Darja miscellaneous notes 2025

Every time I go to Algeria, I come back with some linguistic observations that are new to me (if not necessarily to anyone else.) Here are this year's.

Many collective nouns take plural agreement: sqit əššjəṛ əttəħtaniyyin “I irrigated the lower trees”, kanu sjəṛ “there were trees”, ənnməl haðu “these ants”. Not all do, though, or at least not all the time: nnamus bəkri kʊnna nšufuh nəqqʊtluh “mosquitoes, in the old days, if we saw them (lit. it) we’d kill them (lit. it).” A topic worth looking at in more detail.

“Have”-based expressions for “ago” are familiar from Romance languages; in Darja, however, they agree with the notional possessor, e.g. dərtu ma-ʕəndi-š bəzzaf ‘I did it not long ago’ (lit. “I did it I don’t have much”). Along similar lines, the subject of ʕla bal-i “I know” (originally “on my awareness”) was originally the theme, the fact known. Synchronically, however, utterances like ma-kʊnt-š ʕlabal-i “I didn’t know” (lit. “I was not I know”) suggest this is no longer the case.

Another example of næ̃mpoṛt (discussed here previously): u xəllih yakʊl næ̃mpoṛt ħaja ‘and let him eat anything’.

The construct state has undergone some interesting developments. Most masculine nouns have no distinct construct state, and most feminine nouns form a construct state by replacing -a with -ət. If we factor out, for the present, the stem-internal effects of schwa-zero alternations and compensatory gemination, then, for most nouns, we can speak of a single construct state used for head nouns followed by possessor NPs or by suffixed possessor pronouns alike. However, a few nouns show a different distribution. Several kinship terms in -a take the suffixes directly: yəmma-k ‘your mother’, baba-k ‘your father’, jədda-k ‘your grandmother’, even ṭaṭa-k ‘your auntie’. (These nouns have zero-marked 1Sg possession: yəmma u yəmma-k “my and your mother”.) Such nouns usually take clitic doubled possessives (yəmma-ha ntaʕ Baya ‘Baya’s mother’, lit. ‘her mother of Baya’); however, if used in the regular synthetic possessive (“iḍāfah”) construction, they take a suffix t, e.g. yəmma-t yəmma-k “your mother’s mother”. For these nouns, it seems tempting to postulate two construct states rather than one.

The noun pattern CəCCayC is not particularly productive, but I heard a new example: tərtayqat “firecrackers” (cf. tərtəq “pop”). Other examples include ħərrayqa “jellyfish” (ħrəq “burn”), xʊṭṭayəf “swallow (bird)” (xṭəf “snatch”), bu-zəllayəq “blenny (fish)” (zləq “slip”).

Feminine nouns without overt feminine marking form diminutives with overt feminine marking: yədd ‘hand’ > ydida ‘little hand’. Very few masculine nouns have apparent feminine marking, but x(a)lifa ‘caliph’ is one such; məskin əlxliyyəf haðak “poor little caliph!” shows that the converse is also true, i.e. that masculine nouns with apparent feminine marking form diminutives without it.

The verbal template CəCCəC is in generally semantically and syntactically distinct ftom its corresponding passive/middle tCəCCəC. However, the distinction is neutralised in the participles: mwəð̣ð̣i “washed for prayer” from twəð̣ð̣a, mkəṛməṣ “dried (of figs)” from tkəṛməṣ “dry (of figs, intr.)”. Some speakers, however, do say mətwəð̣ð̣i.

Passives in n usually involve a simple coda n, but I heard clear gemination in li baš yənnəqsəm ‘for it to be divided’. The question of gemination in triliteral passives would deserve a closer look.

Weak-final triliteral verbs tend to add -an- in verbal nouns: tənħaniyya “removal” from nəħħi “remove”.’

A few emotional idioms: bərrəd qəlb-u “he cooled his heart”, i.e. he satisfied his heart’s desire; ṭəyyəṛhali “he made it fly for me”, i.e. he made me lose my temper; ṭəḷḷəʕlu lgaz “he raised the gas for him”, i.e. he made him angry. A proverb: triq əlʕafya tənẓaṛ yalukan tkun bʕida “the road of safety gets visited even if it’s far away.”

The usual ‘whatchamacallit’-word in Dellys and elsewhere in Algeria is laxʊṛ, originally “the other one”, used to substitute for verbs as well as nouns. However, from a relative about 90 years old, I heard a different construction based on haðak “that”: ma-yhaðak-š “he doesn’t whatsit”. This is paralleled in Malta and Morocco, so presumably it used to be more widely used.

The usual word for “knife” in Dellys is mus, but xʊdmi (usual in Bechar) is also in use. However, I hadn’t previously heard xʊdmiša. The curious final š can perhaps be explained as a borrowing from Berber, in some varieties of which ṯaxʷəḏmiyṯ would regularly yield ṯaxʷəḏmišṯ.

French cinquante is often heard as sikõnt “fifty”. The vowel is difficult to explain – influence from another Romance language?

Some words new to me: gərziz “empty gum, empty tooth socket”; ma-ksan-š “he’d rather not”; ṣfiħa “horseshoe”.

The ʕ in the verb ‘give’ is often elided: aṭini “give me” for regular aʕṭini.

I don’t think triliteral verbs ever end in w, but quadriliterals may: yqəwqəw ‘(a chicken) cackles’ (usually yqaqi in Dellys), yčəwčwu ‘they chatter’.

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?

Instrument nouns between Dholuo and Arabic

In Dholuo (a West Nilotic language of Kenya), instrument nouns are formed using ra-...-i (the final -i is dropped after sonorants and semivowels), as in the table below (Tucker 1993:111-112, retranscribed). Both English and Arabic have comparable formations. In English, instrument nouns are occasionally formed with the -er suffix, like agent nouns. In Arabic, instrument nouns are more systematically formed, but with a variety of different patterns, starting with mi-..., or in modern colloquials with a feminine agent noun CaCCaaC-a.

However, taking a look at the cases listed by Tucker, we may note a striking cross-linguistic difference in distribution. In Arabic, all but three of the translated nouns use an instrument noun pattern of some sort, and two of the others use a more general verbal noun pattern; only "ladder" appears completely underived. In English, "peg", "billhook", "pestle", "tongs", "lid" all seem to be underived and simplex, and for several cases with zero-derivation (notably "hoe", "rake", "drill", "sign"), intuition suggests that the verb derives from the noun, the opposite of what we see in Arabic or Dholuo.

This suggests a typological difference in the structure of the lexicon: perhaps some languages "prefer" to mark instrument nouns as such and to form them from corresponding actions, while some prefer simple instrument nouns from which verbs may be formed indicating the corresponding actions. I wonder whether that holds up on a larger sample? What does your language tend to do, dear reader?

cut	toŋ-o	قطع	|	billhook, cutter	ra-tóŋ̂	منجل
slash	bẹt-ọ	مزّق	|	slasher	rạ-bẹ́t-ị̂	منجل طويل
hoe	pur-o	عزق	|	hoe	ra-púr̂	معزق
scratch	gwạr-ọ	خدش	|	forked rake	rạ-gwạ́r̂	مدمّة
see	ŋịy-ọ	رأى	|	mirror	rạ-ŋị́ị̂	مرآة
strain	dhịŋ-ọ	صفّى	|	strainer	rạ-dhị́ŋ̂	مصفاة
pound	yọk-ọ	دق	|	pestle	rạ-yọ́k-ị̂	مدقة
pierce	cwọw-ọ	ثقب	|	piercing instrument	ra-cwọ́p-î	مثقاب
hold	mạk-o	مسك	|	tongs	rạ-mạ́k-ị̂	ممساك
plug up	din-o	سد	|	stopper	ra-dín̂	سدّادة
hang	ŋạw-ọ	علّق	|	peg for hanging	ra-ŋạ́ŵ	علاّقة
cover	um-o	غطّى	|	lid, cover	ra-úm̂	غطاء
show	nyis-o	أظهر	|	sign	ra-nyís-î	علامة
climb	ịdh-ọ	صعد	|	ladder	rạ-ị́dh-ị̂	سلّم

Lemurian Arabic

In the western ports of the continent of Lemuria, on the old trade route to Uqbar and thence to Atlantis, a dialect of Arabic has been spoken since probably the 6th century AD or so. Its longstanding isolation from other Arabic dialects, and its speakers' bilingualism in neighbouring Lemurian languages, has allowed it to develop some rather unusual features. Like all Arabic dialects, it has lost the final short vowels preserved in Classical Arabic; but, unlike any other surviving dialect, it has largely preserved case and mood marking, thanks to extensive final-syllable ablaut.

For example, the noun "book" is conjugated as follows:

	SG	PL
NOM	kitoob	kitaaboot
ACC	kitaab	kitaabeet
GEN	kiteeb	kitaabeet

One thus says royt ilkitaab "I saw the book", sagatʼ ilkitoob "the book fell", deexil ilkiteeb "inside the book". The resulting system is rather reminiscent of Old Irish, among other languages of our own timeline.

Sadly, a full documentation of this fascinating dialect will forever be wanting, due to the difficulty of travelling to fictional destinations and of getting recording equipment to work properly in fantasy universes. However, I trust that the available data is sufficient to establish that phonetic changes such as the loss of final short vowels need not automatically imply the loss of morphological information that the lost phonemes had encoded.

A fable written in Korandje

Yesterday, H. Yahiaoui posted what might be the first continuous story written down in Korandje by a 1st-language speaker (translated from a cynical little fable in Arabic): The Donkey, the Lion, and the Tiger. In this text, we clearly see the "consecutive aorist" used after imperatives but not after perfectives: contrast n-as abəqqạ nə-m-t-as "give_imperative him a slap and tell_irrealis him" with a-hh-ana a-tt-asi lit. "he asked_perfective and said to him_perfective". More crucial among this text's points of interest, however, is the placement of spaces. Word boundaries are surprisingly tricky to determine in Korandje. Plenty of elements could be analysed as bound forms or just as free forms with a somewhat restricted syntactic distribution, and it's hard to decide which is which. A text like this provides suggestive (though certainly not conclusive) data on where speakers perceive them. A few generalizations quickly emerge. In the verb word:

• Subject markers are written as prefixes to the verb or MAN marker (2Sg n, 3Sg a, etc.)
• The aspectual auxiliary ba, which turns perfective into perfect and imperfective into progressive, is written as a separate word - but only in contexts where the b is preserved; contrast ənnmər ba bə-kkạ-γ "the tiger is hitting me" with a-(a)-b-kkạ-γəy "he is hitting me".
• Otherwise, mood, aspect, and negation (MAN) markers are written as prefixes to the verb (Neg s, Prosp (b)aʕam, etc.)
• Directionals (ti "hither" are written as suffixes to the verb.
• Object pronouns (2Sg ni, 3Sg ana, etc.) are written as suffixes to the verb.
• Oblique pronouns (2SgDat nisi, 3SgDat asi, etc.) are usually written as suffixes to the verb word, but in one case (kəs γəys "leave to me") as an independent word, plausibly reflecting its less closely bound status.

In the noun phrase:

• Genitive n is written as a prefix to the head noun.
• Possessive pronouns are written as prefixes to the head noun (1Sg ʕan, etc.)
• The indefinite article (or numeral) fu "a, one" is written as a suffix to the noun it quantifies.
• "Other" (fyạṭən), despite historically containing "one", is written as a separate word.
• Demonstratives are written as suffixes to the noun phrase (γu "this", etc.)
• Dative si and locative ka are written as suffixes to their objects.
• The focus marker a is written as a suffix to its noun phrase.
• The identificational copula (aγu "this is", etc.) is written as an independent word, despite historically incorporating the focus marker.

Pending more data, the following cases seem sui generis:

• səndza-n-a (Neg.Cop-2Sg-Foc) "it's not you who..."
• mu-kunna-ni (what.Rhet-find-2Sg) "what's wrong with you?"
• ku-xəd (each-when) "whenever"

For those who can't read the original, here's a transcription of the fable:

1. Fəṛka a-ddər izmmi-s a-yzʕəf a-hh-ana, a-tt-asi: "Maγạ səndza-n-a lγabət n-uγ bya?"
2. Izmmi a-tt-asi: "Iyyah… mu-kunna-ni, tuγ ba yzra?"
3. Fəṛka a-tt-asi: "Nnmər ba bə-kkạ-γ ʕam-mu-ka ku-xəd a-ggwa-γəy, a-m-ti 'Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-ḍəb taššəyt?', maγạ a-(a)-b-kkạ-γəy kʷəl ana?? Aha tuγa taššəyt-γ ʕamḍəb kʷəl aγəy?"
4. Izəmmi attasi: "Kəs γəys ləxbạ-γu, nə-s-bə-zzu lhəmm haya."
5. Aywa ləxʷəddzi(d) izəmmi a-kbʷəy ənnmər a-hh-ana "Tuγ-a taššəyt-γ n-ləxbạ?"
6. Nnmər a-tt-asi: "ʕa-b-talla γar əssəbbət ndzuγ ʕa-b-kkạṛ-ana wəxḷaṣ.."
7. Izəmmi a-t ənnmər-si: "Təlla ssəbbət fyạṭən-ka, a-a-ybən… T-as a-m-zu-t-nis əttəffaħ-fu ndzuγ, ndza a-zzu-t-a-nis yạṛạ, n-as abəqqạ nə-m-t-as 'Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-zu-t-ana tirəy?' Ndza a-zzu-t-a-nis tirəy, n-as abəqqạ nə-m-t-as 'Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-zu-t-ana yạṛạ?'"
8. Nnmər a-žžawb-ana a-tt-asi "Lfikrət-f hannu aγu."
9. Am-bibya ənnmər a-kbʷəy fəṛka a-tt-asi: "Zu-t-γis əttəffaħ-fu."
10. Fəṛka a-nnəg-aka mliħ a-hh-ana a-tt-asi "Waš ʕa-m-zu-t-ana tirəy wəlla yạṛạ???"
11. Nnmər a-ttəmtəm an-nin n-tiri a-tti "Tirəy yạṛạ…"
12. A-ħħərrəm an-kambi ạ-kkạ fəṛka ndza abqa-fu, a-tt-as "Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-ḍəb taššəyt???"
13. *** Uγ ba b-iḍləm a-ss-a-bə-ttəlla əssəbbət ndzuγ a-b-yəḍləm.

In English:

1. The donkey went to the lion angry and asked him: "Hey, aren't you the chief of the forest?"
2. The lion told him "Yes... what's wrong with you, what has happened?"
3. The donkey told him "The tiger is hitting me on my face every time he sees me, saying 'Why won't you wear a cap?' Why is he hitting me?? And what cap would I wear anyhow?"
4. The lion told him "Leave this affair to me, don't worry about it at all."
5. So when the lion met the tiger, he asked him "What's the issue of this cap?"
6. The tiger told him "I'm just looking for an excuse to hit him, that's all."
7. The lion told the tiger: "Look for another excuse, it's (too) obvious... Tell him to bring you an apple so that, if he brings it to you yellow, give him a slap and tell him 'Why won't you bring it red?' If he brings it to you red, give him a slap and tell him 'Why won't you bring it yellow?'"
8. The tiger replied "This is a good idea".
9. The next day the tiger met the donkey and told him "Bring me an apple."
10. The donkey looked hard at him and asked him "Should I bring it red or yellow?"
11. The tiger mumbled under his breath "Red, yellow..."
12. He lifted up his hand and slapped the donkey and said "Why won't you wear a cap?"
13. *** An oppressor doesn't need an excuse to oppress.

Unifying Mubi -oo- plurals

NB: Sorry, no tone marking today – might throw it in later.

We’ve seen two productive plural allomorphs characterized by round vowels: BVCV > BuCooC vs. BVVCV [-front] > BooCuC. Let’s see where -oo- shows up in the plurals of longer nouns.

Nouns of the form BVCVD(V) [-front] tend to take a plural in BuCooDu (the reduplicative plural horoɗyo > horoɗyuc, discussed last time, seems to be isolated):

• jorol “fox” > juroolu
• ɗoloso “lynx” > ɗuloosu
• kabada “red fig” > kuboodu
• jubugo “arrow” > juboogu
• wasaga “thread” > wusoogu

In two cases, a suffix -k is added, with what seems to be dissimilation of *-guk > -yuk:

• fidak “mat” > fudooyuk
• cagada “hut” > cugooduk

Formally, despite the shape and the front vowel (which may lead us to rethink the conditioning), the following cases fit this pattern as well:

• kurri “chicken” (assimilated from *kurɗi) > kurooɗuk
• urde “granary” > urooduk

In another two cases, both ending in -k, the expected final vowel is omitted:

• tamak “sheep” > tumook
• koɗogo “toe-ring” > kuɗook

And, as we saw last time, in one case the final consonant is irregularly reduplicated:

• bodol “road” > budoolul

If a long vowel is present and this plural type is used, vowel length is normally preserved; thus BVCVVDV yields BuCooDu – sometimes, as above, the final vowel is omitted to end in -k:

• ɗyubaago “blind” > ɗyuboogu
• sinyaaro “cat” > sinyooru (the i in the first syllable is probably caused by the following palatal)
• duwaago “dorcas gazelle” > duwok (with unexpected shortening of the last vowel)

but BVVCVDV yields BooCuD(u):

• gaayimo “wildcat” > gooyumu
• kaarumo “fingernail” > koorum

On the other hand, we also find the variant plural gaayimo > guyoomu, suggesting that BuCooDu is starting to be generalized.

What about longer nouns? In those, frontness is irrelevant...

A nasal followed by a voiced stop (except in the Arabic borrowing (a)ngumbul "calabash" > (a)ngunoobul) behaves like vowel length, so BVNDVF(V) > Bo(o)CDuF:

• tengil “calf” > tongul
• minjilo “Mubi person” > monjul
• humbuk “hedgehog” > hoombuk

In the few relevant examples available, BVCVDFV(GV) > BuCoDFu(G), whether D is nasal or not:

• gomorko “basket” > gumorku
• suwangot “Arab” > suwongu
• aranjala “kidney” > uronjul

Otherwise, four-consonant nouns BVCDVF(V), BVCV(V)DVF(V) overwhelmingly (15 out of 24 examples) map to BuCooDuF:

• ɗurgul “donkey” > ɗuroogul
• kalman “in-law” > kuloomun
• sunsuna “tale” > sunoosun
• kasagar “sword” > kusoogur
• kodoguno “sorcerer” > kudoogun
• giraakumo “molar” > gurookum

Now we can finally start to put things together: all of these seem to be mapping to subsets of a notional template CuCo(o/C)CuCu, in a predictable fashion.

If the first syllable is long or includes the first half of a prenasalized stop, you drop the initial Cu:

BVVC >	Cu[BooCuC]u
BVVCV >	Cu[BooCuC]u
BVVCVD(V) >	Cu[BooCuDu]
BVNDVF(V) >	Cu[BoCDuF]u

If the first syllable is open and the second one is closed, you get oC instead of oo:

BVCVDFV >	[BuCoDFu]Cu
BVCVDFVG >	[BuCoDFuG]u

Otherwise, you just proceed from left to right, always respecting the requirement that the output have at least 2 syllables:

BVCV >	[BuCooC]uCu
BVCDV >	[BuCooDuk]u
BVCVC(V) >	[BuCooDu]Cu
BVCVVD(V) >	[BuCooDu]Cu
BVCDVF(V) >	[BuCooDuF]u
BVCV(V)DVF(V) >	[BuCooDuF]u

So we’re starting to get somewhere. But this opens up a new can of worms: do some geminate-internal plurals belong here too? And where do those BaaCaC plurals fit into the system now? Those questions will have to wait for another time.

Reduplicative plurals in Mubi

Yesterday we saw that the dominant plural type for CVC / CVVCV stems, CVVDvD, can be given a unified analysis. How does this generalize to other stem types?

Plurals with final reduplication, dominant for CVC / CVVCV stems, are much less common for other stem shapes. For CV(C)CV stems, however, we do find a reasonable number of reduplicative plurals, this time in -o(o)C:

• sùwá "calabash" > sùwòw
• tògò "skin" > tùgók
• rìwwí "song" > rèwòw
• màbò "old" > mùbóop
• cóɓɓì "lance" > cúɓóop
• lánjá "friend" > lúnjóoc

(There is also one reduplicative plural in -eC - kúrɗyí "buttock" > kòrɗyèc - which seems difficult to reduce to the same pattern. It suggests that height harmony may apply to short vowels too, in which case we might blame sùwòw above on the influence of the semivowel.)

In Mubi, final VVC seems to be rare in simplex words. In monosyllables, it occurs only in loans, while elsewhere, it mainly shows up in imperfectives (cf. Jungraithmayr 2013:31). We may very tentatively suppose that in some common plurals it has been reduced to VC. Reduction of vowel length in final VVC also allows us to revise our analysis from yesterday to take into account bàŋ "mouth" > bòŋúŋ; a surface CVC stem may be underlying *CVC or *CVVC, and the vowel length in the plural reflects that rather than changing the stem.

Apart from the issue of vowel length, the rules outlined so far would yield the following (or, if we assumed that height harmony applies to short vowels too, the forms in brackets):

• sùwòw (*sòwòw)
• *tògók
• *rìwwòw (*rèwwòw)
• *màbóop (*mòbóop)
• *cóɓɓóop
• *lánjóoc (*lónjóoc)

A rule spreading roundness along the lines of a,o > u / _Coo seems feasible, judging by the lexicon, and fixes some of the problems above (not sure what's going on with "song"):

• sùwòw
• *tògók
• *rìwwòw
• mùbóop
• *cùɓɓóop
• lúnjóoc

But that can't be the whole story here. If bòdòl (see below) is a possible word, then so is *tògók; and there's no general ban on geminates in these positions, cp. wíccáak "to jump about while dancing (impf.)". Instead, there seems to be a templatic element here, whereby the vowel before the plural o/oo has been generalized to be u irrespective of the input, and the consonant before it must not be geminate. Insofar as these involve fixed vowels inside the stem, that strengthens the case for a comparable analysis of the previous data, which is feasible for CooDuD plurals. Integrating the -oC plurals seen above, we can thus reformulate the reduplicative plural as follows:

sg. BV(C/D)DV => pl. Bu(C)DooD (with sporadic reduction to -oD)
sg. BVVD(v) [-front] => pl. BooDuD
sg. BVVD(v) [+front] => pl. BVVDaD

Note that the internal vowel lengths and positions of the singular are preserved in the plural in all three of these; only stem-final vowels are affected.

For other stem shapes, reduplicative plurals seem to be sporadic, mostly involving words whose last consonant is a liquid. I can only find 3 clear instances of -uC in Jungraithmayr's lexicon for them, and 1 of -aC:

• bòdòl "road" > bùdòolúl
• kòròojó "small calabash" > kòròojúc
• ɗíngírí "branch" > ɗìngéerúr
• gúrlí "testicle" > gòrlàl

Once again, the internal vowel positions of the singular are preserved in the plural, if not necessarily the lengths. However, the predictions of our previous hypothesis are thus slightly off in two cases; we would have expected:

• *bòdòolúl
• kòròojúc
• *ɗìngéerár (or, if we force a -uD plural despite the front vowels, *ɗìngúurúr)
• gòrlàl

For ɗìngéerúr, no explanation for the -uC comes to mind; it is tempting to hope that this one is a typo. For bùdòolúl, however, a templatic explanation for the irregularity is at hand: CuCooCuC is, as we will hopefully see in a later post, the dominant plural template in Mubi for four-consonant nouns, which behave rather differently from what we've seen so far.

Now we've covered final reduplication plurals (glossing over a couple of irregulars, notably gìn "face" > gèenín / gànàn). This leads on naturally into another set of plurals, likewise featuring long vowels but without reduplication; if everything goes well, we can look at those next time.

Pluralizing Mubi biradical nouns

(Attention conservation notice: Kind of technical...)
NB: Updated with important corrections shortly after posting, following discussion with Marijn van Putten.

To better understand the Mubi plural system (following up on last time), let's start with two-consonant nouns of the form CVVCV and CVC (not CVCV, which has different default plural templates). Most of these take a CVVDvD plural with reduplication of the final consonant, with the vowels accounted for by the following correspondences:

• CeeDi > CaaDaD, e.g. gèébí "horn" > gàabàp (final consonants automatically devoice)
• CiiDi > CeeDaD, e.g. lìísí "tongue" > lèesàs
• CooDi, CuuDi, CuD > CooDaD, e.g. fùúdí "thigh" > fòodàt
• CooDo > either CooDaD or CooDuD, e.g. góoró "throat" > gòoràr; zòoró "tributary river" > zòorúr
• CaD, CaaD, CeD, CoD, CaaDo > CooDuD, e.g. fáaɓó "breast" > fòoɓúp

(No such nouns end in -a, -e, or -u.)

There seem to be no instances in the lexicon of *iiCa or *uuCa (the only case of iiCaa is in an Arabic loanword); nor are there cases of *aaCi or *aaCu, except in manifest loans like áarìt pl. àwáarìt "devil" (Arabic ʕifriit), with the odd exceptions of gíráakúmò "molar" and káarúmo "fingernail". We may thus assume that there is backwards spread of height from the short vowel to the long vowel preceding it. The latter may be mid but must not be the opposite height to the short one, with conflicts resolved by changing to mid and harmonising for frontness and roundness:

• ii > ee / _a
• uu > oo / _a
• aa > ee / _i
• aa > oo / _u

Generalizing the latter point, it also looks like roundness spreads backwards to a long vowel in a preceding syllable, i.e.:

• ee > oo / _o, u
• ii > uu / _o, u

On a quick glance through the lexicon, the only exceptions I can see to this are vocalised semivowels as in hàaɗáw, pf. héeɗû "knead". This allows us to reinterpret CeeDi above as /CaaDi/, and CooDo as either /CeeDo/ or /CooDo/. We thus get a nice distribution of allomorphs: -aD if the singular contains an underlying front vowel, -uD if not:

• *CaaDi > CaaDaD
• CiiDi > *CiiDaD
• CooDi > CooDaD
• CuuDi, CuD > *CuuDaD
• *CeeDo > CooDaD
• CooDo, CoD > CooDuD
• CaD, CaaD, CaaDo > *CaaDuD
• CeD > *CeeDuD

Now we can almost rewrite the rule rather simply to unite all these cases:

sg. CVD, CVVDv [+front] => pl. CVVDaD
sg. CVD, CVVDv [-front] => pl. CVVDuD

The problem with this reformulation is that CooDo < *CeeDo nouns take a plural in CooDaD, not *CeeDaD. Perhaps this is best understood as an effect of the deleted final vowel: the delinked /o/ relinks to the previous vowel. But if so, this only applies for rounding, not for fronting...

This information, missing from the published grammar, gives us some of the necessary background to understand where those pesky CuCooDuC plurals might come from... But that's a story that still needs work, to be continued later perhaps.

Mubi plurals from Arabic

Mubi, an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera Mountains of eastern Chad, stands out even in Chadic for the sheer complexity of its plural system, and all the more so for its extensive use of internal vowel changes. This seems likely to give it particular relevance for the reconstruction of Afroasiatic. However, Mubi is also profoundly influenced by Chadian Arabic, to a greater degree than even an Arabic-speaker might suppose at first sight. How much of Mubi's plural system reflects Arabic influence?

Looking through Jungraithmayr's (2013) La Langue Mubi^review, I find 14 plurals of the form BaCaaDi(i)F (e.g. àbàlány "patas monkey", pl. àbàalîny) and 5 of the form BaCaaDo/u (e.g. móngò "monkey sp." > mánáagò). Of these, 9 and 4 respectively are found in Jullien de Pommerol's (1999) Dictionnaire arabe tchadien-français (including, to my surprise, both the previous examples), and many of the remainder seem semantically likely to be features of some more localized Arabic variety (e.g. mánjàk "village chief" pl. mànáajìk, various ethnonyms). It seems rather clear that these two plural types are borrowed from Arabic; but there is no strong evidence that they have been extended to inherited vocabulary.

For the closely related plural form BaCaaDiFe, we find 3 examples, of which only one is definitely of Arabic origin: shàddáarì "shaman" (i.e. "herbalist", based on Chadian Arabic šadar < šajar), pl. shàdáadìrè. Suffixation of -e is not otherwise typical of Mubi plurals, and matches perfectly with the Arabic plural in BaCāDiF-ah; it thus seems reasonable to consider this plural type as a borrowing from Arabic as well. If so, it provides us with one good candidate for an extension to inherited vocabulary. Mubi érìny "scorpion", pl. àráarínyè is comparable to other East Chadic forms in its singular, eg Dangaleat ɛ́rîndílɛ̀ pl. ɛ́ríndílnà, Toram irindeeɗà pl. irindeɗ, Kajakse ʔàràari pl. ʔàràaràk (Fedry 1971, Alio 2004), but disagrees strikingly with them in its plural.

At first sight, one is tempted to go further and conclude that the plural types BuCooDuF and BiCeeDiF are also adaptations of the Arabic iambic plural. But the evidence in those cases is not so clearcut. BiCeeDiF is only attested for a single word with no Arabic counterpart that I've been able to find (dólgúm "a type of basket", pl. díléegìm.) BuCooDuF is far more frequent than BaCaaDi(i)F and seems to contain a much greater proportion of inherited vocabulary, although some Chadian Arabic loans are found as well (e.g. àngúmbùl "calabash", pl. àngùnóobùl, corresponding to Chadian Arabic amgunbul pl. amganâbil). Moreover, it can plausibly be unified with another plural schema with no possible Arabic counterpart, BuCoDFuG, e.g. áránjálà "kidney", pl. ùrònjúl. For the time being, it seems prudent to withhold judgement on the explanation for why these two plural types are so strikingly reminiscent of the Arabic iambic plural.

Other Arabic plurals borrowed only for the corresponding Arabic nouns include BuCuuD (e.g. tês "billy-goat", pl. túyúùs), BiCiDaan (e.g. jédì "dorcas fawn", pl. jídíyáàn), and the sound masculine plural suffix -iin (e.g. máanì "strong", pl. màanìʔíìn). In the case of the sound feminine plural suffix -a(a)t, only two of the four examples in Jungraithmayr are clearly of Arabic origin (àntàháarà "mantis", pl. àntàhàarât; ràbàʔíyè "young woman", pl. ràbàʔìyáàt.) The other two look suggestively Arabic, however (ìrèedíyè "small granary", pl. ìrèedìyât; ròomìyè "crushing-stone", pl. ròomìyáàt), and this plural type too probably consists entirely of Arabic loans.

So far, it looks like in Mubi, as in Berber, Arabic influence has had the effect of further complicating an already very complex plural system. But Mubi is spoken in a far more multilingual context than most Berber varieties; one wonders whether some of the complexity here might be due to contact with regional languages other than Arabic as well...

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.

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.

What's wrong with the obvious analysis of waš bih واش بيه?

In the Algerian Arabic dialect I grew up speaking, "what's wrong with him?" is waš bi-h? واش بيه. (Further west, in Oran and in Morocco, it's the more classical sounding ma-leh? ما له.) When the object is a pronoun, as it usually is, waš bi-h? can readily be understood as waš "what?" and bi-, the form of "with" (otherwise b) used before pronominal suffixes (in this case, -h "him"). But substitute a noun, and this historically correct interpretation becomes synchronically untenable: we say waš bi jedd-ek? "what's wrong with you (lit. your grandfather)?" واش بي جدّك, whereas "with your grandfather" would be b-jedd-ek بجدّك. Nor can we cleft it with the relative/focus marker lli اللي: *waš lli bi jedd-ek? (*"what is it that's wrong with you?") is totally ungrammatical, while *waš lli b-jedd-ek? does not have the appropriate meaning (in fact, out of context, it makes no sense at all). This tells us that, whatever its origins, waš bi- can no longer be analysed as "what?" plus a preposition "with"; it has to be treated as a morphosyntactic unit in its own right. In particular, this bi- cannot be used to form an adverbial - it only forms a predicate - so it can hardly be treated as a preposition. Nevertheless, it continues to take the prepositional pronominal suffixes: "what's wrong with me?" is waš bi-yya? واش بيَّ, not *waš bi-ni.

The independent unity of waš bi-? becomes a lot clearer when the construction is borrowed into another language, as has happened in the Berber variety of Tamezret in southern Tunisia. The stories recorded there by Hans Stumme shortly before 1900 are a bit hard to read, but provide probably the single most extensive published corpus of material in Tunisian Berber. These texts furnish many examples of aš bi-, although Tamezret Berber neither has aš to mean "what?" (that would be matta) nor bi- to mean "with" (that would be s). Many of these look just like Arabic: aš bi-k "what's wrong with you? (m.)" (p. 14, l. 11); aš bi-kum "what's wrong with you (pl.)?" (p. 27, l. 26), aš bi-h "what's wrong with him?" (p. 14, l. 3); and even, with a noun, aš bi iryazen "what's wrong with men?" (p. 41, l. 5). But the similarity is somewhat deceptive; in some cases, this construction takes Berber rather than Arabic pronominal suffixes, as illustrated by aš bi-ṯ "what's wrong with her?" (p. 25, l. 21) instead of Arabic aš bi-ha, aš bi-m "what's wrong with you (f.)?" (p. 10, l. 5). Unfortunately, the texts do not provide a complete paradigm - further documentation is needed! But judging by the available data, all cells but 3m.sg. match well with the Berber paradigm:

	Algerian Arabic	Tamezret	Tamezret, direct objects	Tamezret, objects of prepositions
2m.sg.	waš bi-k	aš bi-k	-ak	-k
2f.sg.	waš bi-k	aš bi-m	-am	-m
2m.pl.	waš bi-kum	aš bi-kum	-akum / -awem	-kum
3m.sg.	waš bi-h	aš bi-h	-ṯ	-s
3f.sg.	waš bi-ha	aš bi-ṯ	-ṯ	-s

The 2m.sg. and 2m.pl. suffixes are quasi-identical between Tamezret Berber and Arabic, facilitating the borrowing; for the second person, neither language clearly distinguishes direct object forms from objects of prepositions. The third person, however, distinguishes the two in Berber but not in Arabic, and 3f.sg. suggests that the object in this construction is treated as a direct object, not as the object of a preposition, contrary to the situation seen for Arabic. This fits Berber-internal patterns; throughout Berber, nonverbal predicators (Aikhenvald's "semi-verbs") typically take the direct object pronominal paradigm, and assign absolutive case to their arguments. The perfect agreement of the most frequently used cells in this paradigm between Arabic and Berber surely facilitated the borrowing of this item, but within Berber the paradigm got rebuilt on a largely Berber basis. In morphology, etymology is not destiny!

Re-besoin?

In English, "re-" is a moderately productive derivational prefix - reboot, remake, redo... In French, though, it seems more like an incorporated adverb - it's practically the main way you say "again": remanger (eat again), repleuvoir (rain again), redire (say again) are all perfectly normal. It's even possible to say ravoir (have again), although it seems to be less and less frequent.

Now a number of states are expressed in French with the verb avoir "to have" plus a bare noun: avoir faim "to be hungry", avoir peur "to be afraid", avoir besoin "to need" etc. Given the preceding remarks, you would naturally assume that "need again" should be ravoir besoin - and, indeed, it is possible to find this expression at least in 19th century texts, eg:

Rentré dans le journalisme, cet esprit capable, mais aride et paresseux va ravoir besoin de moi. (1856)

It appears to be very little used in the 20th century, though. Instead we hear avoir rebesoin: j'ai rebesoin de ça, I need this again. The only Italian I asked said this is quite impossible in Italian, but even there ho ribisogno gets a few dozen hits on Google (though for all I know they're all second language speakers.)

The fact that besoin appears bare, with no article, already makes it unusual among nouns. The ability to take the prefix re- makes it stand out even more: you certainly can't say *revoiture (car again) or *repain (*bread again). So maybe it's not a noun any more? It certainly looks like it's become kind of verby; but what can we label it? In an Australian context, the uninflected element of a complex verb would be called a preverb, but apart from suggesting the wrong order of elements, this term has way too many different meanings depending on which part of the world you're in. Perhas, as in Japanese, we could call besoin a verbal noun - although that, too, is all too potentially ambiguous. Any better terminological suggestions are welcome.

More Darja notes: oath complementisers, free choice indefinites, kids' morphology, finger rhymes

Oath complementisers

In North Africa, the oath wəḷḷah والله, literally "by God", is used so frequently to emphasize statements - religious scruples notwithstanding - that a more appropriate synchronic translation might be "seriously". (It can even be used with imperatives, which can hardly be read as committing the speaker to the truth of any given statement.) Perhaps as a result of their high frequency, constructions with wəḷḷah have a number of unique morphosyntactic characteristics. Negation after wəḷḷah uses ma ما alone, whereas in most other contexts negation is bipartite ma... š(i) ما... شي. Positive sentences after wəḷḷah are introduced by what seems to be a complementiser, ɣir غير or la لا, which in other contexts mean "just, only". What struck me this time is that in certain syntactic contexts this complementiser systematically shows up twice, once right after the oath and once at the start of the main clause proper; I've come across this in topics:

wəḷḷah la lyum la sxana والله لا اليوم لا سخانة
by.God just today just heat
By God, today, it's hot.

wəḷḷah ɣir anaya ɣir dərt-ha والله غير أنايا غير درتها
by.God just I.EMPH just did.1sgPf-3FSgAcc
By God, me, I did it.

and in conditionals with the condition preposed:

wəḷḷah ɣir lukan t-dir-ha ɣir nə-ʕṭi-k ṭṛayħa والله غير لوكان تديرها غير نعطيك طرايحة
by.God just if 2Sg-do-3FSgAcc just 1Sg-give-2SgAcc beating
By God, if you do that I'll give you a beating.

In generative grammar, it is generally supposed that sentences are complementiser phrases. The complementiser is unpronounced in normal declarative sentences here, as in many languages, but is pronounced overtly in specific circumstances such as, here, oaths. A popular hypothesis in the cartographic approach to generative grammar proposes that the complementizer phrase needs to be split into a more fine-grained set of projections: Force > Topic > Focus > Topic > Finiteness, following Rizzi 1997. Prima facie, this complementiser-doubling data suggests otherwise: it looks very much as though right-adjunction of both topics and conditions is being handled by embedding the CP within another CP.

---

Free choice indefinites

In traditional Algerian Arabic, it seems pretty clear that the function of free choice indefinites ("anyone could do that", "take anything (you want)") isn't very strongly grammaticalised. In French, however, it's expressed using a relatively frequent, dedicated series of forms based on "no matter" plus the interrogative pronouns: n'importe qui/quoi/quel "anything, anyone, any..." Younger speakers of Algerian Arabic have borrowed the morpheme n'importe, but not the construction as a whole; instead, they simply prefix n'importe to existing indefinite nominals, in which interrogative pronouns play no role. Thus the phrase I heard today:

fə-z-zit wəlla f næ̃mpoṛt ħaja في الزيت ولا في نامبورت حاجة
in-the-oil or in any thing
in oil or in any thing

---

More children's morphology

Algerian Arabic has very few native bisyllabic words ending in the vowel u, but in loanwords it's not so unusual; for instance, it uses French triku تريكو (ie tricot) for "t-shirt". The first person singular possessive has two allomorphs: -i after consonants, -ya after vowels. I caught the younger of the two kids mentioned in the last post saying trikuww-i تريكوّي "my T-shirt" and trikuww-ək تريكوّك "your shirt"; his father (and everyone else, as far as I've noticed) says triku-ya تريكويَ and triku-k تريكوك. So it would seem that this kid has reanalysed the word as phonologically /trikuw/. Further inquiries are called for.

---

This little piggy...

I've encountered two finger rhymes in Algerian Arabic around Dellys; compare them to a Kabyle version below from Hamid Oubagha:

Dellys A	Dellys B	Kabyle
hađa ʕaẓẓi məskin هاذا عزّي مسكين This one is a robin, poor thing	hađa sɣiṛ u ʕaqəl هاذا سغير وعاقل This one is small and gentle	Wa meẓẓiy, meẓẓiy meskin ! This one is small, poor thing!
u hađa ṣbəʕ əssəkkin وهاذا صبع السكّين And this one is the knife-finger	u hađa ləbbas əlxwatəm وهاذا لبّاس الخواتم And this one is the ring-wearer	Wa d Ɛebḍella bu sekkin ! This one is Abdallah of the Knife!
u hađa ṭwil bla xəsla وهاذا طويل بلا خسلة And this one is long without function	u hađa ṭwil u məhbul وهاذا طويل ومهبول And this one is tall and crazy	Wa meqqer, meqqer bezzaf ! This one is big, very big!
u hađa ləħħas əlgəṣʕa وهاذا لحّاس القصعة And this one is the dish-licker	u hađa ləħħas ləqdur وهاذا لحّاس القدور And this is one is the licker of pots	Wa d ameccaḥ n teṛbut ! This one is the dish-licker!
u hađa dəbbuz əlgəmla وهاذا دبّوز القملة And this one is the louse-club	u hađa dəbbuz ənnəmla وهاذا دبّوز النملة And this one is the ant-club	Wa d adebbuz n telkin ! And this one is the lice-club
u yəmma tqul: mʕizati, mʕizati, mʕizati! ويمّا تقول: معيزاتي، معيزاتي، معيزاتي And mother says: my little goats, my little goats, my little goats!	dəbb əđđib, dəbb ənnəmla, dəbb əđđib, dəbb ənnəmla... دبّ الذّيب، دبّ النملة، دبّ الذّيب، دبّ النملة... Debb the wolf, Debb the ant, Debb the wolf, Debb the ant...	(n/a?)

All three clearly share a common background. Obviously, Dellys B has been deliberately made more posh - ants substituted for lice, pots (with urban q) for dishes (with villagers' g), ring-finger for knife-finger... Dellys A remains defiantly unrefined, but shows at least one sign suggesting an original in Kabyle: ʕaẓẓi məskin "a robin, poor thing" makes a lot less sense for referring to the little finger than meẓẓi meskin "small, poor thing", but sounds almost the same. On the other hand, Dellys A shows a near-rhyme between verses 3, 4, and 5 which doesn't work at all in the attested Kabyle version. It would be interesting to compare more versions in both languages

Darja notes: Elms and kids' morphology

I'm back in Algeria, and, as usual on such trips, finding matters of linguistic interest all around. Here are a couple, with more to follow if time permits...

A morphological innovation continues

Regular readers will recall that, just about a year ago, I found two young cousins using an innovative strategy to prevent consonant clusters in feminine nouns when vowel-initial possessive suffixes are added. I predicted that “Most probably, the next time I go to Dellys I'll find these two children using the normal forms and denying they ever spoke this way”. It turns out I was wrong: for the time being, at least, both of them are still using it, as confirmed by spontaneous data (quww-at-ək قوّاتك “your strength”, sənsl-at-ək سنسلاتك “your chain” rather than everyone else's quww-t-ək, sənsəl-t-ək.)

Elms between Europe and Arabia

A new word I learned lately is nəšma نشمة (pl. nšəm نشم) “elm tree”. Knowing that most of Arabia is desert, you might assume that this would be a prime candidate for a substratum word to borrow from Berber. In reality, however, it reflects Classical Arabic našamah نَشَمَة, a word used by the pre-Islamic poet 'Imru' ul-Qays and defined in the first Arabic dictionary, Kitab al-`Ayn, as “a tree from which bows are made” (even though the Modern Standard term appears to be dardār دَرْدَار). Clearly it would be a mistake to imagine the pre-Islamic Arabs as uniformly living in an isolated desert environment. At first sight, this word looks nothing like English elm, Latin ulmus, or Kabyle ulmu. However, in general Arabic š corresponds to Proto-Semitic *ɬ, so the original form would have been *naɬam-, which looks rather more similar. The mountains of the northern Middle East where the elm grows have been a zone of contact between Semitic and Indo-European for a long time, and given the tree's distribution, a borrowing into Semitic from IE would seem plausible a priori, especially since it doesn't seem to have cognates in Syriac or Hebrew; but the etymology would require more investigation than I can undertake on holiday. Within Indo-European, the form in question seems to be limited to European branches (Slavic, Germanic, Italic, Celtic), so how it would have reached Arabic is not obvious; coincidence is not to be excluded.

Can two kids change Algerian Arabic? (Probably not, but let's see.)

In central Algerian Arabic, feminine nouns are usually marked by a suffix -a, which becomes -ət when possessed. Pronominal possessors are indicated by suffixes, eg -i "my", -u "his". The lax vowel ə cannot occur in open syllables; when the suffix starts with a vowel, this is resolved by dropping it. If doing so would result in a three-consonant cluster, then, in certain cases, the latter is broken up by inserting a new schwa after the first consonant in the cluster, and geminating that consonant: thus jəfn-a جفنة "big bowl" becomes jəffən-t-i جفّنتي "my big bowl". I've been trying to figure out when exactly this happens in the dialect of Dellys, and finding a good deal of variation, especially in the treatment of sonorants: some people (especially but not exclusively the older ones) say səlʕ-t-i سلْعتي "my goods", leaving the cluster intact, while others say səlləʕ-t-i سلّعتي. I was surprised, however, to find two children, 8 and 10-year-old siblings, using a strategy not, as far as I know, used by adults for nouns at all: changing the problematic ə into a. This was confirmed not just by elicitation (zənq-at-i زنقاتي "my alley", ʕənb-at-i عنباتي "my grape", səlʕ-at-i سلعاتي "my goods") but also by sentences produced; thus for bəlɣ-a بلغة "pair of flip-flops":

ənta ʕəndək bəlɣ-at-ək w ana ʕəndi bəlɣ-at-i انتا عندك بلغاتك وانا عندي بلغاتي
"You have your flip-flops and I have my flip-flops."

and for xədm-a خدماتك "work", completely unprompted:

kəmmli xədm-at-ək كمّلي خدماتك
"Finish your work."

which his older brother actually corrected to kəmmli xəddəm-t-ək كمّلي خدّمتك.

Adults' speech furnishes one plausible model for this strategy - not in nouns but in participles. The active feminine participle takes direct object pronoun suffixes, identical to the genitive ones except in the 1st person singular. In such forms, -ət becomes -at before a vowel, rather than dropping the ə: šayf-a شايفة "having seen (f.)", šayf-at-u شايفاتهُ "having seen him (f. subject)". But its extension to nouns is something quite new; neither their parents nor their elder brother nor any adult I've met use such forms.

Most probably, the next time I go to Dellys I'll find these two children using the normal forms and denying they ever spoke this way. Even now, they already use the normal form for body parts which almost always occur possessed: rəqb-a رقبة "neck" becomes rəqqəb-t-i رقّبتي "my neck". But what if this innovation instead spreads among their peers? Most likely it won't: there seems to be little evidence for children initiating language change, notwithstanding the idea's widespread adoption by generative historical linguists, and adults' innovations are much more likely to be maintained or copied (cf. Luraghi 2013, Foulkes and Vihman fc; for a potential counterexample, see Moyna 2009). For that very reason, however, it will be worth keeping an eye on them; potential counterexamples are always interesting.

Nasheed in Tumzabt

In honour of the month - and of the harmonious coexistence in Algeria of different branches of Islam, threatened in recent years - here's a rather well-produced bilingual Ramadan nasheed in Arabic and Tumẓabt, the Berber language of the Mzab region far to the south of Algiers:

Apart from its linguistic interest, it's rather interesting semiotically. The first half, in Arabic, presents life in a Saharan oasis as idealised by an oasis-dweller rather than a tourist - no dunes, not much picturesque architecture, just well-watered, well-shaded palm groves, traditional picnic blankets, and lots of happy children. The second half, in Tumzabt with Arabic subtitles, focuses more on religious life - mosques and prayer at odd hours and pages of the Qur'an. Someone put a lot of money into this clip; I don't know anything about its background, but I get the impression that it was intended not just to edify fellow speakers of Tumẓabt but also to show the best possible image of the Mzab to outsiders - perhaps a precautionary PR effort in case of further problems in the region?

Some linguistic features of interest include:

• The Latin loanword i-bekkaḍ-en "sins", from peccatum;
• The non-borrowed Berber word Yuc "God";
• The curious metathesis in dessat < s dat "before, in front of" (I have no explanation for the gemination here either);
• The coinage ɣiṛu, based on the inherited root "call", for the time before dawn when the first call to prayer is traditionally made, about an hour before the actual time of prayer (thanks to Banouh Nouh-Mefnoune for the details). Similar forms are paralleled sporadically in a number of Berber varieties, but which prayer they refer to depends on the region;
• The varying forms of the 1st person plural object clitic (if indeed it can still be called a clitic): -aɣen when placed before the verb, as in the first line, but -aneɣ when placed after it;
• The addition of meaningless -i at the end of the line to make it fit the metre, paralleled in Tashelhiyt. (see comments)

Here's my best effort to transcribe it, minus some of the repetition; corrections welcome.

Yus-ed yur n uẓumi, a-ɣen yerr f etcetmi; [corrected following comments]
The month of fasting has come, let it take us away from sin;
Eṛbeḥ-ed si-s a memmi arrazen n etzeɛmi.
Win from it, my son, the reward of goodness.
Eččer-t fissaɛ ɣiṛu, dessat ma ɣad yedden,
Get up quick before dawn, before the call to prayer,
Esserr n elxiṛ eğrew, a-c reẓmen ibriden;
Gather secret good deeds, roads will open for you;
Yus-əd yur n uẓumi.
The month of fasting has come.

Yus-ed yur n uẓumi, a-ɣen yerr f etcetmi;
The month of fasting has come, let it take us away from sin;
Eṛbeḥ-ed si-s a memmi arrazen n etzeɛmi.
Win from it, my son, the reward of goodness.
S tala-s seṛwa ul-eč, tfarrid-t s ibekkaḍen, [corrected following comments]
Fill your heart from its fount, purify it from sins,
Ezdey i tawwat-eč; a-c yexs Yuc ed midden,
Reconcile with your relatives, God and people will love you;
Yus-əd yur n uẓumi.
The month of fasting has come.

Anomalous gender agreement in Algerian Arabic

In Algerian Arabic (here, Dellys dialect), the feminine singular form of an adjective is formed just by adding a suffix -a, with almost no exceptions. In two of the exceptions, a full look at the paradigm suggests that it's really the masculine form rather than the feminine which is irregular (though the situation is less clear-cut in other dialects - in traditional Algiers, for example, the plural of "beautiful" is شبّان šəbban):

	m. sg.	f. sg.	pl.
beautiful	شباب šbab	شابّة šabba	شابّين šabbin
other	آخُر axŭṛ	أُخرى ŭxṛa	أُخرين ŭxṛin

A third case is rather different. "Such-and-such (a person), so-and-so" is expressed by the noun m. sg. فلان flan, f. sg. فلانة flana, with no known plural. (This originally Arabic form is rather widely borrowed; you may be familiar with it from Spanish fulano). From this we can derive an adjective "such-and-such a" by adding a nisba suffix -i: m. sg. فلاني flani, but f. sg. فلانتية flantiyya. To make matters worse, we suddenly find ourselves with a gender distinction in the plural, something otherwise absent from adjectival agreement in this dialect: m. pl. فلانيين flaniyyin, f. pl. فلانتيين flantiyyin.

What's going on, though anomalous, is pretty clear (recall that feminine -a regularly becomes -t in the construct state): this adjective is displaying double agreement, gender agreement alone on the nominal root flan, and normal gender+number agreement on the adjectival derivational suffix -i. Can you think of any comparable cases elsewhere?

How Korandje made "with" agree it-with its subject

Korandje, the language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, requires the comitative preposition "with" to agree in person and number, not with its object, but with its subject (strictly speaking, with its external argument):

ʕa-ddər ʕ-indza xaləd, I-went I-with Khaled.
nə-ddər n-indza xaləd, you-went you-with Khaled.

This seems to be vanishingly rare worldwide. The nearest parallels I have encountered are ones in which the comitative is expressed using a serial verb, but a closer look at the syntax and morphology of Korandje shows that indza is indeed a preposition, not a verb or a noun. Perhaps most strikingly, when you relativise on its object, you pied-pipe not only the preposition but the agreement marker on it too:

ʕan bạ-yu ʕ-indz uɣudz əgga ʕa-b-yəxdəm
my friend-s I-with whom PAST I-IMPF-work
"my friends with whom I was working"

Its historical source, proto-Songhay *ndá "with, and, if", was also a preposition, and did not display agreement. Comparative data makes it possible to reconstruct how this change took place: it developed out of a strategy, common in Berber and found in some Songhay languages, of expressing "I went with Khaled" as "I went, I and Khaled", which seems to be the result of reinterpretation of a postverbal subject as part of the adjacent comitative phrase. This development in turn provides the first attested way to reverse the well-known grammaticalisation chain "with" > "and". If you want to know more, read my article, which has just been published:

"How to make a comitative preposition agree it-with its external argument: Songhay and the typology of conjunction and agreement". In Paul Widmer, Jürg Fleischer, and Elisabeth Rieken (eds.), Agreement from a diachronic perspective, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 75-100, 2015. (offprints available on request - just email me.)

Here's the abstract:

This article describes two hitherto unreported comitative strategies exemplified in Songhay languages of West Africa – external agreement, and bipartite – and demonstrates their wider applicability. The former strategy provides the first clear-cut example of a previously unattested agreement target-controller pair. Based on comparative evidence, this article proposes a scenario for how these could have developed from the typologically unremarkable comitative and coordinative strategies reconstructible for proto-Songhay, in a process facilitated by contact with Berber. The grammaticalisation chain required to explain this has the unexpected effect of reversing a much better-known one previously claimed to be unidirectional, the development COMITATIVE > NP-AND.

Out now: The development of dative agreement in Berber

After about two years in the pipeline, an article summarising the results of my British Academy research on agreement in Berber has just come out in Transactions of the Philological Society. If you have access to Wiley Online Library, you can read it online: The development of dative agreement in Berber: beyond nominal hierarchies. If you're interested but don't have access, email me to ask for a copy. Here's the abstract:

Diachronically, agreement commonly emerges from clitic doubling, which in turn derives from topic shift constructions (Givón 1976) – a grammaticalisation pathway termed the Agreement Cycle. For accusatives, at the intermediate stages of this development, doubling constitutes a form of Differential Object Marking, and passes towards agreement as the conditions for its use are relaxed to cover larger sections of the Definiteness and Animacy Scales. Berber, a subfamily of Afroasiatic spoken in North Africa, shows widespread dative doubling with substantial variation across languages in the conditioning factors, which in one case has developed into inflectional dative agreement. Examination of a corpus covering eighteen Berber varieties suggests that low Definiteness/Animacy datives are less likely to be doubled. However, since most datives are both definite and animate, these factors account for very little of the observed variation. Much more can be accounted for by an unexpected factor: the choice of verb. “Say” consistently shows much higher frequencies of doubling, usually nearly 100 per cent. This observation can be explained on the hypothesis that doubling derives from afterthoughts, not from topic dislocation.