Nubian languages

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The Nubian languages are spoken today in northern and western Sudan (formerly Nubia ) as well as southern Egypt . Linguistically, they belong to the East Sudanese branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages . The most important Nubian language is the Nobiin .

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The modern Nubian

According to popular belief, modern Nubian is divided into Nile Nubian, which is spoken in the Nubian Nile Valley, and mountain Nubian, which is spoken in the western Sudanese province of Kordofan . There are also a few smaller dialect variants of the Bergnubischen in the province of Darfur, which is also located in western Sudan .

According to this theory, Nile Nubian is further subdivided into the dialects Kenuzi (spoken in Lower Nubia), Nobiin (spoken in southern Lower Nubia and in northern Upper Nubia) and Dongolawi (spoken in central Upper Nubia). More recent studies counter these considerations with an alternative theory, according to which the Nobiin is isolated, while the Kenuzi and Dongolawi are linguistically closer to the Mountain Nubian dialects than to Nobiin. According to this theory, Kenuzi would be an island language, which only emerged in the Middle Ages through the targeted settlement of Dongolawi-speaking mercenaries in the then Egyptian-Nubian border area under the Fatimids .

The Arabic script is used to fix the modern Nubian dialects in writing .

The classic Nubian

Classical Old Nubian , which was written in a variant of the Coptic script , is regarded as the medieval forerunner of modern Nobiin . To reproduce some special phonemes that do not occur in Coptic , four additional characters, borrowed from Meroitic italics, were used. Texts in Old Nubian are mainly from Lower Nubia, the medieval state of Nobatia, as well as from the area of ​​medieval Makuria in Upper Nubia. They are mostly of Christian religious content; Recently, however, many profane texts, especially letters and contracts, have been unearthed and published.

As a variant of Old Nubian, the so-called Alwa inscriptions, which are still little known today, are to be considered, which were found in the southern Nubian Soba on the Blue Nile , the capital of the medieval kingdom of Alwa. Here, too, a script was used that was borrowed from Coptic. The additional characters used to reproduce the sounds that do not occur in Coptic did not come from Meroitic cursive script, but from Meroitic monumental script . The linguistic position of the Alwa inscriptions in comparison to classical Old Nubian has so far been little researched.

Linguistic characteristics

Grammatically, Nubian is one of the agglutinating languages ; that is, the grammatical forms are formed by adding numerous prefixes and suffixes to the theoretically unchangeable word stem. However, this rule is softened by the pronounced tendency of the Nubian to harmonize vowels and consonants, which is reflected in a multitude of complex rules of assimilation. Especially with shorter words, this can often blur the original word stem beyond recognition, which makes dealing with Nubian dictionaries particularly difficult.

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