many cases are realized (exceptionally) as consonant clusters. There are no tautosyllabic consonants that follow liquids or fricatives and nasals do not follow other consonants. Words usually contain one, two or three syllables, but verbs may contain as many as eight or more. Grammar Morphology Afitti can tentatively be defined as an agglutinative SOV language with postpositions. Plural marking on adjectives and nouns take the form of a suffix. Plural marking in verbs is found for both objects and subjects. Plural forms of verbs without a verbal plural marker are translated as duals. Afitti has no definite or indefinite articles and gender marking also seems to be absent. All of these characteristics are common both geographically and within the Eastern Sudanic language. However, with the exception of Nyimang, the differentiation between dual and plural is particular to Afitti. Kinship Terms The Afitti kinship terms have specific possessive pronouns and in the case of ‘father’ and ‘mother’, there is a separate set of dual forms. This set is also found when speaking, plurally, of ‘mothers and ‘fathers’. Other kinship terms, namely ‘son’, ‘sibling’ and ‘mother- in-law’, also have a set of dual forms but lose this distinction when speaking, plurally, of ‘sons’, ‘siblings’ and ‘mothers-in-law’. All other terms, including ‘daughter’, ‘father- in-law’, ‘husband’, ‘wife’ and ‘(paternal or maternal) uncle’ do not or no longer distinguish dual from plural forms. The dual is mainly formed by way of morpheme or word order. More specifically, in the case of ‘father’ and ‘mother,’ the dual seems to be created by inversing the order of possessive pronoun and kinship term. Afitti and Meroitic The Afitti language may help scholars to better understand texts in Meroitic, a script whose sounds can be deciphered but whose meanings remain unclear. In the last few years, some linguists have come to the opinion that ancient Meroitic shares a history with a number of languages still spoken today. According to French archaeologist Claude Rilly, Meroitic belongs part of the Nilo-Saharan language group, and has particular affinities with that group's North Eastern Sudanic branch which comprises a handful of languages spoken in Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Notes References Bender, Lionel M., 2000. Roland Stevenson's Nyimang and Dinik lexicon. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 63: 103–120. Bolton, A.R.C., 1936. The Dubab and Nuba of Jebel Daier. Sudan Notes and Records 19: 93–108. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.