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In memory of Nikodemos Idris. Nikodemos Idris was a honest man and a competent linguist. He died in Addis Ababa 23 years ago. I met him for the first time in 1991 at the Kennedy Library. I was impressed by his dignified manner and love for his homeland and people. In 1993 we started working together on the Kunama ethnography. He was born in 1934 at Kedagul, a kunama marda village of a Kunama mother and a Sudanese father who was miner at the colonial gold mine of Awsa Konoma/Soosona in the Eritrean western lowlands. He was educated at the Lutheran church in Ašoši and became a teacher. In 1972 he visited Addis Ababa with a folklorist group and decided to settle and establish a new family there. In 1987 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree writing a thesis in Linguistics titled The Kunama and their Language. He could speak and read Tǝgre, Tigrigna and Amharic and helped many linguists giving his knowledge with extreme generosity. I upload his thesis and other papers on Kunama phonology.
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This article draws attention to the fact that in certain constructions relative or participial clauses are 'pseudo -modifiers', i.e. they have the superficial syntactic characteristics of modifying clauses but lack the restrictive or nonrestrictive (appositive) meaning typical of such relative and participial clauses. Four typical cases of such pseudo-modifiers are pointed out.
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