Nubian variant) Latin alphabet Arabic alphabet | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | fia |
Glottolog | nobi1240 |
Nobiin, also known as Halfawi, Mahas, is a Northern Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan language family. "Nobiin" is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ("Nubian") and literally means "(language) of the Nubians". Another term used is Noban tamen, meaning "the Nubian language".[2]
At least 2500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the
Nobiin is currently spoken along the banks of the Nile in
There is no standardised
Geography and demography
Before the construction of the
Practically all speakers of Nobiin are bilingual in Egyptian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic. For the men, this was noted as early as 1819 by the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in his Travels to Nubia. The forced resettlement in the second half of the twentieth century also brought more Nubians, especially women and children, into daily contact with Arabic. Chief factors in this development include increased mobility (and hence easy access to non-Nubian villages and cities), changes in social patterns such as women going more often to the market to sell their own products, and easy access to Arabic newspapers.[6] In urban areas, many Nubian women go to school and are fluent in Arabic; they usually address their children in Arabic, reserving Nobiin for their husband. In response to concerns about a possible language shift to Arabic, Werner notes a very positive language attitude.[7] Rouchdy (1992a) however notes that use of Nobiin is confined mainly to the domestic circle, as Arabic is the dominant language in trade, education, and public life. Sociolinguistically, the situation may be described as one of stable bilingualism: the dominant language (Arabic in this case), although used widely, does not easily replace the minority language since the latter is tightly connected to the Nubian identity.[8]
Nobiin has been called Mahas(i), Mahas-Fiadidja, and Fiadicca in the past. Mahas and Fiadidja are geographical terms which correspond to two dialectal variants of Nobiin; the differences between these two dialects are negligible, and some have argued that there is no evidence of a dialectal distinction at all.[9] Nobiin should not be confused with the Nubi language, an Arabic-based creole.
History
Nobiin is one of the few
The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan. For a long time it was assumed that the Nubian peoples dispersed from the Nile Valley to the south, probably at the time of the downfall of the Christian kingdoms. However, comparative lexicostatistic research in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that the spread must have been in the opposite direction. Joseph Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the two Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2500 years ago. This is corroborated by the fact that the oral tradition of the Shaigiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago. The speakers of Nobiin are thought to have come to the area before the speakers of the related Kenzi-Dongolawi languages (see classification below).
Since the seventh century, Nobiin has been challenged by
Classification
Nobiin is one of the about eleven Nubian languages.[citation needed] It has traditionally been grouped with the Dongolawi cluster, mainly based on the geographic proximity of the two (before the construction of the Aswan Dam, varieties of Dongolawi were spoken north and south of the Nobiin area, in Kunuz and Dongola respectively). The uniformity of this 'Nile-Nubian' branch was first called into doubt by Thelwall (1982) who argued, based on lexicostatistical evidence, that Nobiin must have split off from the other Nubian languages earlier than Dongolawi. In Thelwall's classification, Nobiin forms a "Northern" branch on its own whereas Dongolawi is considered part of Central Nubian, along with Birged (North Darfur) and the Hill Nubian languages (Nuba Mountains, Kordofan).[10]
In recent times, research by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst has shed more light on the relations between Nobiin and Dongolawi. The groups have been separated so long that they do not share a common identity; additionally, they differ in their traditions about their origins.[11] The languages are clearly genetically related, but the picture is complicated by the fact that there are also indications of contact-induced language change.[12] Nobiin appears to have had a strong influence on Dongolawi, as evidenced by similarities between the phoneme inventories as well as the occurrence of numerous borrowed grammatical morphemes. This has led some to suggest that Dongolawi in fact is "a 'hybrid' language between old Nobiin and pre-contact Dongolawi."[13] Evidence of the reverse influence is much rarer, although there are some late loans in Nobiin which are thought to come from Dongolawi.[14]
The Nubian languages are part of the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages. On the basis of a comparison with seventeen other Eastern Sudanic languages, Thelwall (1982) considers Nubian to be most closely related to Tama, a member of the Taman group, with an average lexical similarity of just 22.2 per cent.
Phonology
Nobiin has open and closed syllables: ág 'mouth', één 'woman', gíí 'uncle', kám 'camel', díís 'blood'. Every syllable bears a tone. Long consonants are only found in intervocalic position, whereas long vowels can occur in initial, medial and final position. Phonotactically, there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms like dàrrìl 'climb' and dààrìl 'be present' are found, but *dàrìl (short V + short C) and *dààrrìl (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly, féyyìr 'grow' and fééyìr 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not *féyìr and *fééyyìr.
Vowels
Nobiin has a five vowel system. The vowels /e/ and /o/ can be realised close-mid or more open-mid (as [ɛ] and [ɔ], respectively). Vowels can be long or short, e.g. jáákí 'fear' (long /aː/), jàkkàr 'fish-hook' (short /a/). However, many nouns are unstable with regard to vowel length; thus, bálé~báléé 'feast', ííg~íg 'fire', shártí~sháártí 'spear'. Diphthongs are interpreted as sequences of vowels and the glides /w/ and /j/.
Monophthongs | Front | Central | Back |
---|---|---|---|
Close | i, iː | u, uː | |
Close-mid | e, eː | o, oː | |
Open | ɑ, ɑː |
Consonants
Consonant length is contrastive in Nobiin, e.g. dáwwí 'path' vs. dáwí 'kitchen'. Like vowel length, consonant length is not very stable; long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases (e.g. the Arabic loan dùkkáán 'shop' is often found as dùkáán).
Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
affricates
|
-voice | p | t
|
cç | k | |
+voice | b | d
|
ɟʝ | ɡ | ||
Nasals | m | n
|
ɲ | ŋ | ||
Fricatives
|
-voice | f | s | ç | (h) | |
+voice | z | |||||
Trill | r
|
|||||
Approximants
|
l
|
j | w |
The phoneme /
Tone
Nobiin is a tonal language, in which tone is used to mark
- árré 'settlement' (high)
- nùùr 'shadow' (low)
In Nobiin, every utterance ends in a low tone. This is one of the clearest signs of the occurrence of a boundary tone, realized as a low tone on the last syllable of any prepausal word. The examples below show how the surface tone of the high tone verb ókkír- 'cook' depends on the position of the verb. In the first sentence, the verb is not final (because the question marker -náà is appended) and thus it is realized as high. In the second sentence, the verb is at the end of the utterance, resulting in a low tone on the last syllable.
Íttírkà
vegetables.DO
ókkéé-náà?
cook:she.PRES-Q
Does she cook the vegetables?
Èyyò
yes
íttírkà
vegetables.DO
ókkè.
cook:she.PRES
Yes, she cooks the vegetables.
Tone plays an important role in several derivational processes. The most common situation involves the loss of the original tone pattern of the derivational base and the subsequent assignment of low tone, along with the affixation of a morpheme or word bringing its own tonal pattern (see below for examples).
For a long time, the Nile Nubian languages were thought to be non-tonal; early analyses employed terms like "stress" or "accent" to describe the phenomena now recognized as a tone system.[16] Carl Meinhof reported that only remnants of a tone system could be found in the Nubian languages. He based this conclusion not only on his own data, but also on the observation that Old Nubian had been written without tonal marking. Based on accounts like Meinhof's, Nobiin was considered a toneless language for the first half of the twentieth century.[17] The statements of de facto authorities like Meinhof, Diedrich Hermann Westermann, and Ida C. Ward heavily affected the next three decades of linguistic theorizing about stress and tone in Nobiin. As late as 1968, Herman Bell was the first scholar to develop an account of tone in Nobiin. Although his analysis was still hampered by the occasional confusion of accent and tone, he is credited by Roland Werner as being the first to recognize that Nobiin is a genuinely tonal language, and the first to lay down some elementary tonal rules.[18]
Grammar
Pronouns
The basic personal pronouns of Nobiin are:
|
|
my | àyíín | án | ànní |
your | ìríín | ín | ìnní |
his/her | tàríín | tán | tànní |
our | ùùíín | úún | ùùní |
your | úríín | únn | únní |
their | téríín | ténn | ténní |
There are three sets of
Nobiin has two
ìn
this
íd
man
dìrbád
hen
wèèkà
one-OB
kúnkènò
have:3SG.PRES
'This man has a hen.'
mám
that
búrúú
girl
nàày
who
lè?
be.Q
'Who is that girl?'
Nouns
Nouns in Nobiin are predominantly disyllabic, although monosyllabic and three- or four-syllabic nouns are also found. Nouns can be derived from adjectives, verbs, or other nouns by appending various suffixes. In plural formation, the tone of a noun becomes low and one of four plural markers is suffixed. Two of these are low in tone, while the other two have a high tone.
- -ìì (L): féntí → fèntìì '(sweet) dates'
- -ncìì (L): àrréé → àrèèncìì 'falls'
- -ríí (H): áádèm → ààdèmríí 'men, people'
- -gúú (H): kúrsí → kùrsìgúú 'chairs'
In most cases it is not predictable which plural suffix a noun will take. Furthermore, many nouns can take different suffixes, e.g. ág 'mouth' → àgìì/àgríí. However, nouns that have final -éé usually take Plural 2 (-ncìì), whereas disyllabic low-high nouns typically take Plural 1 (-ìì).
Gender is expressed lexically, occasionally by use of a suffix, but more often with a different noun altogether, or, in the case of animals, by use of a separate nominal element óndí 'masculine' or kàrréé 'feminine':
- íd 'man' vs. ìdéén 'woman'
- tòòd 'boy' vs. búrú 'girl'
- kàjkàrréé 'she-ass' vs. kàjnóndí 'donkey'
The pair male slave/female slave forms an interesting exception, showing gender marking through different endings of the lexeme: òsshí 'slave (m)' vs. òsshá 'slave (f)'. An
In
- kàdíís 'cat' + mórrí 'wild' → kàdììs-mórrí 'wild cat'
- ìkìríí 'guest' + nóóg 'house' → ìskìrììn-nóóg 'guest room'
- tògój 'sling' + kìd 'stone' → tògòj-kìd 'sling stone'
Many compounds are found in two forms, one more lexicalized than the other. Thus, it is common to find both the coordinated noun phrase háhám ámán 'the water of the river' and the compound noun bàhàm-ámán 'river-water', distinguished by their tonal pattern.
Verbs
Verbal morphology in Nobiin is subject to numerous
ày
I
féjírkà
morning.prayer
sàllìr
pray:I.PRES
'I pray the morning prayer.'
Only rarely do verbal bases occur without appended morphemes. One such case is the use of the verb júú- 'go' in a serial verb-like construction.
áríj
meat
wèèkà
one:OB
fà
FUT
júú
go
jáánìr
buy:I.PRES
'I'm going to buy a piece of meat.'
Syntax
The basic word order in a Nobiin sentence is
kám
camel
íwgà
corn-OB
kàbì
eat:he.PRES
'The camel eats corn.'
ày
I
ìkkà
you-OB
ìn
this
kìtááppá
book-OB
tèèr
give:I.PRES
'I give you this book.'
Questions can be constructed in various ways in Nobiin. Constituent questions ('Type 1', questions about 'who?', 'what?', etc.) are formed by use of a set of verbal suffixes in conjunction with question words. Simple interrogative utterances ('Type 2') are formed by use of another set of verbal suffixes.
Type 1 | Type 2 | |
---|---|---|
I | -re/-le | -réè |
you | -i | -náà |
he/she | -i | -náà |
we | -ro/-lo | -lóò |
you (pl) | -ro/-lo | -lóò |
they | -(i)nna | -(ì)nnànáà |
Some of the suffixes are similar. Possible ambiguities are resolved by the context. Some examples:
mìn
what
ámán
water
túúl
in
áányì?
live:PRES.2/3SG.Q1
'What lives in water?'
híddó
where
nííl
Nile
mìrì?
run/flow:PRES.2/3SG.Q1
'Where does the Nile flow?'
ìr
you
sààbúúngà
soap:OB
jáánnáà?
have:2/3SG.PRES.Q2
'Do you have soap?'
sàbúúngà
soap:OB
jáánnáà?
have:PRES2/3SG.Q2
'do you sell soap?' / 'Does he/she sell soap?'
úr
you.PL
báléél
party.at
árágróò?
dance:PRES1/2PL.Q2
'Do you (pl.) dance at the party?'
Writing system
Old Nubian, considered ancestral to Nobiin, was written in a
.There are three currently active proposals for the script of Nobiin (Asmaa 2004, Hashim 2004): the
More recent educational material implements the teaching and using of the Nubian alphabet.[19]
Character | ⲁ | ⲃ | ⲅ | ⲇ | ⲉ | ⲍ | ⲓ | ⲓ̈ | ⲕ | ⲗ | ⲙ | ⲛ | ⲟ | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Phonetic value | /a, aː/ | /b/ | /ɡ/ | / d / |
/e, eː/ | /z/ | /i, iː/ | /j/ | /k/ | / l /
|
/m/ | / n / |
/o/ | |
Character | ⲡ | ⲣ | ⲥ | ⲧ | ⲩ | ⲫ | ⲱ | ϩ | ⳝ | ⲇⳝ | ⲧⳝ | ⳟ | ⳡ | ⳣ |
Phonetic value | /p/ | / r / |
/s/ | / t / |
/u, uː/ | /f/ | /oː/ | /h/ | /ç/ | /ɟ͡ʝ/ | /c͡ç/ | /ŋ/ | /ɲ/ | /w/ |
Notes and references
Notes
- ^ Nobiin at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
- ^ Nubian Language Society[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Nobiin". Ethnologue. Retrieved 26 September 2023.
- ^ "Nubians demand repatriation during Sisi visit". Al-Monitor. Retrieved 7 January 2022.
- ^ Rouchdy 1992b:92, citing Adams 1977.
- ^ Rouchdy 1992a:93.
- ^ Werner 1987:31: "Zwar ist fast jeder nubische Mann zweisprachig, und durch die Schule dringt das Arabische immer weiter vor, doch konnte nie der 'Verlust der Sprachkompetenz' beobachtet werden." [It is true that almost every Nubian man is bilingual, and that Arabic is pervading through education — but a 'loss of competence' was never observed.]
- ^ Rouchdy 1992a:95
- ^ Werner (1987:18—24), see also Bell (1974).
- ^ Thelwall 1982.
- ^ In particular, the speakers of Nobiin claim to be the only real Nubians of African descent, whereas the Dongolawi believe they are descendants of Arabian immigrants.Bechhaus-Gerst (1996, p. 298)
- ^ Bechhaus-Gerst 1996.
- ^ Heine & Kuteva 2001, p. 400.
- ^ Bechhaus-Gerst 1996, p. 306.
- ^ Werner 1987, p. 36.
- ^ The Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius spoke in 1880 of the Wohlklang of the Nubian language, and related this to the vowel distribution and the balance between long and short consonants.
- ^ In 1933 for example, Diedrich Hermann Westermann and Ida C. Ward wrote in their influential Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages that "Swahili and Nuba are good examples of languages which were probably once tone languages and which are said to have lost their tones" (p. 139).
- ^ Nowadays, Old Nubian is seen as a tonal language just like its descendant Nobiin. Browne writes that the Nobiin minimal pairs ín 'your.SG' vs. ìn 'this' and úr 'your.PL' vs. ùr 'head' appear in Old Nubian as en and our respectively. From the fact that the Nubians must have had a way to distinguish these forms even though they were written the same, he draws the conclusion that "[Old Nubian] probably followed the tone system observable in modern Nobiin".Browne (2002:23)
- ^ "Reading Nubian: Books for a new generation discovering their language". Middle East Eye. 20 July 2021. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
References
- Abdel-Hafiz, Ahmed S. (2009). A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian. Saarbrücken: VDM.
- Adams, William Y. (1977). Nubia, Corridor to Africa. London: Allen Lane.
- Adams, William Y. (1982). "The coming of Nubian speakers to the Nile Valley". In Ehret, C.; Posnansky, M. (eds.). The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. pp. 11–38.
- Ahmed, Asmaa Mohd. Ibrahim (2004). "Suggestions for Writing Modern Nubian Languages". Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages. 9. Entebbe: SIL Sudan: 185–213.
- Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne (1996). Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen im Niltal. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer diachronen Soziolinguistik (in German). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
- Bell, Herman (1974). "Dialect in Nobíin Nubian". In Abdalla, Abd el-Gadir Mohmoud (ed.). Studies in Ancient Languages of the Sudan. Khartoum. pp. 109–122.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Bell, Herman (2000). A survey of Nubian Place-Names (PDF) (Report). Working Paper. Vol. 19. United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names.
- Browne, Gerald M. (2002). A grammar of Old Nubian. Munich: LINCOM. ISBN 3-89586-893-0.
- Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig (or John Lewis) (1819). Travels in Nubia. London. Archived from the original on 2008-09-11.
- Hāshim, Muḥammad Jalāl Aḥmad (2004). "Competing Orthographies for Writing Nobiin Nubian". Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages. 9. Entebbe: SIL Sudan: 215–248.
- Heine, Bernd; Kuteva, Tania (2001). "Converge and divergence in the development of African languages". In Aikhenvald; Dixon (eds.). Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics. pp. 393–411.
- Lepsius, R. (1880). Nubische Grammatik. Mit einer Einleitung über die Völker und Sprachen Afrikas (in German). Berlin.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Rouchdy, Aleya (1992a). "'Persistence' or 'tip' in Egyptian Nubian". In Dorian, Nancy (ed.). Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 91–102. ISBN 978-0-521-32405-2.
- Rouchdy, Aleya (1992b). "Urban and non-urban Egyptian Nubian: is there a reduction in language skill?". In Dorian, Nancy (ed.). Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 259–266. ISBN 978-0-521-32405-2.
- Thelwall, Robin (1978). "Lexicostatistical relations between Nubian, Daju and Dinka". Études nubiennes: colloque de Chantilly, 2–6 juillet 1975. pp. 265–286.
- Thelwall, Robin (1982). "Linguistic Aspects of Greater Nubian History". In Ehret, C.; Posnansky, M. (eds.). The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. pp. 39–56. Archived from the original on 2005-04-03.
- Werner, Roland (1987). Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch). Nilo-Saharan Studies. Vol. 1. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. ISBN 3-87118-851-4.
- Westermann, Diedrich Hermann; Ward, Ida (1933). Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages. Oxford University Press for the International African Institute.
External links
- Nobiin audio samples and alphabet
- Nobiin basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
- New website with Nobiin texts and audio samples: www.nobiin.com
- ELAR Archive deposit of Nobíin, a Nubian languageby Kirsty Rowan & Herman Bell