Native to Egypt, Sudan Writing system Greek | Era 8th–15th century ISO 639-3 onw | |
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Region Along the banks of the Nile in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan Language family Nilo-Saharan?
Eastern Sudanic
Nubian
Northern
Old Nubian | ||
Old Nubian is an ancient variety of Nubian, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century (the most recent known text was written in 1485). It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and related to other Nubian languages such as Dongolawi. It was used throughout the medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria and its satellite Nobadia. The language is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a religious nature, written using a modified form of the Greek script; the best known is The Martyrdom of Saint Menas.
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History
Old Nubian had its source in the languages of the Noba nomads who occupied the Nile between the First and Third Cataracts and the Makorae nomads who occupied the land between the Third and Fourth Cataracts following the collapse of Meroë sometime in the 4th century. The Makorae were a separate tribe who eventually conquered or inherited the lands of the Noba: they established a Byzantine-influenced state called Makuria which administered the Noba lands separately as the eparchy of Nobadia. Nobadia was converted to Monophysite Christianity by the priests Julian and Longinus, and thereafter received its bishops from the pope of Alexandria.
Old Nubian is one of the oldest written African languages but was used only sporadically. The civil administration and legal records tended to employ Greek, while the church leadership (originally all Egyptians) were fluent in Coptic. Over time, more and more Old Nubian began to appear in both secular and religious documents, and the language also influenced the use of Greek and Coptic in the region (e.g., some confusion of Greek grammatical genders & use of variant verb tenses). The consecration documents found with the remains of archbishop Timotheos suggest, however, that Greek and Coptic continued to be used into the late 14th century, by which time Arabic was also in widespread use.
Writing
Old Nubian is written in an uncial variant of the Greek alphabet, including three unique letters: ⳡ /ɲ/ and ⳣ /w/ are both apparently derived from Meroitic script characters; so is also ⳟ /ŋ/, unless it is a ligature of two Greek gammas. Additionally Old Nubian used the variant Ⳝ for the Coptic letter Ϭ.
Old Nubian made extensive use of nomina sacra. Abbreviation was also used more generally throughout the language: in addition to nomina sacra formulas, a line over a letter could indicate:
The sound /i/ could be written ε, ε̄ι, η, ι or υ, or by a line over the following consonant letter; /u/ was normally written ου. In diphthongs, a diaeresis was sometimes used over ι to indicate the semivowel y. Geminate consonants were written double; long vowels were usually not distinguished from short ones.
Modern Nobiin is a tonal language: if Old Nubian was as well, the values were not marked.
Punctuation marks included a high dot •, sometimes substituted by a double backslash \\ (⳹), used roughly like an English period or colon, a slash / (⳺) used like a question mark, and a double slash // (⳼) sometimes used to separate verses.
Noun
Old Nubian has no gender or any articles. The noun consists of a stem to which grammatical case suffixes and postpositions are added; the main ones are the following:
The most common plural is in -gu-; e.g. uru-gu-na "of kings", or gindette-gu-ka "thorns (object)", becoming -agui- in the predicative. Rarer plurals include -rigu- (e.g. mug-rigu-ka "dogs (obj.)" (predicative -regui-) and -pigu-.
Pronoun
The basic pronouns are the following:
Demonstratives include in- "this", man- "that"; interrogatives include ngai- "who?", min- "what?", islo "where?", iskal "how?".
Verb
The verb has five main forms: present, two different preterites, future, and imperative. For each of them, there are subjunctive and indicative forms. It conjugates according to person, e.g. for doll- "wish" in the present tense:
Example text
Literally: "Rock and-when-they-rolled-away Jesus eye pair high raising he-said father I-thank you."
Translated: "And when they rolled away the rock, Jesus, raising his eyes high, said: Father, I thank you."