Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

I. African Studies / Африканистика 28 Proceedings of the International Congress on Historiography and Source Studies of Asia and Africa.Vol. I. 2020 languages and taught by Nubian linguists, such as the late Mukhtar Muhammad Khalil Kabbara, 1 Muhammad Jalal Hashim and Husain Mukhtar Kabbara 2 with special courses on writing the modern Nubian languages. Like Cyrillic alphabets, the Old Nubian alphabet was developed upon a Greek base. It uses several characters from the Coptic alphabet together with additional characters from the ancient Meroitic script. 3 The language policy of the Sudan contrasted diametrically with the traditional language policy of the Soviet Union., as described in 1977 by M. I. Isayev when he published National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions. 4 At that time the Sudan had only one official language, Arabic, and well over 100 languages with no official status. In the Soviet Union there was a very different situation. When Lenin first came to power, he declared all the languages of the Soviet Union to be equal. There was to be no compulsion such as there had been during the Tsarist era with the policy of Russification. No longer would Russian be the official language. There was not to be one exclusive official language, but rather 130 ‘national languages’. In 1978 the contrasting situations in the Sudan and the Soviet Union were examined in a postgraduate course conducted at the Institute of African and Asian 1 Kabbara M. M. K. Wörterbuch der nubischen Sprache (Fadidja/Mahas–Dialekt). Warsaw: Raven [Nubica], 1996. 2 Hashim M. J., Kabbara Ḥ. M. Iqra’ bi’l-lugha al-nūbiyya. The Nubian Studies and Documentation Centre. Cairo, 2008. 3 Bell H. A World Heritage Alphabet: The Role of Old Nubian in the Revitalization of the Modern Nubian Languages // Anderson J. R., Welsby D. A. (eds.). The Fourth Cataract and Beyond. Proceedings of the 12 th International Conference for Nubian Studies . British Museum Publications on Egypt and Sudan 1. Leuven — Paris — Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2014. P. 1189. 4 Isayev M. I. National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions. Moscow: Progress Publications, 1977.