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]	-	-	-	-

Edit (12/12/2024): The Elenchus comparativus (von Hurter, 1800) records, s.v. "souris" (mouse), <hén> for "Abugonos Burun" vs. <rine> for "J. Kurmuk". This is the only word in the list transcribed with initial h - and the only word on the list corresponding to any of the ones above - but seems sufficient to suggest that this pronunciation is indeed old. Among words with *r, one notes Abugonos <yonga> "meat" and <ímaghi> "blood" (Kurmuk <rin>), which do not support the hypothesis of *r > ħ, but, given the imprecise transcription, do not disprove it either. My thanks to Shuichiro Nakao for sending me a link to this exceptionally early source.