Mursi (also Dama, Merdu, Meritu, Murzi, Murzu) is a Southeast Surmic language spoken by the Mursi people who live in the South Omo Zone on the eastern side of the lower Omo valley in southwest Ethiopia.^[2] The language is similar to Suri, another Southeast Surmic language spoken to the west of the Mursi language area.^[3] It is spoken by approximately 7,400 people.^[1]: 91

Classification

Mursi is classified as belonging to the Southeast Surmic languages, to which the following other languages also belong: Suri, Me'en and Kwegu.^[4][5] As such, Mursi is also part of the superordinate Eastern Sudanic family of the Nilo-Saharan languages.

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

The vowel and consonant inventory of Mursi is similar to those of other Southeast Surmic languages, except for the lack of ejectives, the labial fricative /f/ and the voiceless stop /p/.^[6]

• Except for the hesitant inclusion of the glottal stop /ʔ/ by Firew, both Mütze and Firew agree on the consonant inventory. The layout mostly follows Mütze. The characters in angled brackets are the ones used by Firew, where they differ from Mütze.
• Mütze rejects the phonemic status of the glottal stop [ʔ], claiming that it is phonetically inserted to break up vowel sequences.^[9] Firew discusses this and leaves the question undecided, but includes the sound in the phoneme chart.^[10]
• Firew classifies the alveolar implosive /ɗ/ as postalveolar, without giving reasons.^[11]

• Both Mütze and Firew agree on the vowel inventory and on the chosen transcription, as shown above.^[13]
• Even though vowel length appears phonetically in Mursi, it can be explained by the elision of weak consonants between identical vowels.^[14]

Tone

Both Mütze^[15] and Firew^[16] agree that there are only two underlying tone levels in Mursi, as opposed to larger inventories proposed by Turton and Bender^[17] and Moges.^[18]

Grammar

The Mursi grammar makes use of the following parts of speech: nouns,^[19] verbs,^[20] adjectives,^[21] pronouns,^[22] adverbs,^[23] adpositions,^[24] question words,^[25] quantifiers,^[24] connectors,^[26] discourse particles,^[27] interjections,^[28] ideophones,^[24] and expressives.^[24]

Nouns

Nouns can be inflected for number and case.^[29] The number marking system is very complex, using suffixation, suppletion or tone to either mark plurals from singular bases, or singulatives from plural bases.^[30] Mursi preverbal subjects and all objects are unmarked,^[31] whereas postverbal subjects are marked by a nominative case. Further cases are the oblique case and the genitive case.^[31] Modified nouns receive a special morphological marking called construct form by Mütze.^[32]