Week 10: Koman, Gumuz, Shabo, and Goodbyes

There is one final corner of Nilo-Saharan which I wish to analyze in this series of blogs. This corner consists of the Koman, Gumuz, and Shabo language families, all of which reside in the nation of Ethiopia. However, due to the coming deadline of the final project itself, I’d like to slightly change the format of this post and provide to you all a direct preview to my paper, On the Inconsistency of the Nilo-Saharan Phylum, provided in the paragraphs below.

While Greenberg’s initial proposal grouped the Koman and Gumuz families not only as subfamilies of Nilo-Saharan but further as subfamilies of the Coman subfamily of Nilo-Saharan, this particular instance of comparison has been highly debated by Greenberg’s successors. While the corpus of research on these particular families can be particularly slim, the shared base vocabulary between them and the languages of Core Nilo-Saharan is practically non-existent. However, this is a statement which must be tempered by the knowledge of the aforementioned lack of research. The available vocabulary lists for these languages tend to be minute, partially due to the political situations affecting the populations that speak them. For example, Uduk, the largest of the Koman languages at only about 20,000 speakers, has been in quite a fraught situation, as nearly the entire population of speakers has had to migrate from South Sudan to Ethiopia and back again due to various political crises within the former nation. Crises like these make it very difficult for research to proceed on the affected languages as very few linguists enjoy working in warzones, especially since there is little financial incentive to involve oneself in African linguistics to begin with. All of this ultimately leads to a drought of research when it comes to the vocabulary of these languages, making it difficult to ascribe conclusiveness to one’s research.

Similarly, the Shabo language is another instance of a lect facing a drought of research. It is not a Koman or a Gumuz language but rather a language isolate which is similarly spoken in Ethiopia. Shabo is not facing quite the same political crises as those of Uduk, but what it is facing is the perils of a very low number of speakers. Shabo has less than a thousand speakers, and any language of that quantity, though especially in Africa, will suffer from a drought of research. As a result, in Uduk, Gumuz, and Shabo, there were a very limited number of Swadesh words to compare, though I still found some notable matches, displayed in the chart below.

Ultimately, I do not believe that the comparisons shown are proof that the given languages are related, nor do I believe the lack of cognates to be proof that the languages are not related. If anything, I believe these results are proof that more research must be done into this particular line of study. Koman, Gumuz, and Shabo are very unlikely to be related to Core Nilo-Saharan, but their internal relations with one another could vary tremendously.

Sources:

Bender, M. Lionel. 1971. The languages of Ethiopia: A new lexicostatistic classification and some problems of diffusion. Anthropological Linguistics 13. 165-288.

Ehret, Christopher. 1995. Do Krongo and Shabo Belong in Nilo-Saharan?. In Nicolaï, Robert and Rottland, Franz (eds.), Actes du Cinquième Colloque de Linguistique Nilo-Saharienne / Proceedings of the Fifth Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Nice, 24-29 August 1992 Nilo-Saharan language studies, 169-194. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.