Eastern Sudanic is generally taken to embrace most of the languages of Sudan, including the following families:
- Nubian
- Nara
- Taman
- Nyima
- Jebel
- Daju
- Surmic
- Nilotic
- Temeinic
Its existence, however, remains debatable (cf. Güldemann 2022). A reconstruction of Eastern Sudanic (much less anything above it, such as Nilo-Saharan) remains out of reach. If it is possible at all, it will most likely need to be based on prior reconstructions of each of these subgroups. It is therefore useful to outline what has been done in terms of reconstruction.
Rilly's (2010) monograph identifies a clearer family consisting of Nubian, Nara, Taman, and Nyimang (along with the extinct Meroitic), which he labels North Eastern Sudanic ("soudanique oriental du nord"), and for which he proposes some 200 lexical reconstructions. In the process, he also offers 200-word reconstructions of proto-Nubian and proto-Taman, finding it necessary for the former to amend Bechhaus-Gerst's reconstruction of 97 items significantly, and drawing for the latter primarily on Edgar (1991).
Nara is a single language, whose dialectal diversity is not sufficiently well documented to make even internal reconstruction feasible.
Nyima consists of two languages, both poorly documented; Rilly gives provisional reconstructions.
For (Eastern) Jebel, Bender (1998) proposes an extremely provisional reconstruction of 100 items, outlining major sound correspondences.
Proto-Daju is reconstructed in the Ph.D. thesis of Thelwall (1981), who provides more than 300 lexical reconstructions along with the principal sound correspondences, but keeps discussion of morphology and syntax to a minimum.
Proto-Surmic has yet to be reconstructed; Yigezu (2001), however, reconstructs 200-300 words for each of two of its three subgroups, Southwest and Southeast. (The third is a single language, Majang.)
For Proto-Nilotic, Dimmendaal (1988) provides a "first reconnaissance", giving 204 items and ignoring tone; the work of Hall et al. (1975) and Hieda (2006) also deserves notice. Much more elaborated monograph-length reconstructions are available for Eastern Nilotic (Vossen 1982) and Southern Nilotic (Rottland 1982); each of these provides about 200 items for the relevant proto-language along with quite a few more for lower-level subgroups. Western Nilotic has not been reconstruced, but one sub-subgroup, Southern Luo, has been reconstructed in Heusing (1983).
Temein, with three poorly documented members, has not been reconstructed.
In brief: out of nine primary Eastern Sudanic families, none has yet been reconstructed in detail. Where reconstructions at this level exist, they cover a limited number of sound correspondences (usually segmental, ignoring tone), and a couple of hundred basic words; discussion of morphology is limited to a few prominent affixes.
2 comments:
Thanks for the Güldemann link1
Thank you for sharing!
I was currently looking for information like this, and you neatly summarized it.
It's somewhat disappointing that so little robust comparative work has been done. I would speculate that the acceptance of East-Sudanic and Nilo-Saharan as families to a large degree hinges on the facts that a) there is not much obvious evidence against, and b) hardly anyone has looked very closely. ;-)
The following musings are certainly not an in-depth analysis. However, from the litererature a certain picture of the situation is forming:
It is very likely that there are both a North-Eastern and a South-Eastern Sudanic families, with the Northern one as you outlined above (with Nubian and Meroitic as a closer node), and the Southern one at least comprising Nilotic and Surmic.
Now a genetic connection between these groups would not be surprising as a fact. However, presenting compelling evidence even for this detail would probably be a major linguistic feat, and I don't expect this to materialize any time soon.
The phyla Afroasiatic and Atlantic-Kongo (again, I'm being skeptical here) seem more or less generally accepted for good reason, and they both reach to the extreme West and East of Africa. So it wouldn't too surprising if a hypothetical "rump-Eastern-Sudanic", or either of the two groups mentioned, would have relatives further West. But given the situation even in the East, this seems completely out of reach.
So even if there is some version of "trimmed down" Nilo-Saharan, and even if it can be proven at some point, I would still expced that some languages/and or families will still need to be considered isolated - maybe including some that are now classified as Eastern Sudanic.
B.B.
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