The Nara documentation project

Dear all, here I am in Naples, where, at the Università di Napoli l'Orientale , I have collected the recording material I need for the research. I received:  1 New brand MacBook Pro 13" of highest quality (I am very proud of) 1 Marantz digital recorder PD661MKII 1 Zoom digital recorder H4n Pro 1 Zoom digital recorder H1n 1 Rode binaural microphone NT4 1 Rode omni microphone Reporter 1 Shure headset microphone 2 Quiklok microphone  small tripod        1 Sennheiser headphone HD 206 1 Sennheiser headphone Hd 65 TV I think I am very well equipped now to kick off!

Two days ago I talked to the referent person of the tiny Nara community in Addis Ababa, where I will conduct my fieldwork. I normally have been preferring to do data collection in the place where the language is spoken. However, in this case, for logistic, organisational and safety reason this is not possible. Doing fieldwork in Nara locations in Eritrea is complicated in four weeks and in Sudan military actions are going on. Thanks to my contacts in Addis Ababa, favoured also by the enormous help by Moreno Vergari in Bozen, I will find in the proper conditions to do my job on Nara in the Ethiopian capital, which I know very well. Acknowledgements will also go to Widcliffe Ethiopia, who agreed in supporting in my fieldwork with the Nara team. The plan is to work almost four weeks, from Monday to Friday, maximum five hours a day with the Nara consultant, which will be two, probably men. The working language will be English and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia (Savà 2023). I will s...

Nara (ISO code nrb), is a Nilo-Saharan language regarded as belonging to the Northern East Sudanic family together with the Nubian, Tama and Nyimang groups (Güldemann, 2018: 235-309; Dimmendaal  et al. , 2019: 326 ff.). Rilly (2010) has shown that also the ancient Meroitic language probably belonged to this family. The language and its speech community are also known with the older name Barya ( ባርያ , Baria, Barea), which already occurs as an ethnic name in inscriptions of the Axumite king  c Ezana who reigned from 330 to 365-370 CE ca. In Eritrea this name has been replaced by Nara (also Nera), in order to avoid the derogatory meaning “slave”, “one who is in service of a demon”, which  barya  acquired in major Ethiosemitic languages such as Ge’ez, Amharic and Tigrinya, because the Nara-speaking communities were frequently raided for capturing slaves by their more powerful neighbours  [1] . In Sudan, however,  Bāryā  or  al-Bāryā  (  البا...

Dear all, I hereby start a blog that aims at following my activities in a documentation project of the Nilosaharan Nara language. The language is mainly spoken in Eritrea but one dialect is found in Sudan.  In this initial phase, I will provide information on the Nara language and details on the organisation of my fieldwork, which will take place from mid-december to mid-january. Then, once in the field, I will post daily reports on my achievement and what I do in my free time.  Hope it will be fun for you. It will be certainly be for me! Stay tuned! Graziano