Tlemcen: medieval folk etymologies and their implications

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād, Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān, dialectal Arabic Tləmsān):

تسمى بلغة البربر تلمسنين كلمة مركبة من تلم ومعناه تجمع وسين ومعناه اثنان اي الصحراء والتل فيما ذكر شيخنا العلامة ابو عبد الله الابلي رحمه الله وكان حافظا بلسان القوم ويقال ايضا تلشان وهو ايضا مركب من تل ومعناه لها وشان اي لها شان
In the Berber language it is called "T.l.msīn", a word composed of t.l.m, meaning "she/it gathers", and sīn, meaning "two" - i.e. the Sahara and the Tell - according to our shaykh the most learned Abū ʕAbd Allāh al-Ābilī, may God have mercy on him, who was well-versed in the people's tongue. It is also said "T.l.šān", which is also a compound, of t.l., meaning "she/it has", and šān, i.e. "it has status".

Both etymologies are easy enough to interpret in the light of comparative Berber data. In the nearest (barely) surviving Berber variety - Beni Snous (Aṯ Snus), some 40 km west of the town - "Tlemcen" is indeed Tləmsin, not Tləmsan (cf. Destaing's Etude, pp. 368, 370, 371, etc.) This variety, however, does not use the word sin for "two" - it uses ṯnayən, like the Rif to its west (cf. Destaing, Dictionnaire, p. 98). The closest varieties to preserve a Berber word for "two" - geographically and genetically - use sən, in common with the rest of the Zenati subgroup to which Beni Snous belongs. The nearest varieties using the form sin are Kabyle, far to the east, and Middle Atlas Tamazight and Tashlḥiyt, far to the west. For the verb, one might consider t-əlləm "she/it spun", but the gloss given better matches a widespread dialectal Arabic word that could well have been borrowed into Berber: t-ləmm "she/it gathers". The second is obviously a compound of Arabic ša'n "affair, rank, status" and the Berber verb t-la "she/it has". Today this verb survives in Beni Snous, as in Kabyle, only residually, in the construction wi-h y-il-ən "who does it belong to?" (Destaing, Grammaire, p. 88). But it may have been more productive at that time, as it still is in Middle Atlas Tamazight.

Obviously, the first of these etymologies is implausible, while the second is a self-aggrandising play on words rather than an attempt to explain the name. But the fact that the first one could seriously be suggested is strong evidence that the meaning of Tlemcen was no more transparent to 14th century Berber speakers than it is to 21st century ones - as is not unusual for placenames. A better etymology can be proposed by taking into account comparative data - and allows us to explain the cross-linguistics differences in the final vowel - but I'll leave that for another day.

Latin authors from Algeria

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:

• Suetonius, born in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba), ca. 70 AD; historian
• Fronto, born in Cirta (modern Constantine), ca. 100 AD; grammarian
• Apuleius, born in Madaura (modern M'daourouch), ca. 124 AD; author of Metamorphoses, a comic-mystical proto-novel, along with various philosophical and rhetorical works.
• Lactantius, born perhaps in Cirta, ca. 250 AD; a Christian apologist
• Nonius Marcellus, born in Thubursicum (modern Teboursouk), perhaps late 200s AD; a lexicographer
• Augustine, born in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras), ca. 354 AD; a Christian saint notable especially for his autobiographical Confessions
• Martianus Capella, born in Madaura, late 300s AD; author of a formerly influential allegorical curriculum of the liberal arts, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii
• Cassius Felix, born in Cirta, late 300s AD; author of a medical handbook
• Priscian, born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell), late 400s AD; Latin grammarian

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.

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 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum covers the area in Volume VIII. Even the Albertini Tablets, a set of legal documents found near Tebessa and mostly dating to 493-496 AD, are online now.

No doubt I'm missing a few authors; who else belongs on the list above?

Insults slipping through the diglossia filter

I recently came across a video, apparently from the little town of Souani near Tlemcen, of a poet, one Mohamed Tlemceni, performing a public satire of various Algerian establishment figures: كلمة في حق العصابة من إعداد شاعر الحراك تلمساني محمد. The poem itself is in Standard Arabic (Fusha), the normal language for formal public performance, but he intersperses elements from Algerian Arabic (Darja, italicised), as in:

أنتم تعيشون ببركات فخامته
فانحنوا له طاعة وامتثالا
خسئت يا من عرفناك رخيسا
شياتا للفساد طبّالا

"You all live thanks to His Excellency's blessings,
So bow down to him in obedience and compliance" -
Be off with you, you whom we know of old for a cheap bootlicker (lit. shoe-polisher),
a cheerleader (lit. drum-beater) for corruption!

or (in a reference to Ali Haddad):

جمعت ما يفوق الثلاثين مليار دولار بعرق جبيني
ولم أكن يوما محتالا
أول حرّاڨ بعد الحراك المبارك
فبعد أن كان ميليارديرا صار بطّالا

"I amassed more than 30 billion dollars by the sweat of my brow,
and was never once a crook."
The first harrag (illegal emigrant) after the blessed Hirak (protest movement) -
After being a billionaire, he became unemployed!

So what's going on here? The first part of the performance is satirical: for each person mentioned, he gives one or two vainglorious lines sarcastically put in the mouth of the target (often alluding to real quotes), then two or three tearing him down (then he throws the target's picture in the bin). In the second, he praises the Algerian people and urges it to ever greater achievements. Every single Darja element he uses is in the satirical part; various insults (shiyyat "bootlicker", Tebbal "cheerleader", HeRRag "illegal emigrant", HeRki "traitor") and one direct quote (mocked immediately aftewards). The unironic praise is pure Fusha.

This is not a particularly representative sample of the protests, as the small audience and the rural setting should suggest; in its theatrical, rather bombastic style, it harks back to the public speaking of the 1960s or 1970s more than to any contemporary mainstream. The theatricality is obviously to some extent deliberate and even prized; it almost inevitably accompanies the polished use of a language learned at school and never spoken in ordinary conversation. But it also undermines the force of emotional epithets, making them seem a bit recherché. Shifting into Darja for insults helps to restore their immediacy, while adding a bit of comic effect to a moment clearly intended to provoke laughter (at, not with). But it seems the poet is not yet ready to allow that kind of everyday realism into moments of hope; for dreaming of a bright future, only artfully selected, formal words will do. By relegating the Darja words exclusively to the context of mockery, he strengthens the principle of Fusha as the appropriate language for proper speech even as he violates it by letting them into the poem at all. It's a long way from something like Anes Tina's equally contemporary El Cha3be Yourid, where diglossia is hardly even felt as a relevant constraint.

Ga3 c'est que ga3!

Among the many responses to recent events in Algeria circulating on Facebook, a particularly linguistically interesting one caught my eye:

His Excellency the People
orders:
"Throw 'em all out!"
That means all!
Million Man March of Friday 29 March
Peaceful, Popular, National, Civilised

The first two lines and the last two are in Fusha (Standard Arabic); the two middle lines are very much in Darja ("dialectal" Algerian Arabic). The clash of registers produces an amusing effect. But even more striking is the first word of the fourth line: سيك sik. You'll search for it in vain in Arabic dictionaries, or even in Algerian Arabic dictionaries (they do exist) printed before, oh, 2000 or so; it's a word from French - well, in French it's three words - c'est que, literally "it is that..." In French, this structure is used to mark sentence focus. You can find examples of it being used that way in Algerian Arabic too, eg in Lotfi DK's "Aar alikoum": "المشكلة فهذ البشر سيك في راسهم كاين لحجر" [The problem with these people is that there are rocks in their heads]. But that's obviously not quite what's going on here, though. I haven't come across this construction often enough to have a good sense of all its uses, but it seems to be gaining new functions as it becomes integrated into the wider system of information structure marking in Darja.

Kabyle-Arabic code-switching

One of the great understudied subjects in North African linguistics is Berber-Arabic codeswitching (unlike French-Arabic and French-Berber codeswitching, which are massively overstudied); among the few references available are Kossmann 2014, for a central Moroccan community, and Hamza 2007, for Tunisia. A video from "Nass Bejaia" that's been circulating on social media might seem to provide a promising data source for this: in an eloquent plea against efforts to divide and conquer by setting ethnic groups against each other, the speaker alternates fluent Darja [Algerian Arabic] and Kabyle [Berber] to convey his message to both groups. What better context for code-switching? But, surprisingly enough, there is almost no insertional code-switching, almost no embedded language islands. About the only example is (Kabyle in bold, Arabic underlined):

makanš la d aqbayli, la d aɛeṛbi, la d amẓabi, la d annayli, la d attargi, ula ma... yji waħəd məlkamrun ysəggəm ldzayər nqululu mərħba bik.

There is no Kabyle, no Arab, no Mozabite, no Naili, no Tuareg, even if... there comes someone from Cameroon who would fix Algeria, we'll tell him welcome!

Even here, the second shift comes after an audible pause, and it's probably no coincidence that all the Kabyle elements of this sentence except ula ma are immediately comprehensible to Arabic speakers; even copular d is widely used in Jijel and Bejaia, though unfamiliar elsewhere (and la is ambiguous, used in both languages, which probably facilitates the first shift). Otherwise, the language shifts are rather consistently at phrase boundaries, as in the sentence that follows the previous:

yji waħəd mənnižir, waħəd məḷḷalmạn, lɛaslama

Someone comes from Niger, someone from Germany, welcome.

or as in this later sentence (French in red):

Anda ara aɣ terrem? Wac, ad ɛawdeɣ? Lukan par exemple - Ya xawti, ya xawti, had əlmisaž muhimm židdan məbjaya, makanš əljihawiyya.

Where are you taking us? What, should I say it again? If for example - Brothers, brothers, this message is extremely important from Bejaia: No regionalism!

Sometimes the same content is repeated in both languages successively, sometimes it's left in only one language, but in general, any one phrase should be perfectly comprehensible to a monolingual. It remains to be studied whether this is typical of Kabyle-Arabic code-switching, or just a fact about this short clip.

Protest songs 3: Frs Wld El3lmA

The most sociolinguistically interesting protest song that I've come across since the last post is also among the earliest (28 February): Frs Wld El3lmA's Az-Zawja Al-Khamisa (The Fifth Wife), a heavily underlined (and quite sexist) parable of Algerian history over the past 30 years introduced with وأي تشابه مع الواقع فهو مقصود بشكل متعمد... جدا "Any resemblance to reality is intended deliberately... very deliberately". He then launches into the lyrics - the Arabic is already given as subtitles in the video, so I'll just provide translations... (If you're more interested in the sociolinguistics than in the politics, just skim the lyrics and go to the paragraph that follows.)

In a rich town, whose fortune was plentiful,
There was a Bedouin girl, with an interesting body,
Honeyed eyes and silken hair,
Very romantic; many sought her hand.
Rich and poor competed for her,
Doctors and directors raced each other to visit her family.
They betrayed each other, hated each other, envied each other, conspired against each other,
They withdrew, came to blows, fought each other, made war on each other,
On the pure earth flowed conscience's blood
In total Ignorance (jahiliyya) died young children
Blood flowed and women were raped
The building was destroyed when the skies turned black
And blood flowed from those neglected quarries
With the eyes of the bereaved, the widows, the pregnant...
So that the town would not vanish in the process,
They offered up the beautiful one as a sacrifice to the prince.
Its prince was a migrant, returned from far away
With experience and wisdom and promises and threats.
He made a truce among the people of the great town
And said: "Marry me to the little princess,
So I can finish the trajectory and continue the process
So we can completely destroy this dangerous conflict (fitna)."
He married the second one according to the town's law
And changed its sacred book with fabrications
And spread around its money to keep everyone quiet
And shook up its situation so that the herd would bow down
And said: "Our religion, and it is obligatory to obey it,
Has always made licit a third and fourth wife."
He married the third one, his hair already turning grey,
And [???]
So he admitted that it was time for him to go away,
"So take up the torch, our dear youth -"
But suddenly, a deceptive blow!
The old man is capable of marrying a fourth wife.
A fourth wife? My God! How shall he enter unto her?
He is a decrepit old man, he shall not touch her hand!
A bride, fresh, soft, virginal, timid,
To be handed to an senile man with no manhood
While her family watch silently
And no groom arises among them to protect her;
As if the beloved town had become barren
Bringing forth only females or pseudo-males.
After the wedding, the old man slept a deep sleep
And the bride was lost in the continuation of life.
Who here would protect her, who defend her?
At night, in the bed, he would slink towards her...
The old man wasn't dead, no, the old man wasn't dead
And his gang were enslaving all those who stayed quiet.
Meanwhile, a beautiful new bride grew up,
And the time for her wedding drew near.
Where is her new groom? Come on, men,
Come on up, come on up, get ready for the tournament,
For the old man has become like a dry stalk
And everyone says the sacred law forbids a fifth wife.
But then they brought out to them a letter from the void,
In the handwriting of an old man, signed in ink and pen:
"The sacred law forbids a fourth wife who is a free woman,
But we are in a town, not in Algeria.
You have accepted to become like slaves around me;
Therefore, your daughter is - a slave-girl."
A slave-girl!

After this extended, elaborate, emo parable, he adds an afterword for anyone dense enough not to have gotten it yet:

روينا لكم القصة بالفصحى، لأن الفصحى لغة الأدب. لا تضطرونا باش نحكيوهالكم بالدارجة. في هاذاك الوقت، يا سعدو لي هرب.
"We have narrated to you this story in Fusha [Standard Arabic], because Fusha is the language of literature/politeness. Do not force us [shifts to Darja] to tell it to you in Darja [Algerian Arabic]. At that point, happy* the man that has fled!"

The chants of the demonstrators follow, shouting in chorus: ماكانش الخامسة يا بوتفليقة! "No fifth term, Bouteflika!"

While sociolinguistics is hardly the intended point, the sociolinguistic message comes across just as loud and clear as the political one. Fusha is the language of carefully planned literary compositions, where all the arts of parable and metaphor can be deployed to provide a figleaf of deniability when the censors come along; in Darja, you tell it like is, and it hits hard. As previously, this pair of stereotypes is not to be confused with a fact about the world: Darja even has a dedicated verb for speaking in pointed allusions, يمعني ymaʕni, and the practice of doing so is a core linguistic competence, especially essential for women but admired in men too, and seen as necessary in order to convey criticism without creating grudges and worsening conflicts. Then again, doing so relies extensively on proverbs which, if still Darja, are often far removed from the language of everyday speech; in a sense, resorting to Fusha is a natural extension of that approach. Be that as it may, the trope of Fusha as the language of circumlocution versus Darja as the language of straight talk is out there, familiar enough to every reader to make his invocation of it here rhetorically very effective.

---

* Is سعدو here a pun on Said [Bouteflika], the president's brother, widely thought to be pulling the strings? I suspect so...

"I don't speak Arabic, this is in our Darja"

This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter):

The reporter, from Sky News Arabia*, is smoothly unrolling premature platitudes in Standard Arabic - الجزائريون يهنّئون بعضهم بما تحقّق إلى حدّ الآن يقولون "the Algerians are congratulating each other on what has been achieved up to now, saying..." when a somewhat inebriated-looking man pops into the frame (despite his companion's best efforts to stop him) and starts trying to address the camera. She very reasonably pushes him back off camera, then thinks better of it and decides to turn the intrusion into an impromptu vox pop. He says, making absolutely no effort at all to adjust his dialect towards any sort of externally imposed norm (the only word he takes from Standard Arabic is مُقتَنِعين "satisfied", presumably quoting the reporter):

ماكاش منها، ماناش مُقتَنِعين ڨاعيتيك باه تغيّر نحّاو پيو وعاودوا داروا پيو واحد أوخر، يتنحّاو ڨاع! That's baloney, we're not satisfied at all. To change, they took away a pawn and put on a different pawn again - they should all get taken away!

Knowing that her largely Middle Eastern target audience (not to mention her bosses) won't be able to understand this - especially not the French loanword pion, pawn - she tells him, in colloquial Algerian Arabic, to speak "عرْبيّة" (Arabic). He dismisses this with the classic line:

مانعرفش عربية، هاذي هي الدّارجة تاعنا I don't know Arabic, this is our Darja [colloquial].

The contrast being drawn there between "Arabic" and "Darja", striking as it is, should not be overstated. It was obvious from context that she was using "Arabic" to mean Standard Arabic or at least something a bit closer to it, and he ran with that; but in another context, he or any other speaker would use "عرْبيّة" (Arabic) to refer to Darja, as in the old joke about the Egyptian trying to buy stamps at an Algerian post office. (He asks for Standard Arabic "طابع بريدي" and gets nowhere; when the postmaster eventually figures out what he wants, he shouts "قول تامبر، ماتعرفش العربية؟" - "Say timbre - don't you even know Arabic?")

But it's still worth thinking about why this little video has struck such a chord. Part of the answer, I think, is that it resonates so perfectly with a whole set of stereotypes about Darja vs. Fusha [Standard Arabic]. Fusha is for parroting the official line; Darja is for telling it like it is. Fusha is for fluent, well-planned speech; Darja is off-the-cuff and from the heart. Fusha is for upwardly mobile women; Darja, for working-class men. None of these are truths about the world, obviously - you can be every bit as dishonest or premeditated in Darja as in Fusha (ask s'hab el kachir:), and fluent Fusha is no guarantee you won't find yourself hefting bricks for a living. But they are perceptions that emerge naturally from the regimented, restricted contexts in which Fusha is learned and required. If these stereotypes remind you of Glasgow or the East End, that's no coincidence; they emerge naturally in the context of urban diglossia.

More Algerian protest songs

A whole bunch more protest songs are emerging, as singers ride the wave. I don't think any of them have the kind of reach that La Casa d'El Mouradia does, but they should help counterbalance the Algiers-centrism of the previous post...

From the eastern plateau, in Chaoui (Berber), we have Sami Youress' "Ulac n cinquième" (No fifth term). Now I speak some Siwi, and a bit of Kabyle, but no Chaoui, so I wouldn't be able to translate this without the helpful subtitles, and my transcription is probably wrong in parts, but it starts:

Ulac ulac ulac, ulac n cinquième No no no, no fifth term,
Neṣbeṛ εecrin sna, temlim-aneɣ s imezgan We've waited twenty years, you've loaded us with problems.
Monsieur le Président ṛuḥ Ṛebbi ad yeεfu fell-ak Mr. President, go, God have mercy on you,
Ugir gg ubrid nnek, awid id-ek ayetma-k Go on your way, and take your brothers with you.
Agdud ad yeqqaṛ-ak εecrin sna bzayed fell-ak The people tell you twenty years is too much for you,
Ddzayer tamurt nneɣ ur teɣrid c sɣer baba-k / Algeria is our country, you didn't get it from your father.
Ddzayer tamurt nnek macci d elwert n baba-k. Algeria is your country, not your paternal inheritance.

Prominent opposition rapper Lotfi DK, from further east in Annaba, rose to the occasion as expected with Bandiyya (Bandits); there are whole theses on his oeuvre (well, at least one) so I won't devote too much effort to it here, but here's a short excerpt:

الشعب كرهكُم يا الكلاب The people are fed up with you, you dogs,
عشرين سنة بزّاف Twenty years is too much,
جمعنا أزمات البلاد باعوها في المزاد We've gathered crises, they've sold the country at auction,
البلاد رقّاسات ولبسات راهو زاد The country is dancers and costumes, it's gotten worse,
والرّئيس فلابوسات مانعرف مات ولاّ مازال And the President is in a stroller, don't know if he's dead or not yet...

Down in the Sahara in Adrar, a band calling themselves Gsariyine came up with their own take, with interestingly savvy lyrics as well as an unexplained goat:

واش بغيتوا فينا ضركا What do you want of us now?
البلاد راهي في غرقة The country is drowning;
انتُم عاطينها للسرقة You're handing it over to theft
والشعب خصروا النفقة And the people have lost the spending.
بغيتوا تزيدوا لينا عُهدة You want to impose on us another term
باش تديروا الزردة So you can have a party
تدخّلونا في هردة And get us in a mess
وتلعبوا فوقنا الروندة And play hopscotch all over us;
بلادي، c'est le moment - My country, it's the time
باش الشعب يتكلّموا For the people to speak up
ونكونوا يد واحدة And we'll be [as] one hand
ونبلّعوا للظالم فُمّهُ And close the wrongdoer's* mouth.
إيلا هوما ما حشموا If they have no shame,
حنايا نكونوا نفهموا We'll still understand
ونكونوا حضاريين And we'll be civilized
باش مبعد مانندموش So we don't regret it later.
في هاد اللخضة خصّنا نكونوا سلميين At this moment we must be nonviolent,
باش مايضحكوش علينا الُخرين So that "others" don't laugh at us.

And, moving back to the Algiers area for completeness, some sort of anonymous/Anonymous group came up with a catchy chaabi/country song. It ends:

إذا ادّاوا هاذ العُهدة If they get this term,
ما بقى في الدزاير قعدة No more staying in Algeria;
تتباع في سوق الخُردة It'll be up for sale in the flea market.
افّظنوا يا لا جوناس Wake up, youth,
ولّينا عرّة فالاجناس We've become the laughingstock[?] of peoples,
قولوا هاذ المرّة خلاص Say: This time it's enough.

I assume there are similar songs coming out in the west, and surely in Kabyle, but none of them have crossed my path; if you find any, let me know!

---

* Corrected following comment on Twitter.

Some Algerian protest songs

What's going on right now in Algeria is fascinating - and difficult to get a full sense of from abroad even if you speak Arabic and French, let alone if you're relying on English-language media. The lyrics of the protest movements - whether composed for the occasion or just reused for it - may offer some interesting perspectives. Unfortunately this brief selection can't claim any particular representativity; these are just a couple of apparently popular ones that have crossed my path.

Starting with what a Marxist might call the urban proletariat of Algiers, we have a USMA football fans' song which outlines the basic issue:

ساعات للفجر وماجاني نوم Hours to dawn and I still haven't slept,
راني نكونصومي غير بالشوية I'm taking drugs, but only little by little;
اشكون السبة واشكون نلوم Who's the cause, who should I blame?
ملّينا المعيشة هاديّا We're fed up* with this life.

في الاّولى نقولوا جازت In the first [presidential term], we'd say it's fine;
حشاوهالنا بالعشرية They filled our heads with the decade [of civil war].
في التانية الحكاية بانت In the second, the story became clear -
لا كاسا دالمورادية La Casa d'El Mouradia [the Presidential residence].
في التالتة البلاد شيانت In the third, the country got thin
بالمصالح الشخصية thanks to private interests...
في الرابعة الپوپيّة ماتت In the fourth, the doll died [ie the president became too unwell to appear in public]
ومازالت القضيّة And the situation continued.

[chorus again]

والخامسة راهي تسويڥي And the fifth is following on,
بيناتهُم راي مبنية It's been set up between them;
والپاصي راو آرشيڥي And the past is archived,
لاڥوا تاع الحرُّيّة The voice of freedom.
ڥيراجنا الهدرة پريڥي Our corner** is [a place for] private talk,
يعرفوه كي يتقيّا They know it/him when he vomits;
مدرسة ولازم سيڥي A school where you need a CV,
بيرو محو الأمّيّة An anti-illiteracy office.
[x2]
[chorus]

Looking at this as a linguist, there's an interesting contrast between the first and second stanzas; the first is basically in normal Algerian Arabic, but the second uses some very striking French loanwords - some imposed by the rhyme in -ivi, several not. For discussion of similar stylistic devices in medieval Andalusi poetry and late 20th century Algerian rai, see Davies and Bentahila 2008.

Moving on towards the more rah-rah end of the scale, we have "Win Win Win", showing obvious Middle Eastern influence in its form and substantial Standard Arabic influence in its Algerian Arabic. It starts:

وين وين وين؟ وين بيها وين؟ Where where where? Where with it, where?
وين وين وين؟ وين رانا رايحين؟ Where where where? Where are we going?
عيبنا فاح وطننا راح ضاع بين الرجلين، Our shame has festered, our homeland is gone, lost between the legs;
دمنا ساح والمشعل طاح، ماصابش اليدّين، Our blood has flowed, the torch has fallen, it found no hands [to carry it];
ضحّكتو علينا الاجناس وراكو فرحانين You've made the peoples laugh at us, and you're happy about it.

جزاير أرض الحُرّيّة ماتوا عليها رجال Algeria is the land of freedom, for which men have died.
رجال ونسا حاربوا بالنية وجابوا الاستقلال Men and women fought with right intention and brought independence.
ادّيتو الحُكْم بالبُندُقية خُنتوهم يا انذال You people took power at gunpoint and betrayed them, you wretches;
باسم الشرعية الثورية خلفتوا الاحتلال In the name of revolutionary legitimacy you succeeded the occupation.

On the more hipster/"lachichi" end, Jidal showcases a group of artists from Algiers working together to make a worthy but rather forced protest song, guitars, dreadlocks, melodramatic handcuffs and all. The lyrics are mainly in Algerian Arabic, with a stanza or two in Berber, but the refrain is in French ("Libérez l'Algérie", Free Algeria).

يمّا كتّريلنا الدعاوي Mother, pray for us a lot,
ولادك راهُم خارجين Your sons are going out
يمشيوا على الحُرّيّة To walk for freedom***;
يمّا ولادك متحضّرين Mother, your sons are acting civilised,
طالبين ديمُقراطية Asking for democracy -
هاك الورْد زيد الياسمين Here are roses, throw in jasmine - [demonstrators have been giving roses to the police]
في مسيرة سلمية In a peaceful demonstration
عالتغيير معوّلين Bent on change.
الشعب est libéré - The people is free,
Libérez l'Algérie; - Free Algeria;
Libérez, libérez, - Free, free,
Libérez l'Algérie. - Free Algeria.

---

* Edited: was "tired".
** Edited, thanks to Imad's comment.
*** Fixed.

Hausa in Tamanrasset

On a recent trip to Tamanrasset, Algeria's southernmost significant city, I was not surprised to see lots of signs in Arabic and French, and not too surprised to see a significant minority of signs with Tamahaq (Tuareg) content; if I have the time I'll post later on the Tifinagh alphabet they used, closer to traditional Tifinagh than the version used in the north but still quite conspicuously modernised. But I hadn't fully appreciated how much immigration Tamanrasset attracts from the south these days, and even allowing for that I wasn't expecting to see Hausa signs as well. There was much more Hausa spoken than written, of course - on our brief trip through Tafsit market, I heard probably as much Hausa as Arabic, and even in the upmarket souvenir shops Hausa music was playing some of the time. But one Hausa expression had clearly made its way into the visual linguistic landscape of the town: over and over again, I saw little unpretentious-looking restaurants labelled with various spellings, in both Latin and Arabic script, of the Hausa phrase mai nama, "meat owner" (ie meat seller). Most of my pictures were blurry, but one came out - here it is.

We're all related: a calque from Kabyle into Darja

Algerian Arabic (or at least Dellys Arabic) has a verb for "be related to" (as family): kul كول, taking the dative, as in waš y-kul-lek? واش يكوللك "what relation is he to you?" In the reciprocal form, this yields tkawel تكاول "be related to each other"; "we're related to each other" is ne-tkawl-u نتكاولوا. These only seem to be used in the (present) imperfective; I've never heard anyone say *kal كال.

This verb clearly derives from an Arabic word still used in its own right in Algerian Arabic: kun كون "be", with regular assimilation of n+l to ll and reinterpretation of the root. waš y-kul-lek واش يكوللك "what relation is he to you?" was originally waš y-kun-lek واش يكونلك "what is he to you?" But that construction seems rather odd and unidiomatic from a Classical Arabic perspective. You don't normally use an equational verb "to be" in the indicative present tense like that, in Classical Arabic or even in Algerian Arabic; you would rather expect something with a pronoun, like *wašen huwwa lik واشن هو ليك (which you don't hear). What's going on here?

Flipping through Dallet's (1982) enormous dictionary of Kabyle as spoken by the Ait Menguellet, I came across the answer. The Kabyle verb ili "to be" (imperfective ttili) matches Arabic kun كون fairly well in its usage. In the imperfective, with the dative, it means "be related to" (his gloss: "être parent avec, avoir relation de parenté à"): d acu i-m tettili? "what relation is she to you?") It likewise has a reciprocal myili (imperfective ttemyili) "have in common; be related to each other", which in the latter sense only seems to show up in the imperfective: nettemyili "we're related to each other".

It seems clear that the Algerian Arabic verb derives from an excessively literal translation - a calque - of the Kabyle expression, probably by people whose first language was Kabyle. But since then it's taken its own path; whereas in Kabyle the meaning "be related to" remains a context-specific sense of the verb "be", in Algerian Arabic the change of n to l has allowed it to become an independent lexeme in its own right with no one-to-one Kabyle translation equivalent. Contact catalyses change, but the resulting change follows its own path.

Language attitudes around Paris: a vignette

As we reached the stop by the supermarket the other day, I told my son in English "Now we're getting off the bus." This caught the attention of an elderly man sitting near us, who, as we got off, told him with a smile in accented English "Hello. You speak English - very good!". Turning to me, he asked "Est-ce qu'il parle français aussi ? [Does he also speak French?]"

I assured him that he does, and my son piped up with "Moi je parle trois langues : français; anglais, et arabe [I speak three languages: French, English, and Arabic]". Not to be outdone, the old man replied "Comme moi ; je parle français, anglais, allemand, arabe, et hébreu. [Like me; I speak French, English, German, Arabic, and Hebrew.]" I was duly impressed, and he continued "J'ai grandi à Oran, et j'ai fait mes études à la Sorbonne. [I grew up in Oran, then studied at the Sorbonne.]"

"Ô, moi aussi je suis algérien [Oh, I'm Algerian too]", I replied.

His response: "Ah, est-ce que vous êtes français ou israélite ? [So are you French, or Jewish?]"

My answer "Ni l'un ni l'autre [Neither one]" seemed to come as a surprise... The conversation ended about there, as we went our separate ways, with him saying " تهلّا في روحك thəḷḷa fi ṛuħək [Take care]".

Algerian Sign Language

According to Glottolog, the least documented language in Algeria is neither Korandje nor some Berber variety, but rather one that might not immediately leap to mind: Algerian Sign Language. If you have some idea of what to look for, though, there turns out to be a lot more available than might be expected; here's a brief bibliography gleaned from online:

• Boutaleb, Djamila. 1987. Les enfants sourds en Algérie : Problèmes d'acquisition de la langue écrite [Deaf children in Algeria: Problems of written language acquisition]. Thèse de doctorat 3e cycle, Université Sorbonne Paris. 408pp. [Abstract: This thesis deals with the problems of deafness in Algeria, more particularly in schools where an attempt is made to pin down the causes of failure in the learning of language by deaf children. In order to understand the difficulties, it had seemed appropriate to examine the problem of deafness itself and its consequences on schooling and social life. This will be the subject of the first part. The emphasis will be on this "difference" which affects primarily the development of language and which may cause schooling delays and create psychoaffective problems and social problems. The current conflict of methods, oralism sign language, makes it possible to reconsider the status of deaf children thanks to the findings of linguistics and the works of psycholinguists and sociolinguists, of whom some current ideas will be presented in this work. In the second part, the deaf community in Algeria will be illustrated with some historical and socio-educational characteristics, for, to know the past and present living conditions of the deaf gives us the means to understand their actual level in the practice of the written language, which will be examined in the third part. The observed difficulties lie at the syntactic level, as well as the lexical, grammatical, and orthographic levels. The choice of deaf francophones, deaf arabophones, and hearing pupils benefits our analysis. This study is made in a pedagogical prospect but is integrated in a set of psycho-sociolinguistic views.]
• مديرية النشاط الإجتماعي (الجزائر) [Direction des Affaires Sociales (Algérie)]. n.d. قاموسي الأول في لغة الإشارة : الجزء الاول [My First Dictionary of Sign Language: Volume 1]. Algiers. 50pp.
• Djama, Amal. 2016. Les points communs entre la Langue des Signes Algérienne (LSA) - dialecte de Laghouat, Sud de l’Algérie - et la Langue des Signes Française (LSF) [Commonalities between Algerian Sign Language (LSA) - dialect of Laghouat, southern Algeria - and French Sign Language (LSF)]. Dossier, licence SCL « Acquisition et dysfonctionnement » (SCL F14), Licence 3, AMU, Faculté ALLSHS d’Aix-en-Provence. 5pp. [Comparison of 25 signs].
• Guiroub, Mustapha. 2010-09-27. «La langue des signes algérienne est une revendication des sourds» [Algerian Sign Language is a demand of the deaf]. El Watan. [Notes that Algerian Sign Language is descended from French Sign Language (LSF), but that about 50% of the vocabulary is different; that there are many differences within Algeria between the North and the South; and that efforts at standardization are being undertaken.]
• Lakhfif, Abdelaziz. 2009. Un Environnement de Traduction Automatique du Texte Arabe vers la Langue des Signes Algérienne (LSA) [An Automatic Translation Environment from Arabic Text to Algerian Sign Language (LSA)]. Mémoire de Magistèr en Informatique, Université Badji Mokhtar - Annaba. 134pp. [The only specific information about Algerian Sign Language given is a brief discussion of its legal status, pp. 16-17; as far as I can see, the author seems to have no contact with Algerian signers.]
• Mansour, Mohamed Seghier. 2007. Langage et surdité, Description de la langue des signes des sourds oranais [Language and Deafness. Description of Oranais Sign Language]. Mémoire de magistère, Université d'Oran Es-Sénia. 124pp. [An analysis of sign formation in Algerian Sign Language as spoken in Oran, with a brief discussion of syntax, and some background on the language's history taken mainly from Boutaleb (1987).]
• Ministère de la Solidarité nationale, de la Famille et de la Condition féminine (Algérie). 2017. Dictionnaire de la langue des signes algérienne : 1560 mots signés les plus usités. Trilingue Arabe - français - langue des signes. 29 thèmes de la vie quotidienne / قاموس لغة الإشارة الجزائرية : 1560 كلمة الأكثر استعمالا. ثلاثي اللغة : عربي - فرنسي - لغة الإشارة. 29 موضواعا من الحياة اليومية [Dictionary of Algerian Sign Language: 1560 most used signs. Trilingual Arabic-French-Sign language. 29 themes from daily life].
• Ministère de la Solidarité Nationale (Algérie). 2008. Langue des signes algerienne : Guide de recherche et de recueil des signes [Algerian Sign Language: Guide for research and sign collection]. Algiers. 50pp.
• Ministère de la Solidarité Nationale (Algérie). 2008. La langue des signes [Sign language]. Algiers. 14pp.

And - perhaps more usefully - a brief videography:

• [Anonymous]. 2010-2018. SOURD ALGERIENNE. YouTube.
• Daham, Abdelrazek. 2017. abdelrazek daham. YouTube.
• Djama, Amal. 2016. LSA : Langue des Signes Algérienne (LSA), dialecte de Laghouat, Sud de L’Algérie. Aix-Langue des signes, Aix-Marseille Université.
• Kahal, Zoheir. 2014-2015. Kahal Zoheir. YouTube.
• [Anonymous]. 2015-2018. Langue des signes algérienne. Facebook.

Let's round this off with a school:

• Ecole Algérienne de la Langue des Signes. 08 rue Arezki Hamani (ex-Charris ) Alger-Centre, 16000 Algiers, Algeria.

Of course, one obvious question remains open: is there really just one sign language in Algeria?

English spelling traces in Algerian placenames

Going east of Algiers along the coast, the names of two little port towns stand out. Their inhabitants know them as جنّات /d͡ʒənnat/ (sometimes جنّاد /d͡ʒənnad/) and دلّس /dalləs/ (or الدّلّس /ddalləs/). Those names would normally be transcribed in French as *Djennat (if not *Djennette) and *Delless. Yet in French - and hence, given the region's colonial history, in most Western languages - they are in fact written as Djinet and Dellys; the latter at least is very often even (mis)pronounced accordingly as /dɛlis/. French i and y are both normally pronounced /i/; why on earth would Frenchmen write the schwa /ə/ of these names in this way, when French has a schwa and normally writes it as e?

The most likely answer is that they didn't. Rather, they adopted or adapted these placenames' spelling from English - specifically, from the widely translated work of Thomas Shaw, an English reverend and Oxford fellow who spent several years in Algeria in the early 1700s, a century before France occupied Algiers. He spelt the two towns' names as Jinnett and Dellys respectively - a spelling which, in English, yields the almost exactly correct pronunciations /d͡ʒɪnɛt/ and /dɛlɪs/.

Shaw's book was translated into French by 1743, and the translator retained the English spellings of both names. In a later edition no doubt prompted by the French invasion (1830), Jinnett got amended to Djinnett - someone had finally got around to noticing that English j is pronounced like French dj, not like French j. The doubled letters, useful for indicating vowel quality in English but serving no purpose in French, were lost within a decade, as seen in Eyriès (1839). But the i of Djinet, and the y of Dellys, remained to testify to a period when French geographers relied on an English traveller to tell them about Algeria - and to confirm most colonists' lack of interest in how the locals pronounced these names.

"Don't impose on me a language that isn't a vehicle of science": the Salhi scandal

Two years ago, the Algerian state finally decided to make Tamazight (Berber) an official language. In practice, this has not by any means implied giving it the same status as Arabic (much less as French). It has encouraged an expansion of Tamazight teaching, which is being extended to all wilayas (provinces) rather than just the ones with large numbers of Berber speakers. But Tamazight lessons - unlike Arabic, French, or English - remain completely optional. Most parents have no desire for their children to learn Tamazight, and were regularly complaining even before the question arose that the curriculum was too packed. Nevertheless, the very idea that Tamazight might someday be a required school subject seems to have been enough to drive at least one MP - the now-notorious Naima Salhi - into a ranting fury.

I've been reluctant to post about the Naima Salhi scandal, since it's obviously being used by this nonentity as a way to inflate her public profile. But when I heard the actual words of her paranoid rant against Berber, I realized I had to. Her words, thankfully, have been overwhelmingly repudiated by her peers. But her "reasoning" is a perfect specimen of a linguistic ideology that many people all over the world subscribe to, with a few instructive twists coming from the diglossic context of Algeria. As such, it's worth a closer look. Here's what she said, translated from - dialectal - Algerian Arabic into English:

"So don't impose on me a language - it's not a language anyway - don't impose on me a language that isn't a vehicle of science; don't impose on me a language that isn't recognized, isn't understood by people outside; what good is it to me? Study science with it? It doesn't have - it isn't a vehicle of science. Study technology with it? It isn't a vehicle of technology. Go abroad with it, to speak to people abroad? They don't know it and don't understand it. For God's sake, what good is it to us?
When it comes to the Arabic language - and oh, what a language! - which is the world language, which more than a billion people speak, they say we won't study it; a language which has billions of books, and billions of manuscripts, and billions of - everything - you say you won't study it and don't need it. Then you bring me a dead language, which doesn't have letters, and doesn't have meanings, and doesn't have words - you want to hold me back with it so you can make progress - and you go off, and eventually you get to the point, and you tell me: Me, I'm studying English, and I'm studying German, and Spanish, and Turkish, and you all don't know them. You're going to hold me back with this?
My little daughter was studying in a private school where most of them were Kabyles. She naturally learned the language with them, because her classmates' parents taught them to speak Kabyle, so it would continue and spread. So my daughter, with the best of intentions, learned with them. She'd come and speak it, and I never asked her "Why?" I didn't shut her up; I left her free to do as she likes. But now that we've gotten to the point where it's obligatory, I told her: Say another word in Kabyle (Berber) and I'll kill you, I'll discipline you if you say another word.
And I'm saying it plainly and challenging everyone: When we were going by intentions / naive, we didn't say a thing; now that it's become "push me and I'll step on you", don't push me and I won't step on you. Now we're going to make it about who's stronger? And the most for the stronger one? The majority is stronger. You'd have been better off leaving it down to intentions. Now that you think you're so smart and coming out with insults against us, now I'll insult you.
People like me, and people who are real men, and those who don't accept humiliation and aren't used to it, and whose family aren't used to it, won't accept from you something like this. And I now forbid my children from pronouncing a single word in Tamazight. I mean the Frenchified Kabyle made by the MAK and the treasonous terrorist MAK movement. And we need to demand that the MAK is a terrorist movement."

Let's pass over the bizarre misconceptions and factual errors for now (it doesn't have words???), and go to the heart of the matter. It's not an unusual phenomenon anywhere to find speakers of a majority language objecting to having to learn a supposedly useless minority language - look at Swedish in Finland, or Welsh in Wales, or even Irish in Ireland. In this case, however, diglossia introduces a further twist, making her very examples undermine her ideas.

She presents Kabyle as useless for what seem like bluntly utilitarian reasons: it's only spoken by other Algerians and it won't help you study science and technology. Yet most Algerians spend most of their lives in Algeria, and most people anywhere don't study science and technology past high school. By her own testimony, Kabyle is widely enough spoken that her daughter could pick it up in a private school even in a non-Kabyle area. Had her daughter failed to do so, she would presumably have had fewer friends, and found herself excluded from routine social interactions. Yet somehow, for Salhi, that fact doesn't even register as relevant to the question of the language's usefulness. The dialectal Arabic she's speaking is not taught in any school, and the idea of teaching it would no doubt drive her to even greater fury. Dialectal Arabic is by far the most widely used language in Algeria, without which she would find herself deaf and dumb in her own country - just ask any Kabyle outside Kabylie whether it's worth learning - yet that doesn't enter into her definition of "useful" either. A language is "useful", in fact, only if its presence in daily life is so limited as to make it useless in most contexts. Only then can speaking it be a valuable accomplishment that gives you access to coveted jobs, rather than a routine ability that remains invisible until you run into someone who lacks it. Only then is it an appropriate subject for study.

But Tamazight activism threatens to upset that basic rule. If Tamazight ever does become part of compulsory education, that would lead to children studying and getting graded on a language that some of them already speak. How hideously unfair! The Kabyle-speaking children won't need it, and the Arabic-speaking children won't want it. Clearly the only possible explanation for such a move is that Kabyle speakers want to give themselves an unfair advantage at school, and handicap the Arabic speakers. (/sarcasm) The idea that there might be another side to this - that Kabyle speakers would still have to learn dialectal Arabic on their own as they always have, getting no extra credit for that effort, whereas Arabic speakers would be getting government help in learning Kabyle - doesn't even seem to cross her mind.

Translating the comedy of diglossia

Even in English, you can sometimes get a laugh by inappropriately mixing high and low registers - gangster slang in blank verse*, or discussions of medieval agriculture in Cockney. In a diglossic language such as Arabic, this trick is both easier and more effective. An excellent example is provided by Message to the Parliamentarians, a recent political satire by Algerian YouTuber Anes Tina. Apart from its primary themes - the offensive meaninglessness of Algerian elections and the hopelessness of abstention - this video is a spectacular send-up of the bombastic period dramas that occupy such a significant role in Arab TV schedules. In such shows, often set in the pre-Islamic period, the characters speak intimidatingly classical Arabic, case endings and all, as a matter of course. (This is, incidentally, somewhat anachronistic: no attempt is ever made to reproduce even the substantial inter-tribal dialectal variation that early Arabic grammarians explicitly tell us about, much less the substandard non-Bedouin varieties they preferred to ignore.) In this video, the characters speak accordingly - but with carefully planted intrusions from the world of everyday speech. Consider the opening scene:

lam yabqaa lanaa 'illaa Hallun waHid.
wamaa huwa lHall?
falnaktub irrisaalah.
wayHak! ma lladhii taf3aluh?
uktub: wilaayatu banuu qaynuqaa3, firraabi3i min shubaaTi l'awwal. risaalatun min ibnu taynah, annaaTiqu rrasmiyy walmukallifu l'i3laamiyy liqabiilati shsha3b, 'ilaa lfaasiq alfaajir almunaafiqi lla3iin addaa3ir alxabiithu ssaaqiTu lmaariq azzindiiq quzaaHah 'amiiru qabiilati lxarlamaaniyyiin. ammaa ba3d. la3natu l'aalihati 3alaykum. la3natu l3uzzaa wa hubal 3alaa Hamlatikumu l'intikhaabiyya. waHaqqi 'aalihati lwaay waay, waHaqqi 'aalihati shshiita, naHnu lan nuHallibakum fil'intikhaabaat. lan nashtarii sila3akum, walan natazawwaja minkum, walla3natu 3alaykum 'ilaa yawmi ddiin.
oNvwoyi.
hal bu3itha lmiisaaJ? hal hum 'on liin?
Sabran ya bna taynah, fa'inna la koneksyoona thaqiila.
tabban littiSaalaati quraysh. faltuxbirnii idhaa xarajati lvüü firrisaalah.

How on earth are we to translate this? The "letter" itself is not so hard - the inflated rhetoric is easy to render into olde English, and the occasional dialectal intrusions (bolded) correspond pretty well to English slang, producing a roughly similar effect. The allusions to pre-Islamic religion and early Islamic history are unlikely to make much sense to most English speakers, but corresponding names with appropriate resonances can be substituted without much damage; thus:

Only one solution remains before us.
What, then, is the solution?
Let us... write the letter.
Perdition! What are you doing?
Write! Province of Idumaea, on the 4th of Zivim. A letter from Taenaus, the official spokesman and media officer of the tribe of The People, to the evildoer [cymbals!], the sinner [!], the accursed hypocrite [!], the debauched [!], the malignant degraded renegade [!], the miscreant Cuzahah, prince of the tribe of the Charlamentarians. May the gods' curses be upon you. May the curses of Ashtoreth and Moloch be upon your electoral campaign. By the gods of canned applause, and the gods of brown-nosing, we shall not suck up to you in the elections. We shall not buy your goods, nor shall we marry from among you. And curses be upon you until the Day of Judgement.

But what can an English speaker possibly do to reproduce the comic effect of the dialogue that follows it?

Send.
Has the message been sent? Are they online?
Patience, O Taenaus, for the connection is slow.
Damnation unto Quraysh Telecom. Inform me when the message gets a view.

All the bolded words are from French except "slow"; but it would be a mistake to treat them as switches into French. Each of them is the normal, well-established way to refer to its referent in spoken Algerian Arabic. In daily conversations, the corresponding Standard Arabic synonyms (if known at all) would be used only by an insufferable pedant, or - more likely - as a joke. Conversely, in a school composition - almost the only context where the average Algerian child is expected to actually produce Standard Arabic - such terms would be strictly banned. No dialect of English that I know of has non-standard words for telecommunication technology (if it comes to that, I can't think of one offhand that has its own word for "slow" either.) The problem rears its head again soon after, as the protagonist attempts to buy a mobile phone in the marketplace. Suggestions are welcome, but it looks to me like this is one gag that simply can't be translated into English. Among their many other effects, it appears that sociolinguistic situations limit what kind of jokes you can make!

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* I think John Cowan will have the link for this one?

Romance languages in 17th century North Africa

In 1609, 117 years after conquering Granada, the Spanish state decreed the expulsion of all "Moriscos" - that is, everyone descended from Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In the 1720s, a century later, two separate travellers - Jean-André Peyssonel and Francisco Ximenez - found that a number of towns in Tunisia, including Testour, Bizerte, and Tebourba, were Spanish-speaking, inhabited by the descendants of these refugees (as I was surprised to learn from Vincent 2004). According to Peyssonel, for example, "the inhabitants of Tebourba practically all speak Spanish there, a language which they have conserved from father to son"; referring to the same town, Ximenez adds "immediately after their arrival from Spain, they had schools in our language. They were insultingly told they were not real Moors, and the Bey took away their books and their schools; after that, they little by little forgot Spanish and learnt Arabic." All in all, the reports seem compatible with a three-generation pattern of language shift: the people they met still spoke Spanish, but were likely mostly not to pass it on to their children, as they became more closely integrated into the wider society of their new home.

In 1627, a couple of decades after the expulsion of the Moriscos, a corsair ship from Algiers raided Iceland, capturing a couple of hundred unfortunate villagers, one of whom left a description of his experiences. While the distance travelled in this raid was unusual, the practice itself was less so: the capitals of the Barbary states were full of European slaves captured by state-sponsored pirates, waiting for ransoms that might never come. Likewise, many North Africans were captured and held as slaves in Europe (see eg Wettinger 2002 on Malta): describing Algiers in 1612, Diego de Haedo comments that "there are many Muslims who have been captives in Spain, Italy and France" and hence speak those countries' languages (Vincent 2004:107). To further complicate matters, not all immigration from Europe was involuntary: Haedo adds that "There are also an infinite number of renegades [converts to Islam] from these countries and a large number of Jews who have been there, who speak polished Spanish, French, or Italian. The same holds for all the children of renegades who, having learned their national language from their parents, speak it as well as those born in Spain or in Italy."

In brief, 17th-century North Africa contained plenty of European immigrants - some refugees, some captives, and even some voluntary - learning the language spoken around them while maintaining, for a while, the language they had arrived with. What impact did this have on Maghrebi Arabic and Berber? Unfortunately, it's not easy to date Romance loans into either, but we can safely assume that some of the precolonial loans arrived in this period. A good dialect map, in combination with historical data on where these groups ended up, might help identify such loans more precisely - but that doesn't really exist yet, except to some extent for Morocco (Heath 2002).

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References:

Vincent, Bernard. 2004. In Jocelyne Dakhlia ed., Trames de langues. Usages et métissages linguistiques dans l’histoire du Maghreb, Tunis-Paris, IRMC, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004, 561 p.

Of words and pens

In Algerian Arabic, this is a stilu ستيلو - a word instantly recognizable as a borrowing from French stylo:

In Standard Arabic, on the other hand, as any Algerian learns in primary school, it's a qalam قَلَمٌ. This, as it happens, may also be a borrowing, though a much older one; compare ancient Greek kálamos κάλαμος "reed, reed-pen", which apparently has an Indo-European etymology. Clearly, either pre-modern Algerians were so sunk in illiteracy as to have forgotten the word for a pen altogether, or they replaced a pre-existing word for pen with a French borrowing - right?

Well, no. In the Middle Ages, there weren't too many fountain pens or biros around. Classical Arabic qalam referred to something more like these:

Any Algerian who went to Qur'anic school up to the 1960s or so will remember this - a simple reed pen anyone can make using nothing more complicated than a sharp knife. (The Algerian version was a bit different than those in the picture, as it happens - usually people would use a quarter-circumference of a large reed, not the whole circumference of a small one.) More than that, they will remember what it's called: qləm قلم. There are probably people in Algeria who still use these, and very likely they still call them that.

But no one calls a modern industrial pen qləm. When industrial pens were introduced, sometime in the 19th century, ordinary Algerians ended up classing them as a new object, quite distinct from the reed pen despite its similar function, and deserving of an unrelated name. The guardians of Standard Arabic, on the other hand, decided to extend the reference of qalam to cover both. It may be no coincidence that French distinguishes calame from stylo, like Algerian Arabic, whereas English, like Standard Arabic, treats both as diferent types of pen.

Historical linguists regularly use lexical reconstruction to shed light on technological history, an approach called "Wörter und Sachen". This approach has been very fruitful in many cases. But, as this case illustrates, there are some pitfalls to watch out for: whether something counts as the same object or as a new one is a rather culture-bound question, and if investigators impose their own ideas about this on the situation they are investigating, they will get the wrong answer.

Some Dellys etymologies via Andalus

Looking through Corriente's etymological dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, I keep coming across explanations for obscure Dellys words whose origins had been a mystery to me. Corriente's etymologies are not always to be trusted - I've found several errors, most egregiously the attribution of kurānah كُرانة "frog" to Romance rather than to Berber - but the work remains very valuable. Here are a few etymologies that struck me.

• l-ənjbaṛ لنجبار "maize" was originally anjibār أنجبار "snake-weed" (Persicaria bistorta), whose flowers looks vaguely similar. This in turn comes from Persian angbār انگبار, which Corriente seems to derive from rang-bār رنگبار "many-coloured".
• skənjbir سكنجبير "ginger" derives from some sort of popular confusion between two Arabic words: zanjabīl زنجبيل "ginger" and sakanjabīn سكنجبين "oxymel" (a mixture of honey and vinegar used medicinally). I assume the connection is that both are good for colds, but a quick search didn't turn up any actual evidence that oxymel was used for that purpose. Sakanjabīn is apparently from Persian سرکه انگبین serke angabin (Corriente gives the form sik angubēn) "vinegar honey", while zanjabīl is apparently, again via Persian, from Sanskrit शृङ्गवेर ‎śṛṅgavera.
• fərnəħ فرنح "smile, laugh (of a baby)": cp. Andalusi farnas فرنس, Moroccan fərnəs فرنس; possibly, Corriente suggests, from Greek euphrosynē εὐφροσύνη "joy".
• bu-mnir بومنير "seal" was very hard to elicit, since they've been locally extinct for decades (they've nearly disappeared from the entire Mediterranean, in fact). However, it turns out to be correct after all: cf. Andalusi bul marīn بل مرين "sea lion", Maltese bumerin "seal". Corriente seems to take this as Romance *pollo marino "sea-chicken", but the first part of that at least is clearly implausible in light of the comparative evidence as well as of common sense; the second might be tenable, but I'm not sure.

On a not entirely unrelated note: for anyone who wants to explore the maritime terminology of Dellys in greater depth than I've ever been able to elicit, El-Bahri.net is a wonderful and unexpected resource.

Lingua Franca and Sabir in "Four Months in Algeria" (1859)

I recently finished reading Four Months in Algeria, a travel diary by the English Rev. J. W. Blakesley published in 1859. It's mostly rather superficial - he couldn't speak Arabic, and spent most of his time with French soldiers and German settlers - but enlivened by occasional insights. It contains little content of linguistic interest, but it does contain two brief passages in the pidgin still used for communication between North Africans and Europeans when neither spoke the other's language - call it Lingua Franca, or Sabir. Since it would take a brave creolist to plough through the whole thing just in the slender hopes of finding such material, I reproduce them here.

The first passage (p. 340) comes from the author's description of his journey from El Aria to a place called Embadis, both in the east of Algeria, during the month of Ramadan; it shows a curious combination of French, Arabic, and "classic" Lingua Franca:

The poor muleteers had not tasted food during the whole day ; and as soon as ever the sun dipped, they produced one or two flat cakes, and ate them with avidity, not however without first offering me a sahre. I of course declined to diminish their scanty store, and reminded them that I had breakfasted at El Aria. "Toi makasch tiene carême ; toujours mangiaria," said one of the poor fellows, in the polyglot dialect which is growing up out of the intercourse between the natives and the illiterate European settlers of the interior.*
* There are a few Arabic words which the European children habitually make use of at Guelma, even when playing with each other. Makasch, no, shuiya, gently, I found invariably took the place of the corresponding French terms. On the other hand the Arabs constantly use the words ora, hour, and buono or bueno, good, to one another. Iauh, yes, a Kabyle word, pronounced exactly like the German affirmation, is also very common among the lower orders of Europeans.

In this passage, "toi" (you), "carême" (fast), and "toujours" (still) are French, while "tiene" (have) is Spanish, and "mangiaria" (eat, or perhaps food?) is Lingua Franca (from Italian), and "makasch", being used as a simple negator, is Algerian Arabic makaš ماكاش "there is no" (I discuss the latter's history here). Despite the diversity of the lexical sources drawn on, however, the grammar - simple SVO with no subject-verb agreement - matches better with Lingua Franca than with any of the lexifiers.

The second (p. 419), from a country as yet unconquered by the French, shows no such admixture, corresponding perfectly to earlier descriptions of Lingua Franca in which it often appears as little more than Italian minus the morphology:

More than once have I found in Algeria the conventional civility of the Arab to an European change into an unmistakeable expression of goodwill, when it appeared that I was an Englishman ; and in Tunis a notification of the fact at once drew forth a "Buono Inglese ; non buono Francese," from the mouth of a native.