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’.

Clitic doubling in Arabia: An update

Back in 2017, I published an article on "Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic" (ZAL 66, pp. 45-70), arguing that the various cases of clitic doubling reported across Arabic dialects in different regions - NW Africa, Malta, the Levant, Cyprus, Central Asia, Dhofar - differ in their behaviour, do not share a common origin, and in each case reflect substratum influence. The case of Dhofar turned out to be particularly tricky in that the only available evidence for clitic doubling in local Arabic and in its Modern South Arabian substratum came from the same speaker in each case - Mhammed bin Selim El-Kathiri, a bilingual speaker of Jibbali and Dhofari Arabic who worked with a team of Austrian linguists about a century ago. He used the same clitic doubling construction across both his languages (definite DO/IO/PrepO, no marker); but no such construction appears in more recent work on either language. I tentatively concluded that:

Only further data can determine whether this is a general feature of some particular Dhofari dialect (perhaps the second language dialect of Arabic spoken by Shihri speakers?) or just an unusual feature of El-Kathiri's idiolect. However, if this construction was not simply idiolectal, its origins seem more likely to lie in Jibbali than in Dhofari Arabic, since no parallels have been found in any Arabic dialect of the Arabian Peninsula.

A forthcoming article I recently came across, Pronominalization and Clitic Doubling in Syrian and Omani Arabic, changes the picture for this region. In a paper primarily focused on the generative syntax of clitic doubling rather than on its history, Peter Hallman and Rashid Al-Balushi demonstrate for the first time that the Arabic variety of al-Batinah in the north of Oman has productive clitic doubling, and that its distribution (definite/specific DO/IO/PrepO/Poss, no marker) largely matches El-Kathiri's usage a century earlier. Clitic doubling of this type thus a widespread Omani feature, not a Dhofar-specific one, and certainly not a merely idiolectal one.

Note that the dialect of Al-Batinah, like that of Dhofar, is a dialect with q for historic qāf, representing the earliest stratum of Arabic to reach the region. One hypothesis could be that clitic doubling of this type is a Modern South Arabian (MSA) substratum feature, calqued into the first Arabic varieties to reach Oman but never reaching the g-dialects that first come to mind when one thinks of Arabian dialects. On the other hand, no further evidence has yet come to light for clitic doubling in MSA; based purely on the available data, it seems equally or more plausible that this type of clitic doubling arose spontaneously in Omani Arabic and was calqued into Jibbali by bilinguals such as El-Kathiri. Much more dialectological data is needed to decide the question; available descriptions are evidently far from complete. In either case, independent origin appears far likelier than any kind of historic connection with the rather different types of clitic doubling observed in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world.

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.

A real-life subjacency problem sentence

There are some kinds of questions and relative clauses that you just can't form without resorting to a resumptive pronoun, even in languages - like English - that otherwise don't allow resumptive pronouns to begin with. Ever since Ross (1967) came up with a typology of "island constraints", syntacticians have hotly debated both which ones these are and how to account for them.

Unfortunately, real-life examples of people trying to say such things are very scarce on the ground. As a result discussion of this phenomenon tends to be dominated by artificial examples. Much of the literature on subjacency inadvertently demonstrates how unsatisfactory the result can be (as discussed here: 1, 2). Every once in a long while, however, you find a completely spontaneous case of someone running up against such constraints - and here's today's, courtesy of some person on Reddit:

Step zero: find a couple million complete and utter morons, who it's a miracle they can breathe in and out without f***ing it up, to support you.

Normally, a relative clause starting in "who" would have no overt subject within the clause itself apart from "who", as in:

Step zero: find a couple million complete and utter morons, who in all honesty Ø can barely breathe in and out without f***ing it up, to support you.

But that's impossible here: note the ungrammaticality of:

*Step zero: find a couple million complete and utter morons, who it's a miracle Ø can breathe in and out without f***ing it up, to support you.

Instead, you end up having to fill the subject position to which "who" refers with a resumptive pronoun "they".

Too strong to get out

At four, my nephew speaks English (his dominant language) very well. He still shows some interesting divergences from the standard of those around him, though. Some are influenced by German (a close second): he uses "mine" as a determiner in English (like German "mein") rather than "my", saying things like "mine house". Others seem to result from language-internal overgeneralization, as when he said:

• If I push the Lego box then the carpet will destroy. [intended meaning: be destroyed]

Presumably, he's interpreted "destroy" as a labile verb, like "open" or "burn".

At first blush, I thought the following sentence was another example of overgeneralization:

• I'm too strong to get out, so you can't. [intended meaning: I'm too strong for anyone to get me out]

However, reflection suggests that this ought to be perfectly grammatical in English, since "get out" is already labile. "This stump is too heavy to pull out" works fine, so why not "I'm too strong to get out"? Yet, for me at least, the clause immediately receives a pragmatically absurd interpretation with "I" as the subject of "get out", and the obviously intended interpretation is barely accessible even when I've consciously concluded that it should be grammatically acceptable.

In terms of the classic Chomskyan analysis of control, the two interpretations correspond to different unpronounced pronouns PRO:

1. I_i'm too strong [PRO_i to get out]
2. I_i'm too strong [PRO_arb to get PRO_i out]

A lot of linguists really dislike the idea of an unpronounced pronoun. Whatever its psychological merits, though, this analysis has the advantage of suggesting why the first interpretation comes more easily than the second here: it only involves one empty pronoun, whereas the desired interpretation needs two. So if anything is going wrong in this sentence, it's not so much the syntax as the pragmatics: an adult speaker might be more aware that listeners could have trouble processing a clause of this form, and avoid it in favour of something less ambiguous. That would need empirical checking though.

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

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.

Subject-verb order in Tumzabt

Going through Brahim and Bekir Abdessalam's brief grammar of Tumzabt Berber (الوجيز في قواعد الكتابة والنحو الأمازيغية "المزابية": الجزء الأول) recently, I was struck by their discussion of the problem of subject-verb order. Berber in general allows both verb-subject and subject-verb order, with the case ("state") of the subject depending on which order is used. Determining which order is used under which circumstances, however, poses some difficulties; the same language may be described as VSO or SVO, depending on who you ask, and the determining factors certainly differ from one variety to another (cf. eg Mettouchi fc for Kabyle). Their take on the problem combines information structure with pragmatics and verbal mood. The latter two factors can very likely be reduced to information structure too, but that would require testing; in any case, the observation that VS order is required for serialization is interesting. Here's what they had to say, translated into English (pp. 129-130):

We observe that in the first set of examples, the subject precedes the verb; this is the usual form in an Amazigh clause consisting of a verb and a subject.

In the second set of examples, the subject follows the verb. This happens in the following cases:

1. The subject may follow the verb when it is specific and known to the speaker and listener because there is a connection between speaking of it and a previous expression involving speaking of the same subject. For instance:

   twelleh! afunas-nni yetthaḍa - Watch out, that bull rampages.

   After the two parties have parted, they meet again the next day, and one says to the other:
   yak yhaḍ ufunas ay-tessečned asennaṭṭ! - Indeed that bull you showed me yesterday really did rampage!

   Here, the subject - the bull - is specific for both parties to the conversation in the second usage, since it had been spoken of earlier.

2. For the sake of irony, which can only be deduced from the context surrounding this expression and from the circumstances of discourse, eg if we say:

   tiɣawsiwin-ess tqimant-edd ɣel wezğen, drus mi yefra igget, ay-tinid : yebṛem werğaz ! - His affairs stay half-done, rarely does he resolve even one, and you tell me: he's a careful man!

3. The subject may follow the verb obligatorily in the serial aorist, eg:

   yuli tazdayt yuḍa-y-as wemjer - He climbed the date palm and the sickle fell from him [and dropped the sickle].

   It may also occur directly following the verb in the future tense aorist, eg:

   ad tatef teğrest ad yireḍ isemmuṛa n tḍuft or tağrest ad tatef ad yireḍ isemmuṛa n tḍuft - When winter comes, woolen clothes are worn.

They follow this up with an observation that seems quite astonishing from a comparative Berber perspective (p. 131):

A subject following the verb is put in the construct state if definite, this being the normal case for the postverbal subject, and is put in the free state if indefinite without any need for the [indefinite] article iggen / igget ["one"].

Unfortunately, they provide no examples to illustrate this claim.

Grammatically analysing "Sahha Ramdankoum!"

Sahha Ramdankoum صحّة رمضانكم!‍ ‍This Darja phrase, which might be rendered as "happy Ramadan!", is familiar to any Algerian. It groups with a few others - notably Sahha Ftourkoum صحة فطولاركم "happy fast-breaking dinner!" and Sahha Eidkoum صحة عيدكم "happy Eid!" - as an example of a not very productive template "Sahha X+2nd person possessive" expressing good wishes on the occasion of X. But what is "sahha" doing in such forms?

In many contexts, "sahha" is a noun meaning "health"; we can be sure it is a noun, since it can be the object of a preposition and take personal possessive endings, as in b-sahht-ek بصحتك "good for you" (with your health). But there is also a defective verb, taking 2nd person perfective endings: sahhit صحيت (to a man), sahhiti صحيتي (to a woman), sahhitou صحيتو (to a group) "thanks / well done" (a little stronger than sahha "thanks"). The expected 3rd person masculine singular form of this verb would be sahh صح or sahha صحى; sahh actually is attested as an impersonal verb (ysahh-lek يصحلك "it is appropriate for you"), but its meaning is sufficiently distant that it's not necessarily part of the same paradigm. So in principle, "sahha" in "Sahha Ramdanek" could be interpreted as a noun, or a verb. Is there any way to decide which?

If it's a noun, then the phrase's syntax is bizarre - the literal interpretation would then be "Health is your Ramadan", whereas to make it fit the actual meaning we want at least something like "Your Ramadan is health", which would be the opposite order (?Ramdanek Sahha رمضانك صحة). If it's a verb, on the other hand, the syntax is fine - subjects in Algerian Arabic routinely follow the verb, and perfective verbs are routinely used to express states, so we could interpret it as something like "Healthy is your Ramadan!" or even, if we allow the perfective to be optative as in Classical Arabic, "May your Ramadan be healthy!"

On the other hand, if it's a verb, then it should agree in gender and number with what follows it, with feminine "sahhat" صحات and plural "sahhaw" صحاو. This can't actually be tested directly: in all such expressions that I can think of, the noun happens to be masculine and singular, and this expression cannot normally be extended to congratulate people on other occasions. But if we imagine using this formula to congratulate someone on their happiness, I for one would much sooner say "Sahha Farhatkoum" صحة فرحتكم than "Sahhat Farhatkoum" صحات فرحتكم, which suggests that my mind, at least, is not analysing it as a verb.

Perhaps it's neither noun nor verb, then? There are a few words in Algerian Arabic that form predicates and comme at the start of the clause, but do not take verbal morphology - for instance, makash ماكاش "there is no" or oulah ولاه "no need (for)". Putting it in this class would take care of the problem, but just leads us to a different one: can this class of non-verbal predicators be given a coherent positive definition, or is it just whatever happens to be left over from defining the major word classes?

Be that as it may, best wishes to all readers for this coming month, and, for those fasting it, Sahha Ramdankoum!