Meʼen (also Mekan, Mieʼen, Mieken, Meqan, Men) is a
Nilo-Saharan language
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributarie ...
(
Eastern Sudanic,
Surmic, Southeast Surmic
[Peter Unseth. 1988. The Validity and Unity of the Southeast Surma Language Grouping. ''Northeast African Studies'' 10.2/3:151-163]) spoken in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
by the
Meʼen people. In recent years, it has been written with the
Geʽez alphabet, but in 2007 a decision was made to use the Latin alphabet. Dialects include Bodi (Podi) and Tishena (Teshina, Teshenna).
Meʼen and
Kwegu are unique among Surmic languages in that they have
ejective consonants
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...
.
Reliable descriptions of some parts of the language have been produced by Hans-Georg Will, often contradicting
Carlo Conti Rossini's work, the editing of the extensive language notes of a non-linguist.
Phonology
can be realized as a fricative in initial and medial positions.
can have lax variants as .
Notes
References
*Conti Rossini, Carlo. (1913). "I Mekan o Suro nell'Etiopia meridionale e il loro linguaggio." ''Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei'' XXII (7-10): 397–463.
*Diehl, Achim and Hans-Georg Will. (2007). "Meˀen language." In Siegbert Uhlig (ed.), ''Encyclopaedia Aethiopica'' 3, 907–909. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
*Eba Teresa Garoma and Amanuel Raga Yadate. 2015. Sketch
fMorphology and Syntax of Meʼenit. ''International Journal Advances in Social Science and Humanities'' Vol.3, Issue 7, pp. 30–50.
*Will, Hans-Georg. 1989. "Sketch of Meʼen grammar." In M. Lionel Bender (ed.), ''Topics in Nilo-Saharan linguistics'' 129–50. Nilo-Saharan, 3. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.
*Will, Hans-Georg. 1998. "The Meʼen verb system: Does Meʼen have tenses?." In Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and Marco Last (eds.), ''Surmic languages and cultures'', 437–58. Nilo-Saharan, 13. Cologne: R. Köppe
External links
Meʼen basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database*
World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-RO ...
information o
Meʼen
Languages of Ethiopia
Surmic languages
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