Some Aspects of Dinka Noun System - Deng Akol Juach - Bog

Some Aspects of Dinka Noun Systeminvestigates, as the name suggests, aspects of the noun system of the Dinkalanguage.Dinka is a monosyllabic and tonelanguage. It belongs to the Niloticfamily of languages that includes Nuerand Shilluk. The book examines someaspects of Dinka phonology. Phonologyis a branch of linguistics which studieslanguage sound.The second part of the book handlesthe definition of " breathiness" and itsrole in the language.Part three investigates the role ofvowel's length and central vowels.According to Professor Job Malou, investigations show that breathiness inDinka is distinctive and that there are 78distinctive vowels.Linguists such as A. Trucker, Bryanand Welmers who have studied WesternNilotic Languages, pointed out theexistence of seven vowel contrasts.However, Trucker and Bryan (1948), recognised the complicated nature ofDinka vowels system. They pointed outthe existence of seven vowel contrasts.Welmers find Wilson's tentativeanalysis of the Dinka vowel systemtogether with its morphological operatingremarkable.The review discusses the presence ofboth "breathy" and non-breathy" voice inpronunciation of vowels, diphthongs andsemi-vowels. Tone, vowel system andsyllable are included in the discussion.Furthermore, compounding, wordformation, cattle name prefixes andreduplication are tackled at length inchapters four and five respectively.Reduplication is a repetition of all orsome parts of a stem word that mostlyforms abstract nouns.Investigations reveal that theDinka nominal system involves manycomplicated rules. For that reason, the author recommends an in-depthstudy of all the Dinka dialects inorder for researchers to draw out clearmorphological rules governing the Dinkalanguage.Deng Akol Juach was born in Piom de Awan Village. He received all his education in SouthSudan and Sudan.In 2014 Deng Akol Juach crowned his academic achievements with an award of a PhD inApplied Linguistics from the Sudan University of science and technology, Sudan.Dr Juach, who has been a lecturer for about ten years at the Faculty of Education (EnglishDepartment) of the University Upper Nile, Malakal, is currently an Assistant Professor. This ishis first publication.