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Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2013-02-04, 13:42
by Lauren
Does anyone here know anything about any of these languages? Being the least-represented language family in Africa, I find them intriguing. :)

You'd think Dholuo would be the easiest to learn, but since there are quite a few, perhaps there are a few gems in the way of coursebooks for some of the other languages.

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2013-02-04, 15:52
by Itikar
Daza(ga):
http://archive.org/search.php?query=daz ... A%22dzg%22

Dogons:
http://dogonlanguages.org/

Nubian:
There are a grammar of Kunuz Nubian and a book about Old Nubian around. Probably on Uz-translations or on other strange Russian sites I believe (I don't really remember where I got them).

Luo:
There is a book from Eric and also a "parlons Luo" from l'Harmattan.

Maasai:
http://archive.org/details/masaitheirlangu00hollgoog
And of course there is also "parlons Massaï.

This is what I found sometime ago. :P

I hope it can be of interest to you. :)

PS
Wasn't Ubangian the smallest language family in Africa? :o

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2013-07-08, 23:56
by Massimiliano B
A good Kanuri reference grammar WAS available at ERIC. If you try to download it, the following message will appear: «We have currently disabled access to many ERIC full-text PDFs published prior to 2005 due to the discovery of personally identifiable information in some documents. A team is in place to check each PDF for this sensitive information etc.». I hope it will be soon available.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/se ... o=ED214369

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2013-07-09, 3:17
by mōdgethanc
I have a friend who speaks Dinka.

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2013-07-10, 4:55
by johnklepac
I haven't even heard of any but Dinka and Nubian.

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2013-07-15, 23:30
by Trebor
mōdgethanc wrote:I have a friend who speaks Dinka.


I recall reading that there are five different varieties of Dinka, all of which are not easily intelligible among their respective speakers. No piece of cake for the native English student!

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2014-07-05, 7:26
by Trebor
A friend of mine will be going to northern Uganda in several months. I'd like to find out for him what resources there are, in English or French, for Acholi, Alur, and/or Lango (Wikipedia says these have a very high degree of mutual intelligibility).

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2014-07-13, 6:45
by vijayjohn
For Acholi, I found this, which has links to four zip files. Of these, I think the last two would be the most useful: "The Essentials of Acholi" (this may be the best starting point) and "US Peace Corps Acholi Resources."

For Alur, I found this blog. I haven't really looked at it yet, but I thought I'd share it anyway in case it turned out to be useful.

Finally, for Lango, I just found this YouTube video. It's about a project to make Lango kids literate in their own language. There are subtitles throughout the video. A lot of the time, the people in the video are just talking in English, but then there are also many times where they are speaking Lango instead, and there are a few points where you can hear isolated words as well, so hopefully this should be useful at least for learning those:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJp1vG2Tk80

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2014-11-23, 1:27
by vijayjohn
I just thought I'd share this PDF in case anybody's interested. It's a paper from SIL about the orthographies for Dinka and Shilluk, which are both Nilotic languages (and thus Nilo-Saharan as well). I posted it in the thread I started for Dinka, too. :)

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2017-10-02, 13:31
by księżycowy
I know that at least one textbook for Maasai/Maa exists in English (Lessons in Maa: A Grammar of the Maasai Language by Mol), but it seems near impossible to get a copy at the moment. I'd actually love to see the book.

I'm curious, does anyone else know of any other resources for Maasai/Maa?

I've also found the Peace Corps materials too, but they have the grammar explanations in Maa, so they are of questionable helpfulness....
https://www.livelingua.com/project/peace-corps/Maasai/

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2017-10-03, 13:35
by księżycowy

Re: Nilo-Saharan languages

Posted: 2017-10-03, 14:00
by vijayjohn
Oh, thanks for sharing these, księżycowy! I've tried looking for resources for Luo before but had trouble finding anything. :) I think I found something on Wikiversity or something once years ago where a native speaker was going through words in Luo with a documentary linguistics class, and they had a PDF file with a bunch of recordings from their class strung together or something.