Tennet language

Tennet is a Surmic language spoken by the Tennet people in South Sudan. The Tennet home area is a group of fifteen (15) villages at the northern part of Eastern Equatoria state, 65 kilometers northeast of Torit.

Tennet is spoken in fourteen villages, these villages are Imilwanit, Ngaalovi, Itir, Nyaaro, Leteji Ngaanlobok, Loudum, Le̱le̱, Lovi, Tare, Lobele, Imedu, Momoi and Lovirang. The major town for Tennet is Arilo, of Lafon County, Eastern Equatoria State (Ethnologue).

Like its closer Surmic relatives, Tennet uses multiple strategies to mark number on nouns.^[11]

• Singular suffix: Nouns that refer to things that usually occur in groups (e.g. teeth, leaves)
• Plural suffix: Nouns referring to things that usually occur singly (e.g. turtle, carotid artery)
• Singular suffix to mark singular and plural suffix to mark plural (e.g. pipe, waterbuck)
• Tone change
• Stem change (rare)

The number marking system is quite similar to that of Murle, for which Arensen^[12][13] has proposed semantically based categories to group nouns that use the same strategy for marking number.

Tennet has a marked nominative system, where a noun takes a suffix when it is the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb. A noun serving as a direct object is unmarked, and so are citation forms.^[14]

In an equational clause with an implicit "be" verb, both nouns are left unmarked (the accusative form).^[15]

Like other Surmic languages, Tennet uses a modified vigesimal counting system. "Six" is derived from "five and one," "seven" from "five and two," etc. "Ten" is a new word, followed by "ten and one," "ten and two," up to "ten and five and four," after which is a new word for "twenty," which means "a person" (10 fingers and 10 toes). "Forty" is "two people," sixty is "three people," etc.

Tennet has a basic VSO word order.^[16] As is the case with other Surmic languages, Tennet's word order for interrogative clauses is typologically surprising. Greenberg's Universal 12 predicts that for VSO languages, interrogative words will be sentence-initial,^[17] but Tennet and its relatives have sentence-final interrogative words.^[18]

The language has a category of words that have been analyzed as postpositions. If that is what they are, Tennet syntax contains another typological anomaly, since Greenberg's Universal 9 predicts prepositions for VSO languages. However, these postposition candidates also have some noun-like characteristics (case marking), and certain constructions containing indisputable nouns parallel the apparent postpositional constructions quite nicely.^[19]