Nobiin phonology

Nobiin has open and closed syllables: *ág* ‘mouth’, *één* ‘woman’, *gíí* ‘uncle’, *kám* ‘camel’, *díís* ‘blood’. Every syllable bears a tone. Long consonants are only found in intervocalic position, whereas long vowels can occur in initial, medial and final position. Phonotactically, there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms like *dàrrìl* 'climb' and *dààrìl* 'be present' are found, but *\*dàrìl* (short V + short C) and *\*dààrrìl* (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly, *féyyìr* 'grow' and *fééyìr* 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not *\*féyìr* and *\*fééyyìr*.

## Vowels

Nobiin has a five vowel system. The vowels /e/, /o/, /ẽ/, and /õ/ can be realised close or more open (as [ɛ], [ɔ], [ɛ̃], and [ɔ̃], respectively). Vowels can be long or short, e.g. *jáákí* 'fear' (long /aː/), *jàkkàr* 'fish-hook' (short /a/). However, many nouns are unstable with regard to vowel length; thus, *bálé* : *báléé* ‘feast’, *ííg* : *íg* ‘fire’, *shártí* : *sháártí* ‘spear’. Diphthongs are interpreted as sequences of vowels and the glides /w/ and /j/.

## Consonants

Consonant length is contrastive in Nobiin, e.g. *dáwwí* 'path' vs. *dáwí* 'kitchen'. Like vowel length, consonant length is not very stable; long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases (e.g. the Arabic loan *dùkkáán* ‘shop’ is often found as *dùkáán*).

The phoneme /p/ has a somewhat marginal status as it only occurs as a result of certain morphophonological processes. The voiced plosive /b/ is mainly in contrast with /f/. Originally, [z] only occurred as an allophone of /s/ before voiced consonants; however, through the influx of loanwords from Arabic it has acquired phonemic status: *àzáábí* 'pain'. The glottal fricative [h] occurs as an allophone of /s, t, k, f, ɡ/ (*síddó* → *híddó* 'where?'; *tánnátóón* → *tánnáhóón* 'of him/her'; *ày fàkàbìr* → *ày hàkàbìr* 'I will eat'; *dòllàkúkkàn* → *dòllàhúkkàn* 'he has loved'. This process is unidirectional (i.e. /h/ will never change into one of the above consonants) and it has been termed 'consonant switching' (*Konsonantenwechsel*) by Werner (1987:36). Only in very few words, if any, does /h/ have independent phonemical status: Werner lists *híssí* 'voice' and *hòòngìr* 'braying', but it might be noted that the latter example is less convincing because of its probably onomatopoeic nature. The alveolar liquids /l/ and /r/ are in free variation as in many African languages. The approximant /w/ is a voiced labial-velar.

## Tone

Nobiin is a tonal language, in which tone is used to mark lexical contrasts. Tone also figures heavily in morphological derivation. Nobiin has two underlying tones, high and low. A falling tone occurs in certain contexts; this tone can in general be analysed as arising from a high and a low tone together.

* árré 'settlement' (high)
* nùùr 'shadow' (low)

In Nobiin, every utterance ends in a low tone. This is one of the clearest signs of the occurrence of a boundary tone, realized as a low tone on the last syllable of any prepausal word. The examples below show how the surface tone of the high tone verb ókkír- ‘cook’ depends on the position of the verb. In the first sentence, the verb is not final (because the question marker –náà is appended) and thus it is realized as high. In the second sentence, the verb is at the end of the utterance, resulting in a low tone on the last syllable.

* íttírkà ókkéénáà?   (vegetables:DO cook:she.PRESENT-Q)   'Does she cook the vegetables?'
* èyyò íttírkà ókkè.   (yes vegetables:DO cook:she.PRESENT)   'Yes, she cooks the vegetables.'

Tone plays an important role in several derivational processes. The most common situation involves the loss of the original tone pattern of the derivational base and the subsequent assignment of low tone, along with the affixation of a morpheme or word bringing its own tonal pattern.

For a long time, the Nile Nubian languages were thought to be non-tonal; early analyses employed terms like "stress" or "accent" to describe the phenomena now recognized as a tone system. Carl Meinhof reported that only remnants of a tone system could be found in the Nubian languages. He based this conclusion not only on his own data, but also on the observation that Old Nubian had been written without tonal marking. Based on accounts like Meinhof's, Nobiin was considered a toneless language for the first half of the twentieth century. The statements of *de facto* authorities like Meinhof, Diedrich Hermann Westermann, and Ida C. Ward heavily affected the next three decades of linguistic theorizing about stress and tone in Nobiin. As late as 1968, Herman Bell was the first scholar to develop an account of tone in Nobiin. Although his analysis was still hampered by the occasional confusion of accent and tone, he is credited by Roland Werner as being the first to recognize that Nobiin is a genuinely tonal language, and the first to lay down some elementary tonal rules.

## References

1. ↑ The Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius spoke in 1880 of the *Wohlklang* of the Nubian language, and related this to the vowel distribution and the balance between long and short consonants.
2. ↑ In 1933 for example, Diedrich Hermann Westermann and Ida C. Ward wrote in their influential *Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages* that "Swahili and Nuba are good examples of languages which were probably once tone languages and which are said to have lost their tones" (p. 139).
3. ↑ Nowadays, Old Nubian is seen as a tonal language just like its descendant Nobiin. Browne (2002:23) writes that the Nobiin minimal pairs *ín* 'your (sg.)' vs. *ìn* 'this' and *úr* 'your (pl.)' vs. *ùr* 'head' appear in Old Nubian as *en* and *our* respectively. From the fact that the Nubians must have had a way to distinguish these forms even though they were written the same, he draws the conclusion that "[Old Nubian] probably followed the tone system observable in modern Nobiin".