A little mystery: an unidentified Indic language in the Genizah collection

In 1896, Cambridge bought a huge archive of documents from a synagogue in Cairo, starting as early as the 11th century: the Genizah collection. Most of them are in Arabic in the Hebrew script - or just in Hebrew - but the rest cover a wide variety of languages. One of them should be an interesting puzzle for any readers familiar with South Asian languages: the fragment below is obviously in Devanagari or some derivative, but so far no one has been able to determine what language it is written in or what it says. Given the trade connections revealed by the letters, it would probably have come from Kerala, or maybe later on Bombay, but there are no guarantees...

The image is from T-S AS 159.248, T-S AS 159.247: an unidentified Indian language; see there for two other similar fragments.

Any ideas?

"Inability to read or write in your mother tongue was a prerequisite for upward mobility"

If Mohammed Hanif's account of growing up in Pakistan below doesn't ring any bells, then congratulations: you're from one of the minority of countries worldwide with relatively low levels of diglossia. If you're Arab, you know exactly what he's talking about: substitute Darja/3ammiyya for Punjabi, Fusha for Urdu, and French/English as appropriate for English.

"When I was growing up in Pakistan, the complete inability to read or write in your mother tongue was a prerequisite for upward mobility... In my rural version of the state education system, the first thing they did was to try and save me from my mother tongue. Everyone spoke Punjabi in my household and like every five-year-old I had a vocabulary. I could name a goat, a donkey, a chicken. But since the medium of instruction in my school was Urdu, I had to learn alien names for familiar things. I must have spent the next 10 years learning in a language that I would be considered pretentious for speaking in my own street. By the time I finished high school, I realised that there was no college physics in Urdu, forget mathematics, and if you were destined to study aviation, you might have had to wait for centuries while someone drew up navigation maps in Urdu. So I began to learn English and by the time I drifted into writing I had no idea what my own language was. I was more like, “How much are you paying?”"

You might also think it's odd that there's no college maths in Urdu, given that there is such a thing in, for instance, Polish, a language with about a third as many speakers...

Linguistic Survey of India recordings

The Digital South Asia Library at Chicago have just put online for the first time the gramophone recordings originally intended to supplement the Linguistic Survey of India, collected 1913-1929. Burma is also included. If you are interested in almost any South Asian language, this cannot be passed up: Gramophone Recordings from the Linguistic Survey of India. It brings back memories of my time at the Rosetta Project...

Nepal's language riots

Qatar is of course one of the most multicultural places on earth - citizens are only a small minority of the population, and even they include a lot of pre-oil era immigrants from Asia and Africa. Among the largest national groups here in recent years is Nepalis, so it's no wonder that the papers here in Doha have been full of a language controversy that readers elsewhere may not have noticed - the anti-Hindi riots in Nepal.

Apparently, the people of the plains in southern Nepal have ethnic ties to India. They don't speak Hindi natively, but commonly use it as a lingua franca between them. The new vice-president Parmanand Jha comes from this region, and decided to take his oath of office in Hindi (although his native tongue is Maithili). Highlanders took this as a deliberate snub to the official language Nepali, the worse for having not even been in his own language but rather in one primarily associated with India - and a week or so of riots, in which at least 10 people were injured, followed. He issued a sort of apology that calmed things down, but apparently now there are fresh protests from a plains group without Indian ties, the Tharu.

Those who prefer a jargon-filled angle on all this can regard this as an interesting case study in the symbolic weight of language choice in a multilingual context. In this case, they seem to have at least two different diglossias going on: Nepali vs. others in the hills, Hindi vs. others in northern India, and both languages effectively trying to claim the role of the high-prestige language in the plains in between, through competing political parties. Kind of reminds me of North Africa, actually... (And that's without even getting into the role of English.)

For a few links, try:
OhMyNews
KantipurOnline
Hindustan Times

Gulf Arabic (and Hindi?) Pidgin

It should be unsurprising that a pidgin trade-Arabic has evolved in the Gulf, given the incredibly large proportion of the population from non-Arabic-speaking countries. But this is the first info I've seen on it online. Not much actual detail (I would add the word siida "straight ahead"), but it also mentions a pidgin Hindi, which is more surprising. Sounds worth investigating...

Sylheti word order

I've been working on Sylheti - a highly divergent dialect of Bengali / language very closely related to Bengali spoken around Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh - for my field methods class for a while. The particular point I'm focusing on at the moment is the positioning of complement clauses, which obeys a simple rule: if the complement clause has a separate subject, it follows the verb; otherwise, it precedes the verb. The language is otherwise SOV, I should note, so you get contrasts like:

ami exṭa apol sai.
I an apple want-1.
“I want an apple.”

ami exṭa apol xaitam sai.
I [an apple eat-COND-1] want-1.
“I want to eat an apple.”

ami sai he exṭa apol xaok.
I want-1 [he an apple eat-3-OPT].
“I want him to eat an apple.”

This doesn't fit my Japanese-based expectations of "proper" SOV languages (in Japanese, the subordinate clause would always precede the verb) but it turns out that German has basically the same word order (if you factor out the main-clause V2 order by having an initial complementizer). There are some obvious processing motivations for such an order, but it doesn't really fit the head-position parameter idea so well. I was wondering: has anyone seen similar patterns in other SOV languages?

Istanbul, bishops, Rohingya, and Tamezret

For this week, I thought I'd share two curiously parallel reanalyses I've come across recently:

• Istanbul, apparently, derives from the Greek phrase eis ten polin, "in the city";
  
• 'usquuf, "bishop" in Arabic, which apparently derives from a Coptic reinterpretation of Greek episkopos "bishop" as e-pi-skopos "to the skopos", due to which skopos was reanalyzed as meaning "bishop".

And a couple of interesting language sites I've come across:

RohingyaLanguage.com is a speaker's effort to promote the Rohingya language. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group of the western coast of Burma. Like virtually all Burma's inhabitants, they have been seriously mistreated by the government. Apparently, their language is most closely related to (a dialect of?) Chittagongian Bengali. If anyone figures out what the acute accent is meant to indicate, do tell me...

Atmazret.info (in French) is all about the endangered Berber language of Tamezret in southern Tunisia, written by a descendant of speakers. Though he's not a trained linguist, this qualifies as quite an important documentation effort in its own right; as far as I know, the only other thing ever published on the Tamezret dialect was Märchen der Berbern von Tamzratt im Süd-Tünisien in 1900, more than a century ago.