Daatsʼiin language

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Daatsʼiin
Native toEthiopia
RegionBenishangul-Gumuz Region
EthnicityGumuz
Native speakers
300 (2015)[1]
Nilo-Saharan?
Language codes
ISO 639-3dtn
Glottologdaat1234

Daatsʼiin is a Gumuz language of western Ethiopia. There are two communities of speakers in western Ethiopia, one in , on the northeast border of Alitash National Park, and one in on the Sudan border, south of the park where the Rahad River crosses from Ethiopia into Sudan.[2]

Daatsʼiin was first reported in 2013 and described by Colleen Ahland in 2014. Ahland has described it further in 2016. A comparative word list of Daatsʼiin, Northern Gumuz, and Southern Gumuz is available in Ahland & Kelly (2014).[3]

Of the other Gumuz languages, Daatsʼíin has the greatest lexical similarity to Southern Gumuz, but the two groups communicate in Arabic or Amharic.[4]

Phonology[]

The consonant inventory of Daatsʼíin:[5]

Labial Alveolar Postalveolar
/ palatal		 Velar Glottal /
pharyngeal
Stops voiceless p t c k ʔ
voiced b d ɟ g
ejective pʼ t' cʼ kʼ
implosive ɓ ɗ
Affricates voiceless ts tʃ
ejective tsʼ tʃʼ
Fricatives voiceless f s ʃ h
voiced v z (ʒ) (ʕ)
Nasals m n ŋ
Approximants w l j
Rhotic r

The palatal stops /c/, /ɟ/, /cʼ/ can be also realized as palatalized velar stops [kʲ], [gʲ], [kʲʼ] in free variation.

[v] and [ʒ] are rare, both recorded only from one word so far. The former appears to be phonemic, but the latter might be an allophone of /z/.

The voiced pharyngeal fricative [ʕ] only occurs when following /l/ or /r/ and preceding /a/, and it can be analyzed as an allophone of the glottal stop /ʔ/.

Daatsʼíin has eight vowel phonemes:[6]

front central back diphthong
close i(ː) ɨ u(ː) u ~ wɨ
mid e(ː) ə o(ː)
open a(ː)

Ahland analyzes [i], [e], [a], [o], [u] as phonemically long, and [ɨ], [wɨ], [ə] as phonemically short /i/, /u/, /a/ respectively.

Daatsʼíin is also a tonal language: vowels can bear high, low and rarely also falling tone. Some examples of downstep occur.

Grammar[]

Daatsʼíin has several grammatical differences from other Gumuz languages. Verbs inflect for aspect (perfective–imperfective) rather than for tense (future–non-future). Verbs are polysynthetic in all languages, but the order of the morphemes differs in Daatsʼiin, and some morphemes that occur in one language do not occur in the other(s).[4] "The major constituent order in Daatsʼíin clauses tend to be AVO/SV."[7]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Daatsʼiin at Ethnologue (19th ed., 2016)
  2. ^ Ahland 2016, p. 419.
  3. ^ Ahland, Colleen and Eliza Kelly. 2014. Daatsʼíin-Gumuz Comparative Word list.
  4. ^ a b [1]
  5. ^ Ahland 2016, p. 422.
  6. ^ Ahland 2016, pp. 422–423.
  7. ^ Ahland 2016, p. 440.

Literature[]

  • Ahland, Colleen (2016). "Daatsʼíin, a newly identified undocumented language of western Ethiopia: A preliminary examination". In Payne, Doris L.; Pacchiarotti, Sara; Bosire, Mokaya (eds.). Diversity in African languages. Berlin: Language Science Press. pp. 417–449.


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