The Tigre Language of Ginda , Eritrea: Short Grammar and Texts

In The Tigre Language of Ginda , Eritrea, David L. Elias documents the dialect of the Tigre language that is spoken in the town of Ginda in eastern Eritrea. While the language of Tigre is spoken by perhaps one million people in Eritrea and Sudan, the population of Ginda is fewer than 50,000 people. Elias describes basic aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicography. In contrast to other dialects of Tigre, of which approximately a dozen have been identified, Tigre of Ginda exhibits the only recorded examples in Tigre of gender-specific first person possessives, e.g. anye ‘my eye’ (masc) vs. ance ‘my eye’ (masc/fem), and a new form of the negative of the verb of existence, yahallanni ‘there is not’. Contact with Arabic and Tigrinya has resulted in numerous loanwords and a few biforms in Tigre of Ginda .