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Surmic language spoken by Mursi people in southwestern Ethiopia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mursi (also Dama, Merdu, Meritu, Murzi, Murzu) is a Southeast Surmic language spoken by the Mursi people who live in the South Omo Zone on the eastern side of the lower Omo valley in southwest Ethiopia.[3] The language is similar to Suri, another Southeast Surmic language spoken to the west of the Mursi language area.[4] It is spoken by approximately 7,400 people.[1]
Mursi is classified as belonging to the Southeast Surmic languages, to which the following other languages also belong: Suri, Me'en and Kwegu.[5][6] As such, Mursi is also part of the superordinate Eastern Sudanic family of the Nilo-Saharan languages.
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 /f/ and the voiceless stop /p/.[7]
Both Mütze[16] and Firew[17] agree that there are only two underlying tone levels in Mursi, as opposed to larger inventories proposed by Turton and Bender[18] and Moges.[19]
The Mursi grammar makes use of the following parts of speech: nouns,[20] verbs,[21] adjectives,[22] pronouns,[23] adverbs,[24] adpositions,[25] question words,[26] quantifiers,[25] connectors,[27] discourse particles,[28] interjections,[29] ideophones,[25] and expressives.[25]
Nouns can be inflected for number and case.[30] The number marking system is very complex, using suffixation, suppletion or tone to either mark plurals from singular bases, or singulatives from plural bases.[31] Mursi preverbal subjects and all objects are unmarked,[32] whereas postverbal subjects are marked by a nominative case. Further cases are the oblique case and the genitive case.[32] Modified nouns receive a special morphological marking called construct form by Mütze.[33]
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