More Mabaan pharyngeals

Thomas Anour has posted a number of Bible extracts: Mark 10:13-18, John 1:1-13, and James 4:1-3. Comparing these to a published translation from 2002 (from which he sometimes diverges slightly) and to the anonymous dictionary linked in the previous post makes it possible for a beginner to parse much of the text. No more examples of /ħ/ were heard; but another pharyngeal, /ʕ/, was. This phoneme is absent from the online audio version of this Bible translation, but can be heard clearly in Thomas Anour's pronunciation of at least three frequent words, despite occasional variation, and seems to contrast with the glottal stop /ʔ/, as illustrated by the the last few lines of the following table. While one of the words with /ʕ/ is an Arabic loan, the rest clearly are not.

Unfortunately, I don't know yet where it's coming from. I have yet to find any useful cognates to the words with the pharyngeal in the rest of Nilotic, or even in the meager Jumjum dictionary. "We" corresponds to Nuer <kɔn> and (probably?) Dinka /wɔ̂ɔk/.

English	Mabaan (Anour)	Mabaan (anon)	Mabaan (Anderson)
and	[ʕɔ́sì]	ɔci	ʔɔ́cé
so that	[ʕáŋkàː]	aŋ-ka	ʔáŋkà
because (< Ar.)	[ʕásàan]	acaan
where	[ʔáŋɛ̀]	aŋɛ
quotative particle	[ʔàgɪ́]	agi	ʔàgē
we	[ʔɔ̂ːn]	ɔɔn	ʔɔ̆ɔn

Mabaan pharyngeals

The least well documented subgroup of West Nilotic is the Burun group, spoken around the borders between Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. The largest language in this subgroup is Mabaan, spoken in South Sudan, for which there exists at least one dictionary (available without bibliographic information on Roger Blench's site), and several very interesting articles by Torben Andersen. But we are no longer in the era where a non-field linguist could be content to look at printed sources alone; there is a fair amount of Mabaan content on YouTube, including a channel by a BA-trained linguist and first language speaker of Mabaan, Thomas Anour: Learn Maban, African Language with Thomas Anour. (Like and subscribe, or whatever it is you're supposed to do on YouTube to encourage creators.) Between these, that makes enough material to observe an interesting phonological difference.

In Mabaan as described by Torben Andersen and in the aforementioned anonymous dictionary, /h/ seems to show up only in interjections or loans, and /ħ/ is not mentioned at all. The variety spoken by Thomas Anour, however, features a number of words with initial [ħ] (occasionally varying with [h]). A single cognate in a North Burun language, Mayak, suggest that this is the reflex in his variety of *r, which otherwise becomes a semivowel in Mabaan; more would be desirable.

English	Mabaan (Anour)	Mabaan (anon)	Mabaan (Andersen)	Jumjum (Fadul et al.)	Mayak (Andersen)
sorghum field (?)	<hill> [ħîl]	<yielo> "field for dura grain"	-	<yiil> "field, farm"	-
rat	<heeñ> [ħéːɲ]	<yyeño> "rat"	yiiêɲ-ʌ̀ "~, mouse"	<yiiñ>	rii-nit̪
sausage tree	<heeṭṭa> [ħétà]	<wyeṭṭa> "pod of ~"	-	-	-
desert	<hong> [ħʌ̂ːŋ]	<wɔɔŋ> "wilderness, desert"	-	-	-
salmon (sic)	<hitta> [ħítàː]	-	-	-	-
excuse (Ar. izin)	<honda> [ħʌ̀ndá]	-	-	-	-