A morphological borrowing from Central Gur into Songhay

International audience Despite the considerable attention devoted over recent decades to contact influence on Songhay, the possible role of its Central Gur neighbours to the south has yet to be seriously explored. This paper argues that the relatively rare Songhay verbal noun suffix * -ímì, commonly attributed since Greenberg (1963) to Nilo-Saharan on the basis of rather distant and stretched comparisons, was in fact borrowed from a Central Gur language, most probably within the Gurma subgroup of Oti-Volta, along with some of the verbs that are attested as taking it. Its source was a suffixed noun class marker *-mV, ultimately cognate with Bantu's class 6, widely used in Central Gur for forming verbal nouns. The extension of * -ímì to verbs not borrowed from Central Gur (including some Arabic loanwords) was facilitated by its reanalysis as an allomorph of the presumably inherited suffix * -írì, as demonstrated by a novel synchronic analysis of the Songhay data. This reanalysis produced a synchronic "crazy rule" which appears to have remained productive in the "Kaado" Songhay of Gorouol in western Niger.