| Daatsʼiin | |
| States: | Ethiopia |
| Region: | Benishangul-Gumuz Region |
| Ethnicity: | Daats'iin |
| Speakers: | 300-1000 |
| Ref: | e19 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| Familycolor: | Nilo-Saharan |
| Fam2: | Komuz? |
| Fam3: | Bʼaga |
| Glotto: | daat1234 |
| Iso3: | dtn |
Daatsʼiin is a B'aga language of western Ethiopia. There are two communities of speakers in western Ethiopia, one in Mahadid, on the northeast border of Alitash National Park, and one in Inashemsh on the Sudan border, south of the park where the Rahad River crosses from Ethiopia into Sudan.
Daatsʼiin was first reported in 2013 and described by Colleen Ahland in 2014. Ahland has described it further in 2016. A comparative word list of Daatsʼiin, Northern Gumuz, and Southern Gumuz is available in Ahland & Kelly (2014).[1]
Of the other B'aga languages, Daatsʼíin has the greatest lexical similarity to Southern Gumuz, but the two groups communicate in Arabic or Amharic.[2]
The consonant inventory of Daatsʼíin:
| Labial | Alveolar | Postalveolar / palatal | Velar | Glottal / pharyngeal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | voiceless | p | t | c | k | ʔ | |
| voiced | b | d | ɟ | g | |||
| ejective | pʼ | t' | cʼ | kʼ | |||
| implosive | ɓ | ɗ | |||||
| Affricates | voiceless | ts | tʃ | ||||
| ejective | tsʼ | tʃʼ | |||||
| Fricatives | voiceless | f | s | ʃ | h | ||
| voiced | v | z | (ʒ) | (ʕ) | |||
| Nasals | m | n | ŋ | ||||
| Approximants | w | l | j | ||||
| Rhotic | r | ||||||
pronounced as /[v]/ and pronounced as /[ʒ]/ are rare, both recorded only from one word so far. The former appears to be phonemic, but the latter might be an allophone of pronounced as //z//.
The voiced pharyngeal fricative pronounced as /[ʕ]/ only occurs when following pronounced as //l// or pronounced as //r// and preceding pronounced as //a//, and it can be analyzed as an allophone of the glottal stop pronounced as //ʔ//.
Daatsʼíin has eight vowel phonemes:
| front | central | back | diphthong | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| close | i(ː) | ɨ | u(ː) | u ~ wɨ |
| mid | e(ː) | ə | o(ː) | |
| open | a(ː) |
Daatsʼíin is also a tonal language: vowels can bear high and low tone. Some examples of downstep occur.
Daatsʼíin has several grammatical differences from other Gumuz languages. Verbs inflect for aspect (perfective - imperfective) rather than for tense (future - non-future). Verbs are polysynthetic in all languages, but the order of the morphemes differs in Daatsʼiin, and some morphemes that occur in one language do not occur in the other(s).[2] "The major constituent order in Daatsʼíin clauses tend to be AVO/SV."