Mao languages
The Mao languages are spoken in southwest Ethiopia and form a branch of the northern Omotic languages . According to Bender (2000), Mao has four individual languages or dialect clusters:
- Hozo hooz wandi (3000)
- Sezo / Seze seezi waanɛ , seezi waaŋi (3000)
- Bambeshi / Bambassi mao kɔɔle , partly emigrated to Diddessa Valley and Metahara (east of Addis Ababa by the Awash River ) (5000)
- Ganza: in Sudan, almost or completely extinct
The Mao languages are by far the worst-documented subgroup of Omotic. So far only fragmentary grammatical descriptions by Reidhead (1947) and Bender (2000) as well as some word lists are available.
Phonology
The phonological properties of Mao languages are very similar, which enabled Fleming in 1988 to reconstruct the Proto-Mao consonant system, which is essentially the same as that of modern Mao languages. According to Fleming, the Proto-Mao had three series of plosives (bilabial, alveolar, velar), each comprising an unvoiced, a voiced and an ejective phoneme. The only affricate was tsʾ, in fricatives at least š and h can be reconstructed. What is noticeable is the prenasalized mb. For some consonants, restrictions on the position within a root are known: ʔ and h should only appear initially, n only medially, and r and l only final.
The Mao languages have about 5–6 vowels, nasal vowels and a distinctive accent (pä'li “exactly” - 'päli “girl”) are also given for the Ganza; Bambassi, on the other hand, is a tonal language : káɸɛ́ "bird", šáawà "sand".
Morphology and syntax
There are various, sometimes contradicting collections of paradigms for the personal pronouns. According to them, the personal pronouns distinguish the numbers singular and plural , and in the whole also two genera . Depending on the syntactic use, several groups of pronouns can be distinguished: “dependent” and “independent” subject pronouns, possessive pronouns and some other case forms formed by suffixes. Nouns know the numbers singular and plural, the latter can be marked with a suffix. Endings are also used for definiteness and various cases ; the genera masculine and feminine are not formally differentiated.
As far as the sparse information reveals, the Mao languages have conjugation systems that have a structure that is atypical for the omotic. In Hozo, Sezo and Bambassi, personal conjugation takes place either through dependent or independent pronouns that come before the verbal stem and can be separated from it by adverbs. The tenses are made up of various pre- and post-verbal clitics as well as a morpheme š (ɛ) that occurs in many tenses, the basic meaning of which is unclear:
- Hozo na-mu-maa-ye 1st person Sg. + Present tense + "eat" + present tense "I eat"
As in other omotic languages, the verb can be reduplicated in the past tense:
- Sezo dol-šɛ held ya-dol-iya 1st person pl. + Morpheme š (ɛ) + "now" + "go" + 1st person pl. + "Go" "We're going now."
In the Ganza, tense markers and personal affixes usually appear in this order in front of the verbal stem, but the reverse is supposedly also possible. According to Bender's analysis, some non-temporal categories such as the subjunctive and interrogative are expressed using suffixes that follow the verbal stem:
- wa-Na-ma-ʔogwä tense marker + 2nd person Sg. + "eat" + interrogative "did you eat?"
The imperative has separate forms for singular and plural, which are separated by suffixes in all four Mao languages. The plural has an m-element in common in three languages:
- Hozo ma-mo "eat!"
- Ganza ma-m "eat!"
- Sezo maa-ke-mo "eat!"
In the Hozo, negated imperatives are also given an infix -kəz-.
Derivation takes place with various suffixes, but also through composition: Sezo ɔɔb-maʷ write-person "writer"; Sezo: miinsʾɛ "cut", miinsʾ-ɪšɛ "let cut".
Individual particles, especially š, serve as the copula . The negation is not expressed through verbal conjugation, but through a particle.
literature
- M. Lionel Bender: Comparative morphology of the Omotic languages (LINCOM studies in African linguistics) . LINCOM Europa 2000, ISBN 3-89586-251-7 (on Mao: pp. 179-193)
- Harold Fleming: Mao's Ancestor: Consonant Phonemes of Proto-Mao. In: A. Gromyko (Ed.): Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Ethiopian Studies. Nauka, Moscow 1988.
- Paris W. Reidhead: Note on the Ganza Language: A Preliminary Descriptive Analysis. Sudan Interior Mision, Melut 1947.