Nubian Comparison

Thanks to the kind and prolific Ideophone, I now have some new Nubian texts to compare to the mysterious inscription I have been writing about. Gerald M. Browne's "Old Nubian Grammar" is probably the most helpful work out there on Nubian, and Mark Dingemanse (the man behind the expressives) was kind enough to scan a dozen pages of it for me (before going off to catch the African Cup final, which once again was taken by a country which only considers itself African [at least socially] when it comes to sports ;), which included a couple of passages from Nubian translations of the Bible. A comparative analysis of the actual Nubian with the locally found inscription (well probably not local from Darfur, but brought from somewhere else in Sudan), reveals that the inscription could be Nubian, containing a lot of abbreviations, and possibly some letters used as numbers (accounting for the consonant strings). The strange vowel patterns which I commented on earlier were also consistent with some of the Nubian vowel groupings or diphthongs, but from what I could tell, there were not any identifiable Nubian words, nor were there any clearly Nubian letters, so I really couldn't discount the possibility of Coptic (since there are quite a few Coptic letters, and otherwise the letterforms are identical). I am leaning toward thinking the general text is not religious, since of all the Greek words only αναπαυσις is almost definitely religious in nature (signifying a certain type of prayer which requires standing up for a long time I believe), and it occurred to me that its use could be a prescription of prayer for someone who is sick perhaps the Πετρονος whom I had earlier been assuming was actually referring to the Biblical apostle Peter, but could just as well be someone simply named after him. In the next few weeks I will look for some Coptic texts online, and report on any findings of similarities there, but if you are able to pick out any common words between Browne's publication of the Nubian grammar, and the inscription, please let me know. I might even give a prize.

Zaghawa

In light of the impending overthrow of Idriss Deby, the world's richest Zaghawa, and the continuing violence in Chad (most likely supported by Sudan) I wanted to write a follow-up post on Zaghawa. I was finally able to get the sound values for the Zaghawa Beria Alphabet that I wrote about before:

A B P S CD E F G H I J K L M N X O R T U Y W Z

A b p s c d e f g h i j k l m n x o r t u y w z

a b p s š/ʃ d e f g h i j k l m n ɲ/ñ o r t u y w ŋ

These are taken from camel brandings, as I mentioned earlier, and I can not figure out why there would be capital letters and lowercase letters, but in the only text I have access to, it seems to be used as it would in French (Chad being a francophone country). This one text I have, entitled "La Vendeuse de Lait" starts:

Kubayni, bagu oh barta ni geni ru / key key-gini. Ber kettié, oh kigo / narení.

More on the rest of the text, and some translation later, when I have a chance to talk to one of my Zaghawa staff people who has informed me that he, like other Beria, are a very different group of Zaghawa than the "wange" power mongerers like Deby and Minni Minnawi (whom he considers traitors for having signed the Bogus peace deal with Khartoum).

Nilo-Saharan and the Sahel

So, it seems as though (from my relatively amateur perspective) languages of the Sahara and Sahel are particularly hard to classify, whether because of the relative lack of data already mined on them, or because of the inherent difficulties in the languages in finding conclusive similarities. Sociologically and anthropologically speaking, both of these probably have a lot to do with the relatively sparse populations in the region. The more contact, the more linguistic similarity one would presume, and the less contact, the less discernible links - except the region has historically been peopled by nomads and traders who traverse vast expanses and therefore have contact with languages from the Mediterranean to the jungle, and the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The dramatic climatic changes over time also complicate things to some extent, especially the further back you go. So the classification of many languages, or clusters of languages, is very unresolved.
The classification of languages could seem esoteric and irrelevant, but what if it could lead to a decrease in ethnic tensions, through more widespread understanding of the common roots of groups that see themselves as separated and opposed since time immemorial? This particularly tends to be the case between nomads and more sedentary groups, who are often so culturally tied to their occupational identities that they associate with any group of that occupation more than neighboring ethnic groups with whom they have lived in symbiosis for years. My favorite example of this sort of is a Fulani (Fuuta Toro) friend who said that the shepherds to whom the birth of Jesus was first announced by angels (as in the famous christmas carol “Angels we have Heard on High”), were Fulani. He stopped short of saying that King Herod (who tries to kill baby Jesus later in the story) was a Beydhani, but the recent memory of les évènements (’87 – ’91) had definitely colored his memory of centuries of co-existence as bitter.

On the other side of the Sahel, here in Darfur, we are seeing the extermination and absorption of minority ethnic groups, and what has been termed ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs. In Alexander De Waal’s book “Darfur: A short history of a long war,” (which is by far the best and most in-depth analysis of the history of a convoluted and confusing conflict) he reveals internal documents of the nomadic Arabic-speaking tribes, which indicate that they see themselves as Sudan’s only pure Arabs, and that their attempts to purify Darfur of non-Arabs is only the first step toward purging the entire country’s power structure of the dominant riverain Arabs.

Perhaps I am too hopeful in the possibility of linguistic analysis bringing about change, but this is the motivation that pushes me to explore the relationships of some of these languages, and of particularly are the Nubian languages, Meroitic, and Fur. Perhaps a later analysis will look at wider Sahelian trends through language groups such as Fulani, Tuareg, and Songhay (maybe with some help from Jabal al-Lughat and the Ideophone?). Specifically, my question is how the Nubian languages could be so widespread geographically within Sudan without evidence of other attendant elements of the culture having expanded, and without having had a greater overlap with Meroitic.

The common historical reconstruction of what happened is that at some point long ago (at le, the Nubian languages dispersed, and a major part of the family ended up in the Nile Valley and succeeded what remained of the Meroitic Empire. This is covered in the proceedings of a 1981 conference organized by Ehret and Posnansky, the reviewer of whose publication articulates thus:
“When and how [was] the Meroitic kingdom on the Nile penetrated and largely resettled by Nubians from Kordofan and Darfur? The conclusion reached is that, rather than a process of rough and rapid conquest narrowly anticipating that by the Aksumites of King Ezana, most of the Nubians arrived as peaceful settlers five or six hundred years earlier, at a time when the country between the first and third cataracts was temporarily underpopulated. The idea which is persuasively presented by William Adams, seems to have occurred to him in connection with the absence of archeological data for the first millennium BC revealed by all the elaborate surveys undertaken in preparation for the Aswan High Dam. It took shape when he studied the glottochronological evidence for the divergence of the Nobiin and Dongolawi languages, for which a linguistic paper by Robin Thelwall provides the wider background.”

Yet this does not fit with the obvious textual evidence that shows a gap between Meroitic and Nubian cultures (Note that there is evidence of Nubian inscriptions before the 8^th C. but not “texts” per se):

“The corpus of Meroitic Late texts can be dated to circa 5th century CE whereas the Old Nubian corpus extends from the 8th century CE (Browne 2002). The texts of Old Nubian and Meroitic are only distanced by a few hundred years. Diachronically this small length of time would allow us to see the relatedness of these languages if indeed they were, although the attempts to position Meroitic as an ancestor of Old Nubian have always resulted in disappointment for those who have chosen to pursue this line of investigation.” (Rowan 2006)

Though we can determine that Meroitic and Nubian are not very related linguistically, it seems likely that Nubia appropriated a lot of the imperial infrastructure left over from Meroe. They almost certainly did not co-exist along the Nile for the 1500 years that Adams proposes before the Nubians suddenly rose to prominence. However it is also unlikely that the Nubian languages spread to their current dispersal before they developed their writing system, given Arkell’s findings of Nubian inscriptions and pottery shards as far west as Dongola and Eastern Darfur, which one would have to date to (at earliest) the 10^th c. CE. This would seem to indicate a late dispersal date, but what drives the assumption that all the Nubian population movements occurred simultaneously? The Nuba Mountains branch of Nubian languages including Dilling, Ghulfan, and Kadaru seems likely to have been the center of gravity of the family, a theory supported by the fact that there exist the most number of dialects of Nubian here in a relatively small geographical area (the Nuba Mountains seem to be an “accretion zone” as Nichols describes it), and that there are no traces of any writing or other material cultural influence in these areas.

“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 (Thelwall 1982, Adams 1982, among others). Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2,500 years ago. This account is corroborated by non-linguistic evidence — for example, the oral tradition of the Shaiqiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile-Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago.” (Wiki)

In fact the Shaiqiya are quite significant further for the linguistic evidence found among a subgroup, the Nidayfab, which preserved many Nubianisms in a collection of legal documents from the early 19^th c. See Jay Spaulding’s “The Old Shaiqi Language in Historical Perspective.” for more of the specifics, but the key point is that until relatively recently, the Shaiqi and all riverain Arabs saw their identity as autochthonously Sudanese (and thus part of the Meroitic- Nubian Political continuity) rather than Arab.

So perhaps we can say that about 2500 years ago, a large number of Nubians went from the Nuba Mountains northward, but did not arrive to the area which the Meroitic empire was inhabiting until after it was destroyed by Aksum, at which point they saw an opening to establish themselves in the vacuum left behind… but in order to fill the large shoes left behind for them, they had to have a language and material culture to match their predecessors, but wanted to be a part of the global economy, which required Greek, so they borrowed Greek letters via Coptic and added 3 Meroitic letters for good measure, putting forth a standard literary language. This clearly would not have reflected the diversity of the different dialects which composed the greater Nubian empire (actually 3 sub-empires, of Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia), and the limited nature of Nubian writings (religious texts, political proclamations, and a few contracts) makes it likely that their was a vast discrepancy between spoken and written Nubian, and that this diglossia reflects the current diversity in modern riverain Nubian dialects, namely between Kenuzi-Dongolawi, and Nobiin, which probably represent two different empires. This diglossia and diversity of dialects also may explain why the subsequent move of the mysteriously stranded Darfurian dialects of Nubian could have occurred so late, and been accompanied by material evidence (the above mentioned inscriptions detailed by Arkell) and seem so lexically distant from the other strands. I suggest that not only did Midob and Birgid (now extinct) leave toward the waning of the Nubian empires in response to pressure from without, but that these were not the only Nubian languages to have moved out there, and that others have become extinct (like Birgid), and others remain to be classified as Nubian languages… And here’s where it gets crazy – I think the Fur language has significant Nubian influence both lexically and otherwise. The (as-yet unpublished) Fur dictionary I have is poorly organized and not conducive to searching, so more in depth analysis will be forthcoming from that angle, but superficially speaking, Fur and the Nubian languages both have a limited range of tones, they share some plural formations (Fur has multiple) and the ascendancy of the Fur Sultanate not long after the Nubian empire’s demise, in the midst of a jumble of different ethnic groups smacks of some sort of transmission of imperial memory.

To take it back to the meta-level and summarize, a language family (Nubian) within the Nilo-Saharan phylum originates in an accretion zone (Nuba Mountains) with contact with a number of Niger-Kordofanian* language families, then moves into an area dominated by languages within the Afro-Asiatic stock* (Meroitic, then Arabic) until most of the speakers adopted the dominant Semitic language. Some however migrated to an area which was again a Niger-Kordofanian dominated accretion zone (Jebel Marra) where their languages became heavily influenced by these languages until the dominance of Arabic again overtook them. The repeated and prolonged contact of this Nilo-Saharan language family with Niger Kordofanian languages contributes to the extensive lexical similarities noted by Blench in his designation of a Niger-Saharan macrophylum.

*Johanna Nichols has much more on the classification of "quasi-stocks" Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic here:

The type-defining example is probably Niger-Kordofanian, a set of families
and stocks mostly of sub-Saharan Africa including the Bantu family (Bendor-
Samuel 1989, Greenberg 1963), discussed below. The genetic marker of
Niger-Kordofanian is its complex systems of generally prefixal genders (also
called concord classes), in which there are particular prefixes for particular
classes and systematic correspondences between singular and plural concord
classes. The system is shared widely among the daughter branches and is identifiable
as a system even when individual elements are greatly changed or lost.
This kind of gender system is quite specific and quite rare worldwide and thus
useful as a genetic marker. Yet systematic sound correspondences and regular
lexical reconstructability are absent from Niger-Kordofanian, the internal
structure of the genetic tree is still in doubt...
An atypically stock-like quasi-stock is Afroasiatic, another African group
established by Greenberg (1963). It consists of the families Chadic and Berber,
the isolate Egyptian, the Semitic stock, a likely isolate Beja, a stock or pair of
stocks Cushitic, and possibly the family Omotic (see e.g. Bender 1989, Newman
1980). The Afroasiatic quasi-stock has a distinctive grammatical signature
that includes several morphological features at least two of which independently
suffice statistically to show genetic relatedness beyond any reasonable
doubt (the entire set is listed inNewman 1980; for statistical significance,
see Newman 1980 and Nichols 1996). Hence it is routinely accepted as a genetic
grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be
found and a received reconstruction may never be possible.

Egyptian Fur

I was able to find quite a lot of material in Khartoum on the Fur language, the most interesting (though not necessarily most accurate) of which is a book by Dr. Idriss Yusuf Ahmed published in Arabic first in 2001 by New Star Printing House in Khartoum with a second printing by The Key Publishing House in Toronto, Ontario. Unfortunately they neither use the extended arabic letters for sounds that do not occur in standard Arabic, nor is there any attempt made to represent the tones.

I’ll include the most salient selections as I get to them, but I had to start with this list which made me just about roll on the floor laughing, though I defer to the judgment of the reader as to the plausibility of the connections:

Ancient Pharaonic influences on the Fur language:

Fur Language	Ancient Pharaonic Language	Meaning
Kwufuu	khufu	wind, breeze
Sing fi naro	sinfaro	“does what he says”
Uroum	alharam	mound
Toponyms:
Usou aan	Aswan	wait for the signal
Ubwa Simbla	Abu Simbel	black grandmother*
Jasis ah	Giza	“built for you”

(mentions al-abanus which has an interesting history of being borrowed into Coptic from greek, though it originally came from the demotic hbny)

The source of the information is given as Professor Zekariah Sayf al-Din of Nyala, South Darfur

Tonal languages of Darfur

I got back from a field trip to a rural area which is predominantly Fur, and close to the heart of the ancient Fur kingdom/Sultanate in Jebel Marra, and I was able to pick up a fair amount of Fur on the trip, but I didn't realize until speaking with some staff members back in El Fasher that Fur is a tonal language!! They showed me 7 words that are very similar and the main distinguishing feature is the tonal difference, or minor consonantal differences which are almost imperceptible to non-native speakers. Here is my loose attempt at reproducing the sounds with the symbols I could find... (the đ is supposed to be an almost emphatic d, not quite as strong as a ض but I couldn't find the d with the dot underneath Unicode character, so I wasn't really sure how else to represent it). Also the superscript l (thunder) is supposed to be a very light afterthought of a sound:

dēj - a lalub tree

déi - male goat

đêj - oil

déĩ - ant (NB Darfuri Arabic = darr)

dëi¹ - thunder

đēwi - tail

đeui - grass

I was surprised that I hadn't perceived it was a tonal language at first, and in fact I had assumed that none of the languages of the area were really tonal, but in fact it seems quite common... it is also part of Masalit, which you would be able to see (if one could paste accurately from PDF files) in this story recorded by John Edgar in a study on Masalit storytelling:


k e l i m b e l l i m b o singeim waka. k e l i k o r n an g s i n g e i odoore.
girls boys-with wood-loc they-went. girls getting-up wood they-collect.
The girls and boys went to the woods. The girls started to collect wood.

kimamba duu a n y a n e l d l t i k e l a koko singm toyoona. anyaneldi
bop self gum-arabic he-saw going wood-loc he-climbed. gum-arabic
One boy saw a gum-arabic tree and went and climbed up it. He tried to

a w u l te ru tend tokomingi koogi tudona.
I-take-shall saying he-did hornbill eye it-plucked-out.
take the tree (as firewood), but a hombill (that was in the tree) plucked out his eye

suru koogi fong ken karaa s a r g i n kar tununga. s i n g e i
descending eye cover doing girl back coming he-stopped. wood
He got down and, covering his eye, came and stopped behind a girl. She was

toniede. s i n g e i t i r t e n a . kimamba ngo tirnanga: a i a i k o o g i
she-chops. w00d splinter it-did. boy thus he-said: ah ah eye
chopping wood. The wood splintered. The boy said thus: 'Ah ah, you put

mbalodaga! h i l l e m wakaamolo baabata t e n d e l a . kibinu
me-you-put-out. village-loc they-came-jfrom father-his he-told. seizing
out my eye!' When they reached the village, he told his father. Taking

karailimbd j i z e h a . kimadAaga. l e i l e t o mucota
girl that-with marriage they-made. child they-hore. day one wife-his
the girl, they married her with that one. They had a child. One day, his wife

kima Auwd ( n i i b i n d ) saamtaka. kambaa g i kimakuld
child giver (seizer) well-loc she-went. husband this child taking
gave him the baby and went to the well. The husband took the child and

t i A j i k a r i g g o t e r E : tokomiggikima andlya,
he-dandles thus he-says: hornbill child me-gave,
dandled it (on his knees) and said thus (singing): 'The hombill gave me a child;

kaa koikindag k o i t o k o m i g g i k i s a r i a . ndokom ndokom!
people all you-exist-if all hornbill you-play-not. dee dunz dee dum!
people, never play with the hombill. Dee dum, dee dum! '

monjokolatd j a a r i i n i y e ( t a g i t a muiljetagiinimolo) a j i
old-woman one neighhour (house-her near house-their-fronz) song
A certain old woman whose house was near to their house heard the song and,

t ~ i n a g akimakarawosaammolotaramolo tordga a j i kambata
she-heard child girl-the wellfronz she-came-fronz she-called song hushar~d-of
when the girl came back from the well, called her and related to her all of the

k o i t e n d e l a . k a r a g i baabata Tendela, k a a g g i i l u
all she-told. girl this father-her she-told. nzan that
husband's song. The girl then told it to her father. They (the community)

wandarbasiga.
they-made-separate.
divorced them.

Nubian text

n??tepoonia(d)mpp[u>te

lpmiouogocmptniu paipet

??afehoueiammayemduouit

????satanho. nt?ujoocyiteihe

n?mpemeoomatwradmi je

ticoukahek(ic)naicoticonepicah.

Nteihehitmieficeteuciceafm

Toniomoonoipenhociwtatoo

Neiwtaiycoupepicicopoo

Han auopmina,ocyeigggg[[(pp)dm

Nooyjoywq(p) apeboit(gg) pa,wni

Pezooun ticuoiaicy nou?cou

Denjoco ntokhep de[poty

Mptyoyriei?e]naunanapaucic

impicounfnadua ammniowc

mni,iond nefpomoeeit

wlih li,mpgmnnnempate i

jiyt,irodoniantmn?iepicr

pocetyn auhmoocdee

petronoc e ggi do nei

pezetyros e ty o

okly ?ne

n??tepo oniamppsu te

?lp miou ogosmptniu paipet

aheHoueiammaéemduouit

shatankho. nt?édzoosniteiHe

n?mpe meo omatô radmi dze

tisou kaHek(is) naiso tiso nepisaH

ntei HeHitmi ehiseteusis eahm

toniomo onoipen Hosiôtato o-

neiôta insoupepis isopo o-

Hanau opmina khosneitshdm

nooé dzoé ôhpa pebong pakhôni

pezooun tisuoi aisn nou?sou

deédzoso ntokHep detshpoté

mptnpnriei? eTnaun anapausis

impisou nfnadua ammniôs

mnikhiond nefpompeeit

ôliH likhmg mnnnempate i-

dzint khirod oniantmn? iepisr-

posetén auHmoosdee

petronos e ngi do nei

pezetérosh e té o

oklé ?ne

Here is my first attempt at deciphering this inscription, and I thought I would be able to make some sense of it between the greek and some of the local stuff, but I think I am going to need a lexicon of some sort, and unless there is one online, I am up a crick without a paddle... or in an isolated place without a dictionary, as the case may be.

more speculation about the content upcoming...

Nubian text

This is an old Nubian text I came across at the local museum (actually the former palace of Sultan Ali Dinar). It is almost certainly from somewhere closer to the Nile Valley, but it is interesting that they would have that in a local museum, marked "Sandstone with Greek Inscription" no less! When I can get a font for Nubian script, I will transcribe it and make my best guess at a translation...

Midob

In addition to the wonderfully rich Sudanese Arabic colloquialisms that wrapped up the last post, I have the pleasure of access to half a dozen other languages about which relatively little research has been done. Of all these none happens to be more interesting and more accessible than Midob, or Tidd-náal, as they call themselves. One of my closest neighbors is tiddi, and I came upon a locally-published monograph on everything Midob entitled Qabilat al-Midob: taht mijhar al-bahth “The Tribe of the Midob: under the microscope of research,” by al-Hajj Adam ‘Abdallah Hassan. While most of the work is based on collective memory of the recent past, and it does quote some western historians about the more distant past (including “English historian Makmaykel”), the author does valorize oral history:

الجزء المدون من تاريخ الميدوب قليل ونادر واغلبها تعتمد على الروايات الشفوية فاجداد الميدوب يقولون انهم اتو من دنقلا ويدعي ال(كارقوى شلكوتا( بانهم من المحس (سكوت) ومنه اشتقوا لفظ شلكوتا ورواية اخرى تقول ان (الاورتى) هم المحس اما الكارقدى من الدناقلة. (8)

“The recorded part of the history of the Midob is few and far between, and seizing it depends on oral stories, so the grandfathers of the Midob say that they came from Dongola because our language and calls the Karqawi Shelkout because they are from the Muhiss (sukut) and from it they broke away from the remarks of the Shelkouta, and another story which says that the Aourti were the Muhiss as far as the Karqaday [Karqawi?] from Dongola.”

(forgive the translation)

Though we aren’t so lucky as to get any of this oral history written down verbatim (in Arabic or Midob) from the author, he does mention the names of some of his sources (two of whom live in my town), so maybe I will track them down or maybe just the author himself.

Besides just being quite accessible, Midob is of particular interest because it is related to Old Nubian reputedly, though it is the furthest linguistically and geographically from its purported medieval Nubian ancestor.

Roland Werner’s 1993 book on this branch of “Darfur Nubian” is reviewed below:

Roland Werner, Tidn-aal: a study of Midob (Darfur-Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993, 169 pp., DM68, ISBN 3 496 02507 7

The Midob are often referred to as ‘Meidob’: an erroneous spelling which does not reflect pronunciation and which goes back to a MacMichael 1918 article. Although the people have grown to accept the xenonym ‘Midob’, their self-name is tiddi (sg.) and their linguistic self-name is as in the title of this book , meaning ‘Tid (pl.) language’. The people live around Dar Midob, about 500 miles west of Khartoum. Werner says (p.13) the administrative area comprises 24,000 square miles. There are about 45,000 to 50,000 Midob, who are mixed pastoralists (goats, sheep, camels).

The introduction (pp. 13-18) takes up the name, location, tribe, place of Midob in Nubian, dialects and sub-groups, history of Midob linguistic research, methods, scope, and aim of the study.

The Midob are neither ‘Nile’ nor ‘Hill’ Nubians. According to the work of Becchauss-Gerst, Nubian consists of Nobiin (Mahas-Fadicca) as against four other languages, of which Midob is the most divergent. Midob was unknown to Western scholarship till MacMichael’s first published vocabulary list about 1912. Among the fifty bibliography items listed by Werner (pp. 167-9) there is no substantial grammar or dictionary of Midob, so that this book is the first such. A list of abbreviations is given on p. 166.

It contains an extensive Midob-English vocabulary of about 2,000 items (pp. 75-143) with Arabic loans identified and an English-Midob index (144-165). I obtained a copy just as I was in need of some Midob lexicon for a project but was surprised to discover that the English index does not list many basic terms such as ‘blood’ (although it is used on p. 25), ‘belly’, ‘claw’, ‘earth’, ‘feather’, ‘good’, ‘mouth’, ‘new’, ‘other’, ‘path’, ‘person’, ‘plant’, ‘road’, ‘seed’, or ‘smoke’. ‘See’ is given as kəl – on p. 159 but as kood – on p.46 and I could not find the latter in the lexicon. There are also two brief texts with translations (‘Of old times’ and ‘Wedding’, pp. 64-5) and 209 sentences (pp. 66-74).

The grammar is rather brief (pp. 18-63), consisting of (1) phonology, (2) tonology, (3) nouns, (4) pronouns, (5) postpositions, (6) the verb, (7) adverbs, (8) ideophones, (9) conjunctions. I will not go into any details here except to note that Arabic is invading the phonology and lexicon of Midob, as with all Sudanese languages.

The slim volume is well produced from what looks like computer print-out (with both margins justified)…. A sketch map of the location and general features of Dar Midob would have been helpful.

Despite some weaknesses, pointed out above, on balance this tone-marked grammar of Midob, based on fieldwork of 1987-88, is certainly a valuable addition to the Nubian linguistic literature.

M. Lionel Bender

Southern Illinois University

For a quicky wiki overview of contemporary Nubian languages see below:

“Of all the Nubian languages, the ones spoken along the Nile traditionally have received the most attention. Many manuscripts have been unearthed in the Nile Valley, mainly between the first and fifth cataracts, testifying to a firm Nubian presence in the area during the first millennium. Nobiin and a dialect cluster related to it, Kenzi-Dongolawi, are found in the same area. These languages were the languages of the Christian Nubian kingdoms. Historical comparative research has shown that the Nile-Nubian languages do not form a genetic unit; the speakers of Nobiin arrived first in the area, followed later by the speakers of the Kenzi and Dongolawi varieties.

“The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan. In the past, there has been debate as to whether the Nubian languages spread to the Nile valley from Kordofan and Darfur or moved in the opposite direction. 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 (Thelwall 1982, Adams 1982, among others). Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2,500 years ago. This account is corroborated by non-linguistic evidence — for example, the oral tradition of the Shaiqiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile-Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago.”

Jay Spaulding has written an interesting article on the Shaiqiya tribe's relationship to Nubian, asserting that in fact they and several other riverain ethnic groups that have linguistically assimilated into the Arab majority spoke Nubian until a couple hundred years ago (and still retain traces of this in some of their speech)… a more detailed look at this will be in a forthcoming post addressing the question of whether and whither the different branches of the Nubian languages split… for now I leave you with a tree of how the branches of Nubian breakdown (thanks to the SIL Ethnologue):

* Nobiin (Not intelligible with Kenuzi-Dongola. Lexical similarity 67% with Kenuzi-Dongola)

o Mahas (Mahasi, Mahass)

o Fiyadikka (Fedicca, Fadicha, Fadicca, Fadija, Fiadidja)

* Kenuzi-Dongola (Not intelligible with Nobiin. Lexical similarity 67% with Nobiin, 56% with Debri)

o Dongola

o Kenuzi (Kenuz, Kunuzi)

* Midob or Meidob (Lexical similarity 51% with Birgid (closest)

o Shelkota (Shalkota)

o Kaageddi

o Urrti (Uurti)

* Birked/Birgid (extinct)

* ("Hill Nubian")

o Ghulfan (Wunci)

o Kadaru (Kodhin)

o Dilling (Lexical similarity 94% with Debri, 93% with Kadaru)

+ Dilling

+ Debri

o Dair (Thaminyi)

o El Hugeirat (El Hagarat)

o Karko (Kithonirishe)

o Wali