Overview

Morphological alternations are central to the structure of West Nilotic languages: nearly every word form constitutes part of a morphological paradigm. The role of the morphology team is to provide a comprehensive account of the lexicon, morphological forms and morphosyntactic categories, to explain their paradigmatic interactions, and to test our hypotheses about why this type of morphological system is so rare and yet still possible.

For example, in the Dinka language the word tèm, meaning ‘to cut’, can be made to mean ‘she cuts it for someone’ by lengthening the vowel, changing the low tone to high, and pronouncing it with breathy voice quality: té̤ːm, and more than dozen other contrasts can be generated by similar means. A single monosyllabic word in language like Dinka attains a degree of information density unparalleled elsewhere in the languages of the world. Surprisingly, comparative evidence suggests that the West Nilotic languages were once much more conventional, using suffixes to mark grammatical categories. As has happened in many other languages, such as English, these suffixes were lost over time. But rather than simply disappearing, they were transformed into suprasegmental phonological properties pronounced concurrently with the word stem. The aim of NILOMORPH is to reconstruct this evolution. But because of the extreme rarity of this morphological type, we need to explain not just how it happened here, we also have to explain why it did not happen in other language families.