Description
This item consists of 6 audio files and 1 video file. These files, recorded between 10 Oct 2014 and 17 Oct 2014 in the village of Bimadbn (in the donga of NE’s house) constitute a first record of the Ndre language with its last known speaker, Deyebu Irfai (perhaps more properly Yirufai), originally of Rmar village. The village was abandoned when he was a small boy, owing to sorcery, and he was raised among Arammba people. Also present was his adopted son Marai Serkai (son of his small brother). NE and Emil Mittag were both present carrying out the elicitation, ably assisted by Jimmy Nébni as an intermediary to help bridge our inquiries, mostly by explaining and eliciting through Nmbu as a common language; sometimes Arammba was used as the lingua franca as well (Marai and Mittag). Both NE and EM made recordings on their Zoom 4 recorders, and in addition EM made recordings on a Canon Video with mounted Rode mike.
The language is closely related to Nen, even closer to Neme, and is notable for a number of archaic traits from proto-Nambu of which it is the sole witness, most importantly the retention of initial ŋ, which descends as n in Neme and is lost outright in all other Nambu-branch languages.
Deyebu walked to Kiriwa in 2013 to ask EM to begin recording his language and some limited work was done then; the purpose of this week was to get a fuller analytic picture of the language. He and Marai walked from his current location of Setavi to Kiriwa, then the two of them plus EM flew with MAF to Bimadbn for the week’s work. We worked through the standard SNG list (with various informal augments to take the number of vocab items > 500) and many side elicitations to flesh out the most important paradigms.
NE’s field notes are in N2014B and begin p. 62.
