Introduction

chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Tigre

Tigre is the northernmost of the Ethiopian Semitic languages. It is spoken along the Red Sea coast and in the northeastern and western lowlands of Eritrea (East Africa) and, to a lesser extent, in eastern Sudan. Estimates of the number of speakers range from a quarter of a million to 1,050,000. Most Tigre speakers are Muslims.1 Tigre is one of nine ethnic/language groups officially recognized in Eritrea, whose population is approximately 5.4 million. Ethnic Tigrinya and ethnic Tigre together comprise nearly 80% of the country. Arabic, along with Tigrinya and English (which is not one of the nine groups), is a national language. Arabic is the language of the Rashaida ethnic group, and there are many second-language speakers of Arabic as well. While Tigrinya, Tigre, and Arabic are Semitic languages, the languages of the remaining six ethnic groups are in the Cushitic family (Afar, Hidareb, Saho, Bilin) and the Nilo-Saharan phy- lum (Kunama, Nara). Bilingualism and multilingualism are common, and the social, cultural, and linguistic situation is extremely complex.2

1.2 Tigre of Gindaʿ

The town of Gindaʿ (population under 50,000)3 is in eastern Eritrea on the escarpment between Asmara and the Red Sea. The Tigre language of Gindaʿ (or, “Tigre of Gindaʿ ”),4 the speech pattern that is the subject of this work, is one of many dialects of Tigre. Prior to the author’s 2005 work5 it was an undocumented variety of Tigre. Munzinger listed approximately a dozen

1 For general descriptions of Tigre and Eritrea, see “Tigre,” p. 446; “Təgre,” pp. 895–897, “Multilingualism,” pp. 475–478, and “Eritrea,” p. 465. Reference abbreviations appear at the end of this introduction. 2 For the language/cultural situation in Eritrea, see “Multilingualism,” pp. 475–476, 481–485, “Ethnologue,” and “Ethnologue Map.” 3 “Eritrea,” p. 481. 4 The author wishes to thank Saleh Mahmud for suggesting this as the name of the dialect (personal communication, 2007). 5 Elias.

Tigre-speaking groups in his 1865 lexical work.6 The dialect of the Mensaʿ ethnic sub-group has by far received the most scholarly attention, having been documented grammatically, lexically, and textually.7 Mensaʿ is considered the standard variety of Tigre. While hundreds of folk-tales have been collected and published from groups other than Mensaʿ,8 no systematic grammatical study had been undertaken on any of these before the present work. Tigre of Gindaʿ bears some similarity to the Marya Kayah dialect as discussed below but is in the author’s opinion a previously unidentified variety of Tigre. Of the Tigre-speaking groups identified by Munzinger, three are associated with the Ḥabāb, a sub-group within ethnic Tigre: ʿAd Təmāryām, Hebtēs, and ʿAd Taklēs.9 The informants of the present study identify four peoples among the Ḥabāb: ʾAfrenda, ʾAshoma, Takl, and Rigbat. The difficulties in ethnic and tribal nomenclature are apparent, as the informants’ and Munzinger’s reports match neither in name nor in number. Saleh10 discusses seven dialects of Tigre and groups them into three groups based on lexicostatistical and phonological evidence as follows: (1) North and West includes the Barka, Sahil and Marya Tsalam dialects; (2) Sanhit includes the Mensaʿ, Marya Kayah and Betjuk dialects; and (3) Samhar includes the Samhar dialect. The town of Gindaʿ is in the former administrative district of Sanhit (after which Saleh’s second group is named), and the dialect shares two phonological features with the Marya Kayah dialect that it does not share with any of the other six dialects as presented in his study: the presence of [z] (as opposed to [d]) as in zenab ‘tail’ and of [s] (as opposed to [ ʃ]) as in gayyəs ‘goes’.11 The present work is a short grammar documenting major areas within pho- nology, morphology, and syntax. Language contact is documented as well, since it plays a significant role in the lexicon. This work is organized like a reference grammar but is not exhaustive. The texts presented here were the

6 “Vocabulaire de la langue tigré.” 7 “Pronomina,” “Verbum,” PPEA, “Verb,” “Sketches,” Wörterbuch, MTN, and TGT. 8 PPEA 3, pp. 219–530; PPEA 4, pp. 461–1088. 9 “Preliminary Report,” pp. 155–158; PPEA 3, pp. 281–442; PPEA 4, pp. 589–917. 10 “Tigre Dialects,” Journal of Eritrean Studies 4 (2005), pp. 45–73. 11 Saleh, pp. 59–60. Tigre of Gindaʿ shares one or the other feature with Mensaʿ, Barka, Sam- har and Sahil, but Marya Kayah is the only dialect with which Tigre of Gindaʿ shares both features.