Nobiin language
Before the construction of the Aswan Dam, speakers of Nobiin lived in the Nile valley between the third cataract in the south and Korosko in the north.
About 60% of the territory of Nubia was destroyed or rendered unfit for habitation as a result of the construction of the dam and the creation of Lake Nasser.
[5] Nowadays, Nobiin speakers live in the following areas: (1) near Kom Ombo, Egypt, about 40 km north of Aswan, where new housing was provided by the Egyptian government for approximately 50,000 Nubians; (2) in the New Halfa Scheme in the Kassala, Sudan, where housing and work was provided by the Sudanese government for Nubians from the inundated areas around Wadi Halfa; (3) in the Northern state, Sudan, northwards from Burgeg to the Egyptian border at Wadi Halfa.
In recent years, some of the resettled Nubians have returned to their traditional territories around Abu Simbel and Wadi Halfa.
The forced resettlement in the second half of the twentieth century also brought more Nubians, especially women and children, into daily contact with Arabic.
[7] Rouchdy (1992a) however notes that use of Nobiin is confined mainly to the domestic circle, as Arabic is the dominant language in trade, education, and public life.
Old Nubian, preserved in a sizable collection of mainly early Christian manuscripts and documented in detail by Gerald M. Browne (1944–2004), is considered ancestral to Nobiin.
The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan.
Joseph Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the two Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2500 years ago.
This is corroborated by the fact that the oral tradition of the Shaigiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago.
The economic and cultural influence of Egypt over the region was considerable, and, over the centuries, Egyptian Arabic spread south.
In what is today Sudan, Sudanese Arabic became the main vernacular of the Funj Sultanate, with Nobiin becoming a minority tongue.
In Egypt, the Nobiin speakers were also part of a largely Arabic-speaking state, but Egyptian control over the south was limited.
With the Ottoman conquest of the region in the sixteenth century, official support for Arabization largely ended, as the Turkish and Circassian governments in Cairo sometimes saw Nobiin speakers as a useful ally.
However, as Arabic remained a language of high importance in Sudan and especially Egypt, Nobiin continued to be under pressure, and its use became largely confined to Nubian homes.
The uniformity of this 'Nile-Nubian' branch was first called into doubt by Thelwall (1982) who argued, based on lexicostatistical evidence, that Nobiin must have split off from the other Nubian languages earlier than Dongolawi.
[10] In recent times, research by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst has shed more light on the relations between Nobiin and Dongolawi.
[12] Nobiin appears to have had a strong influence on Dongolawi, as evidenced by similarities between the phoneme inventories as well as the occurrence of numerous borrowed grammatical morphemes.
On the basis of a comparison with seventeen other Eastern Sudanic languages, Thelwall (1982) considers Nubian to be most closely related to Tama, a member of the Taman group, with an average lexical similarity of just 22.2 per cent.
Phonotactically, there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms like dàrrìl 'climb' and dààrìl 'be present' are found, but *dàrìl (short V + short C) and *dààrrìl (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly, féyyìr 'grow' and fééyìr 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not *féyìr and *fééyyìr.
Originally, [z] only occurred as an allophone of /s/ before voiced consonants; however, through the influx of loanwords from Arabic it has acquired phonemic status: àzáábí 'pain'.
[15] Only in very few words, if any, does [h] have independent phonemic status: Werner lists híssí 'voice' and hòòngìr 'braying', but it might be noted that the latter example is less convincing because of its probably onomatopoeic nature.
This is one of the clearest signs of the occurrence of a boundary tone, realized as a low pitch on the last syllable of any prepausal word.
For a long time, the Nile Nubian languages were thought to be non-tonal; early analyses employed terms like "stress" or "accent" to describe the phenomena now recognized as a tone system.
Based on accounts like Meinhof's, Nobiin was considered a toneless language for the first half of the twentieth century.
[17] The statements of de facto authorities like Meinhof, Diedrich Hermann Westermann, and Ida C. Ward heavily affected the next three decades of linguistic theorizing about stress and tone in Nobiin.
Gender is expressed lexically, occasionally by use of a suffix, but more often with a different noun altogether, or, in the case of animals, by use of a separate nominal element óndí 'masculine' or kàrréé 'feminine': The pair male slave/female slave forms an interesting exception, showing gender marking through different endings of the lexeme: òsshí 'slave (m.)' vs. òsshá 'slave (f.)'.
Verbal morphology in Nobiin is subject to numerous morphophonological processes, including syllable contraction, vowel elision, and assimilation of all sorts and directions.
The majority of verbal bases in Nobiin end in a consonant (e.g. nèèr- 'sleep', kàb- 'eat', tíg- 'follow', fìyyí- 'lie'); notable exceptions are júú- 'go' and níí- 'drink'.
'Old Nubian, considered ancestral to Nobiin, was written in a Coptic-like script, an uncial variety of the Greek alphabet, extended with three Coptic letters — ϣ "sh" /ʃ/, ϩ "h" /h/, and ϭ "j" /ɟ/ — and three unique to Nubian: ⳡ "ny" /ɲ/ and ⳣ "w" /w/, apparently derived from the Meroitic alphabet; and ⳟ "ng" /ŋ/, thought to be a ligature of two Greek gammas.
