Bayso, Haro and the " paucal " number: history of contact around the Abbaya and C'amo Lakes of South Ethiopia (original) (raw)
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This ethnographic sketch is based on research undertaken among the Bayso during four field visits between 2012 and 2015, both on Gidiccho Island and at the shore of Lake Abbaya, in Southern Ethiopia. It was done in the context of the DoBeS (Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen/documentation of endangered languages) project: “Documentation of Bayso (Cushitic) and Haro (Omotic): two endangered Afroasiatic languages of Lake Abbaya in the Ethiopian Rift Valley.” The aim of the DoBeS program at Nijmegen/Netherlands is to document endangered languages from around the world, and make results accessible through the online portal of the DoBeS archive. Bayso and Haro are two Afroasiatic languages belonging to different language families (Cushitic and Omotic respectively). Documentation through audio- and video recordings, description and analysis of the languages was urgently needed as the number of speakers of both languages is very small, and their languages and cultures, which so far had been only scarcely documented, are considered as endangered. Besides their academic contribution, the results of the project are meant to provide future generations of the Bayso access to their history, culture, and language.
(with G. Savà) A sketch of Ongota, a dying language of southwest Ethiopia
A sketch of Ongota, a dying language of Southwest Ethiopia. Studies in African Linguistics 29 (2000; published 2001)/ 2: 59-135, 2000
The article provides a grammatical sketch of Ongota, a language on the brink of extinction (actively used by eight out of an ethnic group of nearly one hundred) spoken in the South Omo Zone of Southwestern Ethiopia. The language has now been largely superseded by Ts'amakko, a neighboring East Cushitic language, and code-switching in Ts'arnakko occurs extensively in the data. A peculiar characteristic of Ongota is that tense distinctions on the verb are marked only tonally. Ongota's genetic affiliation is uncertain, but most probably Afroasiatic, either Cushitic or Omotic; on the other hand, it must be noted that certain features of the language (such as the almost complete absence of nominal morphology and of inflectional verbal morphology) point to an origin from a creolized pidgin.
The Weyto Language of Ethiopia: State of the Art
Weyto is an unclassified and now probably extinct language formerly spoken in the Lake Tana area of Northern Ethiopia. Except for a word-list collected in 1928 by Griaule and later published and analyzed by Cohen (1939: 358-371), there is no linguistic data available on Weyto. As an ethnic group, the Weyto still exist. They were 1677 according to the 1994 national census of Ethiopia but they are not mentioned in the preliminary report of the 2007 census. Based on the existing literature and on a fieldwork carried out in 2010, this paper intends to give an overview of available information on Weyto people and their language.
Second Platina Workshop 17-19 October 2002, Usa River, Arusha, Tanzania, 2003
Since the publication of Joseph Greenberg’s (revised) classification of African languages (1963), historical linguistics has become an increasingly important part of African historians’ toolkit. This is especially so in Eastern Africa, which boasts the presence of branches of all four widely recognised African language phyla: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic, and Khoisan. This regional pattern of linguistic diversity has provided a significant stimulus to the development of historical linguistic research, from the late 1960s through to the present.3 One outcome of this research has been to highlight relationships between linguistic and environmental diversity, and their mediation by social and cultural practice. In this paper I will review progress in understanding these relationships, focusing on the area between the African Great Lakes and the East African coast and islands. This is intended both as an introduction to the subject for non-linguists, and also as a lead-in to the suggestions for further research which take up the second part of the paper.