The Extinction of the Ongota Language - amazonia.fiocruz.br

The Nilo-Saharan Extinftion are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50—60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubianorth of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the centre; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east.

Eight of its proposed constituent divisions excluding KunamaKuliakand Songhay are found in the modern te of Sudan and South The Extinction of the Ongota Languagethrough which the Nile River flows. In his book The Languages of AfricaJoseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was a genetic family. It contains the languages which are not included in the Niger—CongoAfroasiatic or Khoisan groups. Although some linguists have referred to the phylum as "Greenberg's wastebasket ," into which he placed all the otherwise unaffiliated non- click languages of Africa, [1] [2] specialists in the field have accepted its reality since Greenberg's classification. Some of the constituent groups of Nilo-Saharan are estimated to predate the African neolithic.

Thus, the unity of Eastern Sudanic is estimated to LLanguage to at least the 5th millennium BC. This larger classification system is not accepted by all linguists, however. Glottologfor example, a publication of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, does not recognise the unity of the Nilo-Saharan family or even of the Eastern Sudanic branch; Georgiy Starostin likewise does not accept a relationship between the branches of Nilo-Saharan, though he leaves open the possibility that some of them may prove to be related to each other once the necessary reconstructive work is done.

The constituent families of Nilo-Saharan are quite diverse. One characteristic feature is a tripartite singulative — collective — plurative number system, which Blench believes is a result of a noun-classifier system in the protolanguage. The distribution of the families may reflect ancient water courses in a green Sahara during the Extincfion Subpluvialwhen the desert was more habitable than it is today.

The Extinction of the Ongota Language

Within the Nilo-Saharan languages are a number of languages with at least a million speakers most data from SIL's Ethnologue 16 In descending order:. The total for all speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages according to Ethnologue 16 is 38—39 million people. However, the data spans a range from ca. Given population growth rates, the figure in might be half again higher, or about 60 million. The first inklings of a wider family came inwhen Diedrich Westermann included three of the still independent Central Sudanic families within Nilotic in The Extinction of the Ongota Language proposal he called Niloto-Sudanic ; [11] this expanded Nilotic was in turn linked to Nubian, Kunama, and possibly Berta, essentially Greenberg's Macro-Sudanic Chari—Nile proposal of In G.

Carlo Conti Rossini made similar proposals inand in Westermann added Murle.

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In A. Tucker published evidence linking five of the six branches of Central Sudanic alongside his more explicit proposal for East Sudanic. In Greenberg retained Eastern Sudanic and Central Sudanic The Extinction of the Ongota Language separate families, but accepted Westermann's conclusions of four decades earlier in when he linked them together as Macro-Sudanic later Chari—Nilefrom the Chari and Nile Watersheds. Lionel Bender noted that Chari—Nile was a historical artifact of the discovery of the family and did not reflect an exclusive relationship between these languages, and the group has been abandoned, with its constituents becoming primary branches of Nilo-Saharan—or, equivalently, Chari—Nile and Nilo-Saharan have merged, with the name Nilo-Saharan retained.

When it was realized that the Kadu languages were not Niger—Congo, they were commonly assumed to therefore be Nilo-Saharan, but this remains somewhat controversial. Progress has been made since Greenberg established the plausibility of the family. Koman and Gumuz remain poorly attested and are difficult to work with, while arguments continue over the inclusion of Songhai.

Blench believes that the distribution of Nilo-Saharan reflects the waterways of the wet Sahara 12, years ago, and that the protolanguage had noun classifierswhich today are reflected in a diverse range of prefixes, suffixes, and number marking. Dimmendaal notes that Greenberg based his conclusion on strong evidence and that the The Extinction of the Ongota Language as a whole has become more convincing in the decades since. Mikkola reviewed Greenberg's evidence and found it convincing. Roger Blench notes morphological similarities in all putative branches, which leads him to believe that the family is likely to be valid. Koman and Gumuz are poorly known and have been difficult to evaluate until recently.

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Also problematic are the Kuliak languageswhich are spoken by hunter-gatherers and appear to retain a non-Nilo-Saharan core; Blench believes they may have been similar to Hadza or Dahalo and shifted incompletely to Nilo-Saharan. Anbessa Tefera and Peter Unseth consider the poorly attested Shabo language to be Nilo-Saharan, though unclassified within the here due to lack of data; Dimmendaal and Blench, based on a more complete description, consider it to be a language The Extinction of the Ongota Language on current evidence. Proposals have sometimes been made to add Mande usually included in Niger—Congolargely due to its many noteworthy similarities with Songhay rather than with Nilo-Saharan Te a whole, however this relationship is more likely due to a close relationship between Songhay and Mande many thousands of years ago in the early days of Nilo-Saharan, so the relationship is probably more one of ancient contact than a genetic link [3].]