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The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million Nilotic people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east. Eight of its proposed constituent divisions (excluding Kunama, Kuliak, and Songhay) are found in the modern two nations of Sudan and South Sudan, through which the Nile River flows. As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile basin and the central Sahara desert. Joseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was a genetic family in his 1963 book ''The Languages of Africa''. It contains the languages not included in the Niger–Congo, Afroasiatic, or Khoisan families. It has not been demonstrated that the Nilo-Saharan languages constitute a valid genetic grouping, and linguists have generally seen the phylum as "Greenberg's wastebasket", into which he placed all the otherwise unaffiliated non-click languages of Africa.〔Lyle Campbell & Mauricio J. Mixco, ''A Glossary of Historical Linguistics'' (2007, University of Utah Press)〕〔P.H. Matthews, ''Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics'' (2007, 2nd edition, Oxford)〕 Its supporters accept that it is a challenging proposal to demonstrate, but contend that it looks more promising the more work is done.〔Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, "Nilo-Saharan Languages," ''International Encyclopedia of Linguistics'' (1992, Oxford), volume 3, pp. 100–104〕〔M. Lionel Bender, "Nilo-Saharan," ''African Languages, An Introduction'' (2000, Cambridge), pp. 43–73.〕〔Blench & Ahland (2010)〕 Some of the constituent groups of Nilo-Saharan are estimated to predate the African neolithic. Thus, the unity of Eastern Sudanic is estimated to date to at least the 5th millennium BC.〔John Desmond Clark, ''From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa'', University of California Press, 1984, p. 31〕 Nilo-Saharan genetic unity would necessarily be much older still and date to the late Upper Paleolithic. This larger classification system is not accepted by all linguists, however. ''Glottolog'' (2013), for example, a publication of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, does not recognize the unity of the Nilo-Saharan family, or even of the Eastern Sudanic branch. ==Characteristics== The constituent families of Nilo-Saharan are quite diverse. One characteristic feature is a tripartite singulative–collective–plurative number system, which Blench (2010) believes is a result of a noun-classifier system in the protolanguage. The distribution of the families may reflect ancient water courses in a green Sahara, when the desert was more habitable than it is today.〔Drake NA, Blench RM, Armitage SJ, Bristow CS, White KH. 2011. "Ancient watercourses and biogeography of the Sahara explain the peopling of the desert." ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Science'', 2011 Jan 11, 108(2):458–62.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nilo-Saharan languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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