18th century Zenaga poetry and language change

By far the most distant Berber variety from the rest – a separate language by even the most generous standards, as the lines quoted below will probably convince you – is Zenaga, the Berber of Mauritania. In an old article by Harry Norris (1969), "Znaga Islam during the 17th and 18th centuries", I recently came across an passage in a photograph of a page from a 20th-century Mauritanian manuscript called Dhāt alwāḥ wa-dusur, discussing a poem written in Zenaga by Wālid bin Khālunā al-Daymānī (d. 1797), and containing words already obsolete by the commenter's time. The article says this was to be published by James Bynon, but that doesn't appear to have happened. While I can make out much of it, especially with the help of two partial translations into Arabic quoted in the article, I cannot fully parse the few lines given there – perhaps some commenters will join in the fun of decipherment. The author also throws in some unexpectedly insightful observations on language change...

وأما الثانية فيعسر ضبطها جدا لأن الفاظها كلها عجمية ومع ذلك فتلك الالفاظ قد اندرست اليوم وعدم من يعرفها لأن اللغات تتبدّل فكل سنة تنسى كلمات ويوتى بآخر غير معهودة ولولا محافظة الناس على اللغة العربية في الدهر الذي نزل فيه الوحي تبدلت بالكلية حتى لا يوجد من يعرفها ويدلّ على ذلك ان العرب الاقاح في هذا الدهر الذي نحن فيه قد تغيرت السنتهم حتى لا يتكادون يفهمون العربية الاصلية الا ان يتعلموها وتسمى هذه الثانية بالمزروف ومطلعها:

اترگ نئك اراكلئذ * ايشذ ننتا شد اذچان
ايش اتؤچش اذ تنجگفئذ يسگذان اشرن يستغان

قوله اكلئد اي السلطان
وقوله اتؤجش اي وجوده
وقوله تنجگفئذ اي القدم
وقوله نِ اي انا اي القائم بنفسه

"As for the second [poem], it is very difficult to determine it, because its words are all non-Arabic, yet those words have become rare today and no one knows them any more – since languages change. Every year some words are forgotten, and others, little-known, are brought forth. If people had not preserved the Arabic language at the time when the revelation came down, it would have changed completely, to the point that no one would know it. This is shown by the fact that the tongues of the Arabs of our time have changed, until they can barely understand original Arabic unless they have studied it. This second [poem] is called "al-Mazrūfa", and it opens with:

əttäräg niʔk är ägälliʔḏ – äyš äḏ nəttä šd äḏžān
äyš ätuʔž-əš äḏ tənd'əgfiʔḏ – yässəgḏān āš ni yəstəġān
("I ask of the Sultan * He who is my owner
Whose existence is eternity without beginning * who is rich, who needs nothing")

• His saying ägälliʔḏ means "Sultan".
• His saying ätuʔž-əš means "his existence".
• His saying tənd'ägfiʔḏ means "eternity without beginning".
• His saying ni means "I" ie "the independent"."

From Taine-Cheikh (2007), we find that ättər is "ask", and əttär-äg therefore perfective "I ask"; niʔk is "I" (note the carefully written glottal stop!); and är is "from". Perhaps unsurprisingly given this passage, ägälliʔḏ has not made it into the modern era, so the vocalisation is conjectural, but it is obviously cognate with Tashelhiyt agllid "Sultan". äyš is a relative complementiser ("that") normally combined with a resumptive pronoun; äḏ is the copula ("is"); nəttä "he" is presumably the expected resumptive pronoun (the text actually clearly has two n's, but I'm assuming one of them is a typo). The rest of the line is a bit of a mystery; my best guess is that it involves the perfective participle of the verb "own", äyi(ʔ) in Taine-Cheikh (note that her y is often ž in other Zenaga varieties, from original *l), but then I would expect a glottal stop to be written. äyš "that" we have already seen, and -əš is "his/her/its". ätuʔž, explained as "existence", must be derived from the verb y-uʔy "exist", but the t is surprising. äḏ "is" we have already seen. We are given the meaning of tənd'ägfiʔḏ, but even its vocalisation is conjectural, and I can't find an appropriate root to relate it to. yässəgḏān (vocalisation conjectural again) must be a participle of the verb corresponding to Ould Hamidoun's eʔssəgḏīh "richesse", quoted by Taine-Cheikh (note that vowel length, phonemic in Zenaga, is transcribed accurately!). The rest is another blur, except that yəstəġān (?) may be from Arabic istaġnā "not to need".

If this isn't enough of a challenge, there's several other lines of Zenaga poetry quoted in that article...

The Arabic Script in Africa

An article of mine that's been in the pipeline for almost four years has finally come out: "Writing 'Shelha' in new media: Emergent non-Arabic literacy in Southwestern Algeria". I discuss the usage of non-Arabic languages (Berber and Korandjé) in Southwestern Algeria in digital media, looking at the orthographic solutions adopted and the purposes of those writing it. The results suggest that, under appropriate circumstances, a high degree of orthographic uniformity is possible without any formal training in writing the language in question – but that the existing sociolinguistic marginalisation of these languages in speech is taken even further in writing.

I received a copy of the book recently, and found the rest of it very interesting. Maarten Kossmann and Ramada Elghamis discuss the traditional Arabic orthography of Tuareg, which shows several unexpected features. Two articles discuss the writing of Afrikaans in Arabic script, which – hard as it may seem to believe – predates its writing in Latin script. Nikolai Dobronravine discusses the use of Arabic to write African languages (as well as the Arabic language) in the Americas – the archives of Brazil, for example, contain a surprising number of letters confiscated from slaves. Other articles examine Fulani, Kanembu, Manding, and Swahili, as well as the history of Arabic writing in general and its distribution in Africa.

On a related note, if you're interested in Libyan Berber, it turns out there's a surprisingly large number of people writing even some of the least well-known varieties on Facebook, often in Arabic script; see my recent post on Awjili negation for Awjila, or Awal n ɛdeməs for Ghadames.

The wider context of “Teach Yourself Songhay” in Timbuktu

We’ve seen the “Teach Yourself Songhay” poem. What does it tell us, besides the meanings of a few words in Koyra Chiini?

The writer didn’t tell us anything about himself, but we can deduce some points anyway. The shift of *b > m in Kimsi “Id al-Adha” < *kibsi (< Arabic kabš “ram”) is recorded by Heath as a dialect feature specific to the town of Niafounké, 150 km upstream from Timbuktu at the opposite end of the Koyra Chiini-speaking region; the Timbuktu form is cipsi / ciwsi. The same irregular shift is found in Dedem “Muharram” < *dedeb, for which no Niafounké form is recorded by Heath, contrasting with Timbuktu dedew, Goundam dedeb; Hacquard and Dupuis (1897) already record dédo, so the Timbuktu form is at least a century old. (Why “rest of the holidays”? Because feer-mee, which he’s already given, also means “Id al-Fitr”.)

Now, whereas the rural population surrounding Timbuktu is mainly Tuareg, that around Niafounké is mainly Fulani. When the author lists ethnic groups, he starts with the Fulani, and he consistently uses a third person plural “they” to refer to Songhay speakers. This suggests that he himself is probably a Fulani from around Niafounké, rather than a native citizen of Timbuktu. Fulani speakers have an unusually strong tradition of writing their own language in Arabic script, as illustrated by the other two manuscripts mentioned, so this might make sense.

But what was he doing writing this anyway? Obviously he didn’t need it... but others did. In fact, we can safely say that this poem was actually used by at least one student - the version seen is clearly not the original, since it contains a copying error. Surgu "Tuareg" is written شرع, with the wrong dots, as if the copyist mistook it for the Arabic word "he began". This is explained by the circumstances in which it was written.

At the advanced level, the schools of Timbuktu attracted students from as far away as Algeria or southern Mali. For it to be worthwhile to go there at all, they would have to have already spent years studying Classical Arabic – and much of their study would have taken the form of memorising didactic poems, such as the Ājurrūmiyyah or Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik for grammar. But if their studies took place outside the Songhay region, they would arrive not knowing the dominant language of the town. This poem is tailored for such students. I’ve heard reports of similar poems at Kabyle zaouias intended to help Arabic-speaking students attracted by the zaouia’s reputation to learn Kabyle, though I can’t track the reference down at the moment; so, in a sense, this can be considered part of a much wider genre. At the least, it represents an obvious solution to a problem recurring in higher-level schools all over North and West Africa.

The organisation of the poem reflects that environment. Schools were, first and foremost, Islamic schools; thus the author opens not with the commonest vocabulary but with the basic concepts of religion, starting in the order of the Five Pillars of Islam – shahada, prayer, and fasting (but not zakat or pilgrimage, which would both be financially out of the reach of many students.) He continues with that theme, going through the motions of the prayer ritual in the appropriate order (ablution, saying “Allāhu akbar”, reading from the Qur’an, and finally greeting the angels and asking favours of God), and then starting with the meals associated with fasting before moving on to the meals of non-fasting times. Having covered the basic Islamic rituals that structured their day and their year, he only then moves on to other topics – specifically, ethnicity. For a new student from outside the area, travelling so far perhaps for the first time, the variety of ethnic groups represented in Timbuktu, a crossroads between the Sahel and the Sahara, must have been striking, and being foreign would have heightened his awareness of his own ethnic identity.

Note that the author nowhere uses the term “Songhay”. This is not at all surprising. In Timbuktu, Songhay (Soŋoy) traditionally refers primarily to the noble families of the Songhay Empire, in particular the Maïga family. These families had a reputation for sorcery which did not match well with the ethos of the schools, and were in any case only a small minority of the population speaking what is now called Songhay. The term he uses, Gaa-bibi, has a broader sense, being used for the ordinary Songhay-speaking farmers of the area; it literally means “black body” and thus corresponds almost exactly to the Arabic term “Sūdān” that he also uses. “Koyra Chiini” means “town language”, and as such does not correspond in particular to any one ethnic group.

Other points of linguistic interest: Laarab “Arab” is a conservative form compared to what Heath records – laarow (Timbuktu) / laaram (Niafunké, Goundam) – but this is perhaps natural, given than the author is a student of Arabic. Sete, glossed here as "guest", is rendered by Heath as "caravan"; visiting caravan members would stay as guests of particular families. Cirkose and cirkaarey are treated as synonyms for “lunch”; this is confirmed by the earliest dictionary of Koyra Chiini, Hacquard and Dupuis (1897), but at present they have distinct meanings, cirkaarey being “breakfast”. The forms jiŋgar “pray” < *gingar and jur “run” < *zuru illustrate the characteristic innovation of Koyra Chiini, *z and *g / _[+front] merging to j.

Teach Yourself Songhay: A Timbuktu manuscript poem

Of the non-Arabic content I mentioned earlier, a few images are online. One work partly in Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language of Timbuktu, is available on Aluka (subscribers only): A poem explaining several Songhay language phrases. The portion of the poem available online reads as follows:

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم والصلاة والسلام على النبي الحبيب
يا سائلا عن لغة السودان * اسمع جوابا عند ذي التبيان
الله يركي ان غادي الرسول * صلاة جنقر صوم حومي
قالوا تيمم تيمما وضؤ الولا * بكيرة كبر على من صلا
قراءة ايسو كذا النداء * تسليم سلم غاراي دعاء
فطرة فرمي هكذا السحور * ايسحري عشاء قالوا هوري
ثم الغذاء عندهم ايسركسي * مع ايسركاري عند بعض جنس
قالوا فلن لجملة الفلان * اسماءهم غابب لاتوان
العرب لارب عندهم توارق * شرع كذا سيت كل ضيف
الرجل هر كذلك قلت ايحر * وامراة وي كذا جرى اجر
الوشطير جملة الصبيان * كمس ددم باقية العيدين

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,
and blessings and praise be on the beloved Prophet.
O asker about the language of the Sudan [Songhay],
Hear the answer from one who will explain.
God is Yerkoy, ŋga diya the Messenger;
Prayer is jiŋgar, fasting is haw-mee.
They say teymam for tayammum; wudu is alwalaa;
Takbir is kabbar for whoever prays;
Reading is ay cow and likewise calling;
Greeting is sallam, gaara yo is dua.
Breaking fast is feer-mee; likewise, suhoor
is sohore; dinner they say hawre;
then lunch for them is ay cirkose,
along with ay cirkaare for some people.
They say fulan for all the Fulanis;
Their names are gaabibi, and none other;
Arabs are laarab among them, and Tuareg
surgu, likewise sete is every guest.
A man is har, likewise I say is ay har;
A woman is woy, likewise he ran is a jur;
Alwaši-terey is all the youth;
Kimsi, dedem are the rest of the holidays.

The transcriptions are based on Heath's dictionary of Koyra Chiini, except where incompatible. The manuscript is undated, but the language is so close to present-day standards that it can hardly be more than a couple of centuries old at most (although, oddly, the author renders c as س). The poem is anonymous; it seems to be followed by the start of another work, by the Imam Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-Mahdi, in a different (and much more elegant) hand.

The Fulani materials scanned are a little more extensive: there's a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad and another by Uthman dan Fodio, if you care to give them a try.

Identify the language of this manuscript

A scan of much of the manuscript MS Leiden Or. 14.052 is available online. The main text of this manuscript is in a rather poor Arabic. The marginal and interlinear notes, however, are "in one or more West African languages", as yet unidentified. My best guess is that they're in Mandinka, based on the orthography's use of tanwīn and on the frequent word-initial a/i (suggestive of Mande's 3rd person subject pronouns), but I'm not sure; I haven't been able to decipher any phrases. Anyone else feel like having a look?

Berber manuscripts in Arabic script online

A major collection of early Tashelhiyt manuscripts from the 16th century onwards has gone online: Manuscrits arabes et berbères du Fonds Roux. It includes a copy of al-Hilali's Berber-Arabic lexicon. The Lmuhub Ulaḥbib library of Bejaia has also put a number of works online, including an 18th/19th century manuscript on theology in Kabyle: العقيدة السنوسية. Both collections are also of interest for their many Arabic books, but the Berber ones are particularly significant due to the serious paucity of materials for the study of precolonial Berber writing traditions.

Ajami in Boston

The Boston Globe has an article today about Ajami, the tradition of transcribing African languages in the Arabic script. It focuses particularly on the efforts of Fallou Ngom, whose work has been mainly on Wolof Ajami in Senegal, the subject of one of my first posts here. In the article he emphasises the potential historical significance of such work in opening up neglected sources on African history. While most African manuscripts are in Arabic, some historically rather interesting Ajami sources are known; for Mandinka, published historical manuscripts include the Pakao Book and the Bijini manuscript, the latter outlining regional history over the past 500 years. There are undoubtedly more out there that have gone uninvestigated simply for lack of enough historians who can read them. My work on Ajami has focused more on issues of orthography, however: most African languages have rather different sound systems to Arabic, and it's quite interesting to see what kind of devices they developed to make the alphabet fit better.

Oldest Papuan writing?

What are the oldest written documents in a Papuan language (ie a non-Austronesian language of the New Guinea region?) I'm not totally sure, but a strong candidate has to be the court records of Ternate. The islands of Ternate and Tidore in eastern Indonesia speak two closely related languages belonging to the non-Austronesian North Halmaheran family. They have been writing using the Jawi Arabic script since at least the 1500s; in fact, some of the earliest surviving Malay manuscripts are letters from the sultan of Ternate from about 1521.

Recently I came across an 1890 book on Ternate online: Ternate: The Residency and its Sultanate. The book includes a brief introduction to the language and a word list; it also gives reproductions of several manuscripts whose originals date back to the mid-1800s, along with translations. So if you want to try your hand at deciphering them, or just see what a Papuan language looks like in Arabic script, have a look! The page I've linked to (Arabic interpolation de-italicised) starts:

ma-dero toma hijratu-nnabiyy ṣallī `alayhi wa-sallim nyonyohi pariama calamoi si-raturomdidi si-nyagisio si-rara, tahun alif, toma-arah Sawal, i-fani futu nyagimoi si-tomodi, malam Jumaatu...

"In the year Alif of the Moslem era 1296, during the month of Sawal, on a Thursday night, the seventeenth night of the moon..."

West African grammars in Arabic script

I want to see this talk by Hiroyuki Eto Nikolai Dobonravine (though I'm not likely to be in Dublin for it):

Arabic and Arabic-script writing tradition in West Africa dates back to the 12th century AD, if not earlier. Local scholars were familiar with the linguistic ideas which formed part of Islamic education. Arabic grammars and dictionaries were popular in the region. The interest in the study of Arabic resulted in the development of local Arabic and bilingual vocabularies, sometimes written in verse, as well as some works on Arabic grammar. A few versified vocabularies and grammars of West African languages were also composed. Almost all of them were written in Arabic and used Arabic linguistic terminology.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries several works were written in West African languages using Arabic script. One such work, "Littafen nahwowin Hausance" ("The book of Hausa grammar"), is analysed in the paper. The work demonstrates a special approach to the parts of speech in Hausa (the verb deprived of the "person-aspect complex" is seen as a noun, although it may be used independently in the Imperative). This is a larger work of traditional lexicography, with notes on folk etymology, pragmatic rules, grammatical gender and possessive pronouns in Hausa.

The shift from Arabic to Roman script and the decline in the use of Arabic did not lead to the disappearance of the earlier linguistic tradition. New grammatical works and vocabularies in Arabic script (including a Fula-French vocabulary in Arabic script) were published. All these writings have been largely ignored by the linguists working at the universities in West Africa and abroad.

Classical Kanembu

I went to a very interesting seminar on classical Kanembu this week. It's a highly conservative form of Kanembu/Kanuri, written in the Arabic script, used mainly (exclusively?) for commentary on (and translation of) Arabic religious texts. The earliest dated example is a bilingual Quran from 1669, currently being studied here at SOAS. I don't want to comment in too much detail, because I'm not sure how much they've published on it yet, but a couple of things particularly struck me:

• Classical Kanembu is still used and written by Islamic scholars of the area - although, apparently, Western scholars only became aware of this fact quite recently.
  
• It has substantially more cases than modern Kanuri, and possibly an even more complicated verb morphology.
  
• Most strikingly, since vowel length is non-phonemic in Kanuri, it seems to use vowel length to indicate high tone instead; thus, for example Arabic al-'aakhirah "the afterlife" has been borrowed as laxíra, and thus gets spelled as لاخِيرَ. As far as I know, this would make it the only Arabic orthography to mark tone. (Actually, Dmitri Bondarev, who observed this, prefers for the moment the more conservative interpretation that the vowel length commonly corresponds to a modern Kanuri high tone, not ruling out the possibility that such vowels were actually long in the Kanembu of the seventeenth century.)

This already constitutes some of the oldest documentation of any West African language, and quite apart from its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Saharan, it really makes one wonder what other valuable historical data on other African languages linguists might be missing out on by not studying Arabic/Ajami use. So keep your eyes peeled, and tell me if you spot anything!

Writing Wolof (or rather وَلَفْ)

With apologies for the long hiatus in my postings, I would like to present another topic in West African writing: the surprisingly formalized tradition of writing Wolof, the main language of Senegal, in Arabic script. Wolof is also written in Latin script, I should note, which you can see copious examples of in the pedagogical materials on this Gambian Peace Corps site, but the Arabic script is much more widely known, especially in rural areas, although French is far more widely used for writing than Wolof in any script.

Myself, I only went to Dakar, so books in Wolof of any sort were relatively hard to come by. However, Arabic bookstalls, while rarer than the French ones, weren't hard to find (they had a predominantly religious focus, but a number of literary, scientific, and historical works), and, while most of their works were in Arabic, they had a couple of Wolof religious texts in a rather nice Arabic script, of which I enclose a scan. I was going to retype some, but even a cursory effort revealed serious issues. For instance, there is a Unicode letter for the common West African vowel sign that indicates short e (a dot under the letter, smaller than dots that form part of the letter) - the charts say it's 065C - but I can't find a font that will display it; and another common letter which seems to indicate ny or nj, jiim (ج) with three extra dots on top, isn't in Unicode at all. Apart from those, the main differences with standard Arabic seem to be:

• Short e is as described previously; long e is indicated by adding an alif maqsura ى with a small alif on top (another character I can't seem to find fonts for, despite its commonness in the Qur'an; it should be 0654.)
  
• p is a ba ب with three dots on top (and actually is in Unicode - 0751.)
  
• A dal with three dots above (ڎ) occurs some places; I don't know how it's pronounced.
  
• gaaf is a kaaf with three dots (ڭ), following longstanding Maghrebi tradition.
  
• Again in the Maghrebi tradition, faa has its dot below, and qaaf has a single dot above.
  

PS: You can find a font that will display some of these letters at PakType; however, their selection is more adapted for Sindhi (which has the largest Arabic-based alphabet I know of) than for West Africa.

PPS: Apparently, the latest version of PakType can display all these after all; see comments...