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.

Loanwords examined via Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer, freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have little experience of Atlantic languages as such, and therefore not much useful to say about most of the book (though it made me want to also read Merrill's work, with which much of it is in dialogue.) However, while proto-Fula-Sereer is dated by the author to 2000 years ago or more, some of the comparisons are relevant for studying contact with other regional families. Two forms are particularly interesting to me for exploring contact with Berber:

• *xiris "slay (vb)": Sereer xiris 'couper le cou, décapiter, égorger' (Merrill: 'slit the throat') ~ Fula hirsa 'égorger; sacrifier (un animal, pour en rendre licite la consommation)' [p. 63]
  Sereer x- : Fula h- is a very well represented regular correspondence; however, Fula -r- in -rC- would normally be lost in Sereer (p. 173), and no regular pattern of vowel elision is given in the book. The word also looks like Soninke xùrùsi "to kill by cutting the jugular vein", yet the vowel correspondence is difficult there as well. The explanation is to be found in their common source as a loanword from widespread (non-Zenaga!) Berber əɣrəs, with the same meaning. The religious importance of slaughtering an animal for meat in this precise manner is sufficient to motivate the borrowing, which would thus have spread with Islam - presumably through northern Saharan travellers rather than Zenaga scholars, given the form.
• *Guf "foam": Sereer kuf 'gonfler, écumer en bouillant', kuf a...al / kuf a... ak 'écume de la mer, à la marée montante' ~ Fula ngufo / (n)gufooji 'mousse, écume' (cf. Fula ƴufa 'mousser, écumer (trans.)', ƴufo 'mousse, écume) (Laala kuuɓ 'mousse', Nyun Gubaher gʊ-gʊfʊri 'mousse', Nyun Guñamolo tɪ-gʊf / tɪ-gʊf-ɔŋ 'écume, mousse', Joola Fonyi ka-gʊf 'bave, écume de mer, mousse du savon'). [p. 102]
  The correspondence of Sereer k to Fula ŋg (let alone ƴ) is completely irregular, with no other examples cited. A comparison to Berber forms such as Tamasheq tə-kuffe, Tamazight a-kuffi, Zenaga tu-ʔffukkaʔ-n "froth" is thus not ruled out, although the other Atlantic forms make it more likely that the resemblance is coincidental. Cp. also Zarma kùfú "écumer" and related forms in Songhay, which probably do derive from Berber.

Other forms are interesting to examine in the context of Songhay and Mande:

• *bon "bad (svb)": Sereer bon 'être mauvais, être méchant, être maigre', ponu l / ponu k "le mal [la chose mauvaise]' ~ Fula bona 'être mauvais, être mal; être méchant', mbonki / bonkiji 'méchanceté ; malfaisance ; perversité' (widespread root in Atlantic and Mel) [p. 86]
  Also widespread well beyond; looks originally Atlantic, but the suffixed vowel in Bambara bɔ̀nɛ and Zarma bòné betrays a borrowing path via Soninke rather than directly from Fula.
• *bul "blue (svb)": Sereer bule 'bleu' ~ Fula bula 'rincer au bleu (du linge blanc); passer au bleu de lessive; colorer en bleu pâle' (The root *bulu is common for Atlantic and Mel languages. It is not a European borrowing). [p. 86]
  If so, then this is also the source for Bambara búla and Zarma búlà "blue", and other forms across the region. But this is a widespread Wanderwort, and one wonders how a European source was ruled out.
• *mbedd "road, path": Sereer mbed o...ong/ped k 'petit chemin laissé entre deux champs à l'hivernage, ruelle, rue, allée" ~ Fula mbedda / mbeddaaji 'grand route' (Wolof mbedd 'rue', Jaad mbɛdɛ 'grand route'; Manjaku umbɛra 'chemin carrossable, route'). May be an ancient Soninke borrowing: < béddè 'rue principale, route'. [p. 87]
  Gao Songhay has albedda / mbedda, with an interesting prefix alternation; Heath very tentatively suggests a link to Arabic blṭ, but that probably doesn't work.
• *Birq (mb-/w-) "manure": Sereer mbiqi n 'fumier, tas de fumier' ~ Fula wirga 'labourer le sol en éparpillant la terre (en luttant au sol ou pour la mélanger ou encore pour brouiller des traces...); disperser du fumier (sur un champ)' [p. 88]
  The correspondence mb:w is not regular, arguably reflecting differences in consonant mutation; only four examples are found, although they look like plausible retentions. The loss of r in Sereer would be regular (p. 173). The correspondence of q to g does not appear regular either (p. 192), unless this is related to the preceding r; one would expect q:kk. It's just as well that the correspondence is irregular, since the Fula term is clearly at least in part a borrowing from Songhay, not vice versa: it reflects a merger of two tonally distinct verbs, found in Zarma as bírjí "fumer le sol; fumier" and bìrjí "mélanger, embrouiller", used in the expression laabu birji "mélanger la terre". Conceivably the "spread manure" sense could be original to Fula, with only the "mix" sense being borrowed; but it strains credulity to imagine Zarma borrowing the same verb but giving it two different tonal patterns depending on the intended meaning. Soninke boroko "manure" is suspiciously similar, but the vowels rule it out as an intermediary.
• *gaw "hunt (vb); throw (vb)": Sereer xaƴ 'lancer, envoyer un projectile, tirer une arme à feu; lancer un dard, pêcher au harpon', nGawlax n / qawlax k ~ nGaƴlax n / qaƴlax k 'la chasse [gibier]' ~ Fula gawoo 'chasser, être chasseur (professionel)'. [p. 111; poorly justified correspondences - 5 words for x:g]
  The Fula term is certainly the same root as (Songhay) Zarma găw "hunter", gáwáy "hunt (v.)". The term doesn't seem to be used in Mande, from a quick look. If the Sereer form is related to the Fula one, then the direction of borrowing must be Fula to Songhay. However, the correspondence looks rather poorly justified. For x-:g-, only 5 correspondances are given, including such eminently borrowable words as "indigo" and "okra". For -ƴ:-w, the expected regular correspondence is rather ƴ:ƴ (p. 192), cf. "limp" (p. 180), "lick" (p. 174). The question of borrowing direction thus remains open.

The following cases may be only coincidentally similar, but perhaps they reflect contact at a much earlier period in prehistory, related to the spread of the practice of milking:

• *Gang "chest": Sereer ngang n / kang k ~ Fula gannde / ganndeeje (Fula < gang-nde?) [p. 103; irregular initial correspondence with only two other examples found)
  Cp. Zarma gàndè "chest".
• *gand "nipple": Sereer hand 'être pleine (femelle), être en gestation, porter [femelle]', hand l / qand a...ak 'mamelle (des animaux), pis', and l / and a...ak 'mamelle (des animaux), pis, téton, tétine' (to note a variety of Sereer forms: h-,q-,Ø-) ~ Fula ʔenndu ~ ʔenɗi 'sein, mamelle; pis, trayon'
  Cp. Zarma gánì "udder".

The Fulani abstract noun formative -(aa)ku is analysed (p. 231) as an "extension suffix" -aa- plus a class suffix -ku explained as a taboo-motivated allomorph of -ngu, citing Koval 2000:230 (a source in Russian). This requires further investigation; it certainly cannot be unrelated to Soninke -aaxu with the same function, but what was the direction of borrowing?

Efforts to exclude Arabic loanwords were largely successful, but even so, one crept in: Fula waabiliire "pluie d'orage" is from Arabic waabil rather than proto-Fula-Sereer *(b)waam/b (p. 79). On the other hand, Sereer tuɓaaɓ and Fula tuubako "European, white man" are derived from nonexistent Arabic *tubaab (pp. 115-116), following a long if poorly evidenced tradition connecting this to the real Arabic word ṭabiib "doctor".

"Punching up/down" in comedy: dating a lexical innovation in English

Any educated English speaker nowadays is likely to be familiar with the idea that comedy should punch up, not punch down: i.e., that it's okay to make fun of people more powerful than yourself, but not of people less powerful. But I remember being struck by the novelty of this expression when I first encountered it, well into adulthood. Notwithstanding the recency illusion, a bit of research suggests that my impression was correct. The earliest attestations I've been able to track down online go back to July 2012, in connection with a controversy about rape jokes made by some comedian named Daniel Tosh:

"Kilstein trots out the old trope that all comics are victims who have been bullied and that’s why we’re doing standup. Total bullshit, of course, but he uses the tired cliche to glorify himself and others– who are “punching up”– and characterizes Tosh and others as tyrants or bully comics who are now punching down." (Brian McKim & Traci Skene, Tosh.Opus, 16 July 2012)

"The answer is that in both cases, the comedians were “punching down.”
Punching down is a concept in which you’re assumed to have a measurable level of power and you’re looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you’ve picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying." (the pseudonymous "Kaoru Negisa", Punching Up, 19 July 2012)

All three writers are, naturally, American, and at least two of them are standup comedians themselves. Presumably the expression would already have been in use in some circles - perhaps backstage in standup comedy - for some years before that. But internal evidence suggests that it was still not assumed to be familiar to a general audience; both sources feel the need to put it between quotation marks on first use, and one even provides a definition, treating it as a metaphorical extension of a meaning used in the context of fights rather than as a familiar term in the context of comedy. (As further evidence, one may point to its complete absence from this 2012 Jezebel article about the same controversy; had it been written a few years later, it would seem unthinkable not to use the term "punching down" in expressing these ideas.) The term's use on MSNBC (as mentioned in the first source) would have been a good first step towards making the term familiar to a wider audience. By 2014, it was already appearing in The Atlantic (""We like standing up for the little guy, we like punching up," Bolton said."). On Google Books, however, the earliest hits in the relevant sense show up only in 2016, at which time the "'punching up' vs. 'punching down' dichotomy" could still be described as a way in which this tension has "recently been encoded" (Taboo Comedy.) Before that date, the object of "punching down" mostly seems to have been bread dough.

Can anyone find an attestation predating July 2012? And does this new terminology represent a new concept of comedians' moral duties, or just relabel an older one? If the latter, what did earlier American comedians call it?

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Via @sanddorn on Twitter and Matt Farthing, a 2011 attestation - once again by a stand-up comedian, but from England this time.

"And a lot of comedians do jokes that I think aren’t funny enough to justify what they are about, and there’s plenty of ways you can be offensive without ‘punching downwards’. When FB does jokes about Palestine or black people there’s much more of a point behind it really. But it’s difficult because that’s his job, that’s how he sees himself – as this comedian who’ll say anything and make jokes about anything." (Richard Herring, 18 January 2011, )

And using this, I find that Ben Zimmer managed to discover an even earlier attestation, in a good discussion of this term's origins: a blogpost, also by Richard Herring, in December 2010. Note that, in these earliest attestations, it appears as part of a broader metaphor of likening satire to punching rather than as a preset cliché: "the weak punching the strong, rather than the strong bullying the weak", "Though there are no rules, comedy, I feel, should be siding with the weak and the oppressed and punching either inwards (at the comedian him or herself) or upwards (at the powerful or the oppressors)."

The metaphor derives, as Zimmer notes, from the world of boxing: "If you’re punching up, you’re taking on an opponent who might be taller or perhaps in a higher weight class, while punching down would be for an opponent who’s shorter or in a lower weight class." But its transfer to comedy doesn't appear to have been direct: the earliest relevant metaphorical uses found by Zimmer reflect power differentials in the contexts of British football (2002), then American politics (2006).

Ngər "die out"

In Algerian Arabic, ngər نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; nəgru نڨرو "they died out" typically means they died leaving no descendants bearing the family name. I've usually heard it in reference to small families that had no sons, but it can also be caused by mass killing, as recent events horribly remind us; expressions used in the news, alongside "wiped out", include the oddly bureaucratic formulation "erased from the civil registry".

This verb has no connection to Arabic نقر naqara "peck, hollow out, etc.", as its non-emphatic r betrays. It is a denominal verb formed within Arabic from the Amazigh (Berber) noun anəggaru "end, latter", derived from the verb gʷri "remain behind" (originally *ăgrəβ; forms cited are from Kabyle). Nevertheless, it has been been reborrowed from Arabic into a wide range of Amazigh languages, e.g. Kabyle ngər, glossed by Dallet as "die leaving behind neither descendants nor relatives; die out (family); be exterminated".

This concept, unambiguously expressed by a single word in most North African languages, doesn't seem to be lexicalised in English. Is it lexicalised elsewhere?

More miscellaneous Darja notes

These may or may not be of interest to anyone but myself; I'm posting them essentially so I don't forget them.

A couple of idioms:

• ər-riħ f-əš-šbək الريح في الشبك "wind in the net" - empty talk
• ʕla šufət əl-ʕin على شوفة العين "on the sight of the eye" - as far as the eye can see
• ṣufa ṭayṛa صوفة طايرة "a flying piece of wool" - flighty, capricious
• tɣiḍni ʕəmṛi تغيضني عمري "my life makes me feel pity" - I feel sorry for myself
• qʷʕədna ki ʕəbd waħəd قُعدنا كي عبْذ واحد "we stayed like one person" - we kept working together

And another proverb: əɣʷləq bab-ək ma txəwwən jaṛ-ək اغُلق بابك ما تخوّن جارك "Close your door and you won't make your neighbour a thief" - I guess you could loosely render this as "Good fences make good neighbours". Note that the corresponding verb xwən "steal" خْون forms a minimal pair with xun خون "betray", confirming that semivowels are distinct from the corresponding vowels.

As discussed earlier, the name of the town of Djinet is pronounced variously with a final t or d. As a convincing argument for the latter pronunciation being more correct (if the historical evidence hadn't been sufficient), someone pointed out to me that people from Djinet are called jnanda جناندة. The version with t presumably reflects Turkish influence as well as folk etymology.

fut فوت "pass" is used as a serial verb in a construction whose exact semantics I need to figure out better, typically in subordinate clauses: ila fətt šədditu إلا فتّ شدّيتهُ "once you've grasped it..."

Two interesting bits of maritime vocabulary are walyun واليون "apprentice not-yet-sailor who cleans the fishing boat in port" and ṛədfun ردفون "shrimp net". For the latter, I wonder if the first element might be Spanish red "net"; but I can't see what the fun would be in that case. For the former, I hardly even know how to find out what the translation into other languages around the Mediterranean might be. Suggestions for etymologies are welcome!

(Update thanks to jitaenow on Twitter: walyun is from Neapolitan guaglione, and is ultimately cognate with "galleon".)

Delicious Berber apples

While most Berber varieties use an Arabic loanword for "apple", several are reported to preserve a non-Arabic word: Jerbi a-ḏəffu (Brugnatelli), Nefusi dəffu (Motylinski), Zuara a-dəffu (Baghni). This word was derived by Vycichl (1952) from Punic *tappūḥ, a derivation generally accepted in subsequent work; Kossmann (2013:146) explains various forms along the lines of ta-dəffaḥ-t as blends between this and the Arabic form. Such an etymology makes sense on extra-linguistic as well as linguistic grounds: domestic apples originated much further east, in Central Asia, so a loanword is expected a priori, and given the important role of Carthage in early North African history, Punic appears the obvious source.

Talking to a speaker from near Batna yesterday, however, I realised that the Chaoui word for "apple" is really aḍfu, with an emphatic d. This cannot be explained in terms of regular sound change from the Punic form: the distinction between d and ḍ is in general very stable in Berber, particularly in the absence of any adjacent emphatic or laryngeal, and the apparent loss of gemination is also irregular.

The solution is Berber-internal. In more westerly varieties (cf. Nait-Zerrad, p. 451), we find a root ḍf-t for "taste, savour": Ait Atta t-aṭfi (verb iṭfi-t), Tashelhiyr tiḍfi (verb aḍfu-t), Zenaga taṭfih - also borrowed into Korandje təṭfi. While its geographical distribution seems relatively limited, nothing about this root suggests a foreign origin, and its attestation in Zenaga suggests a priori that it goes back to proto-Berber. We may therefore plausibly assume that at some point it was familiar to Chaoui speakers, if it isn't still. An otherwise unanalysable term for "apple" would therefore have been reinterpreted as, essentially "the tasty one".

Power and nephewhood from the Ahaggar to Hombori

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt, impf. ti-dubu-t). There are no compelling cognates for this in Berber outside Tuareg, as Naït-Zerrad's comparative dictionary confirms; at best, one might speculatively compare Siwi dabb "a lot" and Tarifit dab 'have an appetite', both within Macro-Zenati. The word can therefore not be reconstructed for proto-Berber. A better candidate for 'be able' in proto-Berber would seem to be *ăzmər; cf. Awjila, Kabyle əzmər "be able", Tamajeq əzmər "stand up to, endure", etc. The corresponding verbal noun a-dabu has, however, been borrowed from Tuareg into Standard Algerian Tamazight to provide the noun "power"; its widespread use in political discourse in reference to le pouvoir has made this one of the more successful neologisms.

The Tamahaq of the Ahaggar Mountains attests a second sense of dub-ət that seems to be isolated even within Tuareg. Foucauld glosses it (p. 153) as:

2. ("by extension") 'be able to succeed someone (to an office), by virtue of his being your maternal uncle'
3. ("by extension") 'have as maternal uncle'

It yields the equally Ahaggar-specific word tădabit "person(s) of either sex with the right to succeed to someone's suzerainty due to the latter being their maternal uncle", used in the Ahaggar instead of pan-Tuareg tegăze. Examples include (retranscribed, perhaps imperfectly):

Biska d Mənnək ăddoben Musa daɣ ăra n tăññaten.
Biska and Mennek are potential successors to Musa by virtue of being sisters' children.

Luki d Mikela ăddoben Musa kaskab.
Luki and Mikela are potential successors in suzerainty to Musa.

Barka wa-n ăkli yăddobăt akli hin Mămmădu kaskab.
Barka the slave has as maternal uncle my slave Mămmădu, in a maternal uncle-nephew relationship.

Note the very un-Berber-looking word kaskab, lacking even the characteristic Berber nominal prefix, in the latter two examples. In the not obviously related sense of "metallic part of a camel bridle", akăskabbu (Tamasheq kiskab) is attested throughout Tuareg; but kaskab, in the relevant sense, appears just as unique to the Ahaggar as this sense of dub-ət. Foucauld's entry on the term runs to three pages (pp. 918-920), with neat kinship diagrams, but starts "in the direct line of succession to suzerainty, from maternal uncle to nephew or niece (in a kinship relation of maternal uncle to child of full sister or maternal sister (when speaking of succession to suzerainty over vassals))". One might be tempted to link the first half to Tuareg kus "inherit", but the vowel and the absence of any good explanation for the second half militates against it.

Not to beat around the bush, both dub-ət and kaskab look like great candidates for non-Berber substratum vocabulary loaned into Tuareg, especially in the kinship sense. Considered from this perspective, a non-Berber comparison for the former immediately presents itself: Songhay *túbí "inherit (v.); inheritance (n.)", with its derivative *túbá "sister's child (of either sex)" (the latter may be absent in Zarma and Dendi; both are absent from Northern Songhay, which substitutes Tuareg loanwords). Reflexes of the former include Zarma, Gorwol, Hombori, Djougou túbú (in Hombori also "succeed as chief", just as in Tuareg), Gao and Timbuktu tubu (in Gao also "bequeath, leave (to)"), Kikara túbí ...; of the latter, Gorwol túbéy, Gao tubey / tuba, Hombori túbê, Kikara túbá, Timbuktu tuba. (For modern Timbuktu Heath instead documents kaaya for "inherit", but Dupuis-Yacouba recorded "toubou".)

To my mind, a borrowing from Songhay into Tuareg looks more appealing, as I would expect a high-low tone if it came from Tuareg to reflect Tuareg stress; but the opposite direction could also be defended. Either way, however, there can be no reasonable doubt, given the good formal match and perfect semantic correspondence, that the Ahaggar forms are related to the Songhay ones. (Oddly enough, Nicolaï appears to have missed this connection in his wide-ranging hunt for Berber matches, instead focusing on Kabyle (originally Arabic) ətbəʕ "follow".) Yet their distribution is almost the opposite of what one would expect: in both groups, they are attested only in the varieties least in contact with the other. This suggests that the contact situation they reflect happened quite early, rather than being recent.

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(References consulted include, for Tuareg, the dictionaries of Foucauld, Heath, and Alojaly; for Awjila, Paradisi; for cross-Berber comparison, Naït-Zerrad; for Songhay, Heath, White-Kaba, Ducroz and Charles, Zima, and Dupuis-Yacouba, not to mention Nicolaï's La force des choses.)

Scattered etymological notes

I'm posting these mostly so I don't forget them...

Algerian Arabic jəḥmum جحموم "blackbird", and its Kabyle counterpart ajeḥmum, derive from Classical Arabic yaḥmūm يحموم "soot-black". This otherwise very irregular change y- > j- is perfectly paralleled in another animal name of the form yaCCūC: jəṛbuʕ جربوع "jerboa" from yarbūʕ يربوع. Could this be the regular outcome of this particular template? We need to check if any other yaCCūC animal names have survived.

The Korandje word for "vulva", imən, looks phonologically like an obvious match for Berber iman "soul, self". However, I could never see any sufficiently clear connection between the two semantically. The missing link is provided by Colin's (1918:118) description of the Moroccan Arabic dialect of Taza: there, rōḥ is glossed as a euphemistic term for "vulve de la jument ou de la vache". Is this attested in Berber itself anywhere, I wonder?

Another Korandje word, tasənɣəyt, refers to a type of rock; after Paleolithic discoveries near Tabelbala, paleoarcheologists ended up giving its name to an Acheulian cleaver type, the "Tachenghit" cleaver. This seems to match Jijel Arabic ašənɣud "pierre lisse (pour broyer)" (Marçais 1954:333), although Hassaniya Arabic may offer a more direct point of comparison. I don't remember seeing this in any Berber dictionary so far; is that attested?

Yaqṭīn as substratum vocabulary?

A strong contender for the most obviously ridiculous etymology in Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary of The Quran is his attempt to derive yaqṭīn "gourd" from a "garbled form" of Hebrew qîqāyôn (p. 309). Is it possible to do better?

Like ḍarīʕ, yaqṭīn is barely attested in early Islamic-era literature apart from Qur'ānic allusions and botanical texts. However, in this case the grammarians also take an interest, due to the word's slightly unusual form. Sībawayh (d. 796) notes it as one of two nouns of the form yaCCīC(the similar pattern yaCCūC, mainly for animal names, is more productive), along with a yellow-flowered desert plant called yaʕḍīd (Launaea mucronata). The latter word is well-attested in modern Arabic dialects, eg Najdi ʕaḍīd - and has passed into Korandje, the Songhay language of an oasis in southwestern Algeria, as yaʕḍud; I first heard it there, in a chant from a children's story:

aɣ a išən kadda, I'm a little goat,
aɣ a nɣa tantərama, I eat tantərama,
aɣ a nɣa lyaʕḍud, I eat Launaea.

Now, yaʕḍīd is presumably derived from the root ʕḍd, "support" (etc.); despite its scrawniness, the plant holds itself well above the ground. A Hebrew or Aramaic origin is obviously out of the question, given the ḍ. Ibn Durayd (d. 933) cites a third word of this form whose origin is clearer: yaʕqīd "thickened (crystallized?) honey", related to 'aʕqada "thicken (a liquid)" (ويَعْقيد: عسل يُعقد حتى يَخْثُر). By analogy, one would expect yaqṭīn to be derived from the root qṭn, and this is exactly what al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144) not unreasonably proposes:

واليقطين: كل ما ينسدح على وجه الأرض ولا يقوم على ساق كشجر البطيخ والقثاء والحنظل، وهو يفعيل من قطن بالمكان إذا قام به. وقيل هو: الدباء.
Yaqṭīn is anything that sprawls on the surface of the earth and does not stand on a stalk, like the melon and the snake cucumber and the colocynth. It is (of the form) yaCCīC, from qṭn, "it dwells/settles" in a place if it comes up there. It is also said to be the gourd.

However, the fact that Arabic has only three words of this form - two of them plant names, and one related to honey extraction - should arouse our suspicions. If a language has a small class of morphologically anomalous nouns all relating to wild food-gathering activities, the hypothesis that should immediately spring to mind is: this is substratum vocabulary. In other words, these three words - especially yaqṭīn and yaʕḍīd - should be suspected of being borrowings, not from some garbled Hebrew source, but from the indigenous Semitic languages spoken in the Arabian peninsula before the spread of Arabic. If so, Western Qur'ān studies' excessive focus on written sources seems more likely to obscure linguistic history than to reveal it.

(Yes, you didn't misread that - epigraphic evidence suggests that Arabic expanded from northwestern Arabia into the rest of the peninsula within historic times. Ahmad Al-Jallad has been doing some interesting work on this issue, summarized briefly on this Twitter thread.)

fatta: a loan from Chadic into Songhay?

The Proto-Chadic word for "go out" was reconstructed by Newman and Ma (1966) as *p-t-, with attested reflexes in all primary subgroups of the family; the best known of these is of course (West Chadic A.1) Hausa fìtā.  The vowels vary across languages, and there is often no final vowel.  Only one subgroup, as far as I can see on a quick check, shows the consistent vocalisation *patā: the Bole languages (West Chadic A.2), spoken in Nigeria's Yobe State along the boundary between Hausa and Kanuri.  Thus Bole pàtā, Ngamo hàtâ, Karekare fàtā.

Most Songhay varieties have reflexes of two near-synonyms for "go out": *hùnú and *fáttá.  Usually, the distinction seems to be roughly "leave (a place or event)" vs. "go out of (an enclosed or concealed space)".  In Northern Songhay - the subgroup most isolated from the rest for longest, spoken in the Sahara - only reflexes of *hùnú seem to be attested, covering both senses (eg Korandje hnu).  This could be interpreted as reflecting Northern Songhay's general tendency to reduce its inherited vocabulary by widening the usage of generic terms.  In light of the Chadic data, however, it is tempting to interpret it the other way around: did Northern Songhay preserve the original situation, while a West Chadic borrowing spread throughout the rest of the family via the Niger River?

Drawing water in Songhay and Zenaga

Almost every attested Songhay variety (Tasawaq is perhaps the only exception) has a reflex of the proto-Songhay word *gúrú "draw water" (from the river, from a pond, from a well, etc.)  To express this concept, most Berber varieties (including Tashelhiyt, Kabyle, Tumzabt, Ghadames, Awjila, Tamajeq...) use reflexes of a verb *āgum "draw water", which is thus equally securely reconstructible for proto-Berber.  Zenaga, however, has a rather different verb: ägur "puiser l'eau d'un puits, remonter le delou, tirer la corde du seau; faire parvenir qqc (à qqn)" and "se lever (astre)", with an irregular corresponding noun tgäʔrih "eau tirée du puits".  It seems to be distinct from äggur "pull".

The only Berber cognates Taine-Cheikh suggests for ägur are reflexes of a verb that may be reconstructed as *agir "throw; rise (of sun)" (eg Tashelhiyt gr, Kabyle gər, Chaoui gər).  Presumably the semantic shift of "throw" to "draw water" would be explained via the idea of throwing the bucket down the well.  If the comparison is accepted, then the verb shows an innovative semantic shift specific to Zenaga.  (It would be interesting to see if Tetserrét shares this, but unfortunately the relevant term doesn't seem to have been recorded.)

If the Zenaga word is indeed cognate to the suggested Berber forms, then it seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that proto-Songhay borrowed *gúrú "draw water" from an early relative of Zenaga.  This would fit well with the evidence for a Western Berber language having played an important role in the history of at least northern Mali.  If not, then it would become tempting to draw a conclusion much harder to fit with what is known of the region's history: that Zenaga borrowed the word from proto-Songhay.

Pougetoux

Ever since she got interviewed on TV ten days ago, the 19-year-old president of the student union at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Maryam Pougetoux, has been making headlines - not for anything she said, but simply for wearing a hijab while she said it. In the name of defending freedom and feminism, the Minister of the Interior himself had the gall to criticise this brave young Frenchwoman as "marking her difference from French society". But as a historical linguist watching all this, I found myself wondering: where does the name "Pougetoux" come from? It turns out it can be traced several thousand years back:

• Pougetoux is a diminutive of:
• Pouget, which is a diminutive (in -et) of:
• Occitan puech / pueg / puog / poujhë "hill", which comes from:
• Latin podium "balcony", which comes from:
• Greek πόδιον "foot of a vase", a diminutive (in -ion) of:
• Greek πούς "foot", which comes from:
• Proto-Indo-European *pod-s "foot"

In the course of this long history, no less than three different diminutive suffixes have been accreted on to the original root (although I'm not quite sure about the identity of that -oux.) I wonder whether that generalizes; do words meaning "hill" tend to accrete more and more diminutive suffixes as they develop over time?

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.

Qaswarah revisited: a Qur'anic hapax in Modern South Arabian

A long time ago, I posted some rather speculative musings on the minor mystery of the allegedly Ethiopic word qaswarah قسورة in the Qur'ān, usually considered to mean "lion". An anonymous commenter years later came up with a much better but still rather speculative idea:

Research substantiates that both “lion” and “hunter” are plausible according to analyses of Proto-Highland Eastern Cushitic wherein “kas” is to stab, pierce or cut and the suffix of “wara” creates “agent nouns”. In modern “Ethiopic” languages such as Tigrinya and Ge’ez (as well as in some other African languages) the word “Wagatwara” means “hunter” and in earlier etymons of this word the “g” is rendered a “q” and the “t” is rendered an “s”.

But just now, looking through a Hobyot vocabulary (Nakano 2013:215), I came across an entry that makes all this discussion unnecessary. In Hobyot, "panther" is ḳáyṣ̂ər, with a plural ḳaṣ̂áwrət - clearly related to the term used in the Qur'ān, and clearly (given the ṣ̂) not borrowed from Arabic. The meaning corresponds closely enough to most commentators' consensus on qaṣwarah, while the location - in the extreme south of Arabia - helps explain why the term might have been associated in their minds with Ethiopia. In fact, the irregular correspondence of Hobyot ṣ̂ to Arabic s would suggest a loan into Arabic, rather than common inheritance, even if we didn't know how much this word puzzled the commentators.

Incidentally, the minority interpretation "archers" is presumably based on Persian, where -var added to a noun means "possessor of" - presumably, Arabic qaus "bow" + Persian -var would yield "bowman", and the feminine suffix -ah would form the plural as so often with nouns of profession. In light of the Hobyot form, it also should be clear that the majority of commentators were right to reject this interpretation.

Jerusalem's suppletive gentilic

Jerusalem stands out among Arab cities today not only culturally and religiously, but morphologically as well. In Modern Standard Arabic, the city of Jerusalem is al-Quds القدس, and the gentilic suffix is -ī (properly -iyy), but "Jerusalemite" is Maqdisī مقدسي rather than the expected *Qudsī (though the latter is attested as a personal name). As a general cross-linguistic rule of thumb, morphological irregularities are most likely with older, more basic words. Yet this type of irregularity is rather unusual, even among the region's oldest and most prominent cities: Dimashq (Damascus) yields Dimashqī (Damascene), Baghdād yields Baghdādī, Makkah (Mecca) yields Makkī... How did it arise?

It turns out that, in the early Muslim era, it was formed in a perfectly regular way. In his masterwork, the medieval geographer Al-Maqdisī (d. 991) calls his hometown Bayt al-Maqdis بيت المقدس ("house of holiness"), a title now largely supplanted by al-Quds ("the holy"). It survives to the present in certain religious contexts or as a poetic synonym, not only in Arabic but in Kabyle Berber as well: H. Genevois ("Croyances") notes a traditional popular belief that the souls of the dead gather in Bit Elmeqdes, corresponding exactly to Al-Maqdisī's boast that Jerusalem is "the site of the Day of Judgement, and from it is the Resurrection, and to it is the Gathering" (عرصة القيامة ومنها النشر وإليها الحشر).

A quick search of Alwaraq's heritage library suggests that the shorter name "al-Quds" became popular around the period of the Crusades, when Jerusalem was as much a subject of dispute as now. The earliest attestation I can spot on a cursory search (excluding a work falsely attributed to al-Wāqidī) is a mention by the Andalusi traveller Ibn Jubayr (1185), who notes that "between [Kerak] and al-Quds is a day's march or so, and it is the best location in Palestine" (بينه وبين القدس مسيرة يوم أو اشف قليلاً، وهو سرارة أرض فلسطين). Very likely a longer search would yield slightly older attestations. By the time of the next major Palestinian writer I notice in the collection - Al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363) - al-Quds had clearly become the unmarked term for the town; it recurs constantly in his work.

The name Bayt al-Maqdis was thus replaced in practice by the shorter and catchier name al-Quds a good 800 years ago, yet the corresponding gentilic continues to preserve the older name. Since 1967, the Israeli government has imposed a third name as its official term for the city in Arabic: Ūrshalīm, a transcription of the Syriac name used in Christian liturgical contexts which provoked "furious ridicule" from residents (Segev 2007:492). Since this usage remains entirely unknown to most Arabic speakers, it is unlikely to have much impact on Arabic usage. Yet the timing of the shift from Bayt al-Maqdis to al-Quds reminds us that political upheaval impacts placenames as well as people's lives.

Butterfly-collecting: the history of an insult

Chomsky's barb about butterfly-collecting has echoed in the ears of descriptive linguists for decades, and is sometimes blamed for the withering away of field linguistics over the late 20th century. The earliest published version I could track down via Google is:

"You can also collect butterflies and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it does not do so." (Chomsky 1979:57)

So I was surprised to find a similar statement attributed to the eminent early 20th century physicist Ernest Rutherford, quoted by Dyson (2006:179) as saying "Physics is the only real science; the rest are butterfly-collecting." How did this metaphor make its way into linguistics?

For a start, it appears that Dyson's version is somewhat inexact. The Rutherford quote appears to belong to the oral tradition of physics, rather than deriving from any publication of his; the earliest version that I can find on Google Books is from Baker (1942:96):

"These ideas are crystallized in the statement, attributed to Rutherford, that science consists of physics and stamp- collecting. This is an epigram intended to mean that particular objects are uninteresting : it is the extreme view-point of a general analytical scientist."

The shift from stamps to butterflies came decades later, first attested only in 1974. In fact, the derisive comparison to butterfly collecting seems likely to have seeped into linguistics not from physics but from, of all subjects, anthropology. Edmund Leach (1961:2) makes it the central metaphor of his assault of Radcliffe-Brown:

"Radcliffe-Brown maintained that the objective of social anthropology was the 'comparison of social structures'. [...] Comparison is a matter of butterfly collecting — of classification, of the arrangement of things according to their types and subtypes. The followers of Radcliffe-Brown are anthropological butterfly collectors and their approach to their data has certain consequences."

Anthropologists would reuse the metaphor in debates over the distinction between different types of comparison in linguistics itself, whether endorsing it like Lehman (1964:387) or rebutting the criticism like Sarana (1965:29). From there it seems to have been taken up by Chomskyan linguists as an argument against Bloomfield's "disovery procedures", if I am correctly interpreting the incomplete fragment of Ferber and Lynd (1971) that I can find on Google Books:

"These procedures, which are largely a matter of classification, have been uncharitably called "butterfly-collecting" in the manner of pre-Darwinian biology: they account for a detailed "external" description of each language (what Chomsky [...]"

Geoffrey Leech (1969:4) deploys the same metaphor against rhetoric:

"Connected to this is a second weakness of traditional rhetoric - what I am tempted to call its 'train-spotting' or 'butterfly-collecting' attitude to style. This is the frame of mind in which the identification, classification and labelling of specimens of given stylistic devices becomes an end in itself [...]"

The redeployment of this argument to belittle descriptive work in general, rather than particular approaches, seems to be attributable to David DeCamp (1971:158), criticizing sociolinguistics from a Chomskyan perspective:

"The weakest theory is a 'functional' model, which only relates outputs from the black box to inputs, e. g. a grammar which would generate all and only the sentences of a language; the goal of much scientific research is to replace such a functional model with a 'structural' model, one that makes the stronger claim of describing what is actually in the black box. Mendel's 'genes' were only a functional model of genetics; the research on the DNA and RNA molecules has yielded a model that is much more nearly structural. Thus one branch of biology has at last become a true science; general linguistics is approaching that status; sociolinguistics is still in the pre-theoretical, butterfly-collecting stage, with no theory of its own and uncertain whether it has any place in general linguistic theory."

He then clarifies (ibid:170) that:

"'Butterfly collecting' is simply the collection of a whole lot of information toward the day when somebody can produce a formal theory. Now this is valuable, this is useful. We need a lot of empirical data collection also. I certainly would not want to imply by this that in this I'm saying that there is not an importance to the kinds of things that the Urban Language Survey is doing at CAL, or Bill Labov's work in New York. This is immensely important. What I am saying is that although it is necessary, it is not sufficient. We've got enough data now; it is about time to guide further research by means of some sort of a theory."

So, if we have to blame one person for reducing descriptive linguistics to butterfly collecting, it looks like it would be David DeCamp, at least until someone tracks down an earlier citation. But that misses a broader point: the disparaging comparison of data gathering to butterfly collecting seems to have become rather pervasive across a variety of disciplines in the late 20th century - including biology itself, which may well be part of where DeCamp got it from. All the way back in 1964, Theodosius Dobzhansky - who had been an ardent butterfly collector before becoming a prominent evolutionary biologist - comments sarcastically that:

"The notion has gained some currency that the only worthwhile biology is molecular biology. All else is "bird watching" or "butterfly collecting." Bird watching and butterfly collecting are occupations manifestly unworthy of serious scientists!" (Dobzhansky 1964:443)

Had he lived to see molecular biology turn to such quintessentially descriptive, list-making pursuits as the Human Genome Project, he would surely have enjoyed having the last laugh.

(If you have any earlier citations bearing on the history of this metaphor in linguistics, please tell me below!)

Shoes in Songhay and West Chadic: towards an etymology

The proto-Songhay word for "(pair of) shoes, sandals" is *tàgmú (Zarma tà:mú, Kandi tà:mú, Gao taam-i, Hombori tà:mí, Kikara tă:m, Djenne taam, Tadaksahak taɣmú, Korandje tsaɣmmu). It is evidently related to a less widely attested verb *tàgmá "step on" (Zarma tà:mú, Gao taama, Hombori tà:mà, Djenne taam). (Velar stop codas are lost in all of Songhay except the Northern branch, leaving behind either compensatory lengthening or a w; see Souag 2012.)

In Hausa, the word for "shoe, boot, sandal" is tà:kàlmí: (borrowed directly into the Songhay (Dendi) variety of Djougou as tàkăm). Within Hausa, this likewise corresponds to a verb tá:kà: "step on". The two-way similarity is striking, but if there was borrowing, which way did it go? A cognate set in Schuh (2008) casts some light on the question.

Hausa belongs to the West Chadic family, in which the best comparison to Hausa "shoe" seems to be Bole tàkà(:), with no obvious cognates within its own subgroup, Bole-Tangale (Ngamo tà:hò looks similar, but Ngamo h seems normally to correspond to Bole p, not k.) For "step on", however, Schuh points to a potential cognate set in a slightly more distantly related West Chadic subgroup, Bade. In this subgroup, we have Gashua Bade tà:gɗú, Western Bade tàgɗú, Ngizim tàkɗú which Schuh analyses as *tàk- plus an unproductive verbal extension -ɗu supported by Bade-internal evidence, eg tə̀nkùku "press" vs. tə̀nkwàkùɗu "massage". Within Bole-Tangale, one might speculate that Gera tàndə̀- is cognate, but Gera seems to be known only from short wordlists, so that would be difficult to show.

So the comparative evidence provides some support for the idea that Hausa tá:kà: "step on" goes back to proto-West Chadic. If tà:kàlmí: "shoe" could be regularly derived from this verb within Chadic, then the answer would appear clear: Songhay borrowed it from Chadic. However, while Hausa frequently forms deverbal nouns with a suffix -i: (Newman (2000:157), there seems to be no plausible language-internal explanation for the -lm-. In Songhay, on the other hand, a suffix -mi forming nouns from verbs (sometimes -m-ey with a former plural suffix stuck on) is reasonably well-attested: Gao (Heath 1999:97) dey "buy" vs. dey-mi "purchase (n.)", key "weave" vs. key-mi "weaving", Kikara (Heath 2005:97-98) kà:rù "go up" vs. kàr-mɛ̂y "going up", húná "live" vs. hùnà-mɛ̀y "long life". A shift *-mi to *-mu seems natural enough, especially since a few Songhay varieties actually have reflexes of "shoe" with a final -i in any case; so the Songhay form looks kind of like it could be **tàg "step on" plus deverbal -mí̀. To top it off, deverbal noun-forming suffixes in -r- are widely attested in Songhay, and Zarma attests a combined suffix -àr-mì: zànjì "break" vs. zànjàrmì "shard", bágú "break" vs. bàgàrmì "piece of debris" (Tersis 1981:244). If we treat the Hausa form as a borrowing from Songhay, we can then analyse it as **tàg "step on" plus deverbal -àr-mí. But before we get carried away, we should note that within Songhay there's no motivation for analysing the -mu / -mi in "shoe" as a suffix; the verb and the noun differ (if at all) only in the final vowel.

So what to make of all this? So far, the scenario that suggests itself is something like the following:

1. Songhay borrows a verb *tàk "step on" from West Chadic (or vice versa?).
2. Songhay internally forms a deverbal noun *tàk-mí "shoe" (there is no reconstructible contrast between *k and *g in coda position in proto-Songhay), alongside a variant *tàk-àr-mí.
3. Hausa borrows this as tà:kàlmí:.
4. Songhay replaces *tàk with a denominal verb formed from "shoe" (which becomes internally unanalysable): *tàgm-á. This step has possible internal motivations: in most of Songhay, final velar stops disappeared leaving behind only compensatory lengthening on the preceding vowel, and the resulting form tà: would have been homophonous with the much commoner verb "receive, take".
5. Djougou Dendi, a heavily Hausa-influenced, somewhat creolized Songhay variety spoken in Benin, borrows the Hausa form as tàkăm.

Further Chadic comparative data may yet turn out to bear upon this etymology, but one thing seems clear: these two families have been affecting each other for a long time.

Berber and not so Berber words in Tunisian Arabic

Not too long ago I finished reading Lotfi Sayahi's Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa. The book is a valuable contribution to the study of synchronic language contact between Tunisian Arabic, Standard Arabic, and French in Tunisia, with some coverage of the rest of the region as well. Unfortunately, when it briefly looks at Berber lexical influence on Arabic (pp. 135, 187), reflecting joint work with Zouhir Gabsi, its conclusions are rather over-hasty. Since this book is likely to become a standard point of departure for English speakers studying language contact in North Africa, I think it's worth correcting the record here even at the risk of being pedantic:

• fakru:n "turtle" and ferzazzu "wasp" really are Berber, though the -u:n suffix in the former was first added in dialectal Arabic (almost all Berber varieties have forms similar to Kabyle ifker/ikfer).
• garžu:ma "throat" is a very difficult word to etymologize, but may ultimately be Berber (compare Tuareg a-gurzăy), although it does bring to mind Romance forms such as French gorge.
• karmu:s "fig" is clearly derived from karm-a "fig tree", which is definitely not Berber, and seems to come from a narrowing of the meaning of Classical Arabic كرم karm "orchard" (see the brief discussion in Behnstedt & Woidich 2011:491). The suffix -u:s might theoretically be Berber, I suppose, but probably not; it's not widely attested across Berber, and it fits well with the widespread dialectal Arabic pattern of augmentatives in -u:-.
• sebsi: "pipe" is from Turkish sipsi.
• bu-telli:s "monster/nightmare" ("sleep paralysis", to be precise) is a compound involving bu- "possessor of" (originally "father of") plus telli:s (a kind of rug). The latter is well-attested within Arabic in the Middle East as well as in North Africa; its etymology is controversial, but it may derive from Latin trilicium "triple-twilled fabric".
• ḍabbu:ṭ "axilla" (ie "armpit") is evidently an expressive formation from Arabic إبط 'ibṭ. The widespread Berber word for this is rather taddeɣt (from which we get Maghrebi Arabic dəɣdəɣ "tickle").
• dagdag "to shatter" is a reduplicated form from Arabic دقّ daqqa "pulverize".

I don't have the time to check the rest of the reduplicated verbs he cites (tartar "to mutter", dardar "to muddy", maxmax "to nibble", maṣmaṣ "to rinse", sɛksɛk "to flow", tɛftɛf "to graze", and wɛdwɛd "to talk nonsense"), but maxmax and maṣmaṣ include phonemes with no regular proto-Berber sources, and I doubt any of them is really Berber in origin.

I don't mean to pick on the authors; notwithstanding this brief lapse, it's a good book, and worth reading. But I do want to hammer home to every linguist the message that etymology needs to be done properly. If you want to do etymology in a North African dialect, don't just assume that any word you don't recognize from Modern Standard Arabic or French is a Berber loanword; check other regional languages (especially Turkish), check existing publications on the subject, check the distribution of the word across different Berber and Arabic varieties. Etymology may not be a very trendy subject, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

On Olathe

A few days ago, two unarmed young engineers from India were shot in a bar in Olathe, Kansas by a man yelling "Get out of my country!", as was a heroic bystander who tried to stop the shooter. As this contemptible crime put a normally quiet suburb of Kansas City into the international news, journalists and readers worldwide must have been wondering, as I wondered the first time I heard of it a couple of years ago: "How do you pronounce Olathe, and what sort of a name is that anyway?"

The way the locals pronounce it is /ou'leɪθʌ/, as you can hear early in the Mayor's speech. This is remarkably irregular: I can't think offhand of any other word in the English language in which a final e is pronounced /ʌ/, except occasionally "the". You might expect the etymology to provide an explanation, but it turns out to complicate the story further.

The town of Olathe was founded in 1857 by one John Barton, a doctor from Virginia, who - by his own account - got it into his head that "beautiful" would be a good name for the town he envisaged, and:

... meeting Capt. Joseph Parks, head chief of the Shawnees, he said: 'Captain, what in the Shawnee language would you call two quarters of land, all covered with wild flowers? In English we would say it was beautiful." Parks replied: "We would say it was 'Olathe,' "giving it the Indian pronunciation Olaythe, with an explosive accent on the last syllable. Barton made the same inquiry of the official interpreter, an educated Indian, who made the same reply, adding that for English use it would be best to pronounce it "Olathe," with the accent on the second syllable. So it came to pass that the new town was named "Olathe," the city beautiful. (History of Johnson County, Kansas)

In Shawnee, an Algonquian language, (h)oleθí is indeed documented as meaning "pretty" (Gatschet II:2, II:6, III:5); the root also seems to mean "good", judging from its occurrences (spelled <lafi>) in Alford's Shawnee New Testament translation, eg in Matthew 5:45, 19:16, 20:15. One might assume the Shawnees had their own name for the place, but that is not necessarily true, considering they had gotten there barely a generation earlier. Originally from Ohio, they were induced to sign a treaty to move to Kansas in 1831, onto land originally belonging to the Kaws (Kanzas). A few years after the foundation of Olathe, they were pushed out again, to Oklahoma.

It thus seems pretty clear that the original pronunciation of the town's name was /ou'leɪθi/, corresponding better with the spelling (cp. "synecdoche"). How did that turn into /ou'leɪθʌ/? I think the answer lies in English sociolinguistic variation. In the 19th century, standard English word-final /ʌ/ was often pronounced dialectally as /i/, yielding forms like "Americkee" for America or "Canadee" for Canada. In more recent times this pronuciation seems to show up mainly in caricatures of rural or Appalachian speech. The current pronunciation of Olathe as if it were Olatha can thus best be understood as a hypercorrection by people who didn't want to sound uneducated.

Update: A very helpful article linked by Y below, The Pronunciation of Missouri, reveals that the phenomenon is more systematic in the area than I had realised: it extends not only to placenames like Missouri, but even to words like spaghetti, macaroni, or prairie. This makes hypercorrection seem a less likely explanation. Instead, it looks as though final /ɪ/, which becomes /i/ in standard American English, was instead reduced to schwa in parts of the Midwest, including the area surrounding Kansas City. Andrews' (1994) Shawnee Grammar indicates that Shawnee /i/ was often realised as [ɪ], so this fits together nicely.

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.