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.

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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

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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.

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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

Dreams and tales in Siwa and Ouargla

Valentina Schiattarella, who recently finished her PhD thesis on some aspects of Siwi grammar, has gathered the first serious collection of Siwi folk tales recorded in Siwi (forthcoming from Köppe some time soon). Like most languages, Siwi has opening and closing formulae to mark the beginning and end of a tale. The commonest closing formula in the stories she's recorded seems to be:

ħattuta ħattuta qaṣṣaṛ ʕṃəṛha, akəṃṃus n xer i ənšni, akəṃṃus n šaṛ i ntnən
Hattuta hattuta its span has shortened[Ar], bundle of good for us, bundle of bad for them

The first part of this is in Arabic, and is not too different from what you might hear elsewhere in Egypt: ħattuta ħattuta is a corruption of حدوتة ħadduta, Egyptian Arabic for "story". (For similar formulae in Palestinian tales, such as tūtū tūtū faraɣat il-ħaddūtu, see Sirhan 2014.) The second part is in Berber, and hence presumably has an older history within Siwi; it is precisely paralleled in an opening formula used at Ouargla (Algeria):

Ṛəbbi yəttamən f lxiṛ ụhụ f ššəṛṛ, lxiṛ nn-iw, ššəṛṛ nn-əs, ini yiwi-tən gaɛ
God believes(?) in good not in bad; the good for me, the bad for him, or may He take them both

Basset (1920:107) places this formula in a wider context; throughout the Berber world, opening or closing formulae commonly take the form of "propitiatory formulae or formulae for the expulsion of evil", which he takes to indicate that the act of storytelling must have been viewed as potentially dangerous. Alongside Ouargla, he cites Kabyle examples blessing the group and cursing the jackal, and Shilha ones wishing the teller the meat and the others the tripes. The Siwi formula, however, is far closer to the Ouargla one than to anything else Basset mentions. And whereas the Kabyle formula invokes an animal whose importance in Berber folklore and mythology is obvious, and the Shilha one remians close to everyday life, all the key words of the Ouargli and Siwi formulae are specifically Arabic and religious (Rabbī "my Lord", khayr "good", sharr "bad"). This suggests that, while the idea may be Berber, the formulation itself might be taken from Arabic.

As it happens, the early Islamic period furnishes us with just such a formula in Arabic, in a similar but curiously different context. The still widely used Interpretation of Dreams, attributed to Ibn Sirin, explains in its introduction that a dream interpreter who does not want to reveal his interpretation to his client should instead tell him the following: "May good be for you and bad be for your enemies; may you receive good and avoid bad" (خير لك وشر لأعدائك، خير تؤتاه وشر تتوقاه), or, if the interpretation concerns the interpreter too: "May the good be for us and the bad be for our enemies (etc.)" This expression is also found in an unmistakeably related context in some dubious hadiths reporting Umar ibn al-Khattab as saying "Learn to read the Qur'an in Arabic, and the interpretation of dreams, and say: May good (khayr) be for us and bad (sharr) for our enemy", and: "If one sees a vision and recounts it to one's brother, let him say: May good be for us and bad for our enemy".

The obvious interpretation is that, at some point in the early history of these Saharan oases, the act of telling tales was locally assimilated to the act of recounting dreams, allowing the Arabic formula for the latter to be adopted for the former. It would be interesting to know why this happened; was the idea that a tale, no less than a dream, somehow contained cryptic clues about the future? Or did Saharan Berbers in late antiquity make a habit of recounting dreams to one another on winter evenings, as well as folktales? Unfortunately, we'll probably never know for sure, but it can be interesting to speculate...