tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131774372024-03-16T02:09:45.855+01:00Jabal al-LughatClimbing the Mountain of LanguagesLameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comBlogger525125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-29268662924630257042024-02-20T20:46:00.003+01:002024-02-20T22:27:32.183+01:00Loanwords examined via Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer<p>I recently finished Pozdniakov's <i><a href="https://zenodo.org/record/5820515/files/325-Pozdniakov-2022.pdf?download=1">Proto-Fula-Sereer</a></i>, freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have little experience of Atlantic languages as such, and therefore not much useful to say about most of the book (though it made me want to also read Merrill's work, with which much of it is in dialogue.) However, while proto-Fula-Sereer is dated by the author to 2000 years ago or more, some of the comparisons are relevant for studying contact with other regional families. Two forms are particularly interesting to me for exploring contact with Berber:</p>
<ul>
<li>*xiris "slay (vb)": Sereer <i>xiris</i> 'couper le cou, décapiter, égorger' (Merrill: 'slit the throat') ~ Fula <i>hirsa</i> 'égorger; sacrifier (un animal, pour en rendre licite la consommation)' [p. 63]
<br>Sereer x- : Fula h- is a very well represented regular correspondence; however, Fula -r- in -rC- would normally be lost in Sereer (p. 173), and no regular pattern of vowel elision is given in the book. The word also looks like Soninke <i>xùrùsi</i> "to kill by cutting the jugular vein", yet the vowel correspondence is difficult there as well. The explanation is to be found in their common source as a loanword from widespread (non-Zenaga!) Berber <i>əɣrəs</i>, with the same meaning. The religious importance of slaughtering an animal for meat in this precise manner is sufficient to motivate the borrowing, which would thus have spread with Islam - presumably through northern Saharan travellers rather than Zenaga scholars, given the form.</li>
<li>*Guf "foam": Sereer <i>kuf</i> 'gonfler, écumer en bouillant', <i>kuf a...al / kuf a... ak</i> 'écume de la mer, à la marée montante' ~ Fula <i>ngufo / (n)gufooji</i> 'mousse, écume' (cf. Fula <i>ƴufa</i> 'mousser, écumer (trans.)', <i>ƴufo</i> 'mousse, écume) (Laala <i>kuuɓ</i> 'mousse', Nyun Gubaher <i>gʊ-gʊfʊri</i> 'mousse', Nyun Guñamolo <i>tɪ-gʊf / tɪ-gʊf-ɔŋ</i> 'écume, mousse', Joola Fonyi <i>ka-gʊf</i> 'bave, écume de mer, mousse du savon'). [p. 102]<br>The correspondence of Sereer k to Fula ŋg (let alone ƴ) is completely irregular, with no other examples cited. A comparison to Berber forms such as Tamasheq <i>tə-kuffe</i>, Tamazight <i>a-kuffi</i>, Zenaga <i>tu-ʔffukkaʔ-n</i> "froth" is thus not ruled out, although the other Atlantic forms make it more likely that the resemblance is coincidental. Cp. also Zarma <i>kùfú</i> "écumer" and related forms in Songhay, which probably do derive from Berber.</li>
</ul>
<p>Other forms are interesting to examine in the context of Songhay and Mande:</p>
<ul>
<li>*bon "bad (svb)": Sereer <i>bon</i> 'être mauvais, être méchant, être maigre', <i>ponu l / ponu k</i> "le mal [la chose mauvaise]' ~ Fula <i>bona</i> 'être mauvais, être mal; être méchant', <i>mbonki / bonkiji</i> 'méchanceté ; malfaisance ; perversité' (widespread root in Atlantic and Mel) [p. 86]
<br>Also widespread well beyond; looks originally Atlantic, but the suffixed vowel in Bambara <i>bɔ̀nɛ</i> and Zarma <i>bòné</i> betrays a borrowing path via Soninke rather than directly from Fula.</li>
<li>*bul "blue (svb)": Sereer <i>bule</i> 'bleu' ~ Fula <i>bula</i> 'rincer au bleu (du linge blanc); passer au bleu de lessive; colorer en bleu pâle' (The root *bulu is common for Atlantic and Mel languages. It is not a European borrowing). [p. 86]
<br>If so, then this is also the source for Bambara <i>búla</i> and Zarma <i>búlà</i> "blue", and other forms across the region. But this is a widespread Wanderwort, and one wonders how a European source was ruled out.</li>
<li>*mbedd "road, path": Sereer <i>mbed o...ong/ped k</i> 'petit chemin laissé entre deux champs à l'hivernage, ruelle, rue, allée" ~ Fula <i>mbedda / mbeddaaji</i> 'grand route' (Wolof <i>mbedd</i> 'rue', Jaad <i>mbɛdɛ</i> 'grand route'; Manjaku <i>umbɛra</i> 'chemin carrossable, route'). May be an ancient Soninke borrowing: < <i>béddè</i> 'rue principale, route'. [p. 87]
<br>Gao Songhay has <i>albedda / mbedda</i>, with an interesting prefix alternation; Heath very tentatively suggests a link to Arabic <i>blṭ</i>, but that probably doesn't work.</li>
<li>*Birq (mb-/w-) "manure": Sereer <i>mbiqi n</i> 'fumier, tas de fumier' ~ Fula <i>wirga</i> 'labourer le sol en éparpillant la terre (en luttant au sol ou pour la mélanger ou encore pour brouiller des traces...); disperser du fumier (sur un champ)' [p. 88]
<br>The correspondence mb:w is not regular, arguably reflecting differences in consonant mutation; only four examples are found, although they look like plausible retentions. The loss of r in Sereer would be regular (p. 173). The correspondence of q to g does not appear regular either (p. 192), unless this is related to the preceding r; one would expect q:kk. It's just as well that the correspondence is irregular, since the Fula term is clearly at least in part a borrowing from Songhay, not vice versa: it reflects a merger of two tonally distinct verbs, found in Zarma as <i>bírjí</i> "fumer le sol; fumier" and <i>bìrjí</i> "mélanger, embrouiller", used in the expression <i>laabu birji</i> "mélanger la terre". Conceivably the "spread manure" sense could be original to Fula, with only the "mix" sense being borrowed; but it strains credulity to imagine Zarma borrowing the same verb but giving it two different tonal patterns depending on the intended meaning. Soninke <i>boroko</i> "manure" is suspiciously similar, but the vowels rule it out as an intermediary.</li>
<li>*gaw "hunt (vb); throw (vb)": Sereer <i>xaƴ</i> 'lancer, envoyer un projectile, tirer une arme à feu; lancer un dard, pêcher au harpon', <i>nGawlax n / qawlax k ~ nGaƴlax n / qaƴlax k</i> 'la chasse [gibier]' ~ Fula <i>gawoo</i> 'chasser, être chasseur (professionel)'. [p. 111; poorly justified correspondences - 5 words for x:g]
<br>The Fula term is certainly the same root as (Songhay) Zarma <i>găw</i> "hunter", <i>gáwáy</i> "hunt (v.)". The term doesn't seem to be used in Mande, from a quick look. If the Sereer form is related to the Fula one, then the direction of borrowing must be Fula to Songhay. However, the correspondence looks rather poorly justified. For x-:g-, only 5 correspondances are given, including such eminently borrowable words as "indigo" and "okra". For -ƴ:-w, the expected regular correspondence is rather ƴ:ƴ (p. 192), cf. "limp" (p. 180), "lick" (p. 174). The question of borrowing direction thus remains open.</li>
</ul>
<p>The following cases may be only coincidentally similar, but perhaps they reflect contact at a much earlier period in prehistory, related to the spread of the practice of milking:
<ul>
<li>*Gang "chest": Sereer <i>ngang n / kang k</i> ~ Fula <i>gannde / ganndeeje</i> (Fula < <i>gang-nde</i>?) [p. 103; irregular initial correspondence with only two other examples found)<br>Cp. Zarma <i>gàndè</i> "chest".</li>
<li>*gand "nipple": Sereer <i>hand</i> 'être pleine (femelle), être en gestation, porter [femelle]', <i>hand l / qand a...ak</i> 'mamelle (des animaux), pis', <i>and l / and a...ak</i> 'mamelle (des animaux), pis, téton, tétine' (to note a variety of Sereer forms: h-,q-,Ø-) ~ Fula <i>ʔenndu ~ ʔenɗi</i> 'sein, mamelle; pis, trayon'<br>Cp. Zarma <i>gánì</i> "udder".</li>
</ul>
<p>The Fulani abstract noun formative <i>-(aa)ku</i> is analysed (p. 231) as an "extension suffix" <i>-aa-</i> plus a class suffix <i>-ku</i> explained as a taboo-motivated allomorph of <i>-ngu</i>, citing Koval 2000:230 (a source in Russian). This requires further investigation; it certainly cannot be unrelated to Soninke <i>-aaxu</i> with the same function, but what was the direction of borrowing?</p>
<p>Efforts to exclude Arabic loanwords were largely successful, but even so, one crept in: Fula <i>waabiliire</i> "pluie d'orage" is from Arabic <i>waabil</i> rather than proto-Fula-Sereer *(b)waam/b (p. 79). On the other hand, Sereer <i>tuɓaaɓ</i> and Fula <i>tuubako</i> "European, white man" are derived from nonexistent Arabic *tubaab (pp. 115-116), following a long if poorly evidenced tradition connecting this to the real Arabic word <i>ṭabiib</i> "doctor".</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-39932011877848594162024-02-20T13:37:00.001+01:002024-02-20T17:18:31.125+01:00"Punching up/down" in comedy: dating a lexical innovation in English<p>Any educated English speaker nowadays is likely to be familiar with the idea that comedy should punch up, not punch down: i.e., that it's okay to make fun of people more powerful than yourself, but not of people less powerful. But I remember being struck by the novelty of this expression when I first encountered it, well into adulthood. Notwithstanding the recency illusion, a bit of research suggests that my impression was correct. The earliest attestations I've been able to track down online go back to July 2012, in connection with a controversy about rape jokes made by some comedian named Daniel Tosh:</p>
<blockquote>"Kilstein trots out the old trope that all comics are victims who have been bullied and that’s why we’re doing standup. Total bullshit, of course, but he uses the tired cliche to glorify himself and others– who are “<b>punching up</b>”– and characterizes Tosh and others as tyrants or bully comics who are now <b>punching down</b>." (Brian McKim & Traci Skene, <a href="https://sheckymagazine.com/2012/07/toshopus/">Tosh.Opus</a>, 16 July 2012)</blockquote>
<blockquote>"The answer is that in both cases, the comedians were “punching down.”
<br>Punching down is a concept in which you’re assumed to have a measurable level of power and you’re looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you’ve picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying." (the pseudonymous "Kaoru Negisa", <a href="https://reasonableconversation.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/punching-up/">Punching Up</a>, 19 July 2012)</blockquote>
<p>All three writers are, naturally, American, and at least two of them are standup comedians themselves. Presumably the expression would already have been in use in some circles - perhaps backstage in standup comedy - for some years before that. But internal evidence suggests that it was still not assumed to be familiar to a general audience; both sources feel the need to put it between quotation marks on first use, and one even provides a definition, treating it as a metaphorical extension of a meaning used in the context of fights rather than as a familiar term in the context of comedy. (As further evidence, one may point to its complete absence from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120722034205/https://www.jezebel.com/5925186/how-to-make-a-rape-joke">this 2012 Jezebel article</a> about the same controversy; had it been written a few years later, it would seem unthinkable not to use the term "punching down" in expressing these ideas.) The term's use on MSNBC (as mentioned in the first source) would have been a good first step towards making the term familiar to a wider audience. By 2014, it was already appearing in <i>The Atlantic</i> (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/the-onion-jon-stewart-and-the-rise-of-the-bashful-social-critic/382072/">""We like standing up for the little guy, we like punching up," Bolton said."</a>). On Google Books, however, the earliest hits in the relevant sense show up only in 2016, at which time the "'punching up' vs. 'punching down' dichotomy" could still be described as a way in which this tension has "<b>recently</b> been encoded" (<a href="https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Taboo_Comedy/miygDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22punching%20down%22%20comedy&pg=PA8&printsec=frontcover"><i>Taboo Comedy</i></a>.) Before that date, the object of "punching down" mostly seems to have been bread dough.</p>
<p>Can anyone find an attestation predating July 2012? And does this new terminology represent a new concept of comedians' moral duties, or just relabel an older one? If the latter, what did earlier American comedians call it?</p>
<hr>
<p>Via <a href="https://twitter.com/sand2drn">@sanddorn</a> on Twitter and <a href="https://matthewfarthing.medium.com/an-un-humourous-treatise-on-punching-up-vs-punching-down-d76fa60ba0b1">Matt Farthing</a>, a 2011 attestation - once again by a stand-up comedian, but from England this time.</p>
<blockquote>"And a lot of comedians do jokes that I think aren’t funny enough to justify what they are about, and there’s plenty of ways you can be offensive without ‘punching downwards’. When FB does jokes about Palestine or black people there’s much more of a point behind it really. But it’s difficult because that’s his job, that’s how he sees himself – as this comedian who’ll say anything and make jokes about anything." (Richard Herring, 18 January 2011, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150805004615/https://www.louisewallis.net/richard-herring-interview/"></a>)</blockquote>
<p>And using this, I find that Ben Zimmer managed to discover an even earlier attestation, <a href="https://subtitlepod-62956.medium.com/when-did-comedians-start-saying-punching-up-and-punching-down-affc966a264f">in a good discussion of this term's origins</a>: <a href="https://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/23/12/2010/index.html">a blogpost, also by Richard Herring, in December 2010</a>. Note that, in these earliest attestations, it appears as part of a broader metaphor of likening satire to punching rather than as a preset cliché: "the weak punching the strong, rather than the strong bullying the weak", "Though there are no rules, comedy, I feel, should be siding with the weak and the oppressed and punching either inwards (at the comedian him or herself) or upwards (at the powerful or the oppressors)."</p>
<p>The metaphor derives, as Zimmer notes, from the world of boxing: "If you’re punching up, you’re taking on an opponent who might be taller or perhaps in a higher weight class, while punching down would be for an opponent who’s shorter or in a lower weight class." But its transfer to comedy doesn't appear to have been direct: the earliest relevant metaphorical uses found by Zimmer reflect power differentials in the contexts of British football (2002), then American politics (2006).</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-64289942324288655142024-02-10T09:53:00.000+01:002024-02-10T09:53:40.477+01:00Abu'l-Atahiya in KorandjeA friend in Tabelbala <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016539741968893/?multi_permalinks=3663965360559648¬if_id=1707499855086477¬if_t=group_activity&ref=notif">just posted</a> a translation of some lines from Abu'l-Atahiya into Korandje. Given the general unreliability of Facebook, I think this deserves to be recorded elsewhere, and re-translated into English:
<blockquote>
آغَمْفْ بَا قُوُخْ * نَمْڨَآنَا لَكْوَانْكَا
<br>
الْكَاسْفْ نِيرْ بَا يَّا نَوْ * نَمْنِينَانَا اَيْصْفَا
<br>
مَسْفْكَا اَيْضِيقْ * مْبَاڨُّوكَا نَنْفُونِي
<br>
وَلاَّ تَمْزْڨِيدَافْ بَايَعْزَرْ * آطَّرَّف بَيْكاَ
<br>
نَمْتْيُوَ آكَا الْقُرْءَانْ * اْمْبَا سَّنَّدْ السَّراْيَتْكَا<br>
نَمْفَكَّرْ أُغُوڎِي اَدْرِى * نْڎَا الْقُرُونْڎِي اَيفُوتْ<br>
أَبَّغْ السَّاعَاتڎِي اِيفُوتْ نِيكَا * اْمْبَا يْعِيشْ ڨَآ بَيَيْكَا<br>
إِڎْ بَكَّا لَخْبَآڎْ امْبَنْضَا * نَمْطَوْ نْڎَانَا أُورْكُورْكَا<br>
أَيْتَا عَلاَّوْصَايَتَ اَغُوڎِي * آبْتْبَآ نْڎِيسْ عَلْحَالَتْ<br>
ءَاسَعْدْ أُغْ مَّاوَانَا * غَارْ إِڎَ اَمَّوْ أَمْطَاسِي<br>
وَامَّوْ أُغْسْ ءآيْشْفَقْ اْنْڎِيكَا * ءآمَّآ أَبُو الْعَتَاهِيَةْ<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><i>
aɣəm=fʷ ba-qqux * nə-m-ɣ-ana ləkwan=ka
<br>əlkas=fʷ n-ir ba-yyanəw * nə-m-nin-ana a-yəṣfa
<br>mməs=fʷ=ka a-yḍiq * n-ba-ggʷạ=a-ka nə-n=funi
<br>wəlla taməzgida-fʷ ba-yəʕzər * a-ṭṭəṛṛəf bạ=y=ka
<br>nə-m-tyuw=a-ka lqurʔan * ən-ba-ssənnəd əssaryət=ka
<br>nə-m-fəkkəṛ uɣudzi a-dri * ndza lqṛun=dzi a-yfut
<br>a-bbəɣ əssaʕat-dzi i-yfut=nika * ən-ba-yʕiš gạ bya=y=ka
<br>idz ba-kka ləxbạ=dz ən=bənḍạ * nə-m-ṭəw ndz-ana ur=kʷər=ka
<br>əyta ʕə-n=ləwṣayət a-ɣudzi * a-b-tbạ=ndzi-s ʕə-n=lħalət
<br>a saʕd uɣ mmạw-ana * ɣar idz a-mmə̣w a-m-ṭ=a-si
<br>wə-mmə̣w uɣ=s a-yəšfəq əndzi-ka * a-n=ma abu lʕatahiya
</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
"A dry piece of bread * you eat in a corner,
<br>A glass of cool water * you drink pure,
<br>In a room that's narrow, * in which you sit alone;
<br>Or an isolated mosque, * remote from people,
<br>In which you read the Quran, * leaning on a column
<br>As you remember what is gone * and centuries that have passed -
<br>It's better than those hours that passed for you * living in great houses.
<br>What came after that stuff, * you'd burn for it in a hot fire.
<br>Look, this is my advice, * which shows you your situation;
<br>Happy is he that hears it * what he hears will be enough for him.
<br>Listen to one who pities you, * whose name is Abu'l-Atahiya."
</blockquote>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-30233086416186266842024-01-04T14:02:00.000+01:002024-01-04T14:02:08.827+01:00Ngər "die out"<p>In Algerian Arabic, <i>ngər</i> نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; <i>nəgru</i> نڨرو "they died out" typically means they died leaving no descendants bearing the family name. I've usually heard it in reference to small families that had no sons, but it can also be caused by mass killing, as recent events horribly remind us; expressions used in the news, alongside "<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-residents-who-have-lost-family-fear-more-destruction-ground-assault-looms-2023-10-15/">wiped out</a>", include the oddly bureaucratic formulation <a href="https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/138295">"erased from the civil registry"</a>.</p>
<p>This verb has no connection to Arabic نقر <i>naqara</i> "peck, hollow out, etc.", as its non-emphatic <i>r</i> betrays. It is a denominal verb formed within Arabic from the Amazigh (Berber) noun <i>anəggaru</i> "end, latter", derived from the verb <i>gʷri</i> "remain behind" (originally *ăgrəβ; forms cited are from Kabyle). Nevertheless, it has been been reborrowed from Arabic into a wide range of Amazigh languages, e.g. Kabyle <i>ngər</i>, glossed by Dallet as "die leaving behind neither descendants nor relatives; die out (family); be exterminated".</p>
<p>This concept, unambiguously expressed by a single word in most North African languages, doesn't seem to be lexicalised in English. Is it lexicalised elsewhere?Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-64013511003737504842023-12-26T12:19:00.001+01:002023-12-26T12:19:06.832+01:00"The Sound of Music" across three languages<p>You may well be familiar with <i>The Sound of Music</i>, an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family's memoirs. It features a neat little song for teaching musical notes, "Do, a Deer", which has been translated into a number of languages. Let's contrast three versions - English, Japanese, and Arabic - and see what they suggest.</p>
<table>
<tr><td>English</td><td><a href="https://lyricstranslate.com/en/%E3%83%89%E3%83%AC%E3%83%9F%E3%81%AE%E6%AD%8C-do-re-mi-do-re-mi-no-uta-do-re-mi.html">Japanese</a></td><td><a href="https://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/the-sound-of-music-%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A9/">Arabic</a></td></tr>
<tr><td>Do, a deer, a female deer,</td>
<td>ドはドーナツのド<br>Do is for "donut" (<i>dōnatsu</i>),</td>
<td>دو دروب ومعاني<br>Do is "paths" (<i>durūb</i>) and meanings,</td></tr>
<tr><td>Re, a drop of golden sun;</td>
<td>レはレモンのレ<br>Re is for "lemon" (<i>remon</i>);</td>
<td>ري ربيع الأغنيات<br>Re is a "spring" (<i>rabīʕ</i>) of songs;</td></tr>
<tr><td>Mi, a name I call myself,</td><td>ミはみんなのミ<br>Mi is for "everyone" (<i>minna</i>);</td>
<td>مي مـوسيقى وأغاني<br>Mi, "music" (<i>mūsīqā</i>) and songs;</td></tr>
<tr><td>Fa, a long long way to run;</td>
<td>ファはファイトのファ<br>Fa is for "fight" (<i>faito</i>);</td>
<td>فا فـجر الذكريات<br>Fa, a "dawn" (<i>fajr</i>) of memories;</td></tr>
<tr><td>So, a needle pulling thread;</td><td>ソは青い空<br>So is blue "sky" (<i>sora</i>);</td>
<td>صوتنا ملء الفضاء<br>Our "sound" (<i>ṣawt</i>) is a filling up of space;</td></tr>
<tr><td>La, a note to follow So;</td>
<td>ラはラッパのラ<br>Ra is for "trumpet" (<i>rappa</i>);</td>
<td>لم يزل فينا الوفاء<br>In us is "still" (<i>lam tazal</i>) loyalty;</td></tr>
<tr><td>Ti, a drink with jam and bread;</td>
<td>シは幸せよ<br>Si is "happiness" (<i>shiawase</i>)</td>
<td>سوف تبقى يا غناء<br>You, O song, "shall" (<i>sawfa</i>) remain;</td></tr>
<tr><td>That will bring us back to Do!</td>
<td>さぁ歌いましょう<br>So let us sing!</td>
<td>لنغنّي نغنّي.. لحن الحياة<br>Let us sing, sing... the tune of life!</td></tr>
</table>
<p>As should be obvious, the Arabic version is derived from the Japanese one (via a popular anime of the 1990s) rather than directly from the English one. However, it contrasts sharply with both in the choice of note-mnemonics. In English, each note name (well, except "la") is mapped directly to a near-homophonous monosyllabic word, taking advantage of English's relatively short minimal word length; most of these are widely familiar, high-frequency items. In Japanese, the word choices are necessarily longer and perhaps more obscure (the syllable <i>fa</i> is found only in relatively recent loanwords anyway), but in each case the note is mapped perfectly to the first syllable of a single word, usually referring to something readily visualisable. In Arabic, the note is again mapped (increasingly approximatively) to the first syllable, not of a word, but of a 2-4 word phrase; not a single one of these phrases refers to anything concrete enough to visualise. High-flown slogans replace the original's homely whimsy.</p>
<p>I have no way of proving it, but I believe this is symptomatic - certainly of the Arabic dubbing in the cartoons I used to watch in the early 1990s, and plausibly of Modern Standard Arabic discourse in general: an imagination based on recitation rather than visualization, preferring stirring abstractions to concrete details. After all, <a href="http://lughat.blogspot.com/2016/03/lexical-gaps-in-diglossia-when-you-cant.html">concrete details travel poorly in this diglossic context</a>.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-87319691845773044882023-12-02T21:58:00.008+01:002023-12-02T22:35:00.026+01:00Latin authors from Algeria<p>The modern borders of Algeria had no existence or meaning in the Roman era, but for any potential Algerian classicists, it may be interesting to consider which of the Latin texts that have come down to us were written by people born in Algeria. So far, I've found the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/suet.html">Suetonius</a>, born in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba), ca. 70 AD; historian</li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/correspondenceof01fronuoft">Fronto</a>, born in Cirta (modern Constantine), ca. 100 AD; grammarian</li>
<li><a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/apuleius.html">Apuleius</a>, born in Madaura (modern M'daourouch), ca. 124 AD; author of <i>Metamorphoses</i>, a comic-mystical proto-novel, along with various philosophical and rhetorical works.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/lactantius.html">Lactantius</a>, born perhaps in Cirta, ca. 250 AD; a Christian apologist</li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/compendiosadoctr01noniuoft">Nonius Marcellus</a>, born in Thubursicum (modern Teboursouk), perhaps late 200s AD; a lexicographer</li>
<li><a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/august.html">Augustine</a>, born in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras), ca. 354 AD; a Christian saint notable especially for his autobiographical <i>Confessions</i></li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/denuptiisphilolo00martuoft">Martianus Capella</a>, born in Madaura, late 300s AD; author of a formerly influential allegorical curriculum of the liberal arts, <i>De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii</i></li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/cassiifelicisde01rosegoog/page/n4/mode/2up?view=theater">Cassius Felix</a>, born in Cirta, late 300s AD; author of a medical handbook</li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/PriscianiInstitutionumGrammaticarumLibri/PriscianiInstitutionumGrammaticarumLibriI-xiihertz.1855">Priscian</a>, born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell), late 400s AD; Latin grammarian</li>
</ul>
<p>Conspicuously, all but one of them were born in the east, in what was then Numidia, and all but three date to the late Roman Empire, after Roman citizenship had been extended to all free men under Roman rule but before the Vandals' arrival. It is no doubt misleading to treat such authors separately from their (probably more numerous) counterparts born just across the modern border in Tunisia.</p>
<p>Literary works, of course, are just a small subset of what was written in Latin. For a wider selection of much shorter texts written in Algeria, the <a href="https://cil.bbaw.de/en/homenavigation/the-cil/volumes">Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum</a> covers the area in Volume VIII. Even the <a href="https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Negotia/TA_Courtois.htm">Albertini Tablets</a>, a set of legal documents found near Tebessa and mostly dating to 493-496 AD, are online now.</p>
<p>No doubt I'm missing a few authors; who else belongs on the list above?</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-56851621593788275592023-10-20T17:41:00.000+02:002023-10-20T17:41:28.900+02:00Being "upon the truth"<p>It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - <i>salat</i>, <i>namaz</i>, <i>wudu</i>, <i>shahada</i>, <i>masjid</i>... There are even a few such words that aren't borrowings from Arabic or Urdu: <i>circumambulation</i> comes to mind. It is much more difficult, at least for me, to think of characteristics of "Islamic English" that go beyond the lexicon.
<p>I was recently struck, however, by the expression "upon the truth". Searching for "upon the truth" yields plenty of mainstream English examples like "hit upon the truth", "lay hold upon the truth", "an essay upon the truth of the Christian religion"... However, searching for "be upon the truth", "are upon the truth", "is upon the truth", etc. yields a very different picture. Suddenly almost every single search result is specifically Islamic:</p>
<ul>
<li>"a) Hindering from the path of Allah, b) and confusing the person into believing that he is upon the truth" (<a href="https://www.missionislam.com/knowledge/bewaresheytan.html">Anonymous, <i>Mission Islam</i></a></li>
<li>"Either all of them are upon the truth which is impossible since truth is not open to contradictory differences or one of them is upon the truth" (<a href="https://muslimmatters.org/2007/06/03/a-comprehensive-fatwa-regarding-cooperation-in-dawah/">Shaykh Haytham Al-Haddad in <i>Muslim Matters</i></a>)</li>
<li>"This is because ibn 'Arabee held that all pagans and idol-worshippers were upon the truth since Allah is in his view everything" (<a href="https://islamtees.uk/2012/10/08/the-unity-of-religions-according-to-ibn-arabee/">translated from Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Rabee Ibn Haadee Al-Madkhalee's <i>The Reality of Sufism in Light of the Qur’aan and Sunnah</i></a>)</li>
<li>"who do I follow among all those who claim to be upon the truth?" (<a href="http://blog.iiph.com/five-duas-to-help-us-during-fitnah/">Zahra Anjum in the International Islamic Publishing House blog</a>)
</ul>
<p>You get the idea. The rare exceptions, like "<a href="https://www.pcahistory.org/documents/boarddebates/harmonyletter02.pdf">their ultimate dependence is upon the truth</a>", reflect quite a different construction, as the inanimate subject shows. In English, referring to people or groups being "upon the truth" appears to be unique to Islamic discourse (perhaps even to some genres thereof; most of the hits seem to have a vaguely Salafi vibe).</p>
<p>While this construction uses only well-known English vocabulary, it literally translates the Arabic expression على الحق <i>ʕalā l-ḥaqq</i> "on the truth/right". Within Arabic, this expression has a bit of an archaic ring to it, but is familiar from a number of hadith, e.g:</p>
<blockquote>فَجَاءَ عُمَرُ فَقَالَ أَلَسْنَا عَلَى الْحَقِّ وَهُمْ عَلَى الْبَاطِلِ<br>At that time `Umar came (to the Prophet) and said, "Aren't we on the right (path) and they (pagans) in the wrong?" (<a href="https://sunnah.com/bukhari:4844">Bukhari 65.365</a>)</blockquote>
<p>Being "upon the truth" is thus a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque">calque</a> into Islamic English from Arabic. No doubt a wider investigation would reveal other such cases.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-36603458442911151212023-10-12T15:28:00.000+02:002023-10-12T15:28:00.547+02:00Chenoua and the rectification of names<p>According to <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/language/cnu/">Ethnologue</a> - or even to the <a href="https://www.hcamazighite.dz/docs/document/hca/cours%20tamazight/Rapport%20avec%20statistique%20tamazight.pdf">HCA</a> - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenwa_language">Chenoua</a> (Tacenwit) is one of the larger Berber/Amazigh languages of Algeria, spoken west of Algiers from Tipasa almost to Tenes. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the speakers, who call their own language <I>Haqḇayliṯ</I> or <i>Haqḇayləḵṯ</i> - i.e. Kabyle. Chenoua is the name of one particular area, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chenoua">mountain near Tipasa</a>, and speakers from other areas are often entirely unfamiliar with the term; I recently learned of a first-language speaker who had reached her twenties without ever hearing of it.</p>
<p>This is not to say that they speak the same language in Tipasa as in Tizi-Ouzou! In fact, "Chenoua" is much more closely related to Chaoui than to what is usually called "Kabyle". But "Kabyle" is just an Anglicisation of Arabic <I>qbayǝl</I> - "tribes". It came to be applied to mountain-dwelling groups like this in the Ottoman period as a broad ethno-political category, not a linguistic one; around Jijel, communities who have spoken Arabic for many generations still call themselves Kabyle.</p>
<p>What should you call a language in a situation like this? "Chenoua" takes a part for the whole, and as such is confusing, as well as privileging one group of speakers over others. "Kabyle" matches speakers' traditional self-understanding, but misleads linguists, who are accustomed to using this for the much larger, not very closely related Berber variety spoken further west. "<a href="https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/chen1266">Western Algerian Berber</a>" is potentially too broad; perhaps "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahra_Range">Dahra</a> Berber" is better, after the low-lying mountain range where most speakers live, but it presupposes a distinction from "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarsenis">Ouarsenis</a> Berber" that is probably not linguistically justified.</p>
<p>But neither "Berber" nor the currently preferred term "Tamazight" correspond to traditional usage among speakers. "Berber" has never been used in any Berber variety; it has always been a term used by outsiders to label them, and in traditional coastal Algerian usage <i>bǝṛbṛiyya</i> actually referred to colloquial Arabic, not to Berber. And before the Amazigh identity movement gained ground in the late 20th century, most speakers in northern Algeria had never heard of "Tamazight".</p>
<p>In contexts like this, it makes no sense for a linguist to insist on using the name speakers use. Folk categories simply don't divide languages up at the same level as the one the linguists are interested in, nor for the same purposes. (In Bechar, <i>šəlħa</i> "Shilha" refers not only to several very different Berber varieties, but to the completely unrelated Songhay language Korandje). That doesn't mean denying the validity of folk categories; people can <a href="http://lughat.blogspot.com/2013/08/prescriptivism-and-scientists.html">call whales "fish"</a> if they want to. It does mean making sure not to get misled by them.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-48230459768732297612023-10-05T01:01:00.001+02:002023-10-05T01:01:15.346+02:00Nilotic father tongues<p>Back in the late 1990s as human genetic data started piling up, it became increasingly clear that there were a lot of language families where most speakers shared relatively recent common male-line ancestry, visible by looking at Y-haplogroups. George van Driem memorably turned this observation into the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Tongue_hypothesis">Father Tongue Hypothesis</a>: that language expansions are typically male-led, with children often raised to speak their father's language rather than their mother's. <a href="https://lughat.blogspot.com/2013/09/y-chromosomes-and-language-shift-in.html">Berber</a> is one of the many families where this holds true; Afroasiatic, on the other hand, shows several quite different dominant Y-haplogroups depending on the subgroup, indicating a more complex story at an earlier stage. What about Nilotic?</p>
<p>Nilotic, the most geographically widespread family within the rather questionable "Nilo-Saharan" phylum, divides into three primary subgroups:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>West Nilotic</b> was originally concentrated around the White Nile, in modern South Sudan, including such languages as Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk. Medieval-era expansions brought Luo speakers as far south as Kenya.</li>
<li><b>East Nilotic</b> languages are spread from southern South Sudan down to Tanzania, including such languages as Bari, Turkana, and Maasai.</li>
<li><b>South Nilotic</b> languages are concentrated in mountainous areas of Kenya and Tanzania, including languages like Nandi and Kipsigis.</li>
</ul>
<p>It turns out that each of these subfamilies has a reasonable correlation with a Y-haplogroup. West Nilotic shows high rates of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_A_(Y-DNA)#A1b1b_(A-M32)">A1b1b2b-M13</a> (62% Dinka, 53% Shilluk, 50% Kenya Luo, 38% Nuer, 22% Alur). Its northern members also have a high frequency of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_B-M60">B</a> (54% Nuer, 27% Shilluk, 23% Dinka), which is nearly absent from the more southerly ones (6% Kenya Luo, 0% Alur). A1b1b2b-M13 is also frequent, to a lesser extent, in East Nilotic (33% Karimojong, 28% Maasai and Turkana, 17% Samburu - but 0% Camus), though significant rates of B are recorded only for Karimojong (33%). In South Nilotic, on the other hand, A1b1b2b-M13 is much less frequent (13% Pokot, 10% Marakwet, 8% Ogiek, and so on down to 2% Datog and 0% Sabaot), with B even rarer (11% Pokot), and the plurality of lineages usually belong to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_E-M35">E1b1b1-M35</a> - a Y-haplogroup otherwise notably associated with Cushitic and Nubian speakers (50% Ogiek, 46% Datog, 45% Marakwet, 38% Sengwer...) - or to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_E-M75">E2</a>. E1b1b1-M35 is not unknown further north, but is far rarer (20% Shilluk, 15% Dinka, 8% Nuer).</p>
<p>None of this looks much like the result of a single male-led expansion. An obvious interpretation would be that South Nilotic primarily reflects communal language shift, probably from Cushitic judging by the well-studied stratum of Cushitic vocabulary in these languages. One might reasonably postulate a classical male-led expansion to explain the spread of West Nilotic within South Sudan; but, if so, one is led to the conclusion (already plausible on linguistic and historical grounds) that the Luo expansion southwards involved considerable assimilation of local men, notably Bantu-speaking (the Bantu-associated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_E-M2">E1b1a1-M2</a> accounted for 33% of Kenya Luo sampled). Such assimilation also appears probable in East Nilotic, for which I unfortunately lack data from South Sudan.</p>
<p>In a broader perspective, A1b1b2b-M13 is frequent in several far-flung "Nilo-Saharan" groups along the southeastern fringes of the Sahara whose languages are only very distantly related, if at all, to Nilotic: Fur (31%), various Sudanese Maban (26%), and even Cameroon Kanuri (27%). It does not, however, seem to be frequent among Nubian speakers, much closer at hand.</p>
<hr>
<p>I won't attempt to exhaustively reference this post, which is basically open notes on work in progress, but key sources include <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/5201408">Wood et al. 2005</a>, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/24/10/2180/1071196?login=false">Tishkoff et al. 2007</a>, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Muntaser-Ibrahim/publication/5233268_Y-Chromosome_Variation_Among_Sudanese_Restricted_Gene_Flow_Concordance_With_Language_Geography_and_History/links/5fc157dd92851c933f695f79/Y-Chromosome-Variation-Among-Sudanese-Restricted-Gene-Flow-Concordance-With-Language-Geography-and-History.pdf">Hassan et al. 2008</a>, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio-Amorim-6/publication/41826842_Digging_deeper_into_East_African_human_Y_chromosome_lineages/links/569ccda008ae2e9667eaa329/Digging-deeper-into-East-African-human-Y-chromosome-lineages.pdf">Gomes et al. 2010</a>, and <a href="https://drum.lib.umd.edu/items/2f28a5e6-561d-4d6d-9798-08875301b74b">Hirbo 2011</a>. Note that I've combined different samples for Nuer and Dinka.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-49239723937910638162023-10-03T16:12:00.003+02:002023-10-03T16:12:53.257+02:00Feynman's Father's Fallacy<p>The first time I read this quote from Richard Feynman, I was quite convinced by it:</p>
<blockquote>The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, "See that bird? What kind of bird is that?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is." He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you anything!" But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: "See that bird?" he says. "It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing-that's what counts." (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)</blockquote>
<p>And it would be true - in a world where no one else knows anything about birds. (That's probably not so far from the world you or I or Feynman grew up in as children.) If you don't know what nightingales are called, and neither does anyone else, then you can still learn about them - if you have the time and patience to go deep into the countryside to places where they live, and spend cold nights with a pair of infra-red goggles, or set clever traps deep in the countryside or something.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if you <i>do</i> know what a nightingale is called, you can find out enormous amounts about it by simply asking. You can scour Google Scholar for papers by people who did the hard part already; you can get birdwatchers talking about it; you can look it up in a reference manual; in short, you can benefit from the accumulated experience of many generations of observers, instead of having to reinvent the wheel yourself, only to have your knowledge perish with you in the end. If you know what it's called in other languages, you can find out what other communities of observers had to say about it - which, in some cases, may reflect much longer observation than English speakers have been able to undertake. Having found all this out, you can understand your own observations better. Maybe you've discovered something new! Or maybe you've misunderstood what you saw because you lacked a broader context. Either way, you'll know much more with the name than you're ever likely to be able to discover individually without it.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-27924289171730849062023-09-27T14:32:00.002+02:002023-09-27T15:11:40.609+02:00Two Bambara words in Gnawa songs of Meknes<p>Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and medical functions, usually called Gnawa in Morocco, <a href="https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/116533309/2017_Turner_Tamara_Dee_1268013_ethesis.pdf">Diwan</a> in Algeria, and <a href="https://www.stambeli.com/home-english/">Stambeli</a> in Tunisia. Aguadé's <i><a href="https://www.academia.edu/9061768/Die_Lieder_der_Gn%C3%A2wa_aus_Meknes_Aufgezeichnet_herausgegeben_%C3%BCbersetzt_und_erl%C3%A4utert_von_Frank_Maurice_Welte_und_Jordi_Aguad%C3%A9_Marburg_diagonal_Verlag_1996_ISBN_3_927165_42_5">Die Lieder der Gnawa aus Meknes</a></i> provides the lyrics of an extensive corpus of Gnawa songs from Meknes in northern Morocco. These songs are primarily in Arabic, but characteristically include a number of words with no plausible Arabic or Berber source, presumed to derive from languages of the Sahel. Their identification, however, is generally difficult, although Aguadé ventures a few suggestions drawn from Hausa. Anyone can comb dictionaries for sound-alikes, but similar forms may be found across unrelated languages of the Sahel with very different meanings. It would be much easier if the meanings were certain, but the singers do not necessarily know the meaning of such words, and the context often hardly narrows it down. Nevertheless, some cases can be identified more confidently than others.</p>
<p>Aguadé's song number 88, <i>Lalla l-Batul</i> "Lady Virgin" (pp. 128-129), is dedicated to a female genie whose song cycle corresponds to the colour yellow. Its refrain (accounting for 5 out of its 8 lines) is <i>a lalla l-batul, saysay</i> "Oh Lady Virgin, <i>saysay</i>". The word <i>saysay</i> has no meaning in Arabic or in Berber. In Bambara, however, <i>sáyi</i> means "yellow"; the refrain would then be "Oh Lady Virgin, yellow, yellow".</p>
<p>In his song number 90 (pp. 130-132), the refrain is <i>fufu dənba ya sidi</i> "<i>fufu dənba</i>, oh master" (repeated 14 times, including the opening line of the song). Bambara <i>dénba</i> means "mother". The first verse after the initial refrain is <i>ma bɣatək kda ya sidi</i> "she didn't want you like that, oh master"; no feminine singular subject to which this could refer appears anywhere in the Arabic text of the song, but the Bambara interpretation allows this line to be better understood. I'd like to relate the preceding <i>fufu</i> to Bambara <i>fò</i> "greet" and/or <i>fɔ́</i> "say, speak" - "greet Mother" would seem contextually appropriate - but I can't quite see how the grammar would hang together.</p>
<p><i>Addendum</i>: In song 5, <i>Sidi Gangafu</i> "Mr. <i>Gangafu</i>", almost every couplet ends in <i>Bambaṛa</i> or shortened <i>ya Mbaṛa</i>, so a Bambara etymology seems worth considering (although an allusion to Hausa is also found). As Aguadé notes, <i>Ganga</i> is simply a kind of drum used by the Gnawa, whose name is shared across most of the Sahel, so one would expect this name to mean something like "drum-player" or "drum-maker". In fact, <i>Gangafu</i> can readily be interpreted as Bambara <i>gàngan-fɔ̀</i> "play the <i>ganga</i>-drum". "Drum-player" should properly be something like <i>gàngan-fɔ̀-la</i>, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to suppose that the Bambara used by slaves among themselves would have had some non-standard features, given that for many of them it would have been a second language to begin with.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-37531858401754197552023-09-20T03:58:00.001+02:002023-09-21T22:14:17.717+02:00Some Dellys manuscripts<p><i>(Not linguistics, just history - possibly self-indulgent at that.)</i>
<p>Quite a few years ago in Dellys, I was allowed to photograph a bundle of pages from different manuscripts grouped together in a single detached cover, labelled as belonging to my great-uncle (رحمه الله). (I wasn't very good with metadata at the time, so I apologise in case anything ended up in the resulting folder from a different source.) Both the internet and my ability to read premodern Arabic handwriting have advanced a lot since then, and I can now identify (more or less) six of the works which these were taken from:</p>
<ul>
<li>A commentary on al-Nawawī's <i><a href="https://40hadithnawawi.com/">Forty Ḥadīth</a></i> - a selection of key sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)</li>
<li>Muhammad Mayyāra's <a href="https://archive.org/details/DuruThamin/addor-athamin-1/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater">commentary</a> on Ibn ʕĀshir's <i><a href="http://muwatta.com/ebooks/english/al-murshid_al-muin_arabic_footnotes.pdf">Guiding Helper</a></i> - a condensed summary in verse of essential Mālikī fiqh (religious jurisprudence)</li>
<li>Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī's <i><a href="https://terjemahkitab.com/translation-of-tanbih-al-ghafilin-al-samarqandi/">Warning to the Neglectful</a></i>, a book of religious exhortation</li>
<li>Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī's <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/HallurRumuzIbnGanim">Decipherment of the Symbols and Keys of the Treasures</a></i>, explaining Sufi concepts and terms</li>
<li>A linguistically focused commentary on al-Būṣīrī's <i><a href="https://qasidaburda.com/">Mantle</a></i> - a poem in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)</li>
<li>Ibn Mālik's <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/MatanAlfiyahIbnuMalik">Thousand-Liner</a></i> - a condensed presentation of Arabic grammar in verse to facilitate memorisation</li>
<li>A commentary on al-Abharī's <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/abhari-eec">Isagoge</a></i> - an introduction to Aristotelian logic</li>
</ul>
<p>Apart from these, there were a few pages of rhymed dua (supplication to God), which I can't find a source for online.</p>
<p>I still can't identify most of the commentators; it seems that plenty of commentaries have yet to be properly digitised. But the geographic spread of the authors is noteworthy, covering almost the whole span of the former territories of the Umayyad Caliphate: al-Samarqandī from Uzbekistan, al-Abharī from Iraq or Iran, al-Nawawī from Syria, Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī from Palestine, al-Būṣīrī from Egypt, Mayyāra and Ibn ʕĀshir from Morocco, Ibn Mālik from Spain. The chronological spread, on the other hand, is notably more concentrated: 10th c. (al-Samarqandī), 13th c. (al-Abharī, al-Nawawī, al-Būṣīrī, Ibn Mālik), 16th/17th c. (Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī, Ibn ʕĀshir). The 13th century doesn't necessarily spring to mind as a golden age of Islamic thought, but for the early 20th century curriculum this notebook presumably reflects, it was at least a golden age of school texts. (On the other side of the Mediterranean, it was also the age of Thomas Aquinas and Dante.) The absence of 19th century texts here might be accounted for by the rise of printing, but that cannot explain the paucity of texts from other recent centuries; even the 16th/17th century texts seem to be intended to open the door to understanding older works. The common purpose of these works should also be clear: all of them either relate directly to religion or are ancillary to the religious sciences.</p>
<p>The texts themselves accordingly therefore cast only a very indirect light on the context where they were being studied. A note carefully added in pencil on the inside cover sometime in the early/mid-20th century, however, is much more eloquent:</p>
<blockquote>WARNING: The earth is a dark planet, lit by the moon at night and by the sun in the day. The earth is suspended in space by the power of Allah SWT; He made a gravitational power in the stars that attracts the earth towards them just as a magnet attracts iron. The earth is not carried on the horn of a bull, as claimed on p. 36 of this book in a ḥadīth of `Abd Allāh ibn Sallām when he asked the Messenger of Allāh SAWS about the earth "What was it created from?" and so on until he asked him "And what do these seven earths rest upon?" He replied "On a bull." He asked "And what is the bull like?" He said "A bull with 40,000 heads", etc. This ḥadīth has no basis, and has been deemed fabricated, and none of the learned have confirmed this ḥadīth - and Allah knows best.</blockquote>
<p>This short comment feels like the entire modernist era in a nutshell - that late 19th/early 20th century moment of collision with the West, when this vast storehouse of traditional knowledge, stabilised over centuries by mnemonic verses and long insulated from external criticism, is suddenly confronted with an urgent need to sift out the grain from the chaff and go back to first principles, or risk losing intellectual as well as physical battles. We're still living through the aftermath; one result is a widespread suspicion of works formerly treated as unimpeachable, including some of those above.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-90438432972611244832023-09-18T16:44:00.002+02:002023-09-18T17:05:55.447+02:00Notes on East Saharan<p>Along the southwestern fringes of the Sahara, in the Ennedi and Biltine regions of northeastern Chad and the Darfur region of western Sudan, a few hundred thousand people, the Beri or Zaghawa, speak a language called Beria. Until well into the last century, the Berti people of Darfur and Kordofan still spoke a rather poorly documented related language, Berti; today they are reported to have all shifted to Arabic. Together, they make up the Eastern subgroup of the Saharan family (supposedly part of Nilo-Saharan). I've been looking over some of the literature on these languages lately, so here's a very brief summary on their historical phonology; it's mostly just for my own memory, but if anyone else is interested then great.</p>
<p>Beria is divided into a number of dialects (cf. Wolfe 2001, Anonby & Johnson 2001), of which the best described - thanks to <a href="https://shop.koeppe.de/en/produkt/angelika-jakobi-joachim-crass-grammaire-du-beria-langue-saharienne-pdf/">Jakobi and Crass 2004</a> - is the eastern variety of Kube in Chad. Unfortunately for present purposes, this also seems to be a good candidate for the least phonologically conservative variety. The southeastern Dirong-Guruf varieties preserve /f/, reduced to /h/ in Kube and in the rest of Beria but retained as /f/ in Berti; there is reason to suspect that it was originally *p (for instance, intervocalic variation between /rf/ and /rb/). The western Wegi variety of Darfur preserves intervocalic voiceless stops, which Kube voices, and intervocalic /d/, which Kube merges with *r. There's a lot of cross-dialectal variation within Beria between /m/ and /b/, especially in initial position, which is difficult to account for through regular sound change; word-initially, despite its name, Berti seems to have /m/ in almost all words that have Kube cognates with /b/. Wegi and Dirong appear to preserve a distinction between /l/ and /n/ that has been lost in Kube; but Berti also has /n/ in such cases, so one wonders whether this might be a split rather than a retention, though there's no obvous conditioning factor. It's hard to say much about Berti phonology given the quality of the sources, but it also seems to shift /ɟ/ to [z] in some cases.</p>
<p>Berti is much more closely related to Beria than any other Saharan language, and there are plenty of transparent basic cognates, like "name" (Berti <i>tir</i>, Kube <i>tɪ́r</i>) or "night" (Berti <i>gini</i>, Kube <i>gɪ̀nɪ́ɪ̀</i>). The surprise is that there are also lots of very basic words with no obvious cognates, like the personal pronoun "I" (Berti <i>su</i>, Kube <i>áɪ</i>), or the numeral "one" (Berti <i>sang</i>, Kube <i>nɔ̀kkɔ̀</i>), or the adjective "little" (Berti <i>batti</i>, Kube <i>mɪ̀na</i>). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in Saharan; maybe more data will make things clearer, or maybe there's a contact context that needs to be better understood. Either way it makes subgroup reconstruction a lot trickier.</p>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-28733871382153796122023-09-02T10:23:00.001+02:002023-09-02T10:23:55.861+02:00Book review: Zenati-Arabic Arabic-Zenati Lexicon, Haji (2019)<p>I got my hands on a copy of a recent dictionary of the Berber variety of Ouargla: <i>Muʕjam al-mufradāt zanātī-ʕarabī ʕarabī-zanātī : Warqalah, Ngūsah, Tmāsint, Baldat ʕumar, ɣumrah, Maqrīn, Timīmūn wa-ḍawāḥīhā</i> معجم المفردات زناتي-عربي عربي-زناتي : ورقلة، نڨوسة، تماسنت، بلدة عمر، غمرة، مقرين، تميمون وضواحيها, by Abderrahmane Haji, published 2019 with Afrmād in Algeria. The variety of Ouargla, <i>Təggargərənt</i>, is relatively well-documented thanks primarily to the texts and dictionary published by Jean Delheure. Delheure's work, however, was based on fieldwork between 1941 and 1976, and as such represents the speech of several generations ago. The primary merit of Haji (2019) is in presenting an up-to-date picture of Ouargla Berber as currently spoken and seen by a first-language speaker; it is also of sociolinguistic interest for presenting a heartfelt argument for linguistic diversity and "dialect" preservation from an essentially populist nationalist-conservative perspective. Unfortunately, however, apart from an understandable lack of linguistic training, the book is marred by an astonishing number of typographical errors (the Arabic text of the introduction gives the impression of never having been proof-read at all) and an orthography which fails to distinguish /ə/ from /a/; the author notes that he had to rapidly reconstruct the work from scratch after losing his original manuscript file.</p>
<p>The introduction starts by noting the constitutional position of "the Amazigh language" in Algeria and objecting that the variation across Berber is far higher than such a phrase might seem to imply, with only 2.4% (?) of vocabulary common across all varieties. He claims to be able to understand only 35% of Kabyle and 65% of Tuareg as against 80% of Chaouia, 95% of Tumzabt, and 95% of Timimoun; more surprisingly (typo?), he reports understanding only 40% of the rather similar varieties of Tiout, Boussemghoun, and Beni Ounif. A brief overview of Amazigh/Berber/Algerian history includes an original etymology of "Amazigh": he derives it from <i>am jjiɣ</i>, "as I left (it)", an idea made possible by Ouargli's tendency to merge š/ž with s/z, explaining his eccentric spelling of it as أمزيغ rather than أمازيغ. He then presents his objections to standardisation: "The attempt to create an Amazigh language in the laboratory, without immersion in its principles and the depths of its components spread across the nation is in itself self-destructive, and may find no one to feed it or protect it, being rootless and inauthentic and asocial... How can 17 dialects be reduced to one dialect which no one has deemed the source or the original? As Algerians say: 'When the crow tried to imitate the partridge, it forgot how to walk'." For good measure he takes such efforts to reflect "this savage project known as globalisation, which since 1945... has imposed what it (globalisation and pragmatism) considers appropriate for its ambitions and desires to let loose and satisfy the instincts and consumption in all its forms, and release blind freedoms and illusory democracy." Specifically, "dialectal diversity is a strong fortress and effective tool [against this project] which must not be reduced or destroyed for nothing."</p>
<p>The next section presents his perspective on the history of Arabic in Algeria. He seems to take for granted that the Kutama were descended from Himyar, and therefore that Kabyles are actually Arab, unlike Zenata (such as himself) who are indigenous, but who "learned Arabic of their own free will, far from the Hilalians and Riah and those under their influence, who preferred the wilds and transhumance, entering the town to buy and sell but leaving in the afternoon". He insists that, as with Berber, "In Algeria there are Arabics and not just one Arabic, which must likewise be gathered and corrected and preserved from oblivion." The main thrust of the section, however, is to argue against the exclusion of Arabic loanwords, since they are historically well-entrenched: "is it not true that most of English comes from French ... and most of French from Latin..? Is Arabic not our neighbour, even ahead of Islam being our religion"?</p>
<p>The next section briefly presents a linguistic geography of Algeria from a Saharan-focused perspective: Tuareg around Djanet, Tamanrasset, Borj and Tin-Zaouatine and Timelaouine; Regueibat (non-Amazigh) around Oued Daoura, Matar Ennaga, Hassi-Khebi, Tindouf, Ghar Djbeilat, and the Western Sahara; Zenati in Ouargla, Ngoussa, Goug, Beldet Amor, Temacint, Meggarine, Ghomra, Timimoun, Beni Ounif; Shilha in Tiout, Sfissifa, Boussemghoun, Chellala; Chaouia from Zeribet el-Oued to the Tunisian border, and from El Kantara to the edge of Souk Ahras; Kabyle in a rectangle from the edge of Setif to the sea of Bejaia and from Bouira to the edge of Algiers and Boumerdes - plus Zenati around Cherchell, as an afterthought.</p>
<p>He then briefly and polemically addresses script choice: "I write in Arabic, in accordance with article 2 of the Algerian constitution of 2016, and because Arabic came down from Paradise with Adam AS and Eve, and the Quran is in flawless Arabic... Moreover, Arabic is indisputably the oldest language in the world... Latin script destroyed the country and the people, and stole our goods and property, and split our unity; the people of the South reject it and don't want to learn it." He adds that Zenati has adopted plenty of Arabic loanwords, as well as others from "French and Hausa and Zarma and Bambara and Adadi[?] and other languages".</p>
<p>The next section is an overview of prior publications on Ouargla Berber, short yet replete with mistaken identifications ("Hodson" (sic: rather Hodgson) is identified as a general, René Basset as a member of the René missionary family) and apparently cut short in the middle of the first sentence to mention Delheure ("deleu").</p>
<p>Finally, he moves on to "the rules of Zenati" (قواعد الزناتية), summarizing the fully vocalised orthography he adopts (including new characters for ẓ, ṇ, ṃ, ṛ, but sadly no distinct solution for ə), and then describing the morphology. The headings adopted are "Feminine", "Verb", "Pronoun suffixed to the verb or noun", "Plural", "Negation", "Masdar", "Interrogative", "Warning", "Intimidation", "Calling for help", "Ululation", "Colours", "Relative pronoun", "Demonstratives", "Locative adverbs", "Nisba", "Paucal plural", "Free pronouns", "Demonstrative" (yes, twice), "Ownership", "Demonstratives suffixed to the noun", "Suffixed genitive pronoun", "Numerals and counting in Zenati", "Counting money", "Metre and poetry" (with basically no content), "Keys to Ouargli" (a list of function words). Many of these include asides on subjects that would not be expected based on the section title. These are followed by a series of paradigm tables: "Free pronouns", "Genitive pronoun suffixes", "Free pronouns" (absolute possessives), an unlabelled table of the conjugation of "say", "Conjugation of 'say' in the present then in the past", "Conjugation of 'say' in the negative'", "Conjugation of 'come' in the past then the present then the imperative", "Conjugation of 'give' with a first person subject in the past and the present and the imperative", "Conjugation of 'give' with a third person subject in the past and the present", "Form of exaggeration", ... and many other verb paradigms.</p>
<p>The remainder of the work is divided into three alphabetically ordered sections: a short phrasebook, "Phrases and expressions, Zenati-Arabic"; then the dictionary proper, "Zenati-Arabic dictionary of lexemes" and "Arabic-Zenati dictionary of lexemes".</p>
<p>On the whole, I found this work disappointing; with a better transcription system and some training in linguistics, the author could have created a definitive reference work rather than a miscellany. Nevertheless, serious students of the Berber varieties of the northern Sahara should not neglect it; it covers areas of modern life absent from earlier sources, and addresses some aspects of pragmatics neglected by more professional treatments.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-28960970783803436612023-08-30T09:16:00.004+02:002023-08-30T10:11:27.202+02:00More miscellaneous Darja notes<p>These may or may not be of interest to anyone but myself; I'm posting them essentially so I don't forget them.</p>
<p>A couple of idioms:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>ər-riħ f-əš-šbək</i> الريح في الشبك "wind in the net" - empty talk</li>
<li><i>ʕla šufət əl-ʕin</i> على شوفة العين "on the sight of the eye" - as far as the eye can see</li>
<li><i>ṣufa ṭayṛa</i> صوفة طايرة "a flying piece of wool" - flighty, capricious</li>
<li><i>tɣiḍni ʕəmṛi</i> تغيضني عمري "my life makes me feel pity" - I feel sorry for myself</li>
<li><i>qʷʕədna ki ʕəbd waħəd</i> قُعدنا كي عبْذ واحد "we stayed like one person" - we kept working together</li>
</ul>
<p>And another proverb: <i>əɣʷləq bab-ək ma txəwwən jaṛ-ək</i> اغُلق بابك ما تخوّن جارك "Close your door and you won't make your neighbour a thief" - I guess you could loosely render this as "Good fences make good neighbours". Note that the corresponding verb <i>xwən</i> "steal" خْون forms a minimal pair with <i>xun</i> خون "betray", confirming that semivowels are distinct from the corresponding vowels.</p>
<p><a href="http://lughat.blogspot.com/2018/03/english-spelling-traces-in-algerian.html">As discussed earlier</a>, the name of the town of Djinet is pronounced variously with a final <i>t</i> or <i>d</i>. As a convincing argument for the latter pronunciation being more correct (if the historical evidence hadn't been sufficient), someone pointed out to me that people from Djinet are called <i>jnanda</i> جناندة. The version with <i>t</i> presumably reflects Turkish influence as well as folk etymology.</p>
<p><i>fut</i> فوت "pass" is used as a serial verb in a construction whose exact semantics I need to figure out better, typically in subordinate clauses: <i>ila fətt šədditu</i> إلا فتّ شدّيتهُ "once you've grasped it..."</p>
<p>Two interesting bits of maritime vocabulary are <i>walyun</i> واليون "apprentice not-yet-sailor who cleans the fishing boat in port" and <i>ṛədfun</i> ردفون "shrimp net". For the latter, I wonder if the first element might be Spanish <i>red</i> "net"; but I can't see what the <i>fun</i> would be in that case. For the former, I hardly even know how to find out what the translation into other languages around the Mediterranean might be. Suggestions for etymologies are welcome!</p>
<p>(Update thanks to jitaenow on Twitter: <i>walyun</i> <a href="https://twitter.com/Jitaenow/status/1696792880063344837">is from Neapolitan <i>guaglione</i></a>, and is ultimately cognate with "galleon".)Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-9918997253006762232023-08-29T09:52:00.001+02:002023-08-29T09:52:55.728+02:00Delicious Berber applesWhile most Berber varieties use an Arabic loanword for "apple", several are reported to preserve a non-Arabic word: Jerbi <i>a-ḏəffu</i> (Brugnatelli), Nefusi <i>dəffu</i> (Motylinski), Zuara <i>a-dəffu</i> (Baghni). This word was derived by Vycichl (1952) from Punic *<i>tappūḥ</i>, a derivation generally accepted in subsequent work; Kossmann (2013:146) explains various forms along the lines of <i>ta-dəffaḥ-t</i> as blends between this and the Arabic form. Such an etymology makes sense on extra-linguistic as well as linguistic grounds: domestic apples originated much further east, in Central Asia, so a loanword is expected a priori, and given the important role of Carthage in early North African history, Punic appears the obvious source.
<p>
Talking to a speaker from near Batna yesterday, however, I realised that the Chaoui word for "apple" is really <i>aḍfu</i>, with an emphatic d. This cannot be explained in terms of regular sound change from the Punic form: the distinction between <i>d</i> and <i>ḍ</i> is in general very stable in Berber, particularly in the absence of any adjacent emphatic or laryngeal, and the apparent loss of gemination is also irregular.
<p>
The solution is Berber-internal. In more westerly varieties (cf. Nait-Zerrad, p. 451), we find a root <i>ḍf-t</i> for "taste, savour": Ait Atta <i>t-aṭfi</i> (verb <i>iṭfi-t</i>), Tashelhiyr <i>tiḍfi</i> (verb <i>aḍfu-t</i>), Zenaga <i>taṭfih</i> - also borrowed into Korandje <i>təṭfi</i>. While its geographical distribution seems relatively limited, nothing about this root suggests a foreign origin, and its attestation in Zenaga suggests a priori that it goes back to proto-Berber. We may therefore plausibly assume that at some point it was familiar to Chaoui speakers, if it isn't still. An otherwise unanalysable term for "apple" would therefore have been reinterpreted as, essentially "the tasty one".Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-4470718133112210822023-08-27T00:06:00.006+02:002023-08-27T00:06:42.342+02:00An unusual polysemy in Algeria and its cultural backgroundToday I heard <i>nsəhhlu?</i> “Shall we head off?” The verb <i>səhhəl</i> expresses two rather different meanings: transitive “make easy” and intransitive “head off, leave”. The former is well-integrated into the lexicon: the verbal template <i>BəCCəD</i> regularly forms causatives from triliteral adjectives and verbs, and <i>sahəl</i> “easy” accordingly yields <i>səhhəl</i>, just as <i>barəd</i> “cold” yields <i>bərrəd</i> “make cool”. The latter is much less so: the root <i>shl</i> has no particular ties to motion. A colexification of “leave” with “make easy” is not cross-linguistically common (<a href="https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1752">see CLICS</a>), and a linguist encountering it in isolation in some wordlist would surely be at a loss to account for it.
<p>
It is not, however, arbitrary or accidental. The missing link can easily be found by going beyond the lexicon proper into the realm of politeness: a standard expression used by people staying behind to say goodbye to people leaving is <i>ḷḷah ysəhhəl</i> “may God make it [the trip] easy”. (Algerian Arabic etiquette is pretty much all about knowing which blessing to use when.) The intransitive meaning is therefore indirectly derived from the transitive one.
<p>
Knowing this, and knowing the extent of lexical-typological convergence in this region, one might predict that a similar colexification should be found in Kabyle. Sure enough, consulting Dallet (1982), one finds <i>sahəl</i> “leave on a trip; (God) make a trip easy”. He even records the corresponding blessing to a person departing on a trip: <i>ad isahəl ṛəbbi, yəlli tibbura!</i> “may God make it easy and open the doors!” Unfortunately, the verb is simply an Arabic borrowing rather than a calque properly speaking, although it’s based on a different verb template than the Dellys Arabic one.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-91860411586480435632023-08-22T23:35:00.001+02:002023-08-22T23:35:23.156+02:00Miscellaneous Darja notesWith Twitter apparently determined to become an eX-network, the moment seems right for turning back towards blogging. I might change platforms (Substack sounds promising – any good ideas?), but in the meantime, let’s see if this is still working and post some miscellaneous notes on Dellys Arabic from my holiday.
<p>
Today, when a watch started randomly beeping, I heard a cousin say <i>ʕəbbẓi næ̃mpoṛt waħda təħbəs</i> “press any one, it’ll stop”. This is obviously the same construction as <a href="http://lughat.blogspot.com/2016/08/more-darja-notes-oath-complementisers.html">næ̃mpoṛt ħaja</a>, and was indeed produced by the same person. So it seems that <i>næ̃mpoṛt</i> is indeed a fixed part of his grammar; but note that it is followed by an indefinite noun (<i>ħaja</i> ‘thing’, <i>waħda</i> ‘one’) rather than an interrogative pronoun as it would be in French (<i>quoi</i> ‘what’, <i>qui</i> ‘who’).
<p>
When I heard the verb <i>ykạmiri</i> ‘he’s filming’, I initially thought this was proof positive that the loanverb ending <i>-i</i> had become a productive denominal verbaliser (cp. <i>kạmira</i> ‘videocamera’); after all, there is no French verb <i>camérer</i>. But it turns out that <i>camérer</i> is <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/correcteurs/2005/06/20/2005_06_camrer/">attested in Algerian French</a>, so the case remains ambiguous.
<p>
An old woman to a little girl: <i>ya ṛṛwiħa ttaʕi!</i> “oh my little soul!” The diminutive brings to mind Hadrian’s <i>animula</i>.
<p>
The mediopassive verbs <i>ntkəl</i> ‘be eaten’ and <i>ntfəx</i>swell up</i> are old news to me, but somehow I had missed the corresponding participles <i>mətkul</i> ‘eaten’, <i>mətfux</i> ‘swollen’, which show that both verbs are to be analysed synchronically as n-passives (“Form 7”) with t-initial roots, though in both cases the t originally derives from a passive prefix or infix (“Form 8”).
<p>
On a trip up the mountain, I heard <i>tuzzalt</i>, which <a href="http://lughat.blogspot.com/2016/08/berber-feminine-nouns-in-dellys-arabic.html">does indeed refer to ‘rockrose’</a>, whatever the correct translation of <i>tazalt</i> might be. But the speaker was bilingual in Kabyle, so the pronunciation might not be representative of Dellys Arabic.
<p>
A colonial-era rhyming proverb that was new to me: <i>ləmʕawna f-ənnṣaṛa wala lqʷʕad f-əlxṣaṛa</i> ‘[even] helping the Christians is better than sitting around unprofitably.”
<p>
Onomatopeia for the sound of milking: <i>čəqq čəqq čəqq</i>. May help explain the Siwi verb…
<p>
As discussed on Twitter, <i>skərfəj</i> ‘grate (v.)’ seems to come from Italian <i>scalfeggiare</i> or something very similar. Along with <i>spərpəħ</i> ‘sprawl about’ it provides a rare example of what looks like a five-consonant root, but should perhaps better be interpreted as four-consonant with an otherwise poorly evidenced prefix <i>s-</i>; cf. <i>sħaj</i> ‘need (v.)’Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-23784771965763015562021-12-09T11:43:00.002+01:002021-12-12T20:34:38.293+01:00Power and nephewhood from the Ahaggar to Hombori<s>Throughout</s> In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is <i>dub-ət</i> (pf. <i>yă-ddob-ăt</i>, impf. <i>ti-dubu-t</i>). There are no compelling cognates for this in Berber outside Tuareg, as Naït-Zerrad's comparative dictionary confirms; at best, one might speculatively compare Siwi <i>dabb</i> "a lot" and Tarifit <i>dab</i> 'have an appetite', both within Macro-Zenati. The word can therefore not be reconstructed for proto-Berber. A better candidate for 'be able' in proto-Berber would seem to be *<i>ăzmər</i>; cf. Awjila, Kabyle <i>əzmər</i> "be able", Tamajeq <i>əzmər</i> "stand up to, endure", etc. The corresponding verbal noun <i>a-dabu</i> has, however, been borrowed from Tuareg into Standard Algerian Tamazight to provide the noun "power"; its widespread use in political discourse in reference to <i>le pouvoir</i> has made this one of the more successful neologisms.
<p>The Tamahaq of the Ahaggar Mountains attests a second sense of <i>dub-ət</i> that seems to be isolated even within Tuareg. <a href="https://ia801804.us.archive.org/19/items/foucauld-k/Foucauld-D.PDF">Foucauld glosses it (p. 153) as</a>:
<blockquote>
2. ("by extension") 'be able to succeed someone (to an office), by virtue of his being your maternal uncle'
<br>3. ("by extension") 'have as maternal uncle'
</blockquote>
<p>It yields the equally Ahaggar-specific word <i>tădabit</i> "person(s) of either sex with the right to succeed to someone's suzerainty due to the latter being their maternal uncle", used in the Ahaggar instead of pan-Tuareg <i>tegăze</i>.
Examples include (retranscribed, perhaps imperfectly):
<blockquote><i>Biska d Mənnək ăddoben Musa daɣ ăra n tăññaten.</i>
<br>Biska and Mennek are potential successors to Musa by virtue of being sisters' children.
</blockquote>
<blockquote><i>Luki d Mikela ăddoben Musa kaskab.</i>
<br>Luki and Mikela are potential successors in suzerainty to Musa.
</blockquote>
<blockquote><i>Barka wa-n ăkli yăddobăt akli hin Mămmădu kaskab.</i>
<br>Barka the slave has as maternal uncle my slave Mămmădu, in a maternal uncle-nephew relationship.
</blockquote>
<p>Note the very un-Berber-looking word <i>kaskab</i>, lacking even the characteristic Berber nominal prefix, in the latter two examples. In the not obviously related sense of "metallic part of a camel bridle", <i>akăskabbu</i> (Tamasheq <i>kiskab</i>) is attested throughout Tuareg; but <i>kaskab</i>, in the relevant sense, appears just as unique to the Ahaggar as this sense of <i>dub-ət</i>. <a href="https://ia801804.us.archive.org/19/items/foucauld-k/Foucauld-K.PDF">Foucauld's entry on the term</a> runs to three pages (pp. 918-920), with neat kinship diagrams, but starts "in the direct line of succession to suzerainty, from maternal uncle to nephew or niece (in a kinship relation of maternal uncle to child of full sister or maternal sister (when speaking of succession to suzerainty over vassals))". One might be tempted to link the first half to Tuareg <i>kus</i> "inherit", but the vowel and the absence of any good explanation for the second half militates against it.
<p>Not to beat around the bush, both <i>dub-ət</i> and <i>kaskab</i> look like great candidates for non-Berber substratum vocabulary loaned into Tuareg, especially in the kinship sense. Considered from this perspective, a non-Berber comparison for the former immediately presents itself: Songhay <i>*túbí</i> "inherit (v.); inheritance (n.)", with its derivative <i>*túbá</i> "sister's child (of either sex)" (the latter may be absent in Zarma and Dendi; both are absent from Northern Songhay, which substitutes Tuareg loanwords). Reflexes of the former include Zarma, Gorwol, Hombori, Djougou <i>túbú</i> (in Hombori also "succeed as chief", just as in Tuareg), Gao and Timbuktu <i>tubu</i> (in Gao also "bequeath, leave (to)"), Kikara <i>túbí</i> ...; of the latter, Gorwol <i>túbéy</i>, Gao <i>tubey / tuba</i>, Hombori <i>túbê</i>, Kikara <i>túbá</i>, Timbuktu <i>tuba</i>. (For modern Timbuktu Heath instead documents <i>kaaya</i> for "inherit", but Dupuis-Yacouba recorded "toubou".)
<p>To my mind, a borrowing from Songhay into Tuareg looks more appealing, as I would expect a high-low tone if it came from Tuareg to reflect Tuareg stress; but the opposite direction could also be defended. Either way, however, there can be no reasonable doubt, given the good formal match and perfect semantic correspondence, that the Ahaggar forms are related to the Songhay ones. (Oddly enough, Nicolaï appears to have missed this connection in his wide-ranging hunt for Berber matches, instead focusing on Kabyle (originally Arabic) <i>ətbəʕ</i> "follow".) Yet their distribution is almost the opposite of what one would expect: in both groups, they are attested only in the varieties least in contact with the other. This suggests that the contact situation they reflect happened quite early, rather than being recent.
<hr>
<p>(References consulted include, for Tuareg, the dictionaries of Foucauld, Heath, and Alojaly; for Awjila, Paradisi; for cross-Berber comparison, Naït-Zerrad; for Songhay, Heath, White-Kaba, Ducroz and Charles, Zima, and Dupuis-Yacouba, not to mention Nicolaï's <i>La force des choses</i>.)Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-81811915653339219592021-11-23T13:38:00.000+01:002021-11-23T13:38:16.766+01:00Siwi corpusA small part of the <a href="https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/corpus/Siwi?lang=en&mode=normal">Siwi corpus</a> I gathered during PhD and postdoctoral fieldwork is now publicly accessible online, with more planned. Despite my best efforts, there will undoubtedly be some number of errors in transcription and translation; hopefully being able to listen to the audio will make these easier to correct in the long term. (Feel free to comment here or by email.) Some of these recordings may be of particular interest:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/corpus/show?continuousPlay=false&corpus=Siwi&lang=en&mode=normal&oai_primary=cocoon-71a8f5d8-ad04-4867-a8f5-d8ad04286776&oai_secondary=cocoon-d9579f80-452b-47c3-979f-80452b37c352&optionMorphemeTranscriptions=&optionMorphemeTranslations=&optionNotes=&optionSentenceTranscriptions=autre%2Bother&optionSentenceTranslations=en&optionTextTranscriptions=&optionTextTranslations=&optionWordTranscriptions=&optionWordTranslations=">Four facts about Siwa</a>, short as it is, is a perfect starting point for understanding Siwa anthropologically; the speaker chooses four questions about Siwa, of his own devising, and answers them.</li>
<li><a href="https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/corpus/show?corpus=Siwi&lang=en&mode=normal&oai_primary=cocoon-5feb0b04-2dbb-40ab-ab0b-042dbbe0abb3&oai_secondary=cocoon-e9f74ece-de88-4903-b74e-cede887903cf&optionTextTranscriptions=&optionTextTranslations=&optionSentenceTranscriptions=other&optionSentenceTranslations=en&optionWordTranscriptions=&optionWordTranslations=&optionMorphemeTranscriptions=&optionMorphemeTranslations=&optionNotes=&continuousPlay=false">The story of the Prophet Joseph</a> is probably the best long narrative I was privileged to record during my fieldwork, retelling a well-known Islamic story with energy and eloquence, and giving numerous examples of grammatical features rarely attested in shorter texts.</li>
<li><a href="https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/corpus/show?corpus=Siwi&lang=en&mode=normal&oai_primary=cocoon-116c50fe-4c08-43b8-ac50-fe4c0813b86b&oai_secondary=cocoon-7989e6f2-f16c-44b4-89e6-f2f16ce4b4ff">Paradigm of the Siwi verb əlməd "learn"</a> - does what it says on the tin, and as such makes a great introduction to Siwi verb morphology. Pay particular attention to the position of stress. Not all forms of the verb are included in this recording, but the remainder can easily be derived from these ones.</li>
</ul>
<p>The speaker recorded in these, Sherif Bougdoura, was a thoughtful and intelligent person, trying to find the right balance between local and national cultures, who made his living as a repairman for lack of opportunities to take his education further. He sadly died young in a work accident several years ago. I hope these recordings will serve to preserve his memory as well as to facilitate linguistic analysis.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-60108149098390736432021-11-03T16:38:00.002+01:002021-11-03T16:38:16.939+01:00Instrument nouns between Dholuo and ArabicIn Dholuo (a West Nilotic language of Kenya), instrument nouns are formed using <b>ra-...-i</b> (the final <b>-i</b> is dropped after sonorants and semivowels), as in the table below (Tucker 1993:111-112, retranscribed). Both English and Arabic have comparable formations. In English, instrument nouns are occasionally formed with the <b>-er</b> suffix, like agent nouns. In Arabic, instrument nouns are more systematically formed, but with a variety of different patterns, starting with <b>mi-...</b>, or in modern colloquials with a feminine agent noun <b>CaCCaaC-a</b>.
<p>
However, taking a look at the cases listed by Tucker, we may note a striking cross-linguistic difference in distribution. In Arabic, all but three of the translated nouns use an instrument noun pattern of some sort, and two of the others use a more general verbal noun pattern; only "ladder" appears completely underived. In English, "peg", "billhook", "pestle", "tongs", "lid" all seem to be underived and simplex, and for several cases with zero-derivation (notably "hoe", "rake", "drill", "sign"), intuition suggests that the verb derives from the noun, the opposite of what we see in Arabic or Dholuo.
<p>
This suggests a typological difference in the structure of the lexicon: perhaps some languages "prefer" to mark instrument nouns as such and to form them from corresponding actions, while some prefer simple instrument nouns from which verbs may be formed indicating the corresponding actions. I wonder whether that holds up on a larger sample? What does your language tend to do, dear reader?
<table>
<tr>
<td>cut</td>
<td>toŋ-o</td>
<td>قطع</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>billhook, cutter</td>
<td>ra-tóŋ̂</td>
<td>منجل</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>slash</td>
<td>bẹt-ọ</td>
<td>مزّق</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>slasher</td>
<td>rạ-bẹ́t-ị̂</td>
<td>منجل طويل</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>hoe</td>
<td>pur-o</td>
<td>عزق</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>hoe</td>
<td>ra-púr̂</td>
<td>معزق</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>scratch</td>
<td>gwạr-ọ</td>
<td>خدش</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>forked rake</td>
<td>rạ-gwạ́r̂</td>
<td>مدمّة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>see</td>
<td>ŋịy-ọ</td>
<td>رأى</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>mirror</td>
<td>rạ-ŋị́ị̂</td>
<td>مرآة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>strain</td>
<td>dhịŋ-ọ</td>
<td>صفّى</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>strainer</td>
<td>rạ-dhị́ŋ̂</td>
<td>مصفاة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>pound</td>
<td>yọk-ọ</td>
<td>دق</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>pestle</td>
<td>rạ-yọ́k-ị̂</td>
<td>مدقة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>pierce</td>
<td>cwọw-ọ</td>
<td>ثقب</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>piercing instrument</td>
<td>ra-cwọ́p-î</td>
<td>مثقاب</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>hold</td>
<td>mạk-o</td>
<td>مسك</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>tongs</td>
<td>rạ-mạ́k-ị̂</td>
<td>ممساك</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>plug up</td>
<td>din-o</td>
<td>سد</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>stopper</td>
<td>ra-dín̂</td>
<td>سدّادة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>hang</td>
<td>ŋạw-ọ</td>
<td>علّق</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>peg for hanging</td>
<td>ra-ŋạ́ŵ</td>
<td>علاّقة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>cover</td>
<td>um-o</td>
<td>غطّى</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>lid, cover</td>
<td>ra-úm̂</td>
<td>غطاء</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>show</td>
<td>nyis-o</td>
<td>أظهر</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>sign</td>
<td>ra-nyís-î</td>
<td>علامة</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>climb</td>
<td>ịdh-ọ</td>
<td>صعد</td>
<td>|</td>
<td>ladder</td>
<td>rạ-ị́dh-ị̂</td>
<td>سلّم</td>
</tr>
</table>Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-86812247002122117042021-10-17T13:43:00.002+02:002021-10-17T13:43:56.160+02:00Had Gadya in the Arabic dialect of Constantine JewsSeeing as you can't turn on the news in France these days without hearing a certain more-French-than-thou provocateur fulminating against Arabs, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the Arabic dialect his parents or grandparents must have grown up speaking. There are a couple of recordings of the "Judeo-Arabic" of Constantine; a nice easy one to transcribe is <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-814922216/lmqs7ttasvqv">Michael Charvit's recording of the originally Aramaic children's song Had Gadya</a>, as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Gadya">traditionally sung at the Passover (Pesah) festival (translation here)</a>:
<blockquote><i>
حاد ڨاديا، حاد ڨاديا، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجات القطّوس، وكلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجات الكلبة، وڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجات العصا، وضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجا النار، وحرق العصا، والدي لي ضربت الكلبة، والدي ڨدمت القطّوس، والدي لي كلات الجدي، لي الدي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجا الما، وطفّى النار، الدي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، الدي لي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجا التور، وشرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، الدي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، الدي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجا الدبّاح، دبّح التور، اللي شرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجا ميلخ همّاڥات، ودبح الدبّاح، اللي دبح التور، اللي شرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
<br>وجا اقّادوش باروخ هو، ودبح ميلخ همّاڥات، اللي دبح الدبّاح، واللي دبح التور، واللي شرب الما، واللي طفّى النار، واللي حرق العصا، واللي ضربت الكلبة، واللي ڨدمت القطّوس، واللي كلات الجدي، واللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
</i></blockquote>
<blockquote><i>
ħ̣ad gadya, ħ̣ad gadya, li šrali baba bzuz əflus, zuz əflus
<br>u ğat əlqəṭṭus, u klat əlždi, lli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
<br>u ğat əlkəlba, u gədmət əlqəṭṭus, lli klat əlždi, lli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
<br>u ğat əlʕṣa, u dŭṛbət əlkəlba, lli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əldi klat əlždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus
<br>u ğa ʔənnaṛ, u ħṛəq əlləʕṣa, u ddi li ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, u əldi gədmət əlqəṭṭus, u ldi li klat əžždi, li ldi šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
<br>u ğa ʔəlma, u ṭəffa ʔənnaṛ, əldi ħrəq əlləʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əlždi, əldi li šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
<br>u ğa əṭṭuṛ, u šṛŭb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əlləʕṣa, əldi š ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əlždi, əldi šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
<br>u ğa ʔəddəbbaħ, dəbbəħ əlṭuṛ, əlli šṛŭb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əlʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əžždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, bzuğ əflus
<br>u ğa milax həmmạvat, u dbaħ əddəbbaħ, əlli dbaħ əttuṛ, əlli šṛəb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əllʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əžždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus
<br>u ğaaaaaaaaa qqaduš baṛux huuuuuuuu u dbaħ milax əmmạvat əlli dbaħ əldəbbaħ ulli dbaħ əttuuṛ ulli šṛəb əlmaaaa ulli ṭəffa nnaaaaaaaaṛ ulli ħrəq əlʕṣaaaaa ulli ḍəṛbət əlkəlbaaa ulli gədmət əlqəṭṭuuuuuus ulli klat əžždiiiii ulli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əfluuuuuuuuuus
</i></blockquote>
<p>This recording should in itself be sufficient to dispel any misguided notion that "Judeo-Arabic" was a different language. All of it should be perfectly transparent to any Algerian Arabic speaker except a couple of phrases specific to Jewish culture: <i>ħ̣ad gadya</i> is Aramaic for "one kid goat" (the name of the song), <i>milax həmmạvat</i> is Hebrew for "the Angel of Death" (ملك الموت), and <i>qqaduš baṛux hu</i> is Hebrew for "the Holy One, Blessed be He" (referring to God). The word <i>dəbbaħ</i> ("slaughterer"), while obviously Arabic, might also be a religiously specific term for "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shechita">shohet</a>" (a kosher butcher) rather than the generic term for "butcher" - I'm not sure. Otherwise, every word in the rhyme is etymologically Arabic, although <i>qəṭṭus</i> "cat", <i>zuğ</i> "two", and <i>flus</i> "small coins" are ultimately from Latin or Greek. (Note the complete absence of Berber vocabulary.)
<p>Nevertheless, we do see a few slightly unusual dialectal features. The most striking is the variation between different forms of the relative pronoun: normal <i>əlli</i> coexists with <i>əldi</i>, <i>əddi</i>, hesitant combinations of the two with <i>li</i>, and, oddly enough, <i>ulli</i>, as if this were coordination rather than subordination. The use of <i>əldi</i>, in particular, is reportedly characteristic of Jewish religious registers of Arabic; it looks as though the speaker was in the habit of using <i>əlli</i> in his normal speech, but aimed for <i>əldi</i> in this religious and formulaic context. We also find variation between (eastern) <i>zuz</i> and (central/conservative) <i>zuğ</i> for "two", and assimilation or non-assimilation of the article in <i>əlždi</i> or <i>əžždi</i> "the kid goat", probably a result of the deaffrication of ğīm before d. The loss of interdentals is fairly normal for old urban dialects.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-74737539340894746242021-10-02T14:39:00.003+02:002021-10-02T14:40:41.063+02:00Cardinal points in Northern SonghayFollowing a recent message from Mohomodou Houssouba, I was wondering where the names of cardinal points come from across Northern Songhay. The first step towards answering is to realize that "cardinal points" don't seem to be an emic category across Songhay in general. In mainstream Songhay, mostly spoken along the Niger River, the river itself provides a more useful coordinate system: upstream (<i>daŋgey</i>), downstream (<i>dendi</i>), left bank (<i>hawsa</i>), right bank (<i>gurma</i>). The sun provides a useful supplementary axis - east (<i>wayna-hunay</i>, "sunrise") vs. west (<i>wayna-kaŋey</i>, "sunset"). North vs. south, on the other hand, is less significant; these tend to be referred to by the names of countries or regions, rather than using absolute terms. In Niger, for example, Hamadou Soumana Souna gives <i>Azawa</i> (ie Azawagh) for "north"; the Azawagh Valley is indeed north of the Zarma region, but it would be east of Timbuktu or Gao, which accordingly use other expressions.
<p>In the Sahara, the river-based system is naturally of little use. Korandje instead preserves the east-west axis, using the same structure as mainstream Songhay varieties: <i>inə̣w n ṭʕạ-yu</i> "east" ("sunrise"), <i>inə̣w n yạṛaħ-yu</i> "west" ("sunset"). This is not, however, accompanied by any fixed north-south axis; for "north", elicitation sometimes yields <i>bəlhadi</i>, properly "the North Star", but this term is not used to describe locations in the way that "east" and "west" are, and there seems to be no proper equivalent to "south". I'm tempted to suggest that this reflects the oasis' general reluctance to think about its historic southern ties, but in a way it maps on to another, better-established three-direction coordinate system used in Tabelbala. The latter is not perpendicular, and not in my limited experience ever used for describing locations; rather, it relates to the wind directions.
<table>
<tr><td></td><td>Korandje winds</td></tr>
<tr><td>ENE</td><td>asərqi</td></tr>
<tr><td>NNE</td><td>tumiyya</td></tr>
<tr><td>SW</td><td>ssaħliyya</td></tr>
</table>
As near as I can make it out by comparing <a href="https://www.meteoblue.com/fr/meteo/historyclimate/climatemodelled/tabelbala_alg%c3%a9rie_2479008">a wind rose for Tabelbala's climate</a>, it consists of <i>asərqi</i> "east-northeast wind", <i>tumiyya</i> "north-northeast wind", <i>ssaħliyya</i> "southwest wind". (In an unpublished source, Champault lists a fourth, <i>qʷəbliyya</i> "east wind", which I did not encounter.) <i>Asərqi</i> comes via Berber from the Arabic for "east", <i>šarq</i>; <i>ssaħliyya</i> from <i>sāħil</i> "coast"; <i>qʷəbliyya</i> from <i>qiblah</i> "direction of prayer (towards Mecca)"; but the source of <i>tumiyya</i> is unclear to me. (Suggestions are welcome.)
<p>In the rest of Northern Songhay, spoken in and around the Azawagh Valley - as far as I gather from secondary sources - the relevant vocabulary is largely Tuareg-derived, with no attested Songhay survivals. Tagdal, spoken by the largely nomadic Igdalen, has borrowed the system whole from (Tawellemmet) Tamajeq: "west" is <i>ataram</i>, "east" <i>dinnik</i>, "south" <i>ággaala</i>, "north" <i>támmasna</i>. (Among these, "north" is originally a toponym, "desert".) Tasawaq, spoken in the oasis of In-Gall, differs only in the name for "east": <i>alkubla</i> (from Arabic <i>alqiblah</i> "direction of prayer"). Emghedesie, the extinct variety of the town of Agades, agrees with Tasawaq on "east" and "west", but uses toponyms for "north" and south", respectively <i>air</i> (ie the Air Mountains) and <i>asudán</i> (Arabic <i>as-sūdān</i> "(land of the) Blacks"). (Note, however, that Tayart Tamajeq too uses <i>ayəṛ</i> for "north".) I have no data on Tadaksahak directions for the moment.
<table>
<tr><td></td><td>Korandje</td><td>Emghedesie</td><td>Tasawaq</td><td>Tagdal</td></tr>
<tr><td>E</td><td>inə̣w n ṭʕạ-yu</td><td>elkúbla</td><td>alkúbla</td><td>dinnik</td></tr>
<tr><td>W</td><td>inə̣w n yạṛaħ-yu</td><td>atáram</td><td>átáram</td><td>ataram</td></tr>
<tr><td>N</td><td>(bəlhadi)</td><td>air</td><td>támasna</td><td>támmasna</td></tr>
<tr><td>S</td><td>-</td><td>asúdan</td><td>ágala</td><td>ággaala</td></tr>
</table>
Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-42365540504665470762021-09-14T14:50:00.001+02:002021-09-14T14:50:32.367+02:00Lemurian ArabicIn the western ports of the continent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuria">Lemuria</a>, on the old trade route to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius">Uqbar</a> and thence to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis">Atlantis</a>, a dialect of Arabic has been spoken since probably the 6th century AD or so. Its longstanding isolation from other Arabic dialects, and its speakers' bilingualism in neighbouring Lemurian languages, has allowed it to develop some rather unusual features. Like all Arabic dialects, it has lost the final short vowels preserved in Classical Arabic; but, unlike any other surviving dialect, it has largely preserved <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_nouns_and_adjectives#Overview_of_inflection">case</a> and mood marking, thanks to extensive final-syllable ablaut.
<p>For example, the noun "book" is conjugated as follows:
<table>
<tr>
<td></td><td>SG</td><td>PL</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NOM</td><td><i>kitoob</i></td><td><i>kitaaboot</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACC</td><td><i>kitaab</i></td><td><i>kitaabeet</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>GEN</td><td><i>kiteeb</i></td><td><i>kitaabeet</i></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>One thus says <i>royt ilkitaab</i> "I saw the book", <i>sagatʼ ilkitoob</i> "the book fell", <i>deexil ilkiteeb</i> "inside the book". The resulting system is rather reminiscent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Irish_grammar#Nouns">Old Irish</a>, among other languages of our own timeline.
<p>Sadly, a full documentation of this fascinating dialect will forever be wanting, due to the difficulty of travelling to fictional destinations and of getting recording equipment to work properly in fantasy universes. However, I trust that the available data is sufficient to establish that phonetic changes such as the loss of final short vowels need not automatically imply the loss of morphological information that the lost phonemes had encoded.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-18984410061566223862021-08-31T21:27:00.009+02:002021-09-02T16:03:41.682+02:00A new Songhay alphabetIn 2019, a new alphabet was invented for <A href="http://songhay.org/">Songhay</A>, joining a long list of West African script creation efforts from the 19th century onwards. It may sink without a trace like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garay_alphabet">Garay</a>, or (less probably) it may enjoy a success comparable to that of <A href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_script">N'Ko</A>; even in the former case, however, it may be of interest as a case study in script creation. I will therefore summarize what little I know about it below.
<p>According to <a href="https://www.afkaar.online/2019/12/2019.html">this page</a>, the script was invented by Ibn Achour Ousmane Touré in 2019, based on livestock marks used by Songhay villages, towns, and regions. He intended it to allow Songhay speakers to write in their own language rather than in French or Arabic, and thus to enable them to continue and progress, following in the footsteps of the Songhay Empire, which he supposes must have had its own writing system at some point. (Songhay is, of course, sometimes written - officially in a Latin-based orthography, unofficially also in Ajami Arabic - but is frequently not thought of as a written language; the primary target of education is literacy in French and/or Arabic, and most locally available printed materials are in one of these languages.) A volunteer committee was set up to promote the script, including the inventor himself, Dr. <a name="https://www.facebook.com/imiran.maiga.3">Imirana Seydou Maiga</a> (secretary), M. Housseiny Ibrahima Maiga (expert advisor), and M. <a name="https://www.facebook.com/faisal.kada">Faissal Kada Maiga</a> (general coordinator and secretary of information). This group seems to use Arabic as their primary language of wider communication, and consists at least in part of Songhay diaspora in the Arab world; the secretary and coordinator seem to have spent time in Saudi Arabia, and the latter is <a href="https://twitter.com/theyloveoudi/status/1432087002279813126">reported</a> to be based in Libya. One might speculate that the script offered them a "third way" to get past the French-Arabic binary.
<p>The alphabet is as follows:
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aNbkuRl4Sdg/YS5-hxIUKoI/AAAAAAAACaQ/a0G_LnDAxKUu4fJQ-YepO34vX1gqj5aKQCLcBGAsYHQ/s827/songhoy-alphabet.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="578" data-original-width="827" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aNbkuRl4Sdg/YS5-hxIUKoI/AAAAAAAACaQ/a0G_LnDAxKUu4fJQ-YepO34vX1gqj5aKQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/songhoy-alphabet.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOM1PZqBXy97IgKyBL964Kw">series of YouTube videos</a>, and posts on <A href="https://www.afkaar.online/search?q=%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%86%D8%BA%D8%A7%D9%8A">Afkaar.Online</a>, clarify the orthography. The writing direction is right to left, and the alphabetic order is obviously inspired in large part by Arabic; there is no capitalization. The diacritics are explained here (titled <i>Hantum maasayan</i> "adding diacritics to writing"):
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J0Z50NbkBTs/YS87uymMHqI/AAAAAAAACaw/pSa5rKNFiPkTj8z2lWwubDiraULQoz1hACLcBGAsYHQ/s640/%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25D9%2583%25D9%258A%25D9%2584%2B%25D8%25AD%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25D9%2581%2B%25D9%2584%25D8%25BA%25D8%25A9%2B%25D8%25B3%25D9%2588%25D9%2586%25D8%25BA%25D8%25A7%25D9%258A.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="465" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J0Z50NbkBTs/YS87uymMHqI/AAAAAAAACaw/pSa5rKNFiPkTj8z2lWwubDiraULQoz1hACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25D9%2583%25D9%258A%25D9%2584%2B%25D8%25AD%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25D9%2581%2B%25D9%2584%25D8%25BA%25D8%25A9%2B%25D8%25B3%25D9%2588%25D9%2586%25D8%25BA%25D8%25A7%25D9%258A.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>Vowel length is marked with a macron over the vowel, and vowel nasalization by a tilde (both betraying the influence of a Latin-based transcription); if placed over a consonant rather than a vowel, these respectively indicate that the consonant should be followed by aa or ã. (In this sense, if not in the more usual one, the script has a default vowel a.) In principle, all other vowels are marked plene (though short a occasionally seems to be omitted). Consonant gemination is indicated by a circle over the consonant. The dot under the letter <i>n</i> is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3MSup3HlM">dropped when it assimilates</a> to a following consonant (Arabic <i>ikhfā'</i>), a feature inspired by Quranic orthography. (The text above gives an example of final dotless n with a tilde over it at the end of <i>maasayan</i>; this combination is not explained as far as I can see.) Besides this, dots distinguish affricates (dot above) from palatoalveolar sibilants (dot below), and d and g (no dot) from z and ŋ (dot above). The letter for ñ is close to being a graphic hybrid of ŋ and j, appropriately enough.
<p>The system is completed by a set of <a href="https://www.afkaar.online/2019/12/blog-post_19.html">numerals</a>, using place notation (titled <i>Soŋay-k(a)buyaŋo</i> "Songhay counting"):
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ufhHXZySBKM/YS6BJVSRroI/AAAAAAAACaY/hYP41ru5grQDMIwhwQjGNGa-U-Blav-bQCLcBGAsYHQ/s827/numeraks.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="827" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ufhHXZySBKM/YS6BJVSRroI/AAAAAAAACaY/hYP41ru5grQDMIwhwQjGNGa-U-Blav-bQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/numeraks.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>Punctuation evidently includes hyphens, used somewhat inconsistently at morpheme boundaries (thus the nominalizing suffix -yan/-yaŋ is not hyphenated in the two previous examples, but is hyphenated in <a href="https://www.afkaar.online/2019/12/blog-post_94.html">denden-yaŋ</a> "learning"), but fairly consistently in compounds (e.g., in the same post, <i>Soŋay-senni m(a) duuma</i> "may the Songhay language last"). Until examples of longer texts are available, little else can be said about punctuation.
<p>If further data becomes available, I will update this post; if you know of any, comments are welcome! Particular thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/theyloveoudi/status/1432087002279813126">"Oudi"</a> for indispensable clarifications.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com1