Week 8: Core Nilo-Saharan

In my past handful of blog posts, I’ve been discussing the areas in which the Nilo-Saharan phylum fails to hold together. Throughout this process, there has been a worry that I might be being a little too strict with my judgments. If I were to end up with a picture of Nilo-Saharan that was simply just every subfamily cordoned off into an independent family, I’d definitely develop suspicions that I was simply going about with the process the wrong way. However, my most recent findings have alleviated some of the worries I’ve been hosting inside of me. To be more specific, I analyzed the Fur and Kuliak subfamilies of Nilo-Saharan, the two families that Starostin positioned closest to Eastern Sudanic in his own analysis, and I found quite the number of cognates between the languages I compared.

However, before I start speaking on the specific similarities I detected in my research, I’d like to spend some time speaking on the other side of the senior project, that of my internship. I’ve been interning at RuReady.fyi, a blogging project dedicated to providing helpful frameworks for developing career readiness. Specifically, I’ve been working on a series of articles dedicated to an experience that many face which is quite personal and recent for me, the process of applying to colleges. The philosophy behind this series is that, because so much of what one does in their professional life is related to their experience in higher education, a series dedicated to approaching higher education was due in order to round out the website as a whole. I also found that, because I had just gone through a quite extensive college application process at a school that provides many resources to assist said process, that I might be able to pass down some of the wisdom I acquired to students at schools that don’t put as much attention into college application. So far, I’ve found that my internship has really helped me with improving my ability to write informatively–as opposed to my preferred habit of writing narratively–which has overall assisted me in writing the document that will make up my final project on the prospect of Nilo-Saharan.

Now, back to the linguistics. I was able to locate a complete 100-word Swadesh list of the Fur language, published by the University of Khartoum, which I compared with my findings for Dinka and Acholi. I’ve put the list of potential cognates below inside a table, which I hope will be a bit more readable than some of my previous choices in formatting.

Overall, I found enough valid potential cognates within the Swadesh list for me to be rather confident in declaring that Eastern Sudanic and Fur are languages related to one another.

The other language we’ll be looking at in this post is the Ik language of Uganda, the only non-moribund member of the Kuliak family. While the Ik language only has about 14,000 speakers, there has been quite a significant amount of anthropological study into their particular society. This is in part due to a particularly horrendous book by Colin Turnbull entitled The Mountain People which presented an incredibly distorted picture of the Ik culture that offended the anthropological community at large so much that many more experienced researchers began committing themselves to studying the Ik people in an effort to disprove Turnbull. As a result, I was able to find a complete English-Ik dictionary, which I used to develop a Swadesh list for the language. Below, I’ve charted the comparisons I drew between Acholi, Dinka, and Ik.

Ultimately, the list of potential cognates I found between Acholi, Dinka, Fur, and Ik leads me to believe that all four languages are related within a linguistic family I will be referring to with the name Core Nilo-Saharan.

Sources:

Waag, Christine. 2010. The Fur verb and its context (Nilo-Saharan: linguistic analyses and documentation 26). Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.; McKeever, Ashley L. 2014. Sonority and Syllable Weight in Fur. University of Texas at Arlington doctoral dissertation.; Beaton, A. C. 1968. A Grammar of the Fur Language (Linguistics Monograph Series I). Khartoum: Sudan Research Unit, University of Khartoum.

Schrock, Terrill. The Ik language: Dictionary and grammar sketch. Language Science Press, 2017.