Abstract
This article treats a set of subject cross-referencing morphemes in the medieval Nilo-Saharan language Old Nubian, traditionally called “personal endings.” Based on an analysis of their syntactic distribution and morphology, I argue that this set can be best described as a set of subject clitics, originally deriving from phonologically reduced pronominals. This set of subject clitics interacts with both topic and focus makers in the clause. Finally, by inspecting the historical development of Old Nubian subject clitics into full-fledged agreement suffixes modern Nile Nubian languages Nobiin and Mattokki (Kenzi) I argue that a purely syntactical approach to this development is impracticable, but that any morpho-phonological approach should be able to account for the diachronic data.
Highlights
Old Nubian is part of the Nubian family within the North-Eastern Sudanic subgroup of the Nilo-Saharan phylum
It should be pointed out that Old Nubian is a dead language. This means that our data set is by definition limited to the Old Nubian texts that have been published and those that we still hope to find at archeological excavations. In spite of this considerable handicap, we hope to prove that the set of “personal endings” far quietly assumed to be agreement morphemes are a set of subject clitics
7 Conclusion In this paper, I have argued that the Old Nubian “personal endings” can best be analyzed as subject clitics, based on their syntactical distribution and morphology
Summary
Old Nubian features a series of morphemes that appear on verbal forms after tense morphology, but before the predicate marker -ⲁ -a (Table 1). These morphemes are referred to in the literature as “personal endings” (Browne 2002: 49; Bechhaus-Gerst 2011: 72; Smagina 2017: 38). Old Nubian features a series of morphemes that appear on verbal forms after tense morphology, but before the predicate marker -ⲁ -a (Table 1).2 These morphemes are referred to in the literature as “personal endings” (Browne 2002: 49; Bechhaus-Gerst 2011: 72; Smagina 2017: 38). Apart from the difference in preterite marker, which we will not address here, the verbal forms in examples (1) and (2) differ in that the latter features a personal ending, whereas the former doesn’t In his analysis of this text, Browne (1994: 32) suggests this variation may be “because of similar variation in the Greek Vorlage,” where pesara ‘say-pst1-pred’ would correspond to the Greek present tense legei and pessna ‘say-pst2-2/3sg-pred’ to Greek aorist eipen. Instead we find a personal ending on the main verb teeil douddre ‘hope exist-inten-prs-1sg.pred.’7 These preliminary data show that an interpretation of the Old Nubian “personal endings” as agreement morphology is questionable
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