«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Does Aten Live On in Kawa (K ó wwa) m 43 n noted by F. Ll. Griffith, even though he opted for Kawa , see Macadam (1955, 2, Text, 1, note 1). Hoskins had written the name as ‘Cowah’. During the 2002 field investigation, a significant comment about / o / was made by al-Hajj ‘Abd al-Qadir Muham- mad Salih Shammat, 66 years old, of the hamlet called Wadi Halfa in Sharq Labab to the south of Kówwa . He vol- unteered that the first vowel in Kówwa was pronounced with a ‘ damma ’ / u / rather than a ‘ fatha ’ / a /. Thus, al-Hajj ‘Abd al-Qadir signifi- cantly rejected the / á / in Káwwa . As a Nubian with an education in Arabic, he made use of the Arabic grammati- cal terms available to him to describe his pronunciation, Kówwa . However, there was no Arabic character to repre- sent / o/ precisely and unambiguously. The / o / was an intermediate sound on the phonetic continuum between / u / and / a /. In the dilemma of having to choose between the ‘ damma ’ / u / and the ‘ fatah ’ / a / as the closest Arabic character to represent / o /, al-Hajj ‘Abd al-Qadir opted for / u /. While there is no / o / in written Arabic, there is a long / o: / in the spoken colloquial Arabic of the Sudan. It corresponds to the diphthong / aw / in written Arabic. The word for ‘bananas’ is pronounced mo:z by speakers of the col- loquial, but mawz by formal Arabic scholars. Formal pronunciation is often preferred by Nubians with an extensive education in Arabic and Islam, such as al-Hajj Ya-Sin Isma’il, 88 years old, in the village of Kasúura north of Kówwa . Al-Hajj Ya-Sin recognized a difference in pronunciation between káwwa and Kówwa. In order to demonstrate the contrasting quality of the vowel of the first syllable in káwwa ‘broad, wide’, he would lengthen it as follows: káawwa . However, he chose to Arabise the / o / in Kówwa in the guise of a formal / aw /. Such an Arabisation of the / o / was not detected in the speech of his colleague Muhammad Latif Muhammad Ahmad, 75 years old, who simply said Kówwa . Formal Arabic forms written ‘by the local kātibs ’ were produced by F. Ll. Griffith to support the spelling ‘ Kawa ’, see his chapter in Macadam (1955, 2, Text, 1, note 1). Like Hoskins before him, Griffith ignored the double / ww /. He Cowah on Hoskins’Map (1835). From the Library of The Queen’s College, Oxford. Acknowledged with thanks