|
A Brief Description of the Eastern Nilotic Language Family
Cheryl January Most if not all of the work done in the Nilotic language family was done within the last 120 years. In 1880, the Egyptologist R. Lepsius published his Nubische Grammatik, a work which became enormously important to Africanists in those days because of its introduction to African people and languages. The classification that Lepsius presented in this introduction included 4 Nilotic languages, Dinka, Shilluk, Bari and Oigob (Maasai), as well as several non-Nilotic languages, Bongo, Nuba, and Barea. Lepsius defended this position by saying the languages were alike because they made a distinction between two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine (Vossen, 1982, p. 87). More than thirty years later, B. Struck picked up where Lepsius left off. He proposed a Bari-Massai group that, combined with the Nandi-Datooga group was named Nilo-Hamitic. HEe did not have very much evidence to support these relationship, but it was accepted anyway by D. Westermann as a group of Eastern Nilotic. Between this time and 1938 several more scholars tried to add their own ideas to this area, but they did so with little information to support their claims and also little success (Vossen, 1982, pp. 88-89). In 1938 Father C, Muratori published Grammatica Lotuxo. In an appendix to this book, he described the Nilotic family as he saw it. The Eastern Nilotic Family consists of two primary branches, i.e., BARI and NON-Bari (including TESO-TURKANA, ONGAMO-MAA, and LOTUKO). Muratori however, did not go as far as to group Lotuko, Massai and Karimojong together against Bari. He rather preferred to set up four sub-groups, which are assumed to be historically independent of one another: 1. Bari (with dialects), 2. Lotuko (with Lomya and Oxoriok), 3. Boya-Toposa-Karimojong-Teso-Turkana, and 4. Massai (and its dialects). (Vossen, 1982, p.89). Again, several more people attempted to make a classification system for this family, but they were either unsuccessful in supplanting Muratoris work or they did not have evidence to back up their claims. In the early 1970s, historian C. Ehret was the first person to add anything of worth to Muratoris work. Ehret concentrated mostly on lexical reconstructions. These reconstructed words gave evidence to at least three Eastern Nilotic proto-stages: Proto-Teso-Masaian from which any Nilotic language other than Bari and its dialects may be derived, Proto-Masaian, the ancestral language of Maa and Ongamo, and Proto-Karomajong-Teso, the direct linguistic mother of the Teso-Turkana languages (Vossen, 1982, p.95). Since Ehret, only two scholars have made contributions to the classification of this family, and these were only minor. They both tried to deal with the problem of sub-grouping Ehrets Masaian group, which they call Ongamo-Maa. Due to some sound relations between Ongamo and three dialects of the Maa language, an addition to the genetic tree was added. The final refinement to this tree was added when another dialect of Maa was uncovered. The Nilotic family has had the greatest impact on other East African languages and language families because that is where its languages are spoken. It has affected, even if only minimally the grammar, pronunciation and lexicon of languages like Bantu, Tanzanian and Ugandan, and families like Eastern Sudanic (Vossen & Bechhaus-Gerst, 1983). This is a language family were there is still a lot to do. Muratori, Ehret and a few others have done great work so far in trying to classify this language, but as more research is done and more dialects are uncovered, additions will need to be made to what they did. Eastern Nilotic is an interesting family at an interesting time in its scholarly history. Bibliography Vossen, R. (1982). The Eastern Nilotes: Linguistic and Historical Reconstructions. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Vossen, R. & Bechhaus-Gerst, M. (Eds.). (1983). Nilotic Studies: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Languages and History of the Nilotic Peoples. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. |