Arabic borrowings in Zaghawa

4.1 Consonant adaptation

The phonemic charts below illustrate the consonants in Sudanese Colloquial Arabic and Zaghawa. Table 4 is adopted from Osman (2006: 351) and has been modified for our purpose.

The data for the Zaghawa language, Sudanese Standard Arabic, and Baggara Arabic are written in IPA symbols. There are areas where we deviate from IPA to present certain phonological features of the language: gemination and vowel length will be written with double letters instead of [:], and ATR vowel distinctions will be written with symbols for tense and lax vowels rather than diacritics. Stressed syllables of Arabic words are represented by a raised vertical line [ˈ ] at the beginning of the syllable.

Borrowings undergo phonological operations to adapt to the phonological system of the recipient language. With Arabic borrowings, the most consistent phonological feature in consonant adaptation is the systematic replacement of the pharyngealized (emphatic) consonants by their non-emphatic counterparts.

4.2 Vowel integration and vowel shortening

As for the vowel system, Sudanese Arabic exhibits five vowels in its system: front /i /, /e / central /a/, and back /u/, /o/ beside the long vowels: [ii], [ee], [aa], [uu], [oo] (Table 5).

It should be noted that vowel length is not contrastive in Zaghawa while Arabic has a length differentiation. Long vowels in Zaghawa are only attested in lexical items composed of more than one morpheme (Wolfe 1999: 36), i.e., across morpheme boundaries, as in (14) below.

However, in the Zaghawa borrowings from Arabic, vowel length is occasionally kept regardless of its morpho-phonological context, e.g., ˈʕeeʃ > ēēʃ ‘bread’, and ˈustaaz > ústāās ‘teacher’.

For Zaghawa, Wolfe (1999), Jakobi and Crass (2004) and later Mathes (2015) proposed nine vowels; this analysis has been adopted also in the present study. Osman (2006: 354) a native speaker of the language, argued that like many Nilo-Saharan languages, Zaghawa has ten vowels, thus including the schwa /ə/ which he considered in his analysis the +ATR counterpart of /a/. Jakobi and Crass (2004) have excluded the schwa considering it as an allophonic variant of /a/ e.g., ə̀kkàɪ̀ ‘chewing’.

Zaghawa has vowel harmony based on the feature Advanced Tongue Root (ATR), which is used to label two sets of contrastive vowels. The [+ATR] vowels are articulated with more advanced tongue root position in the vocal tract compared to their [-ATR] counterparts (Mathes 2015: 180).

In Zaghawa, vowel harmony is observed between roots and affixes (Table 6). Zaghawa has root-controlled ATR harmony. In a simple word, vowels of the two ATR sets do not mix, apart from /a/, and the affixes harmonize with the ATR value of the root vowel. This is illustrated in Table 7 and in examples (15) to (18).

Examples (15) and (16) illustrate the [+ATR] and [-ATR] affixes, respectively:

Except for the 3rd plural perfective example in (17), the negative marker -u, and the imperative plural marker -u, all affixes agree in their ATR value with the vowels of the root they attach to.

The /a/ in Zaghawa is considered a neutral vowel which can exist with [+ATR] (see example 17) or [–ATR] sets. When it is alone in the root, it triggers [-ATR] harmony on suffixes, as in (18).

The Arabic borrowings adapt to the nine-vowel system of Zaghawa. There are no strict phonological rules that govern the integration of vowels in the Zaghawa borrowing, but the following observations can be made.

The [+ATR] and [-ATR] interpretations of Arabic vowels strongly depend on the consonants in the Arabic word. If the Arabic word has an emphatic consonant or /ɡ/, [-ATR] vowels are found in the Zaghawa borrowing, e.g. bɔ́sɔ̀l < ˈbas ^ʕ al ‘onion’, ʃɛ̄ttɛ̀ <ˈʃat ^ʕ t ^ʕ a ‘chili’, sʊ̄k<ˈsuɡ ‘market’. If the word does not contain the above-mentioned consonants, [+ATR] vowels tend to be used, e.g., tèrsì <ˈtarzi ‘tailor’.

For Arabic nouns in which vowel length is significant, the equivalent Zaghawa borrowing has [+ATR] vowel quality, e.g., húl <ˈfuul ‘beans’.

4.3 Syllable adaptation

SSA words may be either monosyllabic or multi-syllabic, and their basic syllable patterns are CVVC, CVC, CV, and CVV.

Zaghawa syllable structure follows four patterns: CV, VC, V, and CVC (Table 9).

Borrowings are incorporated by using the preferred syllable structure of the recipient language. Our data revealed several instances of syllable restructuring, whereby syllables are becoming short due to either vowel shortening, or consonant elision as shown in Table 10. The syllables illustrated in Table 8 may be kept in the Arabic borrowings or shortened to fit the syllable structure of the language. Compare the syllable structure of the Arabic words in Table 8 and their structure in the borrowed word in Table 10.

The syllable adaptation in ˈfuul > húl shows that the vowel is shortened to fit the Zaghawa CVC pattern. In ˈʕeeb > ēb the syllable has been reduced from CVVC → VC due to the loss of the onset consonant and vowel shortening. VVC syllable types are not attested in Zaghawa, thus the result is a VC monosyllabic word. Similarly, in ˈʕuud > údú, the onset consonant is lost, and final epenthesis occurs. Zaghawa occasionally does not allow voiced /d/ and /ɡ/ word finally, and they are either devoiced or epenthesis occurs. The VC with final [b] in ēb is acceptable and the devoicing rule does not apply, whereas VC with final [d] in ˈʕuud is not allowed. This proves that there are exceptions to the devoicing rule and that it is not systematically applied. In ˈʕeeʃ > ēēʃ the initial pharyngeal is elided resulting in CVVC → VVC. Vowel length is occasionally kept as in ēēʃ (see 5.2.).

In ˈdahab > dâb and ˈt ^ʕ aʕam > tâm the initial disyllabic word is reduced to a monosyllabic word: CV.CVC → CVC. The closed syllable is the result of the elision of the intervocalic pharyngeal and traces of the VV sequence can be seen in the resulting falling tone.

The di-syllabic structure of the word ˈʔood ^ʕ a > ɔ́dà CVV.CV → V.CV is shortened because of the loss of the onset consonant in addition to the shortening of the intervocalic vowel plus vowel harmony, i.e., -ATR triggered by the final /a/.

In addition to vowels, Wolfe (1999: 36) distinguished eight diphthongs, and Osman (2006: 354) identified six diphthongs in the phonological system of Zaghawa. According to our observations, the Zaghawa phonological system includes eleven diphthongs with a ±ATR contrast, as presented in the following examples compiled in Table 11. The gaps in the system have a clear pattern: /a/ is not part of a diphthong where the other vocalic element is +ATR. The integration of these diphthongs into SSA words is presented in Table 12.

The following VCV, and CV sequences in SSA are replaced by a diphthong in the Zaghawa borrowing, as shown in Table 12.

4.4 Tone adaptation

Whereas Zaghawa is a tonal language, Arabic is a stress language. Stress patterns in SSA can be summarized as follows. The heavy syllable, i.e., any syllable with a long vowel and non-final CVC syllables, is stressed if there is only one heavy syllable in the word, e.g., usˈtaaza ‘teacher’ (feminine). If there is more than one heavy syllable, stress falls on the penultimate heavy syllable, e.g., t ^ʕ aˈmaat ^ʕ im ‘tomatos’. Otherwise, stress falls on the penultimate syllable of the word, e.g., ˈkatab ‘he wrote’.

Zaghawa is a tonal language which distinguishes between three tone levels: high (H), low (L) and mid (M). Zaghawa often allows two or more of these tones in succession on single syllables, creating contour tones (cf. Clements 2000: 152). The contour tones that exist in Zaghawa are rising (LH), falling (HL), mid-falling (ML), and mid-rising (MH). Contour tones may mark a single monophthong, or they may extend across a diphthong. They occur on a monosyllabic word or on the final syllable of a di-syllabic word. They are marked with the following diacritics: [ ̂ ] HL, [ ̌ ] LH, [ ᷆ ] ML, and [ ᷄ ] MH.

Osman (2006: 357) states that “the Zaghawa language uses tone grammatically to draw a distinction between singular and plural nouns and, lexically, to differentiate between varied meanings of the same phonological segments, i.e., lexical tone”. Tone is also used to mark aspect differentiations in verbs. Consider the examples in Table 13, Table 14 and in example (19 a and b).

The following examples show grammatical tone in perfective (19a) and imperfective (19b) verbs:

Our data reveals that there are no correlations between Arabic stress and tone in Zaghawa borrowings. The existence of grammatical tone in the categories of nouns, adjectives and verbs in Zaghawa makes it difficult to find a correlation between stress and tone. Arabic borrowed words are adapted to the grammatical tone marking system of Zaghawa regardless of their stress pattern.

4.5 Gemination

Gemination is a common feature of Zaghawa phonology, and it can be lexical as in káddó ‘happy person’ or it can arise grammatically, in the formation of verbal nouns (see Section 5.4), in the formation of plural adjectives (by geminating the intervocalic consonant) and in the intensification of adjectives (like ‘new’ to express ‘very new’). It is always an intervocalic consonant which is geminated; consider the examples in Tables 15 and 16 below:

Gemination in Arabic is contrastive: it may express grammatical distinctions, as in ˈakal ‘he ate’, and ˈakkal ‘fed someone (CAUS)’; it may signal lexical distinctions, as in ˈɟamal (n) ‘camel’, and ɟaˈmmal (v) ‘make beautiful (CAUS)’.

Since both languages exhibit gemination, Arabic borrowings in Zaghawa retain their geminated consonants. Our data provided a considerable number of borrowed lexical items with geminated consonants:

5.1 Nominal number marking

Arabic has a complex system of plural formations. With very few exceptions (see Table 21), Zaghawa borrows the singular word which is integrated with the morphology and tonology of the language.

Number on Zaghawa nouns is marked by tone: Arabic nouns are borrowed in their singular form (with or without the Arabic feminine suffix -e/-a), and after various phonological integration processes have taken place, tonal morphology is applied to mark number. This process is illustrated in Table 17.

Nominal number inflections in Zaghawa are marked by tonemes with no segmental alternations to the root. The singular may adopt several tonal patterns; this applies also to the plural. According to Jakobi and Crass (2004), there are ten tonal classes in Zaghawa that mark number and have been attested in our data (Aldawi 2010), as shown in Table 18.

Seven of the mentioned tone patterns have been observed marking singular and plural nouns in our loanword database (Table 19).

Some of the tonal patterns have been modified to fit the syllable structure of the Arabic borrowings, i.e., tonal class (9) has been modified to fit the syllable structure of the Arabic borrowing, sân (sg.) sán (pl.) ‘plate, plates’, and nâl (sg.), nál (p.l) ‘bee, bees’, resulting in a falling tone (HL) for the singular and a high tone for the plural; the underlying structures of these nouns are sáàn, and náàl but because of the consonant elision and reduction of vowel length, the result is a falling tone.

Adjectives in Zaghawa express an attribute of the noun they modify and tend to agree in number with their heads (Aldawi 2010: 157).

Syntactically, Zaghawa adjectives follow their heads; the adjectival word in (20) is marked by the definite clitic =dɔ:

Attributive adjectives in SSA are inflected by means of a suffix morpheme and they copy all the grammatical features of the noun they modify, agreeing in gender, number and definiteness as illustrated in example (21).

Zaghawa does not have nominal gender, and definiteness is not marked. Number in Zaghawa adjectives is expressed by the strategies illustrated below.

Plural number is signaled by a change in the tonal pattern on the noun and a plural suffix on the verb associated with high tone in example (22):

For some adjectives, in addition to the plural tonal pattern, the final vowels -i, -ɪ are replaced by -e, -ɛ as shown in (23):

Other adjectives undergo medial gemination of the intervocalic consonant in addition to the plural tonal pattern:

Number in the Zaghawa borrowed adjectives is also marked by tone as presented in the examples below:

5.2 Gender marking and differences between SSA and BA borrowings

Given that gender is not a morphological category in the Zaghawa language, speakers have two options when referring to natural/biological gender in the borrowings. One option is to borrow the SSA singular form of both masculine and feminine nouns, and mark number according to the tonal class 8, which assigns HM (singular) and MH (plural) tonal patterns. Since singular feminine nouns ending in -a are tri-syllabic, a third tone is assigned to the feminine marker -a: HML (singular) and MHH (plural), see Table 20.

The other option is to borrow both the singular and plural of SSA nouns with their gender and number markers, a feature which is referred to by Kossmann (2010) as parallel system borrowing. In such system “[…] morphological paradigms appear in loanwords without much (or any) influences on the native part of the lexicon” (Kossmann 2010: 460). According to Kossmann parallel system borrowing may affect nominal number marking, verbal inflection, and pronominal morphology. The nouns in Table 21 are SSA borrowings showing gender and number marking:

Like Arabic borrowings in Laggori (Manfredi 2013), the Baggara Arabic feminine marker -e in borrowed nouns is the “morphophonological element that helps us to distinguish nouns borrowed from BA from those borrowed from Sudanese Standard Arabic, which typically present the feminine marker -a” (Manfredi ibid: 474). The feminine marker -e is one out of eight features that distinguish SSA from BA; the other features are listed below, and they are further exemplified in Table 22:

1. The /i/ in SSA is realized as [a] in BA initial syllables.

2. The /a/ is realized as a rather fronted [e] in BA, when it is preceded or followed by an alveolar or palatal consonant which is a productive process in BA.

3. Gahawa syndrome: a short vowel is inserted between two consonants at the end of one syllable and at the beginning of another (Jong et al. 2007). The inserted vowel is not necessarily /a/, and it may be subject to vowel harmony.

4. Bukara syndrome: “the /r/ in consonant clusters may be delayed by the insertion of an epenthetic vowel preceding the /r/” (Jong et al. 2006), as presented in BA.

5. Deletion: the short unstressed /a/ in open syllables is deleted in BA.

6. Metathesis: the process referred to as qalb in Arabic (Qāsim 2002: 15), in which two phonemes in a word are switched.

7. Word final Ɂimaala: Ɂimaala is a distinct feature of the variety of Arabic spoken in western Sudan which is the result of Bedouin influence (Ishaq 2002; Qāsim 2002). It refers to the process by which the final /a/ of a word is raised to /i/ or /e/ when it is preceded by a front vowel.

8. The feminine marker is -e in BA and -a in SSA

Baggara Arabic nouns with the feminine marker -e are integrated into Zaghawa as they are, i.e., the gender morpheme is reinterpreted as part of the root. Number is marked by tone as shown in Table 23. The following group of nouns adapt the tonal patterns HML for singular and MHH for plural which is a modified version of tonal class 8 where a third tone is assigned to the feminine marker /e/.

5.3 Verbs

The verbal morphology of Arabic presents many inflected forms. Verbs in Arabic are generally inflected for person, number and tense; further inflections may occur. At this point it is difficult to assess which stem of the Arabic verbal system is borrowed. The Arabic verb stem, regardless of which stem is borrowed, is completely integrated into the morphological and tonal system of Zaghawa.

The Zaghawa verb is inflected for person, number, and TAM. According to Aldawi (2017: 41–49), four verb classes (labeled A, B, C, D) have been distinguished in Zaghawa based on the model of their conjugation. The most productive verb classes in all Saharan languages are class C^[3] and class D.^[4] There are two major differences between verbs of these two groups that are important to outline; Class C verbs are transitive verbs whereas class D verbs are intransitive. Both verb classes consist of a root providing the lexical meaning and an auxiliary -l-, functioning as a light verb. Compare the class C verb in example (26) and the class D verb in (27):

The auxiliary -l- has a suppletive form [ɛ] or [e] that appears with the 1st and 2nd person singular and plural of class C verbs. The morpheme -kɪ- marking 3rd person in the perfective aspect for class B verbs is realized as [-ɡɪ] in class C verbs, cf. example (26). The 3rd person subject morphemes -r, -Ø are null morphemes in the perfective and imperfective aspects, for more information see Aldawi (2017: 41–49).

Class D verbs are characterized by the presence of an object morpheme preceding the auxiliary, and a subject morpheme. Accordingly, the order of the morphemes in a class D verb is the following: the lexical morpheme, an obligatory object morpheme, the auxiliary -l-, and a dummy third person subject morpheme. The auxiliary takes a different form in the perfective and imperfective, cf. examples (26) and (28):

The lexical information in the verbs of classes C and D may be provided by an Arabic borrowing. The Arabic stem is fully integrated into Zaghawa morphology and tonology. This accommodation strategy is called by Muysken (2000) and by Wohlgemuth (2009: 21) “nominalization”, and it consists of a borrowed lexeme treated like a noun in a construction like “do x”. Arabic verbs are borrowed and conjugated according to the model of class C and D.

Tables 24 and 25 show the integration of Arabic verbs in the Zaghawa verbal morphology and tonology. There is a systematic pattern of vowel harmony and vowel insertion in ɡɛ̀rɪ̀-l-ɛ́, kɛ̀tɪ̀bɪ̀-l-ɛ́, fɛ̀ttɪ̀ʃɪ́-l-ɛ̀, wɛ̀ddɪ̀-l-ɛ̄, sɛ̀kkɪ̀rɪ̀-ɡɪ̄-l-ɪ́, sɛ̀llɪ̀-ɡɪ̄-l-ɪ́, fèkkìr-ɡī-l-í, and hèmì-ɡī-l-í where the first inserted vowel is always e, ɛ ±atr and the following vowels are i, ɪ ±atr.

The exceptions to the previous pattern are the verbs ʃʊ̀kʊ̀rɪ̀-ɡɪ̄-l-ɪ́ in which the dominant vowel in both syllables is /ʊ/; this vowel appears in both syllables of the stem ˈʃukur. Similarly, sàʊ̀ɡɪ̀-ɡɪ̄-l-ɪ́ is the result of the replacement of the VCV combination [awu] in ˈtasawuɡ by the diphthong [aʊ] in Zaghawa (cf. Table 12). A further exception is the stem ˈʕaaliɟ which is borrowed as ààlɪ̀ɟɪ̀-l-ɛ́ and ˈwas ^ʕ s ^ʕ a borrowed as wàssà-ɡɪ̄-l-ɪ́ where no changes are made to the stems.

The borrowed verbs in Table 24 are in the imperfective aspect, but when conjugated in the perfective, the borrowings follow the same morphological rules which apply to Zaghawa verbs: the borrowed verb stem is marked with a low tone and the auxiliary with TAM [-ɡɪlɪ] is suffixed with a M/H tonal pattern, which is the same tone marking of non-borrowed Zaghawa verbs. Consider the examples in Table 25:

Consider the SSA morphology for the verb ˈnaɟaħ ‘succeeded’ and compare it to the Zaghawa morphology of class D verbs in the perfective and imperfective; the final /ħ/ is elided following the consonant elision rule of the voiceless pharyngeal fricative, the remaining verb stem is borrowed and conjugated according to the model of class D verbs:

Borrowed verbs, regardless of which stem is borrowed, are integrated in the Zaghawa system with phonological and morphological modifications. Borrowed verbs follow the conjugation of class C or D.

5.4 Verbal nouns

Nouns can be derived from verbs in the Zaghawa language by a derivative affix acting as a nominalizer. The form of this affix depends on the verbal class. Class A verbs are derived by the suffix -la as illustrated below:

The verbs of class B have three different affixes used to derive verbal nouns: (V)C, (V)kk(V), and the infix -k-, consider examples (31), (32) and (33):

Verbal nouns derived from class C verbs take the nominalizer suffix -di. In the derivation of verbal nouns of class C, the auxiliary typical of class C verbs is replaced by the suffix -di; this suffix is either preceded by a vowel, or a sonorant consonant. Consider the examples (34) and (35) below:

Nominalization is productive in Arabic and in SSA. Zaghawa does not take over Arabic verbal nouns, but instead, applies Zaghawa nominalization rules to the Arabic borrowed stems. Consider the Arabic verb stems (ʔal)ɡiˈraaja ‘reading’ in example (36), (ʔal)ˈs ^ʕ alla ‘praying’ (37) and (ʔal)ʃuˈkur ‘thankfulness’ in (38) that have been conjugated according to the model of class C verbs: the formation of the verbal nouns is based on replacing -ɡɪ̄lɪ́ by the nominalizer -di with a high tone.