Cushitic Research Articles

Where do Central Cushitic ejectives come from?

This paper examines and accounts for the origin and presence of ejectives in Central Cushitic (CC) languages. Appleyard (2006) claimed that most occurrences of ejectives are due to borrowing from the Ethiosemitic languages. This is certainly true for all ejectives in Kemantney, and some in Blin and Xamtanga. However, examination of Appleyard’s data shows that only 37% of ejectives in Blin and 25% of ejectives in Xamtanga are found in borrowings. Most ejectives in CC in these two languages are therefore “of indubitable Agaw origin”, which suggests that ejectives are from the proto-language rather than through sound change. This paper analyzes the distribution of ejectives in Appleyard’s data and re-examines the consequences for reconstructed forms and probable sound changes.

Dialect separation and cross-dialectal influence: a study on the grammatical gender of Oromo

Abstract The extent to which the grammar of one dialect influences the grammar of another and the mechanisms that bidialectal speakers employ to distinguish a target grammar from non-target grammar have not been adequately investigated. In this study, we elucidate these issues by investigating the grammatical gender of Oromo, a Cushitic language that is spoken in Ethiopia. The results from two successive offline experiments indicate that Oromo bidialectal speakers can differentiate between the grammar of their native dialect and that of a non-native dialect in both spoken and written modes. This finding implies the existence of a dual-system representation of grammar. Moreover, there is a significant amount of dialect mixing that varies across various developmental stages and modalities. The bidialectal speakers’ ability to differentiate between the grammar of their native dialect and that of a non-native dialect is constrained by the magnitude of their exposure to the non-native dialect, modalities, and a specific property of grammatical forms. Here, we propose an interactive dialect separation model that accounts for diverse dialect contexts.

Social and political contexts of religious conversion in Sidaama, Ethiopia, 1891-1974

This article discusses religious conversion in Sidaama, Ethiopia, 1891-1974. The Sidaama area is in Southern Ethiopia, southeast of Lake Hawassa and northeast of Lake Abaya in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Most of the population belongs to the ethnic group Sidaama, speakers of the Cushitic language Sidaamu Afoo. The region became incorporated into the Ethiopian Empire during the twentieth century. The article will first provide a historical overview of religious change in the area. Next, the paper will present theoretical approaches to religious conversion. The article's main content focuses on the interreligious encounter between the indigenous Sidaama religion and varieties of christianity. The paper will discuss how the interreligious encounter initiated a process of conversion to Christianity. The conversion process occurred at the intersection between indigenous Sidaama converts and various forms of Christianity and was influenced by internal social tensions and inequalities in Sidaama.

The grammar of typically developing Oromo-speaking 3-year-olds

This study investigates the grammatical skills of typically developing Oromo-speaking preschool-age children and lays the foundation for a language assessment tool for Oromo, a Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. The current study used a standard picture–based elicitation task that evaluated children’s accuracy in producing grammatical utterances. Language samples were collected from 44 monolingual 3- to 4-year-old Oromo children with typical language development. The percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) was computed and error types were analyzed. The average level of grammatical accuracy as measured by PGU was 69%, with a large amount of variability. The data for Oromo 3-year-olds showed a variety of infrequent error types. The results of the study provide crucial foundational knowledge on grammatical development in Oromo, which could form the basis of future language assessments and diagnostic materials.

Mauro Tosco, A grammar of Gawwada, a Cushitic language of south-west Ethiopia

Mauro Tosco, A grammar of Gawwada, a Cushitic language of south-west Ethiopia

The approximative derivation in Kambaata (Cushitic)

Kambaata, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia, has a productive, word-class changing approximation derivation. The process marked by the suffix -lab takes adjectival, nominal and verbal roots as inputs and generates approximatives that belong to the adjective word class, whose members are characterised by their agreement behaviour in the NP. The meaning of the Kambaata approximatives is dependent on the word class of its input. Deadjectival approximatives express a vague, attenuated degree of a property, deverbal forms convey similarity or near-identity in manner, while denominal forms express similarity in nature or function and create ad hoc categories. The sub-meanings are subsumable under an overarching meaning of approximation, understood as deviation from a prototypical realisation. The source of the -lab suffix is a verb ‘resemble’. From a Cushitic perspective, the Kambaata approximative derivation is unique of its kind. No related language is known to have approximative morphology.

Verbal derivation in Kambaata (Cushitic), with a focus on the encoding of noncausal/causal alternations

Kambaata, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia, has a rich verbal morphology. This paper first sets out to describe its productive verbal derivation processes, i.e. the forms and functions of the causative, the passive and the middle (autobenefactive) derivation. In the second part, the study starts from Haspelmath’s (1993) list of 31 verbal concepts to determine the preferred morphological strategies to express noncausal/causal alternations. The analysis shows that the causative strategy is predominant in Kambaata, but that the decausative strategy follows closely behind. If the whole documented lexicon including the numerous ideophones are considered, the equipollent strategy is a very important third strategy. Kambaata has only a single labile verb but otherwise distinguishes consistently between transitive and intransitive verbs. Finally, two suppletive verb pairs are found in the list: ‘die/kill’ and ‘finish (intr./tr.)’.

The focus system in Hadiyya

Abstract This study identifies, analyses and describes the devices and functions of focus in information structuring in Hadiyya, a Highland East Cushitic language. Data, which were collected from native speakers, were dealt with based on the theory of Functional Grammar (Dik 1997). For focalization, the language uses morphological, lexical and syntactic means. The latter involves word-order change and cleft construction (including pseudo-cleft). Comparatively, the morphological mechanism is the most dynamic and frequent in use while the lexical means is limited both in the number of items employed and in frequency of occurrence.

The Structure of the Iraqw Noun Phrase

The structure of the noun phrase (NP) is demonstrated to differ among languages. Albeit studies that paid attention on Southern Cushitic languages in general and Iraqw in particular, their contribution is selective to the general grammar of the language while the structure of the NP is scarcely described. This study contributes to the description of the language through an empirical explanation of the elements and the morphosyntactic properties of the NP in the language. It describes the orders of the elements, their co-occurrence, and constraints to illuminate the structure of the NP of the language. It draws on the data collected through elicitation and text collection. The qualitative analysis of the data obtained revealed that Iraqw NP demonstrates four different peculiar characteristics (i) the Iraqw NP is constituted of the head noun with or without dependents. The dependents of the NP are possessives, demonstratives, indefinite markers, the distributive determiner, adjectives, quantifiers, numerals, genitive constructions, and relative clauses. The dependents follow the head noun, except the distributive determiner, which precedes the head noun. (ii) The attested order of the dependents is N>[Poss>Dem/Indef]>[Gen>Adj>Num/Quant]>[Rel]. (iii) Possessive, demonstrative, and indefinite markers are non-lexical words that occur immediately after the head noun. (iv) In spontaneous speech, the NP with up to three dependents is preferred.

Conflict Dynamics between Two Neighbours: Looking Beyond Federalism

Ethiopia is a multicultural and multilingual country. The Oromo and Somali communities are found in the same linguistic community, that is, the Cushitic language. Historically, Somalis and Oromo have a long tradition of co-existence and strong socio-cultural interactions, as well as antagonistic relationships and intermittent conflicts. Traditionally, the major sources of conflict between the two communities were competition over scarce resources, territorial expansion, livestock raids and counter raids, kidnapping for marriage purposes and the revenge tradition. However, this time the conflict took a different nature, form and bigger scale causing devastation never seen in the history of communal conflict in the country. The study has utilised primary and secondary data collection and employed narration and content analysis to realise the objective of the paper. The findings of this study reveal that the causes of the Oromo–Somali conflict are complex and dynamic. This urges the need to carry out a deeper investigation beyond the federal arrangement. Thus, fundamental and triggering factors including the involvement of internal and external forces, the collapse of social norms and prevalence of moral anarchism, socio-economic issues, competing interests among public and military officials, poor leadership and governance system, competing interests over resources, aspects of local cultural institutions in regulating inter-ethnic relationships are identified in fuelling ethnic conflict in the studied area. Since the conflict in the region is much more complex than the dominant narrative of resource scarcity and ethnic politicisation, open democratic dialogue, genuine consultation and negotiation at a different level with various interest groups, stakeholders and community representatives, militant groups operating in the area is of paramount importance to ease the increasing ethnic tension and political crisis in order to build sustainable peace in the region.

The Typology of Tone and Cushitic

The current dimensions in the typology of tone are not insightful for understanding the properties of tone in  Cushitic languages. Some Cushitic languages are characterised as “pitch-accent” and these cannot be considered stress languages because the criterion of obligatoriness of every word having a stressed unit is not valid for them. In Hyman’s (2006) typology these languages are (restricted) tone languages. Pitch as prominence marker does show stress-like tendencies of culminativity and demarcation in these languages which is why a label pitch-accent has been suggested. The tone properties are better explained by another dimension, namely the fact that the distinctive function of tone hardly plays a role at the lexical level but does play a role at the grammatical level

Beja and Cushitic Languages in Middle Egyptian Texts. The Etymologies of Queen Aashayet and Her Retainers

The presence of names and words from the Beja language in Egyptian texts is well-documented from a number of studies, which have demonstrated contact between Beja speakers and Egyptians since before the Middle Kingdom (c. 2050 BCE). This would mean that Beja and Egyptian have a shared history of over 3,000 years until the termination of Coptic as a spoken tongue. But this supposition of a monolithic Beja language as the correlate of the historical ‘Medjay’ is partly an oversimplification of our linguistic evidence. This study aims to assess and problematize some of our suppositions on the nature of Beja and Cushitic materials in Middle Egyptian records by using case studies of personal names on the sarcophagus of the ‘royal-wife’ and ‘priestess of Hathor’ Aashayet.

Plural marking on noun-associated forms

Abstract Number systems can be morphosemantic or morphosyntactic, based on whether number marking is restricted to nouns or also extends to noun-associated forms, such as adnominal modifiers, predicates, and pronouns. While it is well-known that asymmetries in the distribution of plural marking on nouns can be due to lexico-semantic properties such as animacy and/or inherent number, the question of whether these properties also affect patterns of plural agreement has been less broadly investigated. This paper examines the distribution of plural agreement in 24 Cushitic (Afro-Asiatic) languages. The number systems of the languages of the sample are classified into three types, ranging from radically morphosemantic (Type 1) to radically morphosyntactic (Type 2). A subset of languages displays a combination of morphosemantic and morphosyntactic strategies, and thus qualifies as a mixed type (Type 3). In these languages, the distribution of plural agreement is largely lexically-specified: nouns denoting groups, masses, and collections are more likely to trigger plural agreement than other types of nouns. These results thus show that, similarly to the nominal domain, the lexical semantics of nouns may also affect plural marking on noun-associated forms. Furthermore, in Cushitic, radically morphosemantic and radically morphosyntactic number systems appear to be diachronically connected to each other, with the latter seemingly evolving from the former, as testified by ongoing variation and change in some of the sampled languages. The relevance of these findings for understanding the typology and evolution of number systems is discussed.

Using machine learning to build POS tagger for under-resourced language: the case of Somali

POS tagging serves as a preliminary task for many NLP applications. It refers to the process of classifying words into their parts of speech (also known as words classes or lexical categories). Somali is a member of the Cushitic languages with limited number of NLP tools for use. An accurate and reliable POS tagger is essential for many NLP tasks like shallow parsing, dependency parsing, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition. In this paper, we present a statistical POS tagger for Somali language using different machine learning approaches (i.e., HMM and CRF) and neural network model. Our Somali POS tagger outperforms the state-of-the-art POS tagger by 87.51% on a tenfold cross-validation. The key contribution of this paper are (1) building a generic POS tagger, (2) comparing the performances with the existing state of the art techniques, and (3) exploring the use word embeddings for Somali POS tagging.

Analyzing interspeaker variation in Maay

This paper advocates an approach to interspeaker linguistic variation that aligns with the ‘I-language’ view (Chomsky, 1986). On this view, the object of study in linguistics is mental grammar; language is understood as being internal to the individual, in contrast to the ‘E-language’ approach, where language is external to 
 individual speakers. This paper considers a case study from Maay (a Cushitic language spoken in southern Somalia) in which interspeaker variation in a refugee community defies analysis in E-language terms. An I-language approach allows for a straightforward analysis of the observed variation, specifically in the domains of plural noun formation and vowel length alternations.

Gender switch in Sidaama

Abstract In Sidaama, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia, the majority of nouns are feminine in the plural, regardless of their gender in the singular. We refer to this as ‘gender switch’ and we investigate how best to analyze this puzzling change in morphosyntactic behavior. We compare gender switch in Sidaama to the well-studied gender switch in Somali, arguing that Sidaama is different in that it is a true morphological syncretism unrelated to the syntax of plurality. We develop an analysis of Sidaama gender switch in the framework of Distributed Morphology and show how this analysis correctly predicts that feminine is the default gender in Sidaama. Overall, the paper provides a better understanding of gender switch in Sidaama and of the relationship between gender and number generally, it contributes to the very small theoretical-linguistic literature on Sidaama, and it offers some empirical support for Distributed Morphology.

Language Shift or Maintenance? A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Ilwana Language of Tana River County

Tana River County is home to a number of Bantu and Cushitic speech communities. The dominant groups are the Pokomo and the Orma, while other groups include the Waata/Sanye, Wardei, Ilwana/Malakote, Dahalo, Munyo-yaya, and some Somalis. Of significant interest to this study is the Ilwana language, which incorporates a unique linguistic blend of the Bantu and Cushitic languages. This paper presents research findings about the extent to which the Ilwana language has undergone language shift or maintenance. It focuses on Ilwana proficiency, the domain use of this language, and sociolinguistic indicators about language shift and/or maintenance. Findings suggest that the Ilwana language is gradually shifting towards Kiswahili, and that it is predominantly used at home and in a few communal gatherings and events. The results further reveal that there are significant linguistic similarities (cognates) with the neighbouring Pokomo and the Cushitic Orma languages. Some of the lexical items also show signification correlation with certain Kiswahili words. Lexical borrowing, language transfer and code-switching are thus considered clear indicators of the linguistic blending that characterises the many decades of language contact between the Ilwana and other Tana River ethnic groups. In this sense, this paper argues that indigenous languages demand greater documentation as they play a fundamental role in promoting cultural preservation, collective and individual identity, and regional and national cohesion.

From abugida to alphabet in Konso, Ethiopia

Abstract This study examines the interplay between phonological awareness and orthography in Konso, a Cushitic language in Southwest Ethiopia. Thirty-two adults reading the Konso abugida but with minimal exposure to alphabetic literacy completed an orally administered phoneme deletion task. The responses were then examined using the minimal edit distance hypothesis (Wali, Sproat, Padakannaya & Bhuvaneshwari, 2009) as a framework for the analysis. The results suggest that the difficulty of a deletion was related to the way the phoneme was represented in the Konso abugida. Content-based error analysis of the incorrect responses gave indications of how Konso abugida readers’ processing of sounds is linked to Konso abugida sound-symbol relationships. The Konso language community is undergoing a change in their writing system from abugida to alphabetic writing. As abugida symbols primarily denote consonant-vowel sequences, the change requires learning new sound-symbol mappings. By examining Konso abugida readers’ phonemic awareness the study contributes to developing transfer literacy teaching methods from abugida to alphabetic writing in Konso and elsewhere.

"Issues and maize bread taste good when they're cool"

This paper is an analysis of the basic and extended meanings of temperature lexemes and the grammar of temperature expressions in Kambaata in comparison to related Highland East Cushitic languages of Ethiopia. Globally, Kambaata has a system of two opposing temperature values, ‘cold’ vs. ‘warm/hot’. The lexeme iib- ‘be(come) warm/hot’ contrasts with caal- ‘be(come) tactile cold’ in the tactile frame of temperature evaluation, while it contrasts with gid- ‘be(come) non-tactile cold’ in the domain of ambient (weather) and personal-feeling (inner) temperature. In addition to these central lexemes, Kambaata has a number of terms that are semantically more restricted, are less frequent and/or have an unequivocal positive or negative connotation, including, e.g., sigg- ‘be(come) comfortably cold or warm, cool’ and buss- ‘burn (tr.); be dangerously, excessively hot’. Irrespective of the temperature value, the expression of personal-feeling temperature is constructionally different from that of ambient temperature and tactile temperature; for the former a transitive, for the latter an intransitive construction is used. As for the extended uses of temperature terms, Kambaata maps warmth/heat onto freshness, busyness, and anger, and links burning heat to anger, spiciness and raging thirst. Unlike many other languages in the world, Kambaata does not relate warmth/heat to affection. Furthermore, Kambaata conceptualizes inactivity, ineptness and fear as tactile cold but the absence of emotional and physical pain as non-tactile cold. Coolness is linked metaphorically to calmness and absence of thirst. In the Highland East Cushitic branch of languages, ‘warm/hot’ is the most stable term, whereas six seemingly non-cognate roots are used for ‘tactile cold’ and/or ‘non-tactile cold'.

South Cushitic classification in lexicostatistic perspective

South Cushitic classification in lexicostatistic perspective