The (Hi)story of Nobiin - 1000 Years of Language Change

Bearbeitet von Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst

1. Auflage 2011. Buch. 252 S. Hardcover ISBN 978 3 631 61494 5 Format (B x L): 14 x 21 cm Gewicht: 430 g

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It is not often that we can observe language change in a language over a period of more than one thousand years. Nobiin-Nubian seems to be the only language belonging to the Nilo-Saharan phylum where this is possible. The present study analyzes language change in Nobiin over a period of about a millennium. This analysis is based on textual data from the older stage of Nobiin written in the medieval period between the 8th and the 15th centuries, called Old Nobiin throughout this book, as well as present-day Nobiin, as it is known through the work of scholars from the nineteenth century onward until the latest grammatical and lexical studies of Werner (1987) and Khalil (1996), called Modern Nobiin here. A few introductory notes on terminology seem to be indicated at this point. The Nobiin language was and is spoken in a region called . The geographi- cal term, which will frequently be used in this study, comprises the area of As- wan around the 1st Cataract in the north (see map) and the region around ed- Debba between the 3rd and 4th Cataracts in the south. This means that the north- ernmost part of Nubia lies in the modern country of but the greatest part of Nubia belongs to present-day . Traditionally, the region between the 1st and 2nd Cataracts was referred to as “” and the region south of it as “Upper Nubia”, with the Batn el-Hajar or kid-n-tu “Belly of Stones” as a stretch of the difficult to pass as a natural barrier in between the two divisions. The construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s brought about dramatic changes for the Nubian people and the region. People were relocated in regions far from their original homes and great parts of Lower Nubia were flooded. At the same time, the construction project led to the first collaborative international rescue effort involving UNESCO. The so-called “Nubia Campaign” aimed at salvaging the archaeological sites threatened by the Aswan High Dam. Most of the Old Nobiin texts which served as a basis for the grammatical analyses in this book were found in the course of several archaeological campaigns conducted during the “Nubia Campaign”. Throughout this book, the chronological and historical category “medieval pe- riod” is repeatedly used. “Medieval period” or “Middle Ages” usually designate a period in European history mostly dated from the fall of the Western Roman

11 Empire in the 5th century until about the end of the 15th/early 16th century, amongst other things marked by the beginning of European overseas expansion. As part of the European historical periodization, the term “medieval period” and the concept behind it cannot and should not easily and uncritically be transferred and applied to the history of non-European regions. Early scholars of and history used the designation “Christian Nubia” for the period after the “fall” of the Meroitic Empire and a short “Dark Age” and before the final Islamization of Nubia, i. e. between the 6th and the 14th/15th centuries. As late as 2002, Welsby divides the history of Nubia along traditional terms as “Pagan”, a term which is not only biased, but also pejorative, “Christian”, and “Muslim”. This tripartition suggests that history happens in events at identifiable dates and that religion is the defining factor for the periodization of history. In this book, the designation “medieval period” is mainly used for the era when Old Nobiin was a written language in Nubia. As the oldest document is dated to 787 and the youngest to 1484 this compasses a period of about 700 years. In the appendix dealing with written sources, this period is expanded to nearly a millennium because it includes and critically assesses the work of Chris- tian historiographers on Nubia which starts as early as the 6th century. So it seems justified to talk about the Medieval Period or the Medieval Millennium without referring to religious categories or transferring European periodization to Nubia. Nubia had “its own” medieval period in history which was characterized by a highly organized kingdom interacting with its southern, eastern, western and northern neighbors—of different religious affiliation—and also with the Byzan- tine Empire outside the African continent. The older stage of the language analyzed in this study has been known as “Old Nubian” for about a century. Although it is still used by scholars of the various Nubian languages, this designation is not adequate and appears anti- quated, not the least because Nubian is the name of a language family consisting of different subgroups of languages not mutually intelligible. The language called “Old Nubian”, however, doesn’t represent an early stage of the whole language family but of only one of its members, the Nobiin language, which is moreover isolated within the family (Bechhaus-Gerst 1984/85, 1990, 1996). To call this language “Old Nubian” is at least as misleading as would be calling “Old English” “Old Germanic” which nobody would ever think of. One reason for the misleading designation lies in the history of Nubian studies. For a long time, only the Nubian languages spoken in the Nile Valley were known to Euro- pean scholars. They automatically assumed a closer genetic relationship between these “Nile Nubian” languages which only later turned out to be not the case. When the first pieces of medieval literature were discovered, the writing was deciphered and the linguistic affiliation was identified, it seemed natural to call it

12 Old Nubian, although Griffith (1913:68) in the first comprehensive editing of the then known texts remarked that “the agreement with the Fadija-Mahass dialect [= today’s Nobiin] as opposed to the Kenzi-Dongolese dialect is very clearly marked”. It is recommended here that the term “Old Nubian” should be alto- gether abandoned in favor of the more accurate “Old Nobiin”. The present study is not a work of linguistic theory but it also doesn’t restrict itself to mere descriptions of different language states. It tries to reveal processes of language change and grammaticalization from Old to Modern Nobiin but also within Old and Modern Nobiin respectively. Although the development and changes in the nominal and pronominal systems are discussed, the focus was put on the verbal morphology and syntax. Nevertheless, this book can only represent the beginning of the study of language change in Nobiin. In 1991, the mentor of Old Nobiin studies, the late G. Browne, expressed what he regarded as desiderata of future scholarly work. On top of his list he posted the need for a diachronic grammar which would treat the relationship between Old and Modern Nobiin but also diachronic patterns within Old Nobiin. This study hopefully is a first step towards this end. As most of the work on Old Nobiin has been done by classical scholars and the texts are available only in non-transcribed and non- segmented form, the numerous examples from the texts may also serve to inter- est scholars with different backgrounds for the interesting subject of language change in Nobiin.

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