Laal language
Encyclopedia
Laal is an unclassified language
spoken by 749 people in three villages in the Moyen-Chari
prefecture of Chad
on opposite banks of the Chari River
,
called Gori
(lá), Damtar (ɓual), and Mailao. It may be a language isolate
, in which case it would represent an isolated survival of an earlier language group of central Africa
. It is unwritten (except in transcription
by linguists). According to SIL-Chad member David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespread Baguirmi language
.
This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977, through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based for the most part on a single speaker, M. Djouam Kadi of Damtar.
fishermen
and farmer
s, who also sell salt
extracted from the ashes of doum palm
s and Vossia cuspidata. Like their neighbors the Niellim, they were formerly cattle herders, but lost their herds around the turn of the 19th century. They are mainly Muslim
s, although until the latter half of the 20th century they followed the traditional Yondo religion of the Niellim. The area is fairly undeveloped; while there are Qur'anic schools in Gori and Damtar, the nearest government school is 7 km away, and there is no medical dispensary in the region .
The village of Damtar formerly had a distinct dialect, called Laabe (la:bé), with two or three speakers remaining in 1977; it was replaced by the dialect of Gori after two Gori families fled there at the end of the 19th century to escape a war
. No other dialects of Laal are known.
Under Chadian law, Laal — like all languages of Chad other than French
and Arabic
— is regarded as a national language
. While the 1996 Constitution stipulates that "the law shall fix the conditions of promotion and development of national languages", national languages are not used for education nor for official purposes, nor usually for written media, although some of the larger ones (not Laal) are used on the radio.
, although extensive Adamawa
(specifically Bua
) and to a lesser extent Chadic
influence is found. It is sometimes grouped with one of those two language families
, and sometimes seen as a language isolate
. Boyeldieu (1982) summarizes his view as "Its classification remains problematic; while it shows certain lexical, and no doubt morphological, traits with the Bua languages (Adamawa-13, Niger–Congo family
of Joseph H. Greenberg
), it differs from them radically in many ways of which some, a priori, make one think of geographically nearby Chadic languages." Roger Blench (2003), similarly, considers that "its vocabulary and morphology seem to be partly drawn from Chadic (i.e. Afro-Asiatic), partly from Adamawa
(i.e. Niger–Congo) and partly from an unknown source, perhaps its original phylum, a now-vanished grouping from Central Africa
." It is the latter possibility which attracts particular interest; if this proves true, Laal may be the only remaining window on the linguistic state of Central Africa before the expansion of the main African language families—Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan
, and Niger–Congo—into it.
Their immediate neighbors speak Bua
, Niellim
, and Ndam
. Laal contains a number of loanword
s from Baguirmi, which for several centuries was the lingua franca of the region under the Baguirmi Empire, and perhaps a dozen Chadic roots, which are not similar to the Chadic languages that currently neighbor Laal. In addition, almost all Laal speak Niellim as a second language, and 20%–30% of their vocabulary is cognate with Niellim, especially agricultural vocabulary (Boyeldieu 1977, Lionnet 2010). Like the Baguirmi
, the Laal are Muslim
s; partly because of this, some Arabic
loanwords are also found. However some 60% of the vocabulary, including most core vocabulary, cannot be identified with any known language family (Lionnet 2010). Indeed, some of the words cognate with Niellim, including some basic vocabulary, is not cognate with closely related Bua, suggesting that these are not Adamawa roots but loans in Niellim from the Laal substrate (Lionnet 2010). Pozdniakov (2010) believes Laal is a distinct branch of Niger–Congo with part of its pronominal system borrowed from a Chadic language like Kera.
symbols. The consonants are:
Implosives and prenasalised stops, as well as h, are found only word-initially. Voiceless stops, as well as s, cannot occur at the end of a syllable. /ŋ/ occurs only intervocalically and word-finally. /s/ appears exclusively in loanword
s and certain numbers. The prenasalized stops, as well as the implosive /ʄ/, are extremely rare.
The vowel system for non-initial syllables is: /i/, /ɨ/, /u/, /e/, /ə/, /o/, /a/, and the diphthong
/ua/, with no length distinction. For initial syllables, however, it is much more complicated, allowing length distinctions and distinguishing the following additional diphthongs: /ia/, /yo/, /ya/ (though the latter two appear only as morphologically conditioned forms of /e/ and /ia/, and are perhaps better seen as allophonic.) In addition, /y/ may occur very occasionally; Boyeldieu quotes the example of mỳlùg "red (pl.)".
There are three level tones: high (á), middle (a), low (à). Combinations of these may occur on a single vowel, resulting in phonetic rising and falling tones; these are phonemically sequences of level tones. Such cases are transcribed here by repeating the vowel (e.g. àá); long vowels are indicated only by the colon (e.g. a:).
Suffixes may force any of four kinds of ablaut on the vowels of preceding words: raising (takes /ia/, /a/, /ua/ to [e], [ə], [o]), lowering (takes /e/, /ə/, /o/ to [ia], [a], [ua]), low rounding (takes /i/ and /ɨ/ to [u]; /e/ and /ia/ to [yo]; /ə/, /a/, and /ua/ to [o]), and high rounding (takes /i/ and /ɨ/ to [u]; /e/ and /ia/ to [ya]; /ə/, /a/, and /o/ to [ua]). They are transcribed in the suffix section as ↑, ↓, ↗, ↘ respectively. In some verbs, a/ə is "raised" to [e] rather than, as expected, [ə].
In suffixes, ə and o undergo vowel harmony
: they become ɨ and u respectively if the preceding vowel is one of {i, ɨ, u}. Likewise, r undergoes consonant harmony, becoming l after words containing l. Suffixes with neutral tone copy the final tone of the word they are suffixed to.
–(verbal particle)–verb
–object
–adverb
; preposition–noun
; possessed–possessor
; noun
–adjective
. Nouns can be fronted when topicalized. See the sample sentences below for examples, and the conjunctions for clause syntax.
The possessive is expressed in two ways:
However, if the possessor is a pronoun, it is suffixed with extensive vowel ablaut (in the first case), or prepositional forms with "at", and optionally the connector as well, are used (in the second case): na:ra ɟá ɗe: "my man" ("man CONN. at-me"), mùlù "her eye" ("eye-her", from mɨla "eye"). Some nouns (e.g. páw- "friend") occur only with bound pronouns, and have no independent form. This phenomenon - obligatory possession
- is found in many other languages, for instance the Andamanese languages
, usually for words referring to personal relationships. See the pronouns section for the relevant suffixes.
A noun indicating someone who does, is, or has something can be formed with the prefix màr, meaning roughly "he/she/it who/of": màr jùgòr "landowner", màr ce "farmer" (ce = cultivate), màr pál "fisherman" (pál = to fish), màr pàlà ta: "a fisher of fish".
Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system, but apart from loans the forms do not appear to be cognate with the Adamawa system (Lionnet 2010).
, found in many other languages but not English
, and the gender differentiation of "I" in certain forms. The inanimate plural has in general been dropped by younger speakers in favor of the animate plural, though both are given below. The object paradigm for verbs is quite complex; only two of its several sets of allomorph
s are given in the table below. "He" and "she" are only used with human referents; other nouns take the neuter pronoun. This is quite distinct from the languages that Laal shares vocabulary with, though Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system (Lionnet 2010). The 1st- and 2nd-person plural forms are quite similar to Chadic languages (specifically Kera
) which are currently quite distant from the Laal-speaking region, but have no similarities to Adamawa.
(The arrows indicate vowel harmony
triggered in by the suffix by the root.)
form with final low tone (formed similarly to the "centripetal", for which see below); e.g. ʔà ná ká "he will do"; ʔà ná kàrà mɨ́ná "he will do something"; ʔà kú na:ra "he sees the man"; ʔà kúù:rùúŋ "he sees you (pl.)".
The verb has three basic forms: simple, "centripetal", and "participative" (to calque
Boyeldieu's terminology.) The simple form is used in the simple present tense
or the imperative
, e.g. ʔà duàg jə́w gə̀m "he goes down the riverbank" (lit. "he descend mouth riverbank.") The "centripetal" indicates action "hither", either spatially - motion towards the speaker - or temporally - action up to the present moment; it is formed mainly by suffixing a vowel (often, but not always, identical to the last vowel in the word), e.g. ʔà duàgà jə́w gə̀m "he comes down the riverbank (towards me)". The "participative" - generally formed like the centripetal, but with final high tone - generally indicates an omitted object or instrument, e.g. ʔà sá ɗa:g ʔà sɨ̀rɨ́ su "he takes a calabash
and drinks water with it" (lit. "he take calabash he drink-participative water".)
Immediately before the verb, a particle may be placed to indicate forms other than a simple present tense; such particles include ná (pl. ní) marking future tense, taá:/teé: (pl. tií:) marking continuous action, wáa: (pl. wíi:) marking motion, náa: (pl. níi:) being apparently a combination of ná and wáa:, mà (pl. mì) meaning "must", mɨ́ marking reported speech (apparently an evidential), mɨ́nà (pl. mínì) expressing intention, kò marking habitual action, ɓə́l or ga (pl. gi) marking incomplete action, and wó (always accompanied by ʔàle after the verb) meaning "maybe".
Mediopassives (see passive voice
, middle voice) can be formed from transitive verbs by adding a suffix -↑ɨ́ɲ: e.g. no siár sà:b "someone ripped the cloth" > sà:b sérɨ́ɲ "the cloth ripped". For the inverse operation - forming transitive verbs from intransitives - tonal changes, or changes to the plural, sometimes occur.
Verbal noun
s can sometimes be formed, mainly from intransitives, by the addition of a suffix -(vowel)l, sometimes with ablaut and tone change; e.g. wal "fall" > wàlál "a fall", sùbá "lie" > sɨ́blál (pl. súbɨ̀r) "a lie". The l here becomes n near a nasal, and r near r: man "taste good", manan "a good taste".
: gò: má ʔì:r "the black goat" (literally "goat which black".)
Adverbs of location:
Temporal adverbs:
Unclassified language
Unclassified languages are languages whose genetic affiliation has not been established by means of historical linguistics. If this state of affairs continues after significant study of the language and efforts to relate it to other languages, as in the case of Basque, it is termed a language...
spoken by 749 people in three villages in the Moyen-Chari
Moyen-Chari Prefecture
This article refers to one of the former prefectures of Chad. From 2002 the country was divided into 18 regions.Moyen-Chari was one of the 14 prefectures of Chad. Located in the south of the country, Moyen-Chari covered an area of 45,180 square kilometers and had a population of 738,595 in 1993....
prefecture of Chad
Chad
Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...
on opposite banks of the Chari River
Chari River
The Chari or Shari River is a 949-kilometer-long river of central Africa. It flows from the Central African Republic through Chad into Lake Chad, following the Cameroon border from N'Djamena, where it joins the Logone River waters....
,
called Gori
Gori, Chad
Gori is a small village in Chad on the banks of the Chari River, near Sarh. It is the largest of only three villages where Laal is spoken....
(lá), Damtar (ɓual), and Mailao. It may 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...
, in which case it would represent an isolated survival of an earlier language group of central Africa
Central Africa
Central Africa is a core region of the African continent which includes Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda....
. It is unwritten (except in transcription
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...
by linguists). According to SIL-Chad member David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespread Baguirmi language
Baguirmi language
Bagirmi is the language of the Baguirmi people of Chad, belonging to the Nilo-Saharan family. It is spoken by 44,761 people , mainly in the Chari-Baguirmi Prefecture...
.
This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977, through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based for the most part on a single speaker, M. Djouam Kadi of Damtar.
Speakers and status
The language's speakers are mainly riverRiver
A river is a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including...
fishermen
Fishing
Fishing is the activity of trying to catch wild fish. Fish are normally caught in the wild. Techniques for catching fish include hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling and trapping....
and farmer
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
s, who also sell salt
Salt
In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...
extracted from the ashes of doum palm
Doum palm
Hyphaene thebaica, with common names doum palm and gingerbread tree, is a type of palm tree with edible oval fruit. It is native to the Nile valley in Egypt and Sudan, and in riverine areas of northwestern Kenya.-Uses:...
s and Vossia cuspidata. Like their neighbors the Niellim, they were formerly cattle herders, but lost their herds around the turn of the 19th century. They are mainly Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
s, although until the latter half of the 20th century they followed the traditional Yondo religion of the Niellim. The area is fairly undeveloped; while there are Qur'anic schools in Gori and Damtar, the nearest government school is 7 km away, and there is no medical dispensary in the region .
The village of Damtar formerly had a distinct dialect, called Laabe (la:bé), with two or three speakers remaining in 1977; it was replaced by the dialect of Gori after two Gori families fled there at the end of the 19th century to escape a war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
. No other dialects of Laal are known.
Under Chadian law, Laal — like all languages of Chad other than French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
— is regarded as a national language
National language
A national language is a language which has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a people and perhaps by extension the territory they occupy. The term is used variously. A national language may for instance represent the national identity of a nation or country...
. While the 1996 Constitution stipulates that "the law shall fix the conditions of promotion and development of national languages", national languages are not used for education nor for official purposes, nor usually for written media, although some of the larger ones (not Laal) are used on the radio.
Classification
Laal remains unclassifiedUnclassified language
Unclassified languages are languages whose genetic affiliation has not been established by means of historical linguistics. If this state of affairs continues after significant study of the language and efforts to relate it to other languages, as in the case of Basque, it is termed a language...
, although extensive Adamawa
Adamawa languages
The Adamawa languages are a putative family of 80–90 languages scattered across the Adamawa Plateau in central Africa, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Chad, spoken altogether by only one and a half million people . Joseph Greenberg classified them as one branch of the...
(specifically Bua
Bua languages
The Bua languages are a subgroup of the Mbum–Day subgroup of the Savanna languages spoken by fewer than 30,000 people in southern Chad in an area stretching roughly between the Chari River and the Guera Massif. They were labeled "G13" in Joseph Greenberg's Adamawa language-family proposal...
) and to a lesser extent Chadic
Chadic languages
The Chadic languages constitute a language family of perhaps 200 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon, belonging to the Afroasiatic phylum...
influence is found. It is sometimes grouped with one of those two language families
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
, and sometimes seen as 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...
. Boyeldieu (1982) summarizes his view as "Its classification remains problematic; while it shows certain lexical, and no doubt morphological, traits with the Bua languages (Adamawa-13, Niger–Congo family
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
of Joseph H. Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
), it differs from them radically in many ways of which some, a priori, make one think of geographically nearby Chadic languages." Roger Blench (2003), similarly, considers that "its vocabulary and morphology seem to be partly drawn from Chadic (i.e. Afro-Asiatic), partly from Adamawa
Adamawa languages
The Adamawa languages are a putative family of 80–90 languages scattered across the Adamawa Plateau in central Africa, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Chad, spoken altogether by only one and a half million people . Joseph Greenberg classified them as one branch of the...
(i.e. Niger–Congo) and partly from an unknown source, perhaps its original phylum, a now-vanished grouping from Central Africa
Central Africa
Central Africa is a core region of the African continent which includes Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda....
." It is the latter possibility which attracts particular interest; if this proves true, Laal may be the only remaining window on the linguistic state of Central Africa before the expansion of the main African language families—Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan
Nilo-Saharan languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
, and Niger–Congo—into it.
Their immediate neighbors speak Bua
Bua language
The Bua language is spoken by some 7,708 people north of the Chari River around Korbol and Gabil in Chad. It is the largest member of the small Bua group of languages and is mutually comprehensible with Fanian.-External links:**...
, Niellim
Niellim language
The Niellim language is a Bua language spoken by some 5,000 people along the Chari River in southern Chad. It is mainly spoken in two areas: one around the city of Sarh and one, its traditional home, further north, between about 9°30′ and 9°50′ N, corresponding to the former chiefdoms of Pra,...
, and Ndam
Ndam language
Ndam, also known as Dam and Ndamm, is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in the southwestern Chadian prefectures of Tandjilé and Lai. Most of the speakers generally practice traditional religions, Islam, or Christianity. There are two dialects of Ndam—northern and southern,...
. Laal contains a number of loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s from Baguirmi, which for several centuries was the lingua franca of the region under the Baguirmi Empire, and perhaps a dozen Chadic roots, which are not similar to the Chadic languages that currently neighbor Laal. In addition, almost all Laal speak Niellim as a second language, and 20%–30% of their vocabulary is cognate with Niellim, especially agricultural vocabulary (Boyeldieu 1977, Lionnet 2010). Like the Baguirmi
Baguirmi
Baguirmi is a department of Chad, one of three in the Chari-Baguirmi Region. It takes its name from the kingdom of Baguirmi. Its capital is Massenya....
, the Laal are Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
s; partly because of this, some Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
loanwords are also found. However some 60% of the vocabulary, including most core vocabulary, cannot be identified with any known language family (Lionnet 2010). Indeed, some of the words cognate with Niellim, including some basic vocabulary, is not cognate with closely related Bua, suggesting that these are not Adamawa roots but loans in Niellim from the Laal substrate (Lionnet 2010). Pozdniakov (2010) believes Laal is a distinct branch of Niger–Congo with part of its pronominal system borrowed from a Chadic language like Kera.
Sounds
The sounds of Laal are transcribed here using International Phonetic AlphabetInternational Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
symbols. The consonants are:
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
Voiceless | p | t | c | k | ʔ |
| Voiced | b | d | ɟ | ɡ | ||
| Prenasalized | (ᵐb) | (ⁿd) | (ᶮɟ) | (ᵑɡ) | ||
| Implosive Implosive consonant Implosive consonants are stops with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can... |
ɓ | ɗ | (ʄ) | |||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
s | h | ||||
| Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular.... |
r | |||||
| Approximant | l | j | w | |||
Implosives and prenasalised stops, as well as h, are found only word-initially. Voiceless stops, as well as s, cannot occur at the end of a syllable. /ŋ/ occurs only intervocalically and word-finally. /s/ appears exclusively in loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s and certain numbers. The prenasalized stops, as well as the implosive /ʄ/, are extremely rare.
The vowel system for non-initial syllables is: /i/, /ɨ/, /u/, /e/, /ə/, /o/, /a/, and the diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
/ua/, with no length distinction. For initial syllables, however, it is much more complicated, allowing length distinctions and distinguishing the following additional diphthongs: /ia/, /yo/, /ya/ (though the latter two appear only as morphologically conditioned forms of /e/ and /ia/, and are perhaps better seen as allophonic.) In addition, /y/ may occur very occasionally; Boyeldieu quotes the example of mỳlùg "red (pl.)".
There are three level tones: high (á), middle (a), low (à). Combinations of these may occur on a single vowel, resulting in phonetic rising and falling tones; these are phonemically sequences of level tones. Such cases are transcribed here by repeating the vowel (e.g. àá); long vowels are indicated only by the colon (e.g. a:).
Suffixes may force any of four kinds of ablaut on the vowels of preceding words: raising (takes /ia/, /a/, /ua/ to [e], [ə], [o]), lowering (takes /e/, /ə/, /o/ to [ia], [a], [ua]), low rounding (takes /i/ and /ɨ/ to [u]; /e/ and /ia/ to [yo]; /ə/, /a/, and /ua/ to [o]), and high rounding (takes /i/ and /ɨ/ to [u]; /e/ and /ia/ to [ya]; /ə/, /a/, and /o/ to [ua]). They are transcribed in the suffix section as ↑, ↓, ↗, ↘ respectively. In some verbs, a/ə is "raised" to [e] rather than, as expected, [ə].
In suffixes, ə and o undergo vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
: they become ɨ and u respectively if the preceding vowel is one of {i, ɨ, u}. Likewise, r undergoes consonant harmony, becoming l after words containing l. Suffixes with neutral tone copy the final tone of the word they are suffixed to.
Syntax
The typical word order can be summarized as subjectSubject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
–(verbal particle)–verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
–object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
–adverb
Adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
; preposition–noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
; possessed–possessor
Possession (linguistics)
Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possesses the referent of the other ....
; noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
–adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
. Nouns can be fronted when topicalized. See the sample sentences below for examples, and the conjunctions for clause syntax.
Nouns
Nouns have plural and singular forms (the latter are perhaps better viewed as singulative in some cases), with plural formation hard to predict: kò:g "bone" > kuagmi "bones", tuà:r "chicken" > tò:rò "chickens", ɲaw "hunger" > ɲə̀wə́r "hungers". Nouns do not have arbitrary gender; however, three natural genders (male, female, non-human) are distinguished by the pronouns.The possessive is expressed in two ways:
- "inalienableInalienable possessionIn linguistics, inalienable possession refers to the linguistic properties of certain nouns or nominal morphemes based on the fact that they are always possessed. The semantic underpinning is that entities like body parts and relatives do not exist apart from a possessor. For example, a hand...
", or direct, possession: by following the possessed with the possessor (and modifying the tone or ending of the possessed in some cases), e.g. piá:r no "person's leg" ("leg person"); - alienable possession: by putting a connecting word, conjugated according to number and gender, between the possessed and the possessor, e.g. làgɨˋm má màr-dɨb "blacksmith's horse" ("horse CONN. man+of-forge"). This word is sometimes abbreviated to a simple high tone.
However, if the possessor is a pronoun, it is suffixed with extensive vowel ablaut (in the first case), or prepositional forms with "at", and optionally the connector as well, are used (in the second case): na:ra ɟá ɗe: "my man" ("man CONN. at-me"), mùlù "her eye" ("eye-her", from mɨla "eye"). Some nouns (e.g. páw- "friend") occur only with bound pronouns, and have no independent form. This phenomenon - obligatory possession
Obligatory possession
Obligatory possession is a linguistic phenomenon common in languages with nouns inflected for possessor. Certain words, commonly kinship terms and body parts, cannot occur without a possessor. The World Atlas of Language Structures lists 43 languages in its 244 language sample as having obligatory...
- is found in many other languages, for instance the Andamanese languages
Andamanese languages
The Andamanese languages form a proposed language family spoken by the Andamanese peoples, a group of Negritos who live in the Andaman Islands, a union territory of India. Its validity is disputed...
, usually for words referring to personal relationships. See the pronouns section for the relevant suffixes.
A noun indicating someone who does, is, or has something can be formed with the prefix màr, meaning roughly "he/she/it who/of": màr jùgòr "landowner", màr ce "farmer" (ce = cultivate), màr pál "fisherman" (pál = to fish), màr pàlà ta: "a fisher of fish".
Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system, but apart from loans the forms do not appear to be cognate with the Adamawa system (Lionnet 2010).
Personal
In the following tables, note the distinction between inclusive and exclusive weClusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
, found in many other languages but not English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, and the gender differentiation of "I" in certain forms. The inanimate plural has in general been dropped by younger speakers in favor of the animate plural, though both are given below. The object paradigm for verbs is quite complex; only two of its several sets of allomorph
Allomorph
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound without changing meaning. The term allomorph explains the comprehension of phonological variations for specific morphemes....
s are given in the table below. "He" and "she" are only used with human referents; other nouns take the neuter pronoun. This is quite distinct from the languages that Laal shares vocabulary with, though Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system (Lionnet 2010). The 1st- and 2nd-person plural forms are quite similar to Chadic languages (specifically Kera
Kera language
Kera is an East Chadic language spoken by 45,000 people in Southwest Chad and 6,000 people in North Cameroon.-Grammar:Kera is a subject–verb–object language, using prepositions. It uses exclusively borderline case-marking.-External links:******...
) which are currently quite distant from the Laal-speaking region, but have no similarities to Adamawa.
| Simple | Emphatic | Benefactive | At | Possessive | Object (n-type) | Object (r-type) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I (masc.) | ɟá | ɟá | ni | ɗe: | -↑ər | -↑ə́n | -↑ə́r |
| I (fem.) | ɟí | ɟí | ni | ɗe: | -↑ər | -↑ə́n | -↑ə́r |
| you | ʔò | ʔùáj | na | ɗa: | -↓a | -↘(u)án | -↘á |
| he | ʔà | ʔàáj | nar | ɗa:r | -↓ar | -↓án | -↓ár |
| she | ʔɨ̀n | ʔɨ̀ní | nùg | ɗò:g | -↑o(g), -↗o(g) | -↗òn | -↑ò |
| it | ʔàn | ʔàní | nàná | ɗà:ná | -↓an | -↓àn | -↓àr, -↓àn |
| we (excl.) | ʔùrú | ʔùrú | nùrú | ɗò:ró | -↑rú | -↗(ˋ)nùrú, -↑(ˋ)nùrú | -↗(ˋ)rùú, -↑(ˋ)rùú |
| we (incl.) | ʔàáŋ | ʔàáŋ | nàáŋ | ɗàáŋ | -↑ráŋ | -↑(ˋ)nàáŋ | -↑(ˋ)ràáŋ |
| you (pl.) | ʔùn | ʔùnúŋ | nùúŋ | ɗòóŋ | -↑rúŋ | -↗(ˋ)nùúŋ, -↑(ˋ)nùúŋ | -↗(ˋ)rùúŋ, -↑(ˋ)rùúŋ |
| they (anim.) | ʔì | ʔìrí | nìrí | ɗè:ri | -↑rí | -↑(ˋ)nìrí | -↑(ˋ)rìí |
| they (inan.) | ʔuàn | ʔuàní | nuàná | ɗuà:ná | -↘an, -↑uan | -↘àn | -↘àr, -↘àn |
(The arrows indicate vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
triggered in by the suffix by the root.)
Relative and indefinite pronouns
| Male sg. | Female sg. | Inanimate sg. | Animate pl. | Inanimate pl. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| who/of | ɟá | ɟí | má | jí | já |
| some ... | ɟàn | ɟìn | màn | jìn | jìn |
| such a ... | ɟuàŋá | ɟùŋú | muàŋá | jùŋú | jùŋú |
Prepositions
Prepositions precede their objects: gɨ̀ pə:l "in(to) the village", kɨ́ jà:ná "to his body" (="to near him".)Verbs
The verb does not vary according to the person or gender of the subject, but some verbs (about a quarter of the verbs attested) vary according to its number: no kaw "the person eats", mùáŋ kɨw "the people eat". The plural form of the verb is hard to predict, but is often formed by ablaut (typically raising the vowel height) with or without a suffix -i(ɲ) or -ɨɲ and tonal change. The verb does, however, change according to the direct object. It takes personal suffixes to indicate a pronominal direct object, and commonly changes when a non-pronominal direct object is added to a transitiveTransitive verb
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
form with final low tone (formed similarly to the "centripetal", for which see below); e.g. ʔà ná ká "he will do"; ʔà ná kàrà mɨ́ná "he will do something"; ʔà kú na:ra "he sees the man"; ʔà kúù:rùúŋ "he sees you (pl.)".
The verb has three basic forms: simple, "centripetal", and "participative" (to calque
Calque
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
Boyeldieu's terminology.) The simple form is used in the simple present tense
Present tense
The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...
or the imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
, e.g. ʔà duàg jə́w gə̀m "he goes down the riverbank" (lit. "he descend mouth riverbank.") The "centripetal" indicates action "hither", either spatially - motion towards the speaker - or temporally - action up to the present moment; it is formed mainly by suffixing a vowel (often, but not always, identical to the last vowel in the word), e.g. ʔà duàgà jə́w gə̀m "he comes down the riverbank (towards me)". The "participative" - generally formed like the centripetal, but with final high tone - generally indicates an omitted object or instrument, e.g. ʔà sá ɗa:g ʔà sɨ̀rɨ́ su "he takes a calabash
Calabash
Lagenaria siceraria , bottle gourd, opo squash or long melon is a vine grown for its fruit, which can either be harvested young and used as a vegetable, or harvested mature, dried, and used as a bottle, utensil, or pipe. For this reason, the calabash is widely known as the bottle gourd...
and drinks water with it" (lit. "he take calabash he drink-participative water".)
Immediately before the verb, a particle may be placed to indicate forms other than a simple present tense; such particles include ná (pl. ní) marking future tense, taá:/teé: (pl. tií:) marking continuous action, wáa: (pl. wíi:) marking motion, náa: (pl. níi:) being apparently a combination of ná and wáa:, mà (pl. mì) meaning "must", mɨ́ marking reported speech (apparently an evidential), mɨ́nà (pl. mínì) expressing intention, kò marking habitual action, ɓə́l or ga (pl. gi) marking incomplete action, and wó (always accompanied by ʔàle after the verb) meaning "maybe".
Mediopassives (see passive voice
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
, middle voice) can be formed from transitive verbs by adding a suffix -↑ɨ́ɲ: e.g. no siár sà:b "someone ripped the cloth" > sà:b sérɨ́ɲ "the cloth ripped". For the inverse operation - forming transitive verbs from intransitives - tonal changes, or changes to the plural, sometimes occur.
Verbal noun
Verbal noun
In linguistics, the verbal noun turns a verb into a noun and corresponds to the infinitive in English language usage. In English the infinitive form of the verb is formed when preceded by to, e.g...
s can sometimes be formed, mainly from intransitives, by the addition of a suffix -(vowel)l, sometimes with ablaut and tone change; e.g. wal "fall" > wàlál "a fall", sùbá "lie" > sɨ́blál (pl. súbɨ̀r) "a lie". The l here becomes n near a nasal, and r near r: man "taste good", manan "a good taste".
Adjectives
Adjectives do not seem to constitute an independent category in Laal; to all intents and purposes, they behave just like verbs. E.g. gò: ʔì:r "the goat is black". Attributively, they are typically linked as a relative clauseRelative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
: gò: má ʔì:r "the black goat" (literally "goat which black".)
Numbers
The numbers include ɓɨ̀dɨ́l "one", ʔisi "two", ɓisan "four". No other numbers are given specifically in the works so far published.Adverbs
Adverbs generally come at the end of the clause. Some important adverbs are:Adverbs of location:
- "here": ɗágàl, núŋú
- "there": ɗaŋ
- "over there, yonder": ɗàŋá
Temporal adverbs:
- "day before yesterday": tá:r
- "yesterday": ʔiè:n
- "today": cicam, tari-màá
- "recently": bèrè
- "soon": sugo
- "tomorrow": jìlí-kà:rì
- "day after tomorrow": miàlgà
Modals
Among the most important modals are:- Before the verb: mɨ́ "(say) that", gàná "then"
- After the verb: wó "not", (ʔà)le "maybe", ɓə́l "again", ʔá or gà "already", à interrogative, wá exclamatory, ta "now", cám "again, anew".
Conjunctions
Syntactically, these can be divided into five types:- only main clause - conjunctionGrammatical conjunctionIn grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...
- subordinate clause}: mɨ́ "(say) that", ɓə "because" - either {main clause - conjunction - subordinate clause} or {conjunction - subordinate clause - main clause}: ɟò "if", dànngà (possibly from Baguirmian) "when"
- circumposed: either {conjunction - main clause - conjunction - subordinate clause} or {conjunction - subordinate clause - conjunction - main clause}: ɟò... gàná "if"
- coordinate clause - conjunction - coordinate clause: ní "then afterwards", ku "then", kó "nonetheless", á or ná "and", ɓe: "or", ʔàmá (from Arabic or Baguirmian) "but".
- circumposed: conjunction - coordinate clause - conjunction - coordinate clause: ku... ku "then", jàn... jàn "both... and".
Sample sentences
- mùáŋ lá tií: kìrì jé? "What do the people of Gori do?" (lit. "people Gori progressive-plural do-plural-transitive what?")
- mùáŋ lá tií: pál. "The people of Gori fish." (lit. "people Gori progressive-plural fish.")
- màr-ce ɓɨ́lá mɨ́ "bɨ̀là, ʔò teé: ɗɨ̀grɨ̀r". "The farmer said 'No way! You're tricking me.'" (lit. "man+who-cultivate say that no-way you progressive trick-me".)
- ɟá ná wùsù na pè:rí ní ʔárí ʔò ná kìnì jé? "If/When I take out the snake, what will you give me?" (lit. "I(masc.) will take+out-transitive for-you(sg.) snake then first you give-me-transitive what?")
- jà kàskàr mà mùáŋ lá sə̀ɲə́ be. "It's with swords that the people of Gori fight." (lit. "with swords emphatic(inan.) people Gori fight-participative battle.")
External links
- Laal at LLACAN
- The Genographic Project: Zalloua's notes including two recordings of the Laal recordings online