Octosyllabe

Linguistic Diversity Challenge: Languages of Africa

Day 7 — Gaahmg

What is the language called in English and itself?

• This depends on the time period of the work, in relation to what the language is called in English. More recent works refer to the language as “Gaam” primarily, albeit the grammar of the language calls it “Gaahmg” (IPA: [gəːmg]) which is indeed what the speakers call their language as well—it would appear that both the endonym and exonyms that are commonly used all refer to geography hence why the language is in older works referred to as Ingessana (a name commonly used by Arabic-speakers) and Tabi (the name of a hill in their speech area). The name Gaahmg itself means “people of the hills” since the speech community solely live in the Ingessana hills and rarely leave it due to an aversion caused by centuries of subjugation, slave raiding, and cattle raiding by neighboring peoples. The four dialects of Gaahmg also have their own names according to speakers, with those names being Jog Tao, Buwag, Kulag, and Jog Goor.

Where is the language spoken?

• Gaahmg, like all Eastern Jebel languages, is spoken in modern day Sudan’s Blue Nile state and this is why fieldwork for the language, any language in the area, is so complicated—Blue Nile state is rather unsafe, for reasons. VICE did a small documentary on it back in 2012 actually. Here’s a map from Güldemann et. al (2018) of various languages thrown into the “Nilo-Saharan” proposal per Greenberg, which includes Eastern Jebel:

How many speakers does the language have?

• Gaahmg, per Ethnologue, had around 67,000 speakers in 2000—which is interesting for a number of reasons. Gaahmg is substantially more widely spoken than any of it’s relatives and it’s suspected that there’s no more than 2,000 speakers all together of the other 4 members of the Eastern Jebel family. Gaahmg, despite what appears to be a small number of speakers for the area, is also not at all in danger. The speech community is rather resistant to cultural change to a degree and is suspicious of things and people from outside of their society—not to say they have resisted everything. They haven’t. The Gaahmg speech community indeed has schools and local government and so forth but they are fairly resistant to changing who they are and what they speak. The Gaahmg have, per reports, been one of the preyed upon ethnic groups of the area and this left them open to slave raiding by Arabs, the Funj sultanate, and Ethiopian empire—they also during the existence of the Mahdist movement in the latter portion of the 19th century spent a substantial amount of time being raided for cattle amongst other things; essentially their own suspicion of those outside of their community makes them somewhat resistant to language change because of the fact that they have historical reasons to not trust those who are not from Gaam, and presumably who do not speak Gaahmg. That being said, many Gaahmg-speakers are reported to be multilingual but their native, home, and daily use language is typically Gaahmg.

What language family does it belong to? What are some of it’s notable relatives?

• Gaahmg, in the least controversial proposals, is a member of the Eastern Jebel family—comprised of 5 members it is one of the least studied language families in Africa and there is more we don’t know about it than we do. It’s essentially the bottom of the ocean when it comes to the linguistic geography of Africa. Gaahmg of course is the notable member of the family being it actually has a grammar, but hopefully soon enough the other 4 languages are documented. Anyone familiar with languages in Africa though will be aware that Gaahmg is part of the undemonstrated and likely undemonstrable “Eastern Sudanic” branch of Africa’s own version of Altaic, Nilo-Saharan. This is why the map provided by Güldemann also provides the geographical distribution of other language families in the area because all of them too are part of the same proposed branch—although this doesn’t mean that there isn’t other proposals. There is a proposal, from “Nilo-Saharan: Models and Descriptions” (2015) that suggests that the Berta languages of Ethiopia, which originally came from the same area, may be a related family but the evidence isn’t very convincing and some of the data used for Gaahmg in specific is questionable.

Does it have a writing system?

• Yes, Gaahmg has its own Latin-based orthography.

What is it like phonologically?

• Gaahmg is weird in this regard because a pretty important paper regarding its classification claims it has a voiceless lateral fricative [ɬ], cites the grammar as evidence, but the grammar does not have evidence of this. There is also 3 underlying tones. The phonological inventory per the grammar is as follows:

What is it like grammatically?

• The grammar of Gaahmg has before draw attention partially because it’s one of the few languages in Africa that have, not without controversy, been argued to have some form of ergativity (when a noun is identified as the subject of a transitive verb) although ergativity is very, very rare in Africa and this is something outside of my scope so I’ll just leave it as an interesting thing to mention—nonetheless Gaahmg is rather interesting overall grammatically. The majority of the morphology of in Gaahmg exists in relation to nouns, verbs, and adjectives as opposed to other word categories—in this case pronouns, prepositions, body part locatives, and adverbs—where there is little if any present morphology. Singular nouns in Gaahmg do not have suffixes, while it is obligatory in plural nouns with the most common being /-gg/. Gaahmg also has 7 clitics: copular, definite, locative copular, dative, accompaniment, subordinate, and relative clause definite; of which noun stems may use more than one.

What do you find personally interesting about the language?

• So like I said in a different post of mine, I do and don’t know about Gaahmg. I’ve read that paper about Jebel-Berta, I know a bit about the “Nilo-Saharan” proposal—I’ve even made a long lost visual Swadesh list of the language in fact. So Gaahmg is like that neighbor I don’t talk to, but I know their house number, they have a car, and that they have kids. But once I sat down to read about Gaahmg it is very interesting. The language of course is beautifully structured and the words are very aesthetically pleasing but the speakers are really what catches my eye. Language is never a disembodied entity apart from the speakers and in our world of global languages and Lingua Francas many times we seem to forget how often language is such a personal and identity-specific part of symbolic culture—Gaahmg’s specificity to its speakers (there’s no reports of anyone else speaking the language to speak to them) and their desire to preserve themselves really is something I appreciated hearing about.

Extra stuff:

• Here’s of course the grammar, the paper on the Jebel-Berta proposal, and a cool word with a picture of the traditional Gaam throwing knife:

Partir marcher, l’esprit libre, un petit bout de soleil planté sous la peau, avec la certitude que, malgré tous mes doutes, toutes mes angoisses, mes envies d’ombre parfois, j’ai survécu jusqu’ici, et que j’ai bien fait comme j’ai pu, à chaque fois et avec ce que j’avais, et que finalement j’ai tout bien réussi, malgré mes erreurs, parce que je suis là, que j’aime, que je suis aimée, et que c’est déjà pas mal. 

i hate this so much but this knowledge is too powerful to keep from you all.

last night @phaltu discovered that setting your font to comic sans in google docs improves writing speed and creativity by an insane amount. “no” i said and “die” but then i tried it and god. i wish it wasn’t this way. i wish it wasn’t true. i wish i could protect you all from this but it’s real. 

something about this font is so disarming. something about this font lets you look past the shape of the words and into their soul. i’ve never written so much as i did last night, on my phone, at 2am, in comic sans.

🌲 1374, 23 novembre 2020 🌲

Dans l’allée de chênes

De cet arbre qui s’abreuve

Stationery