Naxi in Qatar

Yesterday I watched an excellent Chinese documentary called E-Ya Village at the Al-Jazeera TV Production Festival in Doha. It covered aspects of this isolated Sichuan Naxi mountain village's daily life, but focused mainly on their religion, covering what they did for naming, coming of age, mourning, New Year, various sacrifices...

The film was full of (subtitled) Naxi dialog, but what I found most linguistically interesting was the writing system. As everybody should know :), Naxi has a complex pictographic writing system of some antiquity, called Dongba after the priests of their religion. In the film, no secular books or newspapers featured, and the few signs (at the clinic's entrance) were written in Chinese; but Dongba was used several times, always in a religious context. In particular, its most obvious "practical" use was for prayer flags put up in mourning contexts: whenever these flap in the wind, the wind is said to carry the words written on them, sections of the Naxi holy book, to the realm of the dead. It suggests a functional interpretation of the Dongba writing system as one intended essentially, not for communication with the living, but for communication with the spirit world. This has suggestive if not exact parallels - consider Mandaic's traditional functions, for instance. But obviously one would want to see more than just a film to analyze the issue!

The festival, incidentally, was very international, with numerous Persian, Chinese, Latin American, and French films as well as the Arabic ones. Unfortunately, they were let down by insufficient subtitling: non-Arabic films were subtitled only in English, if at all, while Arabic films were not subtitled, substantially restricting the audience for both. Hopefully next year they'll try to remedy this.

Crow language

I was Googling for an essay I'm planning to write on reduplication in Siouan languages the other day, so I typed in "Crow language". I was somewhat surprised to come across an article on the vocalizations of the American crow as my second hit, so I thought I'd share it. Apparently, 27 different vocalizations have been noted in the scientific literature (with names like "scolding call", "distress call", "courtship vocalizations", and "pre-mortality call"), and many remain undeciphered, so to speak. It would certainly be interesting to get a really good idea of the communication system of an animal as intelligent as the crow; bees are all very well, but perhaps a little too alien to compare sensibly with human language.

I never did find anything very helpful online on the Crow language, but John Boyle's Siouan Languages Bibliography will certainly come in handy, and this sketch of Omaha-Ponca seems good, though of limited use for what I'm researching.

The Quran on linguistic diversity

In these times of widespread language extinction and of "religious" tensions, I thought some readers might be interested to hear what the Quran has to say about linguistic diversity. The most important text is, of course, 30:22:

And one of His [God's] signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned.

As the context makes clear, this is part of a more general Qur'anic pattern in which this universe itself - the normal, everyday events that we look at as just the way things are - is identified as a sign from God; the Creator's nature is reflected in His creation. So the thrust of the verse is that linguistic diversity is a part of nature, and as such a part of God's plan for the world.

Another relevant verse, which, in light of 10:47 ("for every nation there is a messenger"), puts the idea that the Quran being written in Arabic makes Arabic the best of all languages into perspective, is 14:4:

And We [God] did not send any messenger but with the language of his people, so that he might explain to them clearly; then God makes whom He pleases err and He guides whom He pleases and He is the Mighty, the Wise.

Libyan Berber and a remarkable Laghouat archaism

In case you ever wondered where in Libya Berber languages are spoken, check out this map at Tawalt. Note at least two oases that don't get any mention in the Ethnologue - Ubari and al-Fogaha.

I was talking to a guy from Laghouat the other day, and it turns out that in that area people say `ma عما rather than more widespread Maghreb Arabic m`a معا for "with". This is rather interesting, in the light of Aramaic `am and Hebrew `im... wonder whether it's a coincidence, or a Syriac borrowing somehow picked up by an Arab tribe en route to Algeria? Anyone heard of another Arabic dialect where this happens?

Chechnya Day

Apparently, it's Chechnya Day today - commemmorating Stalin's expulsion in 1944 of the entire Chechen people from their homeland to Central Asia (along with a number of other minority groups, such as the Kalmyks). Something like half the population died en route. The survivors were not permitted to return for more than ten years.

So, marking the occasion, here are some Chechen language links:

• Chechen - Johanna Nichols
  
• Scanned Chechen language materials online (possibly illegal, but very helpful)

Like most Caucasian languages, it's quite interesting, with no known relatives outside the Caucasus, a complex gender system, and a remarkably large set of phonemes. Its language family, Northeast Caucasian, may be the closest living relative of two long-extinct languages once written in cuneiform north of the Fertile Crescent, Hurrian and Urartian.

Classical Kanembu

I went to a very interesting seminar on classical Kanembu this week. It's a highly conservative form of Kanembu/Kanuri, written in the Arabic script, used mainly (exclusively?) for commentary on (and translation of) Arabic religious texts. The earliest dated example is a bilingual Quran from 1669, currently being studied here at SOAS. I don't want to comment in too much detail, because I'm not sure how much they've published on it yet, but a couple of things particularly struck me:

• Classical Kanembu is still used and written by Islamic scholars of the area - although, apparently, Western scholars only became aware of this fact quite recently.
  
• It has substantially more cases than modern Kanuri, and possibly an even more complicated verb morphology.
  
• Most strikingly, since vowel length is non-phonemic in Kanuri, it seems to use vowel length to indicate high tone instead; thus, for example Arabic al-'aakhirah "the afterlife" has been borrowed as laxíra, and thus gets spelled as لاخِيرَ. As far as I know, this would make it the only Arabic orthography to mark tone. (Actually, Dmitri Bondarev, who observed this, prefers for the moment the more conservative interpretation that the vowel length commonly corresponds to a modern Kanuri high tone, not ruling out the possibility that such vowels were actually long in the Kanembu of the seventeenth century.)

This already constitutes some of the oldest documentation of any West African language, and quite apart from its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Saharan, it really makes one wonder what other valuable historical data on other African languages linguists might be missing out on by not studying Arabic/Ajami use. So keep your eyes peeled, and tell me if you spot anything!

Where have you been? - a semantic change in progress?

Just a random observation...

Good sentences: I've been to Finland, I'll have been to Finland five times, he's never been to Finland...

Terrible sentences: *I am to Finland, *I will be to Finland, *I was to Finland, **he never is to Finland...

It seems that "been", in some cases, can act as an alternative past participle for "go", replacing "gone". A linking environment is provided by sentences with a bare locative adverb: I've been there / I am there / I will be there are all fine. Presumably, since "I've been there" normally implies "I've gone there" (unless you've been locked up there since birth or something), the "been" was reinterpreted as an even more irregular past participle of "go".

"I'll be there" equally implies "I'll go there", so it's odd that this wasn't extended similarly to allow "*I'll be to Finland" - or so I thought, before checking Google. Google does reveal a couple of instances: "I'll be to bed in a minute", "I'll be to work way early, and perhaps most strikingly, "I've been to more than half of the counties, and in the next six weeks, I'll be to the other half of the counties". So it seems we have a change in progress. Does this depend on the region? Will it culminate in a complete merger of "go" and "be"? Are there any parallels to this outside English? What do you think?

In Languages We Live

Just watched an interesting new film last night, called In Languages We Live/In Sproget Jeg Er (I don't vouch for the second title's accuracy.) It's a film about linguistic diversity, essentially, with cameos from a number of communities including Mla'bri, Totonaco, and Pitjantjatjara, as well as larger languages, such as a rather fun Arabic Hamlet (with Claudius as an Arab dictator, of course), a newscaster who speaks a dialect of Mandarin (Xiang, I think) natively but wants to bring up her kids only speaking Standard Mandarin, and "sheng", the Swahili-English-other street slang of Nairobi teenagers - not to mention, of course, the English and Danish of the narrators. It also had a brief meeting with the last(?) native speaker of Livonian - who apparently has more people to talk to than you might think, what with the steady stream of Finnicists beating a path to his door! But the most memorable bit was the brief narration, in the original language (Arrernte? I'd have to rewatch the film), of the Australian government's 1950's policy of forcibly separating Aboriginal kids from their parents, as witnessed by one of the parents: parents trying to physically hold on to their kids as the police tore them away; parents running with their kids to hide in local ravines, and being tracked down by the police; children crying as they were driven away... It would be hard to believe that such a policy was being practiced just fifty years ago, if the twentieth century weren't already full of such cases.

Tonkawa

There is little information on Tonkawa, a language once spoken in southern Texas. The earliest data is a word list from 1829, but nothing else was recorded until 1876. The odd thing is that the words recorded from 1829 are either identical to the later ones or, very often, totally different; in the latter case, they are usually transparently derived from different words, usually verbal forms or compounds. No such rapid vocabulary turnover is observed in later work; between 1876 and 1928, nothing much changed. Why would something like this happen?

Apparently, the explanation is remarkably simple, if tragic. The Tonkawa, like many Native American and Australian groups, had a strong taboo against mentioning the name of a dead person, and, when a dead person's name resembled a word in common use, would replace that word. (To reduce this problem, they often gave their children Comanche names.) And, on October 24, 1862, 167 Tonkawas were massacred by an alliance of enemy tribes near Anadarko, Oklahoma. (Given the circumstances of the time, I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't the only massacre between 1829 and 1876 either.) One side-effect was the sort of rapid vocabulary change that should normally be just about impossible. This is one reason why you don't want to rely on glottochronology too much.

(For more details, see Ives Goddard in ed. Campbell and Mithun, The Languages of Native America, University of Texas: Austin 1979, pp. 358-363.)

Desertification in Algeria

Nothing much to do with linguistics, but... Apparently (the book I was reading cites Dresch 1986), the turning point in the desertification of the High Plateaus, the dry zone forming the northern boundary of the Sahara in Algeria and Tunisia, came with French colons' introduction of European-style farming methods. Traditional cultivation methods there left the land fallow one year out of every two, and used nothing sharper than a hoe, leaving numerous clods in the soil, thus keeping erosion to a minimum. The French methods, using a much deeper digging plough and completely weeding the soil, left the soil finely powdered and ready to disappear Dust Bowl-style in the event of any major windstorms, while their expropriation of the land pushed the Algerian farmers into more and more marginal areas, removing their plant cover and rendering them more vulnerable to erosion in turn. The US' Dust Bowl formed in a rather similar way - "sodbusters" removing the crust and vegetation cover that kept the land from blowing away - if on a far larger scale. The process has continued even since independence, due to the obvious short-term financial incentive to plant more land; the result has been "increasing sensitivity to wind erosion and a general degradation of the steppe ecosystem". Nothing so far about Boumedienne's "green line"; I wonder if it made any difference?

I find this interesting in general, but particularly telling given that I recently found some online would-be expert (I don't think I'll bother to link him) boasting that French contributions to Algeria included the "introduc[tion of] modern agriculture". It's amazing how you can put a good face on something just by picking the right words - and on that note, I think I've finally found a linguistics connection for this post.

El-Fogaha

El-Fogaha (الفقهة, or to its own inhabitants el-Foqhat) is a small oasis in central Libya, southeast of Sokna between Waddan and Zwila, whose few hundred inhabitants speak (spoke?) a Berber language. It is not quite the easternmost outpost of Berber - Awjila and Siwa are both further east - but a case could be made that it is the most obscure one. Its vocabulary is heavily influenced by Arabic, but retains some archaic Berber words lost in most westerly dialects, such as isin "tooth", azal "day". Unlike the Ghadames dialect or Tamasheq, but like most Berber varieties, it has reduced proto-Berber *B (Tuareg h) to semivowels or null: aiyaḍ "night". A couple of the plurals end in -aw, whereas in more westernly varieties they would end in -a:

• tamûrt "land" > tmu:râw (Contrast Kabyle tamurt > timura, Tumzabt tamuṛt > timuṛa; compare Ghadamsi tămmurt > tmuro)
• tanâst "key" > tnisâu (Contrast Tumzabt tnast > tinisa; compare Ghadamsi tonest > təniso)
• talîlt "terrace" > tli:lâu

The dropping of final semivowels in Northern Berber is well-known, but I had been wondering where the -o in the Ghadamsi plurals came from. I guess now I know. What I don't get yet is why this set of plurals ends in -a/aw/o in any case, rather than the regular feminine plural -in.

For more on this language, see Umberto Paradisi, "El-Fogaha, oasi berberofona del Fezzân", Roma:Bardi 1961.

PS: A belated Eid Mubarak to everyone!

Istanbul, bishops, Rohingya, and Tamezret

For this week, I thought I'd share two curiously parallel reanalyses I've come across recently:

• Istanbul, apparently, derives from the Greek phrase eis ten polin, "in the city";
  
• 'usquuf, "bishop" in Arabic, which apparently derives from a Coptic reinterpretation of Greek episkopos "bishop" as e-pi-skopos "to the skopos", due to which skopos was reanalyzed as meaning "bishop".

And a couple of interesting language sites I've come across:

RohingyaLanguage.com is a speaker's effort to promote the Rohingya language. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group of the western coast of Burma. Like virtually all Burma's inhabitants, they have been seriously mistreated by the government. Apparently, their language is most closely related to (a dialect of?) Chittagongian Bengali. If anyone figures out what the acute accent is meant to indicate, do tell me...

Atmazret.info (in French) is all about the endangered Berber language of Tamezret in southern Tunisia, written by a descendant of speakers. Though he's not a trained linguist, this qualifies as quite an important documentation effort in its own right; as far as I know, the only other thing ever published on the Tamezret dialect was Märchen der Berbern von Tamzratt im Süd-Tünisien in 1900, more than a century ago.

Andamanese Phrasebook

Some time ago, I found a copy of perhaps the only five-language phrasebook for the Andaman Islands. The Andaman Islands are a remote island group south of Burma belonging to India. Up to the 19th century, they were inhabited by a number of tribes with Stone Age technology, no significant contact with the outside world, and languages extremely different from any spoken anywhere else. Some of their descendants remain there today, but are a tiny minority except in a couple of areas in the south, and most of their languages are extinct. This phrasebook was written by one A. J. Portman in 1887, when the islands had been turned into a British penal colony, for the use of government officials. Some of the entries paint an interesting picture of life in the colony; for economy's sake, I have given only the Aka-Bea equivalents.

"That woman is wearing his skull." Kát apáil lá ót chetta ngāūrók-ké.

"Some convicts have escaped, you must search for them." Jó chāōga lá kájré, áb átaká."

"This village is very dirty." Ká báraij lót láda-da.

"You will be bitten by sandflies and mosquitoes." Nyípá, ól bédig téil ngáb chá-pinga.

"Don't sing, or there will be a storm." Ngódá rámitóyo-ngayábada, élér-wulké.

"He is a boy, and may not eat turtle." Kát áká kádekada, óda yádi mék-nga yábada.

"Do you eat grubs alive?" Án wai ngó butu ligátí mék?"

"You must bring them in by force." Ngó ítár pórawa.

And finally:

"Is there anyone here who understands his language?" Tén kárin míjólá áká teggí gádí-áté?"

They just don't make phrasebooks like this any more...

Oldest African dictionaries

Some time ago, I came across a web page characterizing a dictionary of Kenzi Nubian dating from 1635 as "the oldest dictionary of an African language". Much as I appreciate their work in getting this very interesting material online, that claim is out by at least 500 years, if not 1000.

The oldest arguable dictionary of an African language that I am aware of so far is the Greek-Coptic Glossary of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, which apparently* dates back to the 6th century. Ibn al-'Assal's Arabic-Coptic sullam muqaffa, written in the 1200s, can quite unhesitatingly be described as a dictionary; following a then-current Arabic tradition, it was arranged alphabetically from the last letter of the word backwards (so, for instance, "apple" would be close to "people" but far from "apricot".) This arrangement was meant to aid in the composition of rhymed prose and verse. Other examples, many arranged semantically, are given by the Encyclopedia of Islam article Sullam (literally "ladder"). In Ethiopia, traditional Geez-Amharic lexicons are titled Sawasew, or "ladders"; I thus assume they are of Coptic inspiration, though I haven't been able to find any detail about when they started to be written.

After Coptic, the next oldest is an Arabic-Berber lexicon written in 1145, containing some two thousand words. Its writer, Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Ja'far al-Qaysi, better known as Ibn Tunart, was born in Qalaat Bani Hammad (modern Algeria) and wrote the work in Fez (Morocco) - a second little-known Algerian medieval linguist to add to my list after Ibn Quraysh! The book contains some paradigms and verbs, but consists principally of a list of Arabic nouns with Berber equivalents or glosses, arranged by semantic field; it inspired several later Moroccan lexica. Nico van den Boogert is working on republishing it.

What other African dictionaries predate Carradori's? I don't know, but I can hazard some guesses - Geez, Swahili, Kanuri, and Nubian itself would certainly be worth checking.

* According to Adel Y. Sidarus, “Coptic Lexicography in the Middle Age, The Coptic Arabic Scalae,” in The Future of Coptic Studies ed. R. McL. Wilson (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), 123

A comparative linguist of the 10th century

Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez in Morocco were neglecting the study of the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Bible), he wrote a letter to them intended to establish that they could not and should not get by on the Hebrew alone - because other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, are essential in elucidating the Hebrew. In the process, he casually noted most of the correct sound correspondences between Hebrew and Arabic, and ended up writing what amounts to an extensive comparative dictionary of the three languages, even throwing in 9 Berber comparisons and 5 Latin ones at the end. He definitely hedges his bets on the cause of this obvious similarity between the three languages, but seems to come surprisingly close to the correct explanation - common descent - at times... something to bear in mind next time you read about Sir William Jones having founded comparative linguistics in 1798.

Here is what he had to say about it, as far as I can translate it:

I then resolved to put together this book for people with understanding, so that they should know that Syriac [Aramaic] expressions are scattered throughout the whole of the Holy Tongue in the Bible, and Arabic is mixed with it, and occasionally bits of Ajami [Latin] and Berber - and principally Arabic in particular, for in it we have found many of its strangest expressions to be pure Hebrew, to the point that there is no difference between the Hebrew and the Arabic except the interchange of ṣād and ḍād, and gīmel and jīm, and ṭet and đ̣ā', and `ay(i)n and ghayn, and ḥā' and khā', and zāy and dhāl. The reason for this similarity and the cause of this intermixture was their close neighboring in the land and their genealogical closeness, since Terah the father of Abraham was Syrian, and Laban was Syrian. Ishmael and Kedar were Arabized from the Time of Division, the time of the confounding [of tongues] at Babel, and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (peace be upon them) retained the Holy Tongue from the original Adam. The language became similar through intermixture*, just as in every land adjoining a land of a different language we see intermixture of certain expressions between them and the spread of language from one to another; and this is the cause of the similarities we have found between Hebrew and Arabic...

The original was written in classical Arabic using the Hebrew script; I retranscribe it into Arabic script here:

فرأيت عند ذلك أن أؤلِّف هذا الكتاب لأهل الفطن وذوي الألباب، فيعلمو أن جميع לשון קדש (لغة القداسة: العبرانية) الحاصل في المقرأ (الكتب المقدسة) قد انتثرت فيه ألفاظ سريانية واختلطت به لغة عربية وتشذذت فيه حروف عجمية وبربرية ولا سيما العربية خاصة فإن فيها كثير من غريب ألفاظها وجدناه عبرانيا محضا، حتى لا يكون بين العبراني والعربي في ذلك من الاختلاف إلا ما بين ابتدال الصاد والضاد، والجيمل (حرف عبراني: ڱ) والجيم، والطِت (حرف عبراني: ط) والظاء، والعين والغين، والحاء والخاء، والزاي والذال. وإنما كانت العلة في هذا التشابه والسبب في هذا الامتزاج قرب المجاورة في البلاد والمقاربة في النسب لأن תֶרח (تِرَحْ) أبو אברהם (ابراهيم) كان سريانيا وלבן (لابان: حمو يعقوب) سريانيا. وكان ישמעאל (اسماعيل) وקדָר (قيدار) مستعرب من דוֹר הפלגה (زمان الاختلاف)، زمان البلبلة في בבל (بابل)، وאברהם (ابراهيم) وיצחק (إسحاق) وיעקב (يعقوب) عليهم السلام متمسكين بـלשון קדש (لغة القداسة: العبرانية) من אדם הראשון (آدم الأول). فتشابهت اللغة من قبل الممازجة، كما نشاهد في كل بلد مجاور لبلد مخالف للغته من امتزاج بعض الألفاظ بينهم واستعارة اللسان بعضهن من بعض، فهذا سبب ما وجدناه من تشابه العبراني بالعربي...

(Source: D. Becker, Ha-Risala shel Yehudah ben Quraysh, Tel Aviv University Press, Tel Aviv 1984.)

* I previously mistranslated this, having misread qibal as qabl.

Update: Read more at http://lameen.googlepages.com/ibn-quraysh.html.

Curiosities of Semitic articles

As David Boxenhorn noted in his comment to the previous post, the definite articles of Hebrew and Arabic display two odd-seeming properties:

• agreement: if a noun has a given article, so does any adjective modifying it. Thus "a short boy" in Arabic is walad-u-n qaSiir-u-n (where -n marks indefiniteness, and -u marks the nominative case), whereas "the short boy" is al-walad-u l-qaSiir-u. (The vowel of al- elides when preceded by another vowel.)
  
• In direct compounds of two nouns (possessed-possessor, or more generally modifier-modified), the first noun cannot take any article. Thus in Arabic you can say yad-u l-walad-i "the boy's hand" or yad-u walad-i-n "a boy's hand" (-i marks the genitive case) but not *al-yad-u l-walad (intended to be "the hand of the boy") or *yadun al-walad (intended to be "a hand of the boy").

The second property isn't actually all that "exotic" - English does the same thing! You can say the man's hat, but never *the man's the hat or *the man's a hat; just as in Arabic or Hebrew, to make the full range of possible definiteness distinctions you have to resort to prepositions.

Definiteness agreement between nouns and adjectives is more unusual, but at least one Indo-European language has it: Norwegian. No question of substratum influence there, certainly... Anyone have another example?

However, in determining whether or not the article represents a shared innovation, the question is whether other relatives have it. I recall that Biblical/Imperial Aramaic did (later varieties lost it), but I'm not sure of the detailed behavior of its definite article. The Berber obligatory noun prefixes probably derive from an original article (see my post Beja and Beyond) but, though distinctly similar to the Beja definite article, don't seem directly comparable to the Arabic and Hebrew ones.

Demonstratives in Semitic and beyond

Rishon Rishon just posted a table comparing the words in my previous post to Hebrew. Most of them are correct; mo`ed and g'vul are not cognate, and SaH and loa` I'm not sure about. However, one is particularly interesting: ha- = 'al- "the". You often find this seeming cognate cited in works on Semitic: after all, ha- induces gemination of a subsequent non-guttural consonant - suggesting a lost consonant in the prefix assimilating to the subsequent letter - and Hebrew h- occasionally seems to soften to '- in Arabic (the causative measure hiph`iil corresponds to 'af`ala, for example.) Trouble is, the only letter in Hebrew that regularly assimilates to a following consonant is n (although l does admittedly assimilate in the verb laqaH), and the Safaitic inscriptions seem to reveal an early pre-Islamic northern dialect of Arabic which did have a definite article h- (hn- before gutturals, thus hn'lt for Al-Lat.) So are there any other possibilities?

I think so. ha- corresponds pretty well to Arabic haa "here is", which is also the obligatory prefix to the demonstrative "this" (haadhaa, haadhihi, haa'ula'). Compare also Syriac haanaa "this (m. sg.)" - which appears to reveal an added n which could explain the Hebrew doubling (and the Safaitic form) nicely. Conversely, 'al- corresponds well to Hebrew 'elleh, Arabic haa-'ulaa', Syriac haaleyn "these". The vowel doesn't correspond exactly, but then it doesn't in the certain cognate 'elleh = haa-'ulaa' either. This idea has probably already been put forward (or indeed knocked down) somewhere in the literature, for all I know, but there you go.

In either case, both definite articles would derive originally from unstressed demonstratives - a process so common it's barely worth commenting on. For example, all the Romance languages derive their definite articles from Latin demonstratives - usually illum/illa "that" (before the noun except in Romanian), but istum "that" in Sardinian. Likewise, the Coptic definite article pe- (m.)/te- (f.)/ne- (pl.) derives from the ancient Egyptian demonstrative pn (m.), tn (f.), nn (pl.) "this". Indeed, English "the" derives from the same old English word as "that". Come to think of it, I don't know of any definite articles offhand that don't derive from demonstratives; can you think of any?

Eid Mubarak!

Eid Mubarak عيد مبارك, or, as they say in Algeria, Sahha Eidek صحّا عيدك to everybody!

Today is Eid al-Fitr, the day on which the Ramadan fast ends and the subsequent feasting begins. The Arabic term (`iid al-fiTr عيد الفطر) means "Festival of Fast-breaking"; the original meaning of the root fTr seems to be "cleave, cut open", from which it acquired the senses of "form, make" on the one hand and (in a metaphor somewhat similar to the English one) "break fast" on the other. In North Africa, it is more generally known as El Eid Es Sghir (l`id SSghiR العيد الصغير), "the small festival" (as opposed to Eid al-Adha, the "big festival").

PS: luggi turns out to come from a widely attested Berber word ileggwi, meaning a spiny plant (variously broom or needle-furze) - as Salem Chaker was the first to suggest.

Mpre

A tantalizingly brief note of 1931 in the Gold Coast Review describes an ethnic group called the Mpre, found only in the village of Butie in central Ghana (8° 52' N, 1° 15' W) near the confluence of the White and Black Voltas, apart from a few emigrants in Debre. According to the author's description, the Mpre people, once more widespread, were reduced to a single village in the course of comparatively recent wars with the Asante. Noting that their language was “different to that of the surrounding tribes”, he lists 106 words of Mpre. This short vocabulary appears to be the only existing record of the language, which is believed to be extinct. The gap is all the more unfortunate because Mpre turns out to be of some taxonomic significance. It is not closely related to any of its neighbors, and Heine and Nurse (2000) treat it as unclassified. A friend of mine's paper dealing partly with this will be appearing sometime soonish, but I won't spoil the surprise...

You might think, given all this, that it was impossible to retrieve any information on its grammar. However, you would be wrong! Fellow language geeks may find it an interesting exercise to try their hand at extracting grammar information from the wordlist, which Blench gives a copy of, before reading on...



The wordlist strongly suggests a noun class prefix system still at least partially productive. The highly lopsided initial letter statistics would alone suggest this: 31 entries begin with e-, 21 with a-, and 12 with n-, together accounting for the majority of the wordlist. This speculation is confirmed by distributional analysis for the e- which appears in the numbers 1-5, but disappears in 11-13 and 20-30; it is presumably to be identified with the Ga prefix é- observable in the same numbers. (The change of ekpe “one” to mpe in “11” is noteworthy, if it is not a typo.) Likewise, comparison of kelafa “100” with lefanyo “200” reveals a prefix ke- - with precise analogues in Ch./Kr. kʌ́-, Na. gʌ́-, and Go. ká- in the same numbers. Of the 21 entries with a- (corresponding to 19, or possibly 18, distinct words), five are glossed as plural in English, while another four are glossed as collective nouns; no entries not beginning with a- are glossed as plural. I therefore conclude that a- is a marker of plurality - suggesting that ado (the formative element in “20”, “30”, ...) is the plural of edu “ten”. This jibes nicely with other languages of the area: a plural prefix a- is found in Gonja, Twi, Lejana, Akpafu, and Avatime, for example.

Identifiable compounds include zingilzi-nogha “bush cow” (cf. zingelza “bush”, nogha “cow”), sunko kawuseggi “earth owner or tindana” (cf. sunko “earth”), nkemnzui “son” (cf. nzui “child”), lefanyo “200” (cf. enyo “2”, kelafa “100”), eputo nasi “foot” (cf. eputo “leg”) ; all suggest a word order type Modifier-Modified. “Lion” (jikpajikpakoseggi) must surely be a compound, in which I would identify the final koseggi with kawuseggi “owner (?)” above? Also, ataza “finger” and atazai “toe” are clearly related, but it is unclear whether one is a compound form or whether both are simply different transcriptions of the same word.

One short sentence is given - agbem aba “it rains” (cf. agbem “God”). Assuming that this is of the form SV, this could be taken to suggest verb agreement in gender (or at least number) with the subject; however, this is by no means certain.

SOAS, epiglottal trills, Sergei Starostin

Today I attended my first lecture as an MA student here at SOAS - on phonology. Nothing much to report yet; the highlight had to be our lecturer's demonstration of an epiglottal trill (which, believe it or not, actually occurs in some Caucasian languages; I think she named Aghul.) It's a remarkable sound - impossible to confuse with any sort of pharyngeal.

In other news, I was sorry to hear that Sergei Starostin has died. I met him briefly at the Santa Fe Institute, and am one of many to have benefited from his online comparative databases. He will be missed, particularly at the EHL project.