East Chadic – Chadic Newsletter Online

Skype talk on “Pattern borrowing and hybridisation in Mubi”

Joseph Lovestrand has sent the following invitation to another Skype Talk:

The Chadic Languages & Cultures group, run by Cameroonian linguists, is meeting online Saturday 20 November, 9 AM, Cameroon time (UTC+1). All are welcome to join the discussion (in French and English)!

Chadic Languages & Cultures
Saturday, 20 November, 2021
9 AM (Cameroon time, UTC+1)
Join via Skype: https://join.skype.com/YTdz8ale1BIF

Pattern borrowing and hybridisation in Mubi
Lameen Souag (CNRS)

The plural system of Mubi (East Chadic, Afroasiatic) stands out cross-linguistically within Chadic and worldwide for its extensive use of pattern morphology, fixing the output’s vowel qualities and shape while preserving the input’s consonants. This paper demonstrates that some elements of this system are reconstructible at least for East Chadic B and probably go back to earlier stages of Afroasiatic, while others reflect the influence of Chadian Arabic, the regional lingua franca. The process of influence, however, turns out to involve not just straightforward pattern morpheme borrowing (exemplified here by the iambic pattern BaCaaDiFe), but also the reshaping of inherited patterns. The most frequent quadriliteral plural pattern, BuCooDuF, reflects Arabic influence in its shape – mediated by a change in mapping directionality – but Chadic inheritance in its distribution. This result supports the hypothesis that pattern morphology is more easily transferred between related languages.

Skype talk on “Sentence-final particles in Barayin”

Joseph Lovestrand has sent the following invitation to another Skype Talk:

The Chadic Languages & Cultures group, run by Cameroonian linguists, is meeting online Saturday 28 August, 9 AM, Cameroon time (UTC+1). All are welcome to join the discussion (in French and English)!

Chadic Languages & Cultures
Saturday, 28 August, 2021
9 AM (Cameroon time, UTC+1)
Join via Skype: https://join.skype.com/YTdz8ale1BIF

Sentence-final particles in Barayin
Joseph Lovestrand
SOAS University of London

This presentation is a first exploration of the distribution and functions of seven sentence-final particles in Barayin based on the analysis of a 25,000-word corpus, primarily of transcribed monologues (Lovestrand 2017). The first two types of particles are widespread in Chadic languages: the negation marker /do/ and the interrogative marker /saŋ/. These markers only occur in a sentence-final position and appear to be monofunctional. These markers are closely related to the next two. The conjunction /sane/ ‘or’ can act as a conjunction presenting alternatives, but in a sentence-final position it is an interrogative marker with essentially the same function as /saŋ/. The sentence-final particle /kudi/ always follows the negation marker /do/. Its precise function is not clear, but it is assumed to intensify the negator in a similar sense to the expression “not at all” in English or “pas du tout” in French. The particle /atti/ seems to have a general affirmative function. It is used on its own to express agreement in dialogues. As a sentence-final particle in monologues, its function is less clear, but it could be interpreted as an intensifier analogous to “really” in English.

The other two sentence-final particles in the corpus are words from Chadian Arabic. The word /kalas/ or /halas/ is from Chadian Arabic ‘finished’. It is the 11th most frequent word in the corpus. In addition to occurring at the end of sentences, it is sometimes found transcribed in a sentence-initial position or on its own, suggesting it can appear as an interjection without being part of an adjacent clause. There are cases where /kalas/ or /halas/ is followed by the background marker /ná/ (Lovestrand 2018) thus verifying its integration in the syntax. The other Arabic-origin sentence-final particle is /bas/ ‘only’. This word is sometimes used to simply mean ‘only’, and in this function it can also occur in a non-final position. As a sentence-final particle, /bas/ can take on pragmatic functions of emphasis and downplaying in a manner analogous to some uses of “just” in English. Note that /bas/ in Chadian Arabic is not a sentence-final particle.

Lovestrand, Joseph. 2012. The linguistic structure of Baraïn (Chadic). Dallas, TX: Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics MA thesis. https://www.diu.edu/documents/theses/Lovestrand_Joseph-thesis.pdf (2 December, 2020).

Lovestrand, Joseph. 2017. Recording and archiving Barayin (Jalkiya) language data. London, SOAS: Endangered Languages Archive. https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI1035101 (2 December, 2012).

Lovestrand, Joseph. 2018. The background marker na in Barayin. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 39(1). 1–39.

Presenting Chadic research online on Zenodo & Academia

Zenodo.org is an open-access repository that allows researchers to deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artifacts. For each submission, a digital object identifier (DOI) is created, which makes the stored items easily citeable. Find out more about Zenodo here.

Our colleague Roger Blench has uploaded a paper he presented at the Conference on African Languages and Linguistics a couple of months ago and it is now available for download or watching on Zenodo: The South Bauchi languages of Central Nigeria: a fresh overview based on recent fieldwork

Our colleague Joseph Lovestrand has uploaded a talk on “Manner demonstratives in Barayin (East Chadic)” he presented at the Dallas International Academic Lens (DIAL) conference, which is also available for download or watching on Zenodo.

Roger Blench has also uploaded many of his conference presentations, papers maps, wordlists, reports and even whole books on Academia.edu, e.g.

More by Roger Blench on Aacademia.edu

Online repositories like Zenodo and Academia will probably become more popular. Please let the rest of us know whenever you publish something related to Chadic on these platforms so we can keep track of what is going on in Chadic Studies.

New publication: Serial verb constructions in Barayin

Joseph Lovestrand has informed us that his dissertation on serial verb constructions in Barayin is now online: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:39406562-02d3-46f5-abf3-180d22225925

Again, we would like to remind and encourage other linguists working on Chadic languages to also send such information. Please help us keep up to date with what is going on in Chadic Linguistics by sending us information about your research, new publications, conferences etc. (Contact)

New Publication: Topics in Chadic Linguistics X

Topics in Chadic Linguistics X – Papers from the 9th Biennial International Colloquium on the Chadic Languages, Villejuif, September 7-8, 2017, edited by Henry Tourneux and Yvonne Treis, has just appeared at Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

The following papers are contained:

Paul Newman:
Russell G. Schuh – An overview of his Chadic scholarship

Umma Aliyu Musa / Esther Morgenthal / Henning Schreiber:
Less commonly documented literacy practices – Secular Hausa Ajami as situated social literacy

Sergio Baldi / Rudolf Leger:
Animal names in Hausa and Kupto – Their specific characteristics mirrored in proverbs, epithets and sayings

Gian Claudio Batic:
Verb classes and TAM system in Kushi (Nigeria)

Roger Blench:
Current research on the A3 West Chadic languages

Philippe Cassuto / Victor Porkhomovsky:
Les stratégies de traduction de l’Ancien Testament dans les trois versions haoussa de la Bible – Un problème d’interprétation ?

Emma Kuipers:
Verb classification in Mogum (Eastern Chadic)

Joseph Lovestrand:
Ideophones in Barayin

Joseph McIntyre:
Patterns of organisation in the Hausa grade system

Nina Pawlak / Joseph McIntyre:
Semantic and pragmatic motivations of gender assignment in Hausa

James Roberts / Albert Camus Soulokadi:
On ideophones in Musey

Olga Stolbova:
Lexical links between Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic languages

Henry Tourneux:
Le syntagme nominal dans le parler « kotoko » de Kousseri

Melanie Viljoen:
Gavar verb morphology

New publications on East Chadic languages

Two articles on Barayin, an East Chadic language, have recently been published:

Lovestrand, Joseph. 2018. Plural addressee marker and grammaticalization in Barayin. Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 10(1).
Lovestrand, Joseph. 2018. The background marker na in Barayin. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 39(1):1-39.

Also, Carsten Peust has published an article on Dangla, another East Chadic language :

Carsten, Peust. “Dangla historical tonology.” Folia Orientalia (2017).

I would like to remind and encourage other linguists working on Chadic languages to also send such information. Please help us keep up to date with what is going on in Chadic Linguistics by sending us information about your research, new publications, conferences etc. (Contact)

New publication on Mubi

A new volume (in French) on Mubi has been published at Reimer Verlag:

Herrmann Jungraithmayr. La langue mubi (République du Tchad). Précis de Grammaire – Textes – Lexique (Sprache und Oralität in Afrika, Volume 27). 226 p. + 1 Ill.; 17 × 24 cm, ISBN 978-3-496-02852-9, Price: 69,00 € [D] | 88,80 SFR [CH]

The book comprises a sketch of the grammar (80 pages), a text collection (50 pages) and a lexicon (60 pages).

The following short description can be found at the website of Reimer Verlag:

“Le mubi (moubi) ou Monjul est une langue tchadique parlée par environ 35000 locuteurs dans l’est de la République Tchad. Il s’agit d’un membre particulièrement innovateur de la famille tchadique et qui représente la branche tchadique la plus éloignée du sud-ouest du phylum hamito-sémitique. Parmi ses traits caractéristiques, il y a l’apophonie allant dans le lexique et la morphologie, surtout dans la formation du système aspectuel binaire. En ce qui concerne le lexique, l’influence de l’arabe est forte. Ceci n’est pas surprenant dans le sens où l’islam et les dialectes arabes jouent un grand rôle dans la société mubi. Cependant, cette expansion de l’arabe pourrait mettre en danger les langues locales.”

A table of contents can also be downloaded at the website of Reimer Verlag.

New online publications on East Chadic languages

A recently completed Master’s thesis by Joseph Lovestrand, describing the basic linguistic structure of an East Chadic language, Baraïn (B3), is now available online: “The Linguistic Structure of Baraïn (Chadic)“.

Two related working papers are also available online from the same author: “Classification and description of the Chadic languages of the Guéra (East Chadic B)” and “The Dialects of Baraïn (East Chadic).“