Murle

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The Murle are an ethnic group residing in Southern Sudan and Ethiopia. They have also been referred to in the literature as Beir.

1 Culture
2 Language
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Culture

Pastoralists, they have frequently come into conflict with numerically larger groups, including the Dinka and Nuer.

The Murle have a traditional history of how their people have migrated over the years in a clockwise direction around Lake Turkana (Arensen 1983).

[edit] Language

They speak the Murle language, which belongs to the Southwestern branch of the Surmic languages group, within the larger Nilo-Saharan family.

The basic word order for Murle clauses is VSO (Verb Subject Object) (Arensen 1982). The morphology of the verb agrees with the person and number of the subject, and can also indicate that of the object.

Marking of number on nouns in Murle is complex, with no single suffix being generally productive. Some nouns are marked with a singulative suffix, some with a plural suffix, some with both, and a few with irregular stems for the each number. Arensen has proposed a set of semantically based categories (such as association with men, or with weather and seasons) to try to predict which suffixes will be used (1992, 1998). Payne has proposed analyzing some cases as examples of subtractive morphology (2006:44,45).

The New Testament has been translated into the Murle language.

[edit] References

Arensen, Jonathan E. 1982. Murle grammar. Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages, 2. Juba: Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Juba.
Arensen, Jonathan E. 1983. Sticks and straw: Comparative house forms in southern Sudan and northern Kenya. International Museum of Cultures Publication, 13. Dallas: International Museum of Cultures.
Arensen, Jonathan E. 1991. Aspects of language and society among the Murle of Sudan. D.Phil. thesis. Wolfson College, Oxford University.
Arensen, Jonathan E. 1992. Mice are men: Language and society among the Murle of Sudan. International Museum of Cultures Publication, 27. Dallas: International Museum of Cultures.
Arensen, Jonathan E. 1998. Murle categorization. In Gerrit Dimmendaal and Marco Last (eds.), Surmic languages and cultures, 181-218. Nilo-Saharan, 13. Cologne: R. Köppe.
Lewis, B.A. 1972. The Murle: Red Chiefs and Black Commoners. Oxford University at the Clarendon Press.
Payne, Thomas. 2006. Explaining Langauge Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.