Gumuz language
Encyclopedia
Gumuz is a dialect cluster spoken along the border of Ethiopia
and Sudan
. Most Ethiopian speakers live in the Metekel Zone
of the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, although a group of 1,000 live outside the town of Welkite
. The Sudanese speakers live in the area east of Er Roseires
, around Famaka and Fazoglo on the Blue Nile
, extending north along the border.
An early record of this language is a wordlist from the Mount Guba area compiled in February 1883 by Juan Maria Schuver
.
, Koman, and Gumuz: "very few of the more widespread nominal and verbal morphological markers of Nilo-Saharan are attested in the Coman languages plus Gumuz ... Their genetic status remains debatable, mainly due to lack of more extensive data." (2008:843) And later, "In summarizing the current state of knowledge, ... the following language families or phyla can be identified — ... Mande, Songhai, Ubangian, Kadu, and the Coman languages plus Gumuz." (2008:844)
This "Coman plus Gumuz" is what Greenberg (1963) had called Komuz, a distant relationship of Gumuz and the Koman languages. However, for a long time this connection had not been supported by further research; Bender, Blench, and other Nilo-Saharan specialists did not accept a special genealogical relationship between the two. Bender (2000) placed Gumuz as at least a distinct branch of Nilo-Saharan, and suggested that it might even be a language isolate
. Blench, who tentatively included Koman within Nilo-Saharan, excluded Gumuz as an isolate, as it did not share the tripartite singulative–collective–plurative number system characteristic of the rest of the Nilo-Saharan language families. Ahland and Roger Blench (2010), however, report that with better attestation Gumuz does indeed appear to be Nilo-Saharan, and perhaps closest to Koman; it may even help elucidate the Nilo-Saharan family as a whole, which has been difficult to substantiate.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
and Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...
. Most Ethiopian speakers live in the Metekel Zone
Metekel Zone
Metekel is one of the three Zones in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region of Ethiopia, named after the former Metekkel province. It is bordered on the south by Kamashi, on the southwest by Asosa, on the west by Sudan, and on the north and east by the Amhara Region...
of the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, although a group of 1,000 live outside the town of Welkite
Welkite
Welkite is a town in southwestern Ethiopia. The administrative center of the Gurage Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region , this town has a latitude and longitude of and an elevation between 1910 and 1935 meters above sea level.According to the Gurage Zone government,...
. The Sudanese speakers live in the area east of Er Roseires
Er Roseires
Er Roseires is a town in eastern Sudan 60km from the border with Ethiopia.Lord Prudhoe mentions this town in the 1829 diary he kept while travelling in the Sennar...
, around Famaka and Fazoglo on the Blue Nile
Blue Nile
The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. With the White Nile, the river is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile...
, extending north along the border.
An early record of this language is a wordlist from the Mount Guba area compiled in February 1883 by Juan Maria Schuver
Juan Maria Schuver
Juan Maria Schuver was a Dutch explorer who was a native of Amsterdam....
.
Dialects
Dialects are not all mutually intelligible. By that standard, there are two or three Gumuz languages. Grammatical forms are distinct between northern and southern Gumuz.Phonology
Gumuz has both ejective consonants and implosives. The implosive quality is being lost at the velar point of articulation in some dialects (Unseth 1989). There is a series of palatal consonants, including both ejective and implosive. In some dialects, e.g. Sirba, there is a labialized palatalized bilabial stop, as in the word for 'rat' [bʲʷa] (Unseth 1989).Classification
Dimmendaal (2008) notes that mounting grammatical evidence has made the Nilo-Saharan proposal as a whole more sound since Greenberg proposed it in 1963, but that such evidence has not been forthcoming for SonghaySonghay languages
The Songhay, Songhai, or Songai languages are a group of closely related languages/dialects centered on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the west African states of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. They have been widely used as a lingua franca in that region ever since the...
, Koman, and Gumuz: "very few of the more widespread nominal and verbal morphological markers of Nilo-Saharan are attested in the Coman languages plus Gumuz ... Their genetic status remains debatable, mainly due to lack of more extensive data." (2008:843) And later, "In summarizing the current state of knowledge, ... the following language families or phyla can be identified — ... Mande, Songhai, Ubangian, Kadu, and the Coman languages plus Gumuz." (2008:844)
This "Coman plus Gumuz" is what Greenberg (1963) had called Komuz, a distant relationship of Gumuz and the Koman languages. However, for a long time this connection had not been supported by further research; Bender, Blench, and other Nilo-Saharan specialists did not accept a special genealogical relationship between the two. Bender (2000) placed Gumuz as at least a distinct branch of Nilo-Saharan, and suggested that it might even be a language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
. Blench, who tentatively included Koman within Nilo-Saharan, excluded Gumuz as an isolate, as it did not share the tripartite singulative–collective–plurative number system characteristic of the rest of the Nilo-Saharan language families. Ahland and Roger Blench (2010), however, report that with better attestation Gumuz does indeed appear to be Nilo-Saharan, and perhaps closest to Koman; it may even help elucidate the Nilo-Saharan family as a whole, which has been difficult to substantiate.
Further reading
- Ahland, Colleen Anne. 2004. "Linguistic variation within Gumuz: a study of the relationship between historical change and intelligibility." M.A. thesis. University of Texas at Arlington.
- Colleen Ahland and Roger Blench, "The Classification of Gumuz and Koman Languages",http://25images.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/player/player.php?id=72&id_sequence=433&quality=hd presented at the Language Isolates in Africa workshop, Lyons, December 4, 2010
- Colleen Ahland. 2011. Noun incorporation and predicate classifiers in Gumuz
- Bender, M. Lionel. 1979. Gumuz: a sketch of grammar and lexicon. Afrika und Übersee 62: 38-69.
- Unseth, Peter. 1985. "Gumuz: a dialect survey report." Journal of Ethiopian Studies 18: 91-114.
- Unseth, Peter. 1989. "Selected aspects of Gumuz phonology." In Taddese Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the eighth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, vol. 2, 617-32. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies.
- Uzar, Henning. 1993. Studies in Gumuz: Sese phonology and TMA system. In Topics in Nilo-Saharan linguistics, edited by M.L. BenderLionel Bender (linguist)Marvin Lionel Bender was an American author and co-author of several books, publications and essays regarding African languages, particularly from Ethiopia and Sudan. He retired from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He did extensive work in all four language families of Ethiopia: Semitic,...
. Hamburg: Helmut Buske: 347-383.
External links
- "Map of the Gumuz language", LL-MAP website
- World Atlas of Language StructuresWorld Atlas of Language StructuresThe World Atlas of Language Structures is a database of structural properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM in 2005, and was released as the second edition on the Internet in April 2008...
information on Gumuz
