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 In Eritrea this name has been replaced by Nara (also Nera), in order to avoid the derogatory meaning “slave”, “one who is in service of a demon”, which barya acquired in major Ethiosemitic languages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...
Eventually yesterday I could meet only one of my collaborators and only in the headquarter of the Wycliffe Ethiopia Foundation. Here they are active in translating the Bible in several languages of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. I met the responsible for the translation of the Bible in Nara, who is not a linguist and does not know Nara, but speaks the languages needed to communicate with the Nara experts. He asked me to help him to find the right solutions to represent tone in the orthography that they will adopt, something that perfectly fits with what I wanted to do first, an analysis of tone. We started this morning, and also the second collaborator was there. He resulted to have a better linguistic capacity than the other one. He is a Koya dialect speaker by birth and we worked with the variant. We went through a book on elementary teaching of Nara, as I had planned, worked on nouns asking plurals and tones, and I gave suggestions on when and where marking high tone in order to d...
Waiting for my two Nara collaborators who should have been here fifty minutes ago to start working. I met the main one yesterday for the first time. It is a lovely person that is committed to help me in all possible ways to make this research a success. He speaks the Mogoreeb Nara dialect, while the second consultant can help be with Higir, Kyota and Santoorta. I am, therefore, in the ideal position to make a comparative description of all four Nara varieties. On the other hand, I must be careful not to mix the replies and make sure we are talking about this or that dialect. I will start showing a pedagogical book for teaching Nara published by the Eritrean Ministry of education. There are words associated to images and some grammatical structures and pronouns. I plan to ask for the translation, the plural of nouns and the tones, without recording for the first day for not impressing them immediately with the technological equipment. I need first of all to train my hear with tones. The...
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