More Darja: sea creatures, folk tales, etc.

I’m just back from Algeria, with plenty of work to get to – but before they fade from my memory, here are a few more miscellaneous observations, written down on the plane with help from my notes...

On this trip I took the small, lavishly illustrated book Sea Fishes and Invertebrates of the Mediterranean Sea, by Lawson Wood (London: New Holland, 2002). It proved very useful for checking species identifications, a task I attempted earlier with mixed results in Souag (2005). Since I was on holiday, I didn’t attempt to track down fishermen and do a proper job of identification, but showing it to a cousin yielded the following lexicographical haul:

Previously unrecorded names: rbibət əs-səlbaħa ربيبة السلباحة (“eel’s stepdaughter”) “brittlestar” (Ophioderma longicauda); bu-jəɣləllu بوجغللّو (“snail”) “sea hare (Aplysia sp.)”; langušṭa لانڤوشطة “lobster”; ɣəṭɣuṭ غطغوط “damselfish (Chromis chromis)” (also used in the expression: kħəl ɣəṭɣuṭ كحل غطغوط “pitch-black”); šuṭ شوط “barracuda (Sphyraena sphyraena)”.

Names recorded in Souag (2005) without identification: ṭṛiʕ طريع “Neptune grass (Posidonia oceanica)”; šadiyya شادية “violet sea urchin (Sphaerechinus granularis)”; bərjəmbaluq برجمبالوق “comber (Serranus cabrilla)”; ẓṛiṛga زريرقة (“little green”) “rainbow wrasse (Coris julis)”; luq لوق “striped grouper (Epinephelus costae)”; kəħla كحلة (“black”) “saddled bream (Oblada melanura)”; ʕin əl-ħəjla عين الجلة (partridge-eye) “ornate wrasse (Thalassoma pavo)”; čalba تشالبة “cow bream (Sarpa salpa)”; buriyya بورية “boxlip mullet (Oedachilus labeo)”.

Names differently identified in Souag (2005): zarniyya زارنية “great amberjack (Seriola dumerili)” (previously: derbio or leerfish); čarniyya تشارنية “blue runner (Caranx crysos)” (previously: grouper).

Minor differences in identification: šaɣəṛ شاغر “white bream (Diplodus sargus sargus)” (previously: sea bream); bu-snan بوسنان (“toothy one”) “two-banded bream (Diplodus vulgaris)” (previously: young šaɣəṛ = sea bream); fərxa فرخة (originally “chick”) “dusky grouper (Epinephelus marginatus)” (previously: young čarniyya = grouper).

Confirmed: bu-zəllayəq بوزلاّيق (“slippery one”) “blenny (Parablennius sp.)”; qaṛuṣ قاروص “sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax)”; gʷrəng ڤُرنڨ “conger eel (Congerconger)”; mustila موستيلة “forkbeard (Phycis phycis)”; ẓənkuṛ زنكور “wrasse (Symphodus sp.)” (previously: wrasse); ruži روجي (French rouget) “striped mullet (Mullus surmuletus)” (previously: mullet).

There are plenty of etymological difficulties among these, but clear non-French Romance loanwords include šaɣəṛ (Latin sargus), čarniyya and zarniyya (Latin acernia), čalba (Latin salpa), gʷrəng (Latin conger), and, judging by the š, langušṭa. bərjəmbaluq is from Turkish, cp. balık “fish”, but I still can’t identify the first part.

Moving from wild sea life to domestic animals, reminiscences of life before independence brought up a number of words I had rarely or never heard: nhəš نهش “bite (eg donkey)”, ṣǔkk صكّ “kick (with hind legs)”, ṣhəl صهل “bray”, ɣrəz غرز “stop giving milk (cow)”, tkəlləl تكلّل “curdle”, bəgṛa ṭṛiyya بڤرة طرية “a cow who has recently given birth”, ɣǔṛfa غرفة “1^st story floor” (2^nd story for Americans). yəmni يمني and šəlli شلّي for “right” and “left” were equally new to me; usually I’ve heard ymin يمين and šmal شمال, or feminine yəmna يمنى and yəsṛa يسرى.

The genre of folk tales is just about extinct in Dellys, as far as I can tell, but it too came up in a few reminiscences. A tongue-twister (say it ten times fast!) alludes to a short anecdote: dadda ʕaḅḅʷa lli ḅḅʷa l-bab دادّا عبّا اللي ابّوا الباب “Dadda Abba who carried the door on his back”. I’m unlikely ever to hear the tales of lunja bənt drig əl-ɣul لونجة بنت دريڨ الغول “Lunja daughter of Drig the monster” or bəgṛət l-itama بڤرة اليتامى “the orphans’ cow” in Dellys, but the fact that versions of them have been collected all over the Maghreb – such as this Kabyle version of Lunja summarised in English, or the song Tafunast igujilen –  is some consolation; indeed, a version of the latter tale is popular even in Siwa. From near the ending of the latter comes the following rhyme: when the orphan brother invites his sister to run up the ladder and escape the well, she says ħsən w-əlħusin fi ħəjri, ma nəqdər nəjri حسن والحسين في حجري، ما نقدر نجري“Hasan and Husayn (her twin sons) are in my lap, I can’t run”.

Usually I don’t take much interest in French loanwords, but I noticed one that looks as if it has undergone quite a curious semantic shift: puṭaži پوطاجي means “kitchen counter”, from French potager “kitchen garden” (or some non-standard dialect of French?) Behnstedt and Woidich report that in Biskra this form means “kitchen”; I wonder whether that is a further semantic shift or a misunderstanding.

Finally, to follow up on the last post’s themes, I found two more words which have retained Berber nominal affixes, again without plurals (pardon the etymology): taklufit تاكلوفيت “meddling”, tayhudit تايهوديت “malice”. (From my 2005 paper, I can also add the fig breed timəlwin تيملْوين, and the seaweed species tubrint توبرينْت). However, this strategy is quite atypical; much commoner is to drop the Berber affixes and substitute Arabic ones as appropriate, as in jəgjiga جڤجيڤة “dandelion” (Kabyle tajejjigt “flower”) or məjjir مجّير “mallow” (Kabyle məjjir).

Siwi semantics

I recently arrived in Siwa – a pleasant experience as always, quite unaffected by the political turbulence of Cairo – and since getting here, I've repeatedly been learning the meanings of words I thought I already knew. Siwi has turart and adrar, whose cognates throughout Berber mean “hill” and “mountain” respectively. But a turart can hardly be called a hill – some are rock outcrops not much taller than a man – and the flat-topped layered “mountains” of Siwa that they call adrar would in English usually be considered hills, though the term can be used for larger ones too. ləbħaṛ can obviously mean “sea”, as in Arabic; but in fact, in a Siwi context it primarily refers not to the sea but to the two large lakes of the oasis. lašqəṛ is familiar from Arabic – Ibn Hazm notes, for example, that the Umayyad dynasty of al-Andalus were all blond ('ašqar), thanks to their seemingly heritable marital preferences – but it doesn't actually mean “blond” in Siwi, though that's an associated symptom; it means “albino” (albinism is fairly common in Siwa for some reason; it must be hard having no melanin in a place which hardly ever sees a cloud, but they seem to manage.) iləm is “skin”, as elsewhere in Berber; but the thick skin or hide of a sheep, which Siwis cook on special occasions, is not iləm, it's the Arabic loan əjjəld. Semantic elicitation is trickier than it might seem! Another etymologically interesting item of vocabulary I've learned is agbez “cowrie shell”, used in decoration. The word must be related somehow to Kwarandzyey (Korandje) tsyagmʷəš, but the correspondences are fairly funky. I wonder what it's called in Libyan Berber...

Fieldwork and address books

Linguistics, with its regular sound shifts, unidirectional grammaticalisation processes, and tree diagrams, is perhaps the most satisfyingly scientific of the social sciences. But today I found myself reminded that it is still emphatically social, particularly when you want to actually gather new data about undocumented languages. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous even in such far-flung corners of the Sahara as Tabelbala and Siwa, used even by illiterate people - making it possible to keep asking people about the language well after you've gotten back to the university. So over the past months of fieldwork my phone has accumulated quite a lot of numbers, which I backed up to my computer today. The final count? At least 84 phone numbers from Tabelbala and 43 from Siwa. To put this in perspective, there are only about 3000 Kwarandzyey speakers, so I can call something like 3% of the population.

The field linguistics courses at SOAS lay a commendable emphasis on teaching the practicalities of fieldwork - what microphone, what recorder, what software... But there's a gap in the course: managing contacts. Going through these I found a few casual contacts I could barely or even not at all remember, and some people I could remember but not easily remember the relationships between. There's some information in my field notebooks, but it's scattered and not always detailed. I should have been making concise but informative notes about all these people somewhere as I took their numbers - not something you can do easily with my already somewhat antiquated mobile, but that might be a reason in itself to take a more sophisticated one along, or even to use a paper address book, if you have space in your pocket for one alongside your field notebook. If you plan to do any fieldwork, bear this in mind!