Overview

In The Tigre Language of Gindaˁ, Eritrea, David L. Elias documents the dialect of the Tigre language that is spoken in the town of Gindaˁ in eastern Eritrea. While the language of Tigre is spoken by perhaps one million people in Eritrea and Sudan, the population of Gindaˁ is fewer than 50,000 people. Elias describes basic aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicography. In contrast to other dialects of Tigre, of which approximately a dozen have been identified, Tigre of Gindaˁ exhibits the only recorded examples in Tigre of gender-specific first person possessives, e.g. ʕənye ‘my eye’ (masc) vs. ʕənče ‘my eye’ (masc/fem), and a new form of the negative of the verb of existence, yahallanni ‘there is not’. Contact with Arabic and Tigrinya has resulted in numerous loanwords and a few biforms in Tigre of Gindaˁ.

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David L. Elias, Ph.D. (2005), Harvard University, is an independent scholar of African history and languages. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Asmara (Eritrea), the University of Montana, and Marymount University (Arlington, VA).

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