Jabal al-Lughat

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 K...

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer , freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome a...

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'...

In Algerian Arabic, ngər نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; nəgru نڨر...

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: ...

While most Berber varieties use an Arabic loanword for "apple", several are reported to preserve a non-Arabic word: Jerbi a-ḏəffu...

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt , impf. ti-dubu-t ). There are no compelling cog...

I'm posting these mostly so I don't forget them... Algerian Arabic jəḥmum جحموم "blackbird", and its Kabyle counterpart...

A strong contender for the most obviously ridiculous etymology in Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary of The Quran is his attempt to deriv...

The Proto-Chadic word for "go out" was reconstructed by Newman and Ma (1966) as *p-t- , with attested reflexes in all primary sub...

Almost every attested Songhay variety (Tasawaq is perhaps the only exception) has a reflex of the proto-Songhay word * gúrú "draw wa...

Ever since she got interviewed on TV ten days ago, the 19-year-old president of the student union at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Maryam Pouge...

Going east of Algiers along the coast, the names of two little port towns stand out. Their inhabitants know them as جنّات /d͡ʒənnat/ (somet...

A long time ago, I posted some rather speculative musings on the minor mystery of the allegedly Ethiopic word qaswarah قسورة in the Qur...

Jerusalem stands out among Arab cities today not only culturally and religiously, but morphologically as well. In Modern Standard Arabic, t...

Chomsky's barb about butterfly-collecting has echoed in the ears of descriptive linguists for decades, and is sometimes blamed for the w...

The proto-Songhay word for "(pair of) shoes, sandals" is *tàgmú ( Zarma tà:mú , Kandi tà:mú , Gao taam-i , Hombori tà:m...

Not too long ago I finished reading Lotfi Sayahi's Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa . The ...

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!...

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