Kadu languages
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:
- Katcha-Kadugli-Miri [xtc] (approx. 82,000 speakers; includes Tumma )
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
- Ethnologue, Languages of the World: Nilo-Saharan (The Kadu languages can be found here under "Unclassified", where the non-associated Shabo has also been classified.)