Majang language

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Majang
Ato Majanger-Onk
Spoken in: Ethiopia 
Region: Godere special woreda, Gambela Region
Total speakers: 15,341 (Ethnologue)
Language family: Nilo-Saharan
 Eastern Sudanic
  Surmic
   Majang
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ssa
ISO 639-3: mpe
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Majang language is spoken by the Majangir people of Ethiopia. Although it is a member of the Surmic cluster, this language is the most isolated one in that cluster (Fleming 1983). A language survey has shown that dialect variation from north to south is minor and does not seriously impede communication

Contents

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Vowels[1]

Front Central Back
Close i u
Near-close ɪ ʊ
Close-mid e o
Open-mid ɛ ɔ
Open a

Vowel length is distinctive in Majang, so all vowels come in pairs of long and short, such as goopan 'punishment' and gopan 'road'. Since Majang is a Nilo-Saharan language[2], there are two sets of [+ATR] and [-ATR] vowels in the language, resulting in the system with nine vowels.

[edit] Consonants[3]

Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar
Plosives Voiceless p t ʧ k
Voiced b d ʤ ɡ
Implosives ɓ ɗ
Nasals m n ɲ ŋ
Lateral l
Tap r
Approximants w j

Bender[4] also claims that the glottal stop ʔ needs to be treated as a phoneme of Majang. This has been refuted by Unseth[5]. The language has implosive consonants (bilabial and retroflex), but no ejective consonants.

[edit] Prosodic Features

Two tones distinguish meaning in Majang[6], on both the word level and the grammatical level: táŋ (higher tone) 'cow', tàŋ (lower tone) 'abscess'.

[edit] Morphology

The language has markers to indicate three different past tenses (close, mid, far past) and two future tenses (near and farther)[7].

The language has a wide variety of suffixes, but almost no prefixes. Though its use is limited to a handful of roots, there are a few words that preserve vestiges of the archaic causative prefix i-, a prefix found in other Surmic languages and also Nilotic [8].

The counting system is a modified vigesimal system, based on 5, 10, and 20. "Twenty" is 'one complete person' (all fingers and toes), so 40 is 'two complete people', 100 is 'five complete people'. However, today, under the influence of schools and increased bilingualism, people generally use the Amharic or Oromo words for 100.

The person and number marking system does not mark the inclusive and exclusive we distinction[9], a morphological category that is found in nearby and related langauges.

[edit] Syntax

Majang has a basic VSO word order, though allowing some flexibility for focus, etc. The language makes extensive use of relative clauses, including for circumstances where English would use adjectives[10].

[edit] References

  1. ^ Unseth (2007), p. 628
  2. ^ Casali (2003)
  3. ^ Unseth (1991), p. 526
  4. ^ Bender (1983), p. 116
  5. ^ Unseth(1991), p. 533
  6. ^ Bender (1983), p. 117
  7. ^ Bender (1983), p. 132
  8. ^ Unseth (1998)
  9. ^ Bender (1983), p. 128
  10. ^ Unseth(1989)

[edit] Bibliography

  • Bender, M. Lionel. 1983. "Majang Phonology and Morphology," in M. Lionel Bender, (ed.), Nilo-Saharan Language Studies, pp. 114-47. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, African Studies Center.
  • Casali, Rod. 2003. "An introduction to ATR vowel harmony in African languages."‭ In LinguaLinks library 5.0 plus. Dallas: SIL International DigitalResources.
  • Fleming, Harold. 1983. "Surmic etymolgies" in Nilotic Studies: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Languages and History of the Nilotic Peoples, Rainer Vossen and Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, 524-555. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
  • Unseth, Peter. 1988. "Majang Nominal Plurals: With Comparative Notes," Studies in African Linguistics 19.1:75-91.
  • Unseth, Peter. 1989. "Sketch of Majang Syntax," Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics, M. Lionel Bender, ed., pp. 97-127. (Nilo-Saharan: Linguistic Analyses and Documentation, vol. 3. Series editor Franz Rottland.) Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
  • Unseth, Peter. 1991. "Consonant Sequences and Morphophonemics in Majang" in Proceedings of the First National Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Richard Pankhurst, Ahmed Zekaria and Taddese Beyene, pp. 525-534. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies.
  • Unseth, Peter. 1998. "Two Old Causative Affixes in Surmic," Surmic Languages and Cultures, ed. by Gerrit Dimmendaal, pp. 113-126. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
  • Unseth, Peter. 2007. "Mağaŋgir language" in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Vol 3, ed. by Siegbert Uhlig. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. pp.627-629.

[edit] External links

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