Week 7: On Varied Sudanics

According to Starostin’s analysis, Songhay and the greater Nilo-Saharan family couldn’t possibly be related. In my last two blog posts, I corroborated this opinion, though my suspicion that Saharan and Songhay were related to one another was not reflected in Starostin’s work. It should be remembered, however, that Starostin’s use of glottochronology is not fully supported by many other linguists. It is a controversial technique, one still placed at a higher pedestal than Greenberg’s mass comparison, but not one to be immediately taken at face value. However, it remains a useful tool.

Starostin’s largest claim in his analysis was likely his proposal that Central Sudanic and Eastern Sudanic were, albeit distantly, related to one another. This is a claim that I’d like to look into, as it exists as one of the most fundamental pillars of the proposal itself, so fundamental that both subfamilies were not only included in Greenberg’s original Nilo-Saharan, but also in Greenberg’s now defunct subfamily of Chari-Nile. It is the general consensus among linguists today to split up the families of Chari-Nile, as there isn’t very much they all share in common, and it is increasingly the opinion of linguists today to put the entire Nilo-Saharan family into question.

My goal this week was to incorporate a specific Central Sudanic language into my growing spreadsheet of languages. I already have two Eastern Sudanic languages, Acholi and Dinka, included on the list, and I wanted to add Lugbara, a Central Sudanic language of slightly over two million speakers from Uganda. It is important to note that there are significantly more Eastern Sudanic speakers than Central Sudanic speakers, meaning that I wouldn’t have access to any machine translation software to assist me in my comparison. This would not prevent me from achieving my goals, it just meant I had to do things the old fashioned away. Using the ASJP (Automated Similarity Judgment Program) Database, I was able to compile a workable Swadesh list from the word lists of Viveka Velupillai, Guillame Segerer, and Søren Wichmann. Unfortunately, this would leave me with a slightly less satisfactory 100-word list, based on Swadesh’s original model, rather than my ideal 207-word list. This would make my comparison slightly less astute, but since BASIS refused to fly me to Uganda free of charge, I’d ultimately have to settle on this particular matter.

The first thing I’d like to point out when comparing the Lugbara to the Eastern Sudanic languages is the second-person pronoun. This feature, one actively noted by Greenberg, has proved to stand as the strongest piece of vocabulary in support of a united Nilo-Saharan. In Lugbara, the equivalent word is ‘mi,’while in Acholi it is ‘in,’ and in Dinka ‘yin.’ As a reminder, the second-person pronouns in Zarma and Kanuri are ‘ni’ and ‘nyi’ respectively. Lugbara seems to have the most distinct phonology of all of these words, being the only one without an ‘n’ sound, though the ‘m’ sound is quite similar and it still possesses an ‘i’ sound. Still, if we isolate our Eastern Sudanic and Central Sudanic languages, it can be seen how the two words could have a common root, through the process of metathesis, but they could just as easily be wholly unrelated.

Outside of the second-person pronoun, the support for Eastern Sudanic and Central Sudanic belonging to the same family becomes incredibly sparse. However, there does still exist a handful of words between Lugbara and Acholi that bear some resemblance, such as the word for ‘two,’ which is ‘aryo’ in Acholi and ‘iri’ in Lugbara, the word for ‘tree,’ which is ‘yat’ in Acholi and ‘pati’ in Lugbara, and the word for ‘to see,’ which is ‘neno’ in Acholi in ‘ne’ in Lugbara. Unfortunately, there exists a problem with all of these similarities. Acholi and Dinka are very similar languages, as they both belong to the well-supported subfamily of Eastern Sudanic called Nilotic. Likewise, they have plenty of similarities in vocabulary, a result of both carrying words from proto-Nilotic, the lect they’re both derived from. However, all of the Acholi words that I just listed had equivalents in Dinka which were completely phonetically different, meaning that there’s a high likelihood they did not come from proto-Nilotic but rather from elsewhere. Further, since Nilotic is a very well-supported language family, Lugbara can’t just be related to one of them, it would have to be related to both, yet it only shows similarities to Acholi. I suspect the reason for this dissonance is a matter of Geography. Acholi and Lugbara are both spoken in Uganda, and furthermore both in the north-west of Uganda, while Dinka is much further removed in South Sudan. The similarities between Acholi and Lugbara are likely then the result of interaction between the two cultures as instigated by Geography, rather than any ancient common root between the two lects. This could explain why there was only one word that was similar in all three languages, the word for nose, ‘um’ in Acholi, ‘nhom’ in Dinka, and ‘omvu’ in Lugbara.

Ultimately, like Starostin before me I find the links between Eastern and Central Sudanic to be very poorly supported. Starostin suspected that if they were to be related, their proto-language would’ve had to have diverged about 14,000 years ago, and in this number I detect a flaw in the method of glottochronology, as it is simply too large to postulate with any degree of provable accuracy. While families such as Afro-Asiatic have been provided with similar ages, Afro-Asiatic has the advantage of producing multiple ancient written languages, such as Egyption hieroglyphs, something which cannot be said about Nilo-Saharan save for a handful of potentially Nubian names. I believe that, if we are to recognize the inherent limitations of linguistics, that being that we cannot build a time machine, we must keep Central Sudanic and Eastern Sudanic separate for the time being.

Sources:

Boone, Douglas W. and (eds.), Richard L. Watson. 1992. Moru-Ma’di survey report. Nairobi: Sudan Branch, Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).

Tucker, A. N. 1967. The Eastern Sudanic languages I. London: International African Institute.