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...

The original chupacabra?

Americans of a certain age probably remember the "chupacabra" (goat-sucker), a nonexistent reptilian monster supposed to suck the blood of Puerto Rican goats back in the 1990s. The notion of goat-suckers, however, has a longer, less bloody, and slightly more respectable history. In European folklore, a goat-sucker (Spanish chotacabras, Latin Caprimulgus) is a kind of nocturnal bird, thought since Pliny to steal goats' milk as they slept. In Middle Eastern folklore, however, it's a creature a little more reminiscent of the chupacabra that is popularly supposed to steal milk from goats: namely, the monitor lizard (varan, ورل‍). In Persian, this lizard is even called بزمجه bozmajeh "goat-sucker" (Anderson, "Lizards", Encyclopaedia Iranica). Unlikely as this notion seems a priori, it does appear that monitor lizards will drink milk offered to them, if we may believe an aside in Kesteloot and Veirman's "Le culte du Mboose à Kaolack" (p. 85). I recently came across a passage describing how this is said to work in a recording in Korandje (a Songhay language of southwestern Algeria):

akka,	xʌdz	a-ggw	išən=yu,
monitor lizard,	when	3Sg-see	goat=PL,
a-m-gwab	maʔʔʔʔ maʔʔ,
3Sg-IRR-INCEPT	maaa maaa,
a-b-ṣʌyyaħ	ħar	išən	kadda
3Sg-IMPF-bleat	like	goat	little
ndzuɣ	a-b-
so that	3Sg-IRR-
ndzuɣ	išən-y	əm-ki-a.si	a-m-dər	a-m-mʌṭmṭ-ini.
so that	goat-PL	IRR-stand-3Sg.DAT	3Sg-IRR-go	3Sg-IRR-suckle-3PlEmph.

The monitor lizard, when it sees goats, it starts going maaa maaa, it bleats like a kid goat so that it- so that the goats will stand by it and it can go and suckle them.

I'll leave it to the biologists to determine whether this story has any basis in fact, and folklorists to consider if it can be connected to the Puerto Rican chupacabra. However, it does have one linguistically interesting feature as well. In Korandje, an aspect marker is ordinarily directly followed by a verb. It is possible to hesitate after an aspect marker, but not to insert anything between it and the verb it governs. However, in this sentence we find an aspect marker (gwab) followed directly by an onomatopeia representing the sound made. This suggests that, despite the inseparability of the verb from the aspect marker, it might be plausible to take them as two distinct words rather than as a single long word.