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Gumuz language
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Gumuz (also spelled "Gumaz") is the language of the Gumuz people, who live along the border of Ethiopia and Sudan. Most Ethiopian speakers live in the Metekel Zone of the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, although a group of 1,000 live outside the town of Welkite. The Sudanese speakers live in the area east of Er Roseires, around Famaka and Fazoglo on the Blue Nile, extending north along the border.
Gumuz has traditionally been classified as Nilo-Saharan, though several linguists consider this dubious.
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Encyclopedia
Gumuz (also spelled "Gumaz") is the language of the Gumuz people, who live along the border of Ethiopia and Sudan. Most Ethiopian speakers live in the Metekel Zone of the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, although a group of 1,000 live outside the town of Welkite. The Sudanese speakers live in the area east of Er Roseires, around Famaka and Fazoglo on the Blue Nile, extending north along the border.
Gumuz has traditionally been classified as Nilo-Saharan, though several linguists consider this dubious. An early record of this language is a wordlist from the Mount Guba area compiled in February 1883 by Juan Maria Schuver. It has both ejective consonants and implosives. The implosive quality is being lost at the velar point of articulation in some dialects (Unseth 1989). There is a series of palatal consonants, including both ejective and implosive. In some dialects, e.g. Sirba, there is a labialized palatalized bilabial stop, as in the word for 'rat' (Unseth 1989).
Classification
Dimmendaal (2008) notes that mounting grammatical evidence has made the Nilo-Saharan proposal as a whole more sound since Greenberg proposed it in 1963, but that such evidence has not been forthcoming for Songhay, Koman, and Gumuz: very few of the more widespread nominal and verbal morphological markers of Nilo-Saharan are attested in the Coman languages plus Gumuz ... Their genetic status remains debatable, mainly due to lack of more extensive data. (2008:843) And later, In summarizing the current state of knowledge, ... the following language families or phyla can be identified — ... Mande, Songhai, Ubangian, Kadu, and the Coman languages plus Gumuz. (2008:844)
This "Coman plus Gumuz" is what Greenberg (1963) had called Komuz, a distant relationship of Gumuz and the Koman languages. However, this connection has not been supported by further research; Bender, Blench, and other Nilo-Saharan specialists do not accept a special genealogical relationship between the two. Blench, who tentatively includes Koman within Nilo-Saharan, nonetheless excludes Gumuz as a language isolate, as it does not share the tripartite singulative–collective–plurative number system characteristic of the rest of the Nilo-Saharan language families.
Further reading
- Ahland, Colleen Anne. 2004. "Linguistic variation within Gumuz: a study of the relationship between historical change and intelligibility."? M.A. thesis. University of Texas at Arlington.
- Bender, M. Lionel. 1979. Gumuz: a sketch of grammar and lexicon. Afrika und Übersee 62: 38-69.
- Unseth, Peter. 1985. "Gumuz: a dialect survey report."? Journal of Ethiopian Studies 18: 91-114.
- Unseth, Peter. 1989. "Selected aspects of Gumuz phonology."? In Taddese Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the eighth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, vol. 2, 617-32. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies.
- Uzar, Henning. 1993. Studies in Gumuz: Sese phonology and TMA system. In Topics in Nilo-Saharan linguistics, edited by M.L. Bender. Hamburg: Helmut Buske: 347-383.
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