Spengler and morphology

While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly branches out there into linguistic historical morphology:

Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitân, and again, daz wîp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific ‘‘I’’ is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries ‘‘have’’ and ‘‘be’’ between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the "feci" which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude — a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject ‘‘I’’ becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence. (Atkinson translation, 1926, pp. 262-3)

A linguist - or a scientist - is not particularly well-positioned to judge airy intuitions about "the dawn of a new life-feeling" or the emergence of a "Faustian soul"; how would one even go about testing such claims rigorously? But the emergence of forms like these is rather better studied. On a world scale, there is nothing unusual about fecisti - plenty of languages collapse the subject pronoun, tense/aspect/mood, and the verb into a single word. In fact, a good 70% of languages in Siewierska's WALS survey mark subject agreement on the verb one way or another. Nor is their completely analytic separation all that rare (22% of the same sample). However, Siewierska's work reveals that there really is something unusual about a form like ich bin, where the independent pronoun is obligatory yet the verb still agrees with it:

My cross-linguistic investigations of verbal person markers reveal that person markers which require the presence of accompanying independent nominals or pronominals are very rare. In a sample of 272 languages I found only two such markers, in Dutch and Vanimo, a New Guinea language of the Sko family. The only other languages that I have come across which display such markers are: English, German, Icelandic, Faroese, some Rhaeto-Romance dialects, Standard French and perhaps Labu, an Austronesian language of New Guinea, and Anejom a language of Vanatu. (Siewierska 2001:219

Perfect marking based on "have" also turns out to be a European feature with almost no parallels elsewhere, as shown by Dahl and Velupillai's WALS chapter on the perfect; they emerged and spread there only in the Middle Ages as an areal innovation. (Bridget Drinka has worked on this question in more detail.)

For Spenglerians, then, these two would at first sight seem to be very promising features to focus on - two globally very rare features, known to have emerged in Europe only after the fall of the Roman Empire, equally innovative in Romance and Germanic and prominent in both. However, there are naturally a couple of hitches.

Person marking requiring independent pronominals is essentially a North Sea feature; though found in French, it never made it far enough south to be shared by Italian and Spanish. Given the prominent role of Italy in Spengler's account of the emergence of Faustian culture, a Spenglerian would presumably be forced to dismiss this feature or to find some workaround. If he retained it, the obvious next task would be interesting: to examine the scattering of South Pacific languages which share this feature and see if their speakers' attitudes to the ego (?) show any relevant parallels to Western European ones.

Perfect marking with "have" shows a better match with the hypothesised Faustian culture-area - but extends a little beyond it, to Albania and to some extent Greece. (Indeed, even Algerian Arabic shows a rather marginal possessive perfect construction.) This presumably reflects Romance influence on these languages in the context of Western Europe's rise to power in the Mediterranean, though one wonders why nothing similar happened outside the Mediterranean. Not a problem for a historical linguist; but would a Spenglerian be forced to take this as evidence for a change in ego-conceptions in those regions, and seek corroboration for it in literature and painting?

Latin-speaking Muslims in medieval Africa

In the Middle Ages as today, Christians and Jews regularly called God "Allah" when speaking Arabic, just as Muslims did . It is perhaps not as well known that the converse was often also true: from a very early period, North African Muslims called God "Deus" when speaking Latin. This can clearly be seen on the 8th century Umayyad coins of Tunisia and Spain, which include statements such as:

• Non deus nisi Deus solus - There is no god but God alone (لا إله إلا الله)
• Deus magnus omnium creator - God is great, the creator of all things (الله أكبر خالق كل شيء)

I had always assumed it more or less stopped there, as Latin-speaking Muslims shifted to Arabic. But in the towns of southern Tunisia, the former Bilad ul-Jarid, Latin was still being spoken well into the 12th century. In his recent book La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval (p. 313), Mohamed Meouak uncovers a short recorded example of spoken African Latin from between these two periods, which otherwise seems to have escaped notice so far.

The 11th-century Ibadi history of Abu Zakariyya al-Warjlani, he gives a brief biography of the Rustamid governor Abu Ubayda Abd al-Hamid al-Jannawni (d. 826), who lived in the Nafusa Mountains of northwestern Libya. Before assuming his position, this future governor swore an oath:

Bi-llaahi (by God) in Arabic, and bar diyuu in town-language (بالحضرية), and abiikyush in Berber, I shall entrust the Muslims' affairs only to a person who says: "I am only a weak being, I am only a weak being."

In al-Shammakhi's later retelling, the languages are named as Arabic, Ajami, and Berber (بلغة العرب وبلغة العجم وبلغة البربر). As Mohamed Meouak correctly though hesitantly notes, diyuu must be Deo; he leaves bar uninterpreted, but it is equally clearly Latin per, making the expression an exact translation of Arabic bi-llaahi. The Berber form is probably somewhat miscopied, but seems to include the medieval Berber word for God, Yuc / Yakuc.

The earliest Romance text is the Old French part of the Oaths of Strasbourg, made in 842 and opening Pro Deo amur... "for the love of God". The Ibadi phrase recorded above curiously echoes this, although it predates it by several decades.

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.

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.

Lunja in Sicily, and more Lunja from Dellys

I've now read quite a few Lunja stories, enough to say that there is in fact a core Lunja story which is virtually identical in the mountains of Morocco and Kabylie, as well as a few more scattered stories about Lunja. But the biggest surprise for me was that a Lunja story virtually identical to the northern Moroccan ones is told in Sicily. You can read it online in Crane's (1885) translation, "Fair Angiola", and compare it with several obviously much less closely related stories from the rest of Europe. The name is interestingly distorted: I can only suppose that it represents an etymological hybrid of Lunja with Angela.

Its presence in Sicily should not be too surprising; Sicily was ruled by North African Muslims for several centuries, who are ancestral to many Sicilians today, and they even tell stories of the pan-Arab trickster Juha (baptised as Giufa). But comparison of the two versions is instructive. In North Africa, after they escape, the hero is carried away by a vulture, and Lunja has to disguise herself as a dog (in Morocco) or a slave (in Kabylie) in order to find a place in his parents' household while waiting for his return - a transparent metaphor for the situation of a new bride, who in this part of the world traditionally comes to live at her in-laws' house under the thumb of her mother-in-law. In Sicily, it's the witch she escaped from who curses her to become a dog, and she can't come to live with the hero's parents until the curse is lifted. I don't know what social reality that corresponds to in Sicily, if any, but the difference in the story does correspond to a difference in marriage customs: in Sicily and the rest of southern Italy, newlyweds traditionally started their own household ("neolocal"), rather than living with the groom's parents.

I've also managed to learn a little more about the Lunja story in Dellys - enough to confirm that, despite the substantial differences, it must be cognate. Apparently, at some point in the story, the hero comes and asks "waš ʕšatək əl-lila ya lunja, ya lunja?" ("What was your dinner tonight, Lundja, Lundja?") and she replies "ʕšati nŭxala, wə-mbati mʕa zzwayəl" ("My dinner is bran, and my sleep is with the livestock"), or words to that effect. This is immediately recognisable as what happens in the better-known versions of the story after they run away, while the hero is a captive. It also seems that the superhero team consists of her brothers, which suggests some possible leads. But more investigation is required...

Lingua franca / Sabir

Mi star trovato un bonu libro sopra il sabir: Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque. Avanti l'attaca del Fransis, l'Algerino parlar con il Rumi ne in esbagnol ne in italiano ne in fransis, ma in questa lingua, una miscolantza dell'italiano e dell'esbagnol, muchu facile anche per un muchachu. Il mariniero parlar il sabir non solo in Algieri ma in tutto portao straniero. Ma doppo 1830, il genti star imparato fransis, presto scordato il sabir. Ellu star lasciato giusto qualche parola in l'arab del mariniero, come in Dellys "timpu" (il tempo bello). Per ancora imparar, andar a A Glossary of Lingua Franca, di Alan Corré.