Kadu languages

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The Kadu languages (also: Kado , Kadugli or Kadugli-Krongo languages , Tumtum ) are a group of languages spoken by a few people in the state of South Kordofan in Sudan ( Nuba Mountains ). Today they are mostly assigned to the Nilo-Saharan language family .

According to Bender (2000), this group even seems to belong to the “core” of this language phylum. Ehret, however, considers the Kadu languages ​​to be isolated.

Although Greenberg (1963) had attached this group (“Tumtum”) to the Kordofan branch within the Niger-Congo language family , later considerable doubts about such a relationship arose.

While the Kordofan languages have class prefixes for nouns in the singular and plural , the Kadu languages ​​use their nominal prefixes or suffixes mainly to distinguish between numbers . However, depending on this, there is apparently a gender distinction in the Katcha (Dholubi) (masculine, feminine, neuter), which can only be seen through concordance with other parts of speech .

The name Kadu goes back to a word for "human" in these languages, e.g. B. means "people" in Krongo kátú .

structure

Western subgroup:

  • Tulishi [tey] (approx. 9,000 speakers)
  • Kanga [kcp] (approx. 8,000 speakers)
  • Keiga [kec] (approx. 6,000 speakers)

Central subgroup:

Eastern subgroup:

  • Krongo [kgo] (approx. 22,000 speakers; own designation: nìinò mó-dì )
  • Tumtum [tbr] (approx. 7,000 speakers)

There is a German grammar about the Krongo by Reh (1985) with texts and a dictionary.

literature

  • Joseph H. Greenberg: The Languages ​​of Africa . Indiana University, Bloomington 1963.
  • M. Lionel Bender: Nilo-Saharan . In: Bernd Heine u. Derek Nurse (Ed.): African Languages. An introduction . Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 43-73.
  • Shuji Matsushita: A preliminary sketch of Kadugli vocabulary . In: Morimichi Tomikawa (Ed.): Sudan Sahel Studies . Vol. 1. Tokyo 1984 a. 1986, pp. 15-73 and 111-138.
  • Mechthild Reh: The Krongo language (nìinò mó-dì) . Reimer, Berlin.
  • Thilo C. Schadeberg: The Kordofan . In: Bernd Heine et al. (Ed.): The languages ​​of Africa . Buske, Hamburg 1981, pp. 117–128.
  • Roland C. Stevenson: A survey of the phonetics and grammatical structure of the Nuba Mountain languages, with particular reference to Otoro, Katcha and Nyimang . In: Africa and overseas . Vol. 40 u. 41.

Web links