Ebook: A Handbook of the Ateso Language

Publisher: SOCIETY lOR I'KOMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
Publication date: 1915
Number of pages: 145The Ateso dialect is spoken by a tribe ot" some 300,000 people living between Lake Kioga and Mt. Elgon in the Eastern Province of the Uganda Protectorate. The Teso are a cheerful, industrious people, amenable to control and eminently teachable. Although now for some six years only in close contact with civilization, the tribe has made phenomenally rapid progTess in the arts of peace ; the cultivation of cotton and labour on the construction of metalled roads has provided even the poorest peasants with abundant cash, and European articles, from cigarettes to bicycles, are in eager demand. Yet the name of this tribe does not appear, so far as the wTiter is aware, in any of the works on the peoples of the Uganda Protectorate. The Teso appear to belong to the same Nilotic gi-oup as the Nandi, Turkana and Karamojo tribes, and the language has affinities with Masai. The dialect is given by Sir H. H. Johnston, in his work The Uganda Protectorate, as Elgumi, a name which the Rev. W. Crabtree suggests has been applied to the tribe by the Masai {Engame = the nose) owing to the frecpient occurrence of the velar nasal ng. It is, however, doubtful if the sound in question is associated by natives with nasal utterance ; it is more probable that the word is the Masai Ilkume, one of their names for the Turkana tribe, who speak a dialect nearly resembling Ateso.