| akka, | xʌdz | a-ggw | išən=yu, | |
| monitor lizard, | when | 3Sg-see | goat=PL, | |
| a-m-gwab | maʔʔʔʔ maʔʔ, | |||
| 3Sg-IRR-INCEPT | maaa maaa, | |||
| a-b-ṣʌyyaħ | ħar | išən | kadda | |
| 3Sg-IMPF-bleat | like | goat | little | |
| ndzuɣ | a-b- | |||
| so that | 3Sg-IRR- | |||
| ndzuɣ | išən-y | əm-ki-a.si | a-m-dər | a-m-mʌṭmṭ-ini. |
| so that | goat-PL | IRR-stand-3Sg.DAT | 3Sg-IRR-go | 3Sg-IRR-suckle-3PlEmph. |
The monitor lizard, when it sees goats, it starts going maaa maaa, it bleats like a kid goat so that it- so that the goats will stand by it and it can go and suckle them.
I'll leave it to the biologists to determine whether this story has any basis in fact, and folklorists to consider if it can be connected to the Puerto Rican chupacabra. However, it does have one linguistically interesting feature as well. In Korandje, an aspect marker is ordinarily directly followed by a verb. It is possible to hesitate after an aspect marker, but not to insert anything between it and the verb it governs. However, in this sentence we find an aspect marker (gwab) followed directly by an onomatopeia representing the sound made. This suggests that, despite the inseparability of the verb from the aspect marker, it might be plausible to take them as two distinct words rather than as a single long word.
10 comments:
It confused me that you wrote varan but linked to a Wikipedia article headed waral; I gather that Arabic has both waral and waran. Is it a dialect thing?
Asides:
There's another close parallel in a Roald Dahl's "An African Story". The story takes place in Kenya, as I recall, and very possibly was inspired by something Dahl had heard from the locals.
My understanding is that chupacabra is an Americanism, after chupacabras (where chupa is the head). However the non-s form is common enough now.
Any idea about the etymology of išən?
Languagehat: It seems to be. Varan (a term borrowed into English, marginally) is based on the common dialect form ورن, but the most reliable Classical Arabic sources (such as Al-Jahiz) use waral.
Y: Yes, that is a promising parallel. I wonder how widespread such ideas are? Išni (the i is dropped in many contexts, yielding išən) is from Songhay *hinkini. k > c > ts before front vowels, and ts > s / _C (s has the allophone š next to front vowels or velars); the exact conditioning for short vowel deletion needs further study.
The Dutch word for monitor lizard is varaan.
The v is kind of surprising though, did the word enter European through Persian?
To add to the directionality of waral~waran: r...l > r...n seems to happen more often in Arabic dialections than the other way around. Such irregular dissimilations are very widespread in all the dialects, so it seems to be pretty old.
Also: Surely goats say maaʕʕʕ maaʕʕʕ in Korandje? Long glottal stops seems odd.
However, in this sentence we find an aspect marker (gwab) followed directly by an onomatopeia representing the sound made. This suggests that, despite the inseparability of the verb from the aspect marker, it might be plausible to take them as two distinct words rather than as a single long word.
Would it be an admissible interpretation that onomatopoeic expressions are treated like verbs in this case? I dimly remember having read that this is the case at least for some purposes in some other languages, e.g. Lithuanian.
However, in this sentence we find an aspect marker (gwab) followed directly by an onomatopeia representing the sound made. This suggests that, despite the inseparability of the verb from the aspect marker, it might be plausible to take them as two distinct words rather than as a single long word.
Absofuckinglutely NOT. If expletives can radically disrupt sentence and even word structure, it's entirely plausible that onomatobloodypeia can do the same.
I hope everyone understands that the apparent aggression of my response is forced on me by my example, and is not real.
The n-l vacillation in this word potentially goes back to Proto-Semitic. Akkadian has urnu (*wurnu < *wirnu; the equivalence between Akk CiCC and West Semitic CaCaC is well attested), but in West Semitic, forms with /l/ prevail, so Syria yarla:, Arabic waral (Safaitic wrl, pre-4th c. CE), and metathesized forms in MSA, rewol. It has been suggested that Arabic waran is a loanword from Akkadian, but Militarev and Kogan (Semitic Etymological Dictionary--Vol 2) find this unlikely.
Varanus is one of quite few examples where a modern word has been fully Latinized for use as a genus name. Another is Vombatus.
Jallad: Thanks for the comparative background - didn't realize how early this word was attested!
Hans: That might be defensible in this case; longer examples are needed to prove the point more solidly.
Petre: Infixation is not quite the same thing...
On the subject of warl, I was reminded of this post now that AEN has just released a new article by Laïla Nehmé which shows multiple instances of the name wrylw wurayl(-u), a nice example of an Arabic diminutive of warl as a Nabatean name.
http://arabianepigraphicnotes.org/journal/article/strategoi-in-the-nabataean-kingdom-a-reflection-of-central-places
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