You know that Island in Papua New Guinea that's about to break off and become its own thing in 2027? Well.. do you honestly care about your country's status of being the youngest in the world? Or not?
As I can see on Social media, South sudan is about to hold an election in December, but my question is, who is running against Salva Kiir?.
Or is he running against himself?
The Nubians invaded Kush in 300 BCE and took their land. The fact that the Nubians and Kushites didn’t speak the same language should tell you everything!
Here’s the thing: we know what ethnicity the Nubians were, but not the Kushites. If you ask an AI or read certain books, they will say the Kushites were "indigenous, Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic-speaking people." Well, there’s something interesting about the Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic language family—it used to be a single language.
These languages are connected through actual historical contact, not just by region. The "Eastern Sudanic" branch started as one. During the Green Sahara period, these language speakers didn't live along the Nile River; instead, they thrived across the fertile Sahara. However, as the Sahara dried up around 3000 BCE, they were forced to migrate toward reliable water sources. That displacement is exactly how the original language fractured into different branches.
Here’s where things get spooky:
Most of these languages were never written down until the 1950s. The exceptions are Meroitic—which was written in 300 BCE and spoken by the Kushites—and Nobiin, which is what the Nubians spoke and wrote after the fall of the Kingdom of Kush. Yet, somehow, scientists claim they can trace unwritten languages like Dinka (which had no script until colonists arrived) back more than 5,000 years.
If you want sources, look no further than these:
Joseph H. Greenberg – The Languages of Africa (1963): Greenberg was the pioneer who first formally established Eastern Sudanic as a core genetic branch of the larger Nilo-Saharan macro-family. He pointed to deep-seated structural patterns, such as shared pronominal systems and verbal derivations, as proof of a common origin.
M. Lionel Bender – The Nilo-Saharan Languages: A Comparative Essay (1996) & subsequent 2000 works: Bender identified specific Eastern Sudanic isoglosses (shared linguistic features). For instance, he proposed reconstructed proto-forms for fundamental vocabulary across the branches, such as specific root patterns: *kutuk for "mouth," *ku-lug-ut for "fish," and common roots for the number three (*(ko)TVS-(Vg)).
Claude Rilly – Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique (2010): Rilly provides an incredibly robust, systematic reconstruction of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudanic (PNES).