Mursi (language)
| Mursi | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Ethiopia | |
| speaker | 3280 | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
- |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
muz |
|
Mursi is a language spoken by the Mursi people of the same name in southwest Ethiopia . Other names for Mursi are Dama, Merdu, Meritu, Murzi or Murzu.
Mursi is one of the Surmic languages that are counted among the East Sudanese languages within the Nilo-Saharan language family . The closest relationship is to Chai and Tirma .
Phonology
The transcriptions in this section follow the International Phonetic Alphabet .
Mursi knows 7 vowels and 22 consonants . The vowels can be used anywhere in a word. The vowels of Mursi are i , e , ɛ , a , ɔ , o and u .
The 22 consonants are
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| b ɓ m w | t d s z n ɪ r | ɗ | ʃ tʃ d͡ʒ ɲ j | k g ɳ | ʔ h |
Written language
Originally there was no written form of Mursi. Today, however, there are two spellings based on different scripts. The notation based on the Ethiopian script was developed from 1989 by evangelical missionaries together with Mursis from the Makki am Mago region. The second script, based on the Latin alphabet , was originally developed for transcription and phonetic writing at the University of Addis Ababa .