Mursi (also Dama, Merdu, Meritu, Murzi, Murzu) is a Southeast

Surmic The Surmic languages are a branch of the Eastern Sudanic language family. Today, the various peoples who speak Surmic languages make their living in a variety of ways, including nomadic herders, settled farmers, and slash and burn farmers. Th ...

language spoken by the Mursi people who live in the

South Omo Zone South Omo Zone (or Debub Omo Zone) is a zone in the Ethiopian Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region (SNNPR). Debub Omo is bordered on the south by Kenya, on the southwest by the South Sudan, on the west by Bench Maji, on the northwe ...

on the eastern side of the lower Omo valley in southwest

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

. The language is similar to Suri, another Southeast Surmic language spoken to the west of the Mursi language area. It is spoken by approximately 7,400 people.

Classification

Mursi is classified as belonging to the Southeast Surmic languages, to which the following other languages also belong: Suri, Me'en and Kwegu. As such, Mursi is also part of the superordinate Eastern Sudanic family of the Nilo-Saharan languages.

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

The vowel and consonant inventory of Mursi is similar to those of other Southeast Surmic languages, except for the lack of ejectives, the labial fricative // and the voiceless stop //. *Except for the hesitant inclusion of the glottal stop /ʔ/ by Firew, both Mütze and Firew agree on the consonant inventory. The layout mostly follows Mütze. The characters in angled brackets are the ones used by Firew, where they differ from Mütze. *Mütze rejects the phonemic status of the glottal stop [], claiming that it is phonetically inserted to break up vowel sequences. Firew discusses this and leaves the question undecided, but includes the sound in the phoneme chart. *Firew classifies the alveolar implosive // as postalveolar, without giving reasons. *Both Mütze and Firew agree on the vowel inventory and on the chosen transcription, as shown above. *Even though

vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, ...

appears phonetically in Mursi, it can be explained by the elision of weak consonants between identical vowels.

Tone

Both Mütze and Firew agree that there are only two underlying tone levels in Mursi, as opposed to larger inventories proposed by Turton and Bender and Moges.

Grammar

The Mursi grammar makes use of the following parts of speech:

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...

s, adpositions,Firew (2021), p. 151 question words, quantifiers, connectors, discourse particles, interjections, ideophones, and expressives.

Nouns

Nouns can be inflected for number and case. The number marking system is very complex, using suffixation, suppletion or tone to either mark

plural The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...

s from singular bases, or singulatives from plural bases. Mursi preverbal subjects and all objects are unmarked,Mütze (2014), p. 53 whereas postverbal subjects are marked by a nominative case. Further cases are the oblique case and the genitive case. Modified nouns receive a special morphological marking called construct form by Mütze.Mütze (2014), p. 62

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * *

External links

Mursi Online

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

Mursi 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
Mursi
{{Eastern Sudanic languages Languages of Ethiopia Surmic languages