Mimi of Decorse, also known as Mimi of Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Mimi-D, is a language of
Chad
Chad (; ar, تشاد , ; french: Tchad, ), officially the Republic of Chad, '; ) is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Repub ...
that is attested only in a word list labelled "
Mimi Mimi or MIMI may refer to:
People
* Mimi (given name), a list of people and fictional characters
* Constantin Mimi (1868–1935), Bessarabian politician and winemaker
* Mimi (footballer, born 1996), Bissau Guinean footballer
* Mohanad Ali (born 2 ...
" that was collected ca. 1900 by G. J. Decorse and published by
Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes. Joseph Greenberg (1960) classified it as a
Maban language, like the rather remote Maban relative
Mimi of Nachtigal. However, George Starostin (2011) rejects this classification, arguing that similarities to Maban are due to contact with locally dominant
Maba Maba or MABA may refer to:
* ''Maba'', a plant genus now included in ''Diospyros''
* Maba, Shaoguan (马坝镇), town in Qujiang District, Shaoguan, Guangdong, China
* Maba, Xuyi County (马坝镇), town in Xuyi County, Jiangsu, China
* Maba, Ind ...
(the similarities are with that language specifically, not with the entire Maban family), and provisionally regards it as a language isolate, though it is suggestive of
Central Sudanic
Central Sudanic is a family of about sixty languages that have been included in the proposed Nilo-Saharan language family. Central Sudanic languages are spoken in the Central African Republic, Chad, South Sudan, Uganda, Congo (DRC), Nigeria an ...
.
[Starostin, George]
On Mimi
Journal of Language Relationship, v. 6, 2011, pp. 115-140.
Basic vocabulary
The more stable of Mimi-D and Mimi-N's attested vocabulary is as follows:
See also
*
Mimi of Nachtigal
*
Mimi of Decorse word list (Wiktionary)
References
{{Central Sudanic languages
Maban languages
Languages of Chad
Nilo-Saharan languages
Language isolates of Africa
Languages attested from the 1900s
Extinct languages of Africa