Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Nubian group (East Sudanic family).

Languages included: Old Nubian [nub-onu]; Nobiin [nub-nob]; Dongolawi [nub-dng], Kenuzi [nub-knz]; Dilling [nub-del]; Kadaru [nub-kad]; Debri [nub-deb]; Karko [nub-krk]; Wali [nub-wli]; Birgid [nub-bir]; Midob [nub-mid].

DATA SOURCES

I. Old Nubian

Browne 1996 = Browne, Gerald M. Old Nubian Dictionary. Louvain: Peeters. // The most modern and complete dictionary of all attested forms of Old Nubian from one of the most expert specialists in the language.

II. Nobiin

Werner 1987 = Werner, Roland. Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch). Phonologie, Tonologie und Morphologie. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. // A detailed phonological and grammatical description of Nobiin Nubian (Fadidja-Mahas), accompanied by numerous examples of phrasal usage, texts, and a brief glossary.

Bell 1970 = Bell, Herman. The Phonology of Nobiin Nubian. In: African Language Review, 9, pp. 115-139. // Detailed phonological description of Nobiin, richly illustrated by lexical examples.

Lepsius 1880 = Lepsius, R. Nubische Grammatik. Mit einer Einleitung über die Völker und Sprachen Afrikas. Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz. // R. Lepsius' classic grammatical description of Nubian that also includes examples of texts and a large vocabulary for both the Kenuzi-Dongola and the Nobiin (Mahas) dialects / languages. Despite some relatively minor inaccuracies corrected in later sources, the work still remains relevant to this day.

III. Dongolawi

Armbruster 1965 = Armbruster, Charles Hubert. Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon. Cambridge University Press. // A thorough dictionary of the Dongolawi dialect, following up on an earlier exemplary grammar of Dongolawi by the same author.

Massenbach 1962 = Massenbach, Gertrud von. Nubische Texte im Dialekt der Kunuzi und der Dongolawi. Mit Glossar. Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. // A collection of texts in the closely related Kenuzi and Dongolawi dialects, accompanied with a large glossary. No significant discrepancies with Armbruster's dictionary, but useful as a cross-reference source.

IV. Kenuzi

Hofmann 1986 = Inge Hofmann. Nubisches Wörterverzeichnis. Nubisch-deutsches und deutsch-nubisches Wörterverzeichnis nach dem Kenzi-Material des Samuêl Alî Hisên (1863-1927). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. // A vocabulary of the Kenuzi dialect of Nubian, compiled by the author based on much earlier records of Kenuzi texts by S. Ali Hisen.

V. Dilling

Kauczor 1920 = P. Daniel Kauczor. Die Bergnubische Sprache (Dialekt von Gebel Delen). Wien: In Kommission bei Alfred Hölder. // A detailed grammar of the Dilling (Deleny, Jebel Delen) language. Does not include a separate dictionary, but the lexical data that illustrate phonology, morphology, and syntax are copious enough to allow the construction of a near-complete Swadesh wordlist.

Jabr el Dar 2006 = Khaliifa Jabr el Dar. Towards a general orthography of the Ajang languages. In: Insights into Nilo-Saharan Language, History and Culture. Ed. by Al-Amin Abu-Manga, Leoma Gilley, & Anne Storch. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 183-198. // A short paper on the issues of orthographic representation for Hill Nubian languages. Includes some newly collected lexical data on Dilling that may be used for auxiliary purposes (such as verification of Kauczor's data).

VI. Kadaru; Debri

Thelwall 1978 = Robin Thelwall. Lexicostatistical relations between Nubian, Daju and Dinka. In: Etudes Nubiennes. Colloque de Chantilly, 2-6 Juillet 1975, Kairo, pp. 265-286. // This comparative paper includes wordlists on several varieties of Nubian, including two Hill Nubian languages, Kadaru and Debri, data on which is taken by the author from the unpublished manuscripts of R. C. Stevenson.

Meinhof 1918 = Carl Meinhof. Sprachstudien im egyptischen Sudan. In: Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen, Band IX, pp. 43-64, 89-117, 167-204. // This source includes some brief, not always accurate, but generally important notes on many languages of modern Southern Sudan, including several varieties of Hill Nubian.

VII. Karko; Wali

Krell 2012 = Krell, Amy. Rapid Appraisal Sociolinguistic Survey Among Ama, Karko, and Wali Language Groups (Southern Kordofan, Sudan). SIL International. // A sociolinguistic survey of the Nyimang (Ama) language and several varieties of Hill Nubian. Includes complete 200-item wordlists for all the covered lects.

VIII. Birgid

Thelwall 1977 = Thelwall, Robin. A Birgid vocabulary list and its links with Daju. In: Gedenkschrift Gustav Nachtigall 1874-1974. Ed. by H. Ganslmayr & H. Jungraithmayr. Bremen, pp. 197-210. // The only available wordlist for the extinct Birgid language, collected by the author in December 1969.
MacMichael 1920 = MacMichael, H. A. Darfur Linguistics. In: Sudan Notes and Records, 3.3, pp. 197-216. // This short paper contains a small comparative list of various Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Darfur at the beginning of the 20th century, including Birgid.

IX. Midob

Werner 1993: Werner, Roland. Tìdn-áal: A Study of Midob (Darfur Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. // Detailed grammatical description of Midob. Contains a few illustrative texts and sets of phrases, as well as a relatively comprehensive glossary.
Thelwall 1983: Thelwall, Robin. Meidob Nubian: Phonology, Grammatical Notes and Basic Vocabulary. In: Nilo-Saharan Language Studies. Ed. by Lionel M. Bender. Michigan: East Lansing, pp. 97-113. // Based on the author's own field research in 1979. Contains a 218-item wordlist.

NOTES

1. General.

I. Old Nubian

The term "Old Nubian" refers to the language of texts written in one or more forms of the Nubian language from approximately the VIIIth to the XIth centuries A.D. (the largest of the texts, "The Miracle of St. Menas", is dated to the Xth century, which is why this is the provisional date chosen for glottochronological dating). It is not only the oldest attested form of any Nubian language, but the oldest attested form of any "Nilo-Saharan" language in general.

The amount of recovered texts and their lexical content is large enough to permit the use of Old Nubian for lexicostatistical purposes. Even so, it has only been possible to fill in 75 out of 100 slots (and a few of these entries remain under serious doubt for various reasons), so any lexicostatistical conclusions on replacement rates between Old Nubian and modern Nubian dialects must be made with caution.

Worse still, although this topic has not been seriously explored so far, there are reasons to suggest that "Old Nubian" is not a single, concise, dialect, but that some of the sources represent different dialects: lexical analysis indicates, for instance, every once in a while the presence of "doublets", in which one word is cognate with its equivalent in modern Kenuzi-Dongolawi and the other one - in modern Nobiin (e. g. 'white'). This contradicts the general idea of Old Nubian as being specifically the ancestor of modern "Fadidja / Mahas", i. e. Nobiin dialects. On the other hand, it is also true that generally Old Nubian is more close lexically to Nobiin than to Kenuzi/Dongolawi.

The main principle employed in the construction of a unified wordlist for Nobiin has been that of statistic frequency. Hapax legomena or contextually ambiguous forms are accepted as main entries only in those cases where no other equivalents for the required Swadesh meaning are available. In case of "doublets" where one word is frequently encountered in texts and the other one is basically a hapax, only the frequently used word is listed as the main entry, and the other one remains in the Notes section. Consistent use of this principle shows that the majority of "exclusive" isoglosses, as a result, is indeed between Old Nubian and Nobiin rather than Old Nubian and Kenuzi-Dongolawi.

II. Nobiin

There is no fully adequate and complete dictionary for Nobiin Nubian, or Fadidja-Mahas ("Fadidja" is the most common old name for Egyptian Nobiin, while "Mahas" generally refers to Sudanese Nobiin; actual dialectal variety is reported to be quite small and probably irrelevant for lexicostatistical purposes). The latest dictionary to appear (Mokhtar M. Khalil, Wörterbuch der nubischen Sprache /Fadidja-Maḥas-Dialekt/, Warszawa, 1996) is not so much an original work as simply a compilation of all previous sources on Nobiin, and is therefore fairly useless for lexicostatistics (in addition, it employs the questionable strategy of using the Old Nubian script to transcribe Modern Nobiin words, which results in some hard-to-resolve ambiguities; and it omits all Arabic borrowings into Nobiin, including even those that are used in everyday conversation and have entered the basic lexicon).

We therefore have to rely on older, sometimes less thorough or antiquated, publications. The main source for our wordlist is [Werner 1987], which may be considered perfectly reliable wherever the needed word in question is attested in the author's text corpus and glossary (this accounts for 98 out of 110 entries). The remaining gaps have been filled in by data from the description in [Bell 1970], another reliable, if predictably small, source; and, in just a few cases, with entries from the old dictionary of R. Lepsius [1880]. Comparison of all these sources shows that they generally agree with each other, so the probability of erroneous lexical inclusions or even incorrect phonological notation is quite small even in the most dubious cases (all of which have been marked accordingly).

Where the information is available, nouns are listed along with their plural forms; verbs, following Werner, are listed in the 1st p. sg. present form, but with all the proper morphological segmentation.

III. Dongolawi

The most adequate and detailed source for data on modern Dongolawi is [Armbruster 1965], a dictionary that is closely tied with his earlier grammar, still one of the best "classically-oriented" grammars written for a Nilo-Saharan language. For the most part, it renders obsolete the earlier sources; to make the list more well-rounded, and also in order to counterbalance some of Armbruster's transcriptional excesses (see below), we also use the slightly earlier glossary of [Massenbach 1962] for cross-reference purposes.

It must be noted that a serious flaw of Armbruster's dictionary is its abuse of internal etymologization: many of its verbal and nominal stems are segmented by the author in most ingenious ways (e. g. mıssı 'eye' is explained as *mın-sı 'little what?', etc.). In the process of morphemic segmentation for preparing this particular wordlist, we have carefully omitted all such excesses, and retained only the more or less understandable cases of regular / productive verbal and nominal derivation.

IV. Kenuzi

The most detailed source of lexical data on Kenuzi, a "sister" dialect for Dongolawi with which it has a very minor number of discrepancies, is [Hofmann 1986], a recent reworking of much earlier records by S. Ali Hisen. The vocabulary is well illustrated with lexical examples and is ideally suitable for the extraction of the Swadesh wordlist, although the inclusion of numerous Arabic borrowings may seem somewhat dubious (it is not clear to what extent many of these words were, or have continued to remain, integrated in the common language). For cross-reference purpose, we also consult the glossary of [Massenbach 1962] wherever possible.

V. Dilling

The single largest source on Dilling is Kauczor 1920, a highly detailed grammatical description, well illustrated by lexical data. Comparison with newer, much less detailed but (in theory) more modern and accurate sources, such as Jabr el Dar 2006, shows that Kauczor's description is questionable as far as certain aspects of phonetic transcription are concerned, but on the whole (and particularly in respect to the accuracy of eliciting the basic lexicon), turns out to be a highly reliable source.

VI. Kadaru; Debri

Apart from Kauczor 1920 on Dilling, available information on the numerous Hill Nubian languages is generally scant. Although Carl Meinhof (1918) had managed to compile a small comparative vocabulary of several Hill Nubian idioms, this source is quite incomplete, and the accuracy of its phonetic and semantic notation is quite questionable, so it is recommendable to use it exclusively for etymological purposes or, at best, as an auxiliary source for lexicostatistical lists.
Until 2012, the only two lists to have been officially published for Hill Nubian were Thelwall 1978, for Kadaru and Debri (the latter is either a dialect of Dilling or a very closely related language), taken from the unpublished manuscripts of R. C. Stevenson. Unfortunately, they contain numerous lacunae (around 35 items each), which really justifies their inclusion only in terms of reconstructing an original wordlist for Proto-Hill Nubian.

VII. Karko; Wali

These two lects that seem to belong to a separate small subbranch of Hill Nubian were, until recently, only known through very scarce and unreliable information in Carl Meinhof's comparative vocabulary and various later small-scale comparative works on Hill Nubian. In 2007, however, Amy Krell has collected valuable 200-item wordlists on both these languages, published later as [Krell 2012]. Although comparative scrutiny of the wordlists shows that they may not altogether be free of phonetic and semantic misglossings, on the whole the quality of the data seems quite high, and although these wordlists, too, have some gaps, their addition is very valuable for a proper lexicostatistical evaluation of Hill Nubian.

VIII. Birgid

The presumably extinct Birgid language of Darfur has, unfortunately, failed to be adequately documented. The only more or less serious wordlist is provided by Robin Thelwall [1978] without much commentary, and even that list contains some important gaps in the basic lexicon. For certain purposes (including gap filling in the Swadesh list), the much older list in [MacMichael 1920] may also be consulted, although its phonetic and semantic accuracy is under serious doubt.

IX. Midob

The main source on Midob Nubian of North Darfur is the grammar and vocabulary [Werner 1993]; for cross-checking purposes, the older wordlist in [Thelwall 1983] may also be consulted. Both sources were obtained independently and generally agree with each other, although there are some significant discrepancies in tonal notation between the two.

2. Transliteration.

I. Old Nubian

Old Nubian is commonly written in a modified form of the Coptic alphabet, with a few additional letters. For technical reasons, even though Coptic has its own Unicode section, we do not use Coptic letters in the database. However, the alphabetic notation of Old Nubian words is not perfect, and the same form may frequently be graphically noted in different ways. For this reason, it is often important to include the words both in their phonetic transcription ("restored" with a high, but not always hundred-percent probability of accuracy) and in their original graphic form, transliterating the Coptic alphabet directly with Latin (or, occasionally, Greek) letters.

The following has to be remembered when comparing the original transcription and the UTS transliteration:

(1) Coptic/Nubian ou = UTS u (following the Greek tradition).

(2a) Coptic/Nubian ω, o = UTS o
(2b) Coptic/Nubian η, i = UTS i
(although Old Nubian must have had vowel length opposition, there is no serious evidence that it was correctly reflected in writing).

(3) The superscript dash in Old Nubian texts most commonly renders a short i preceding the letter over which the dash is placed (so {agl̄} = agil, etc.). Sometimes, however, it is also placed over the word-initial vowel (e. g. {ādω} 'white'), where its function is unknown; in these cases, we do not reflect the dash in UTS transliteration.

(4) Finally, the vowel i is also sometimes rendered by the digraph ei. Again, there is no clear indication that this transcription indicates that the vowel was long. The "trigraph" -iei- is quite likely to mark an original -iː- (although in some cases it could probably transcribe an original -yi-).

(5) The glide w is either rendered with the special letter w (rarely) or, more frequently, with ou (before a vowel) or u (as part of a diphthong), thus {ouatto-} = {wattω-} = watto-; {dau-} = daw-, etc.

II. Nobiin

Changes from Werner's phonological transcription to UTS have been minimal and mostly concern satisfying the usual UTS requirements, such as:

(a) Werner's c, j = UTS ɕ, ʓ (= ǵ in [Lepsius 1880], where voiced and voiceless palatal affricates are not discerned);
(b) Werner's sh = UTS š (also in Lepsius' transcription);
(b) Werner's ny = Lepsius' ń = UTS ɲ; Werner's ng = UTS ŋ;
(c) Werner's VV = Lepsius' V̄ = UTS Vː (vowel length);
(d) Werner marks high tone as V́ and leaves the statistically more frequent low tone unmarked (V); we always mark it as V̀.

III. Dongolawi

The transcription used by Armbruster requires only minimal transliterational activity when converting it to UTS:

(a) Armbruster's ǧ = UTS ǯ. Massenbach uses the symbol j, transliterated as UTS ʓ, for the same phoneme (it is probably realized more often as a palatal rather than post-alveolar consonant, but the issue is not quite clear);
(b) Armbruster's ñ = Massenbach's ny = UTS ɲ (palatal nasal);
(c) Armbruster's j = Massenbach's y = UTS y;
(d) Armbruster's V̄ = UTS Vː (vowel length).

It should also be noted that in most contexts, Armbruster transcribes the front vowels of Dongolawi as "-ATR" sounds: ɛ and ı. We retain that transcription, but there is really no phonemic opposition between ɛ and e, or ı and i, in Dongolawi Nubian (nor, as it seems, in any other Nubian language).

IV. Kenuzi

The transcription used by Hofmann is, for the most part, preserved when transliterated to UTS. The following discrepancies should be noted:

(a) Hofmann's ǧ = UTS ǯ;
(b) Hofmann's ġ = UTS ɣ;
(c) Hofmann's ` = UTS ʕ (this laryngeal is encountered only in borrowings from Arabic).

Double vowels (aa, ee, etc.) represent vowel length and are transliterated accordingly (aː, eː, etc.).

V. Dilling

In his grammar, P. Kauczor uses a number of local idiosyncrasies that are transliterated into the UTS system as follows:

(a) Kauczor's palatal t̄, d̄ = UTS ɕ, ʓ respectively. (In Jabr el Dar 2006 and certain other sources, the same consonants are transcribed as tʃ and dʒ, i. e. as post-alveolars).

(b) Kauczor distinguishes between three varieties of mid-level vowels, which he marks respectively as e, ẹ, e̺ and o, ọ, o̺. His description of the actual phonetic differences is rather vague, but it seems that the dot indicates openness; thus, we retain Kauczor's e, o as UTS e, o and transcribe his ẹ, ọ as UTS ɛ, ɔ. On the other hand, the distinction between e, o and e̺, o̺ is extremely dubious; it is possible that Kauczor uses this to indicate near-close articulation (ı, ʋ), but there is no knowing for sure. For now, we simply merge these symbols in UTS transliteration (i. e. e, e̺ = UTS e; o, o̺ = UTS o), indicating, however, which of the transcriptional signs Kauczor uses in the notes section. According to the description in Jabr el Dar 2006, open / close vowel pairs in Dilling do form phonological oppositions, whereas Kauczor's distinction between e/o and e̺/o̺ is not even noted there as a relevant phonetic opposition.

(c) Other transliterational issues: Kauczor's ń = UTS ɲ, Kauczor's ṅ = UTS ŋ; V̄ = Vː (long vowels); V́ = ˈV (stress, defined by Kauczor as musical pitch-rising and usually characteristic of more than bisyllabic words).

VI. Kadaru; Debri

Almost no differences between Stevenson's (Thelwall's) transcription of the data and the UTS, other than the standard coronal affricate/fricative conversions (ʃ > š; dʒ > ǯ; c > ɕ; ɉ > ʓ).

VII. Karko; Wali

Amy Krell mainly uses standard IPA, with only minimal UTS transliteration requirements (same as in Kadaru and Debri, actually). It is only worth noting that she postulates tonal distinctions for both languages, and consistently marks high and low tones as V́ and V̀, respectively. We presume that unmarked vowels in her transcription correspond to mid-level tone (V̄), although this is not explicitly stated in the source.

VIII. Birgid

No transcriptional differences from Thelwall's transcription other than standard UTS/IPA discrepancies (ʃ > š; c > ɕ; ɉ > ʓ; j > y). It should be noted that Thelwall distinguishes between centralized a and back ɑ in his transcription; this difference is most likely phonetic rather than phonological, but we have preserved this distinction in the recoding.

IX. Midob

Minimal discrepancies with Werner's transcription include: (a) long vowels are transcribed as doubled (aa, oo, etc.) in [Werner 1993], retransliterated as aː, oː, etc.; (b) the palatal series c, j, ny is retransliterated as ɕ, ʓ, ɲ; (c) velar nasal ng is transliterated as ŋ.

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin (last update: May 2015).