School in a language you don't speak

When I was six years old, I started first grade in a small Algerian city, right after having done kindergarten in the US and forgotten most of the Arabic I had previously known. It was by far the most painful institutional transition I've ever had to make. At home, I was devouring National Geographics and starting to tackle The Lord of the Rings - but at school, I'm pretty sure the teacher thought I was retarded. In the classroom, I spent a lot of that year completely tuned out, playing with pens or bits of bread and waiting for the boredom to stop. By the end of second grade I had formed some idea of what the teacher was talking about - her vivid descriptions of hellfire and torture remain particularly memorable - though I still had no idea that there might be actual principles determining whether my writing was judged as correct or incorrect. At that point, however, my parents decided that enough was enough, and we started homeschooling, mostly in the language I spoke best - English. It felt like being released from jail.

My experience of starting school in a language I didn't know is not exactly typical, of course. I was a lot luckier than most. Sure, I was failing at school, but I could already read English just fine, so even at six I could see that that school wasn't the only game around. For most children who start school in a language they don't know, the choices are starker: master the new language, or give up on education altogether.

Plenty of Algerian children have faced precisely that situation, as I saw doing fieldwork in the southwest - and not just during the colonial era. It's what has led the people of Tabelbala and Igli to start speaking Arabic to their children rather than Korandje or Berber. For that matter, so have plenty of American children - Native Americans during the era of forced boarding schools come to mind. It's a problem faced by linguistic minorities all over the world, and, unless they manage to force the schools to make concessions, it often ends in language extinction, as the next generation of parents try to spare their children the trauma they themselves had experienced.

The big difference, though, is that in America, most children come to school speaking something pretty close to the language of their textbooks. In Algeria, and any other Arabic-speaking country, it's a little more complicated. Most children come to school speaking Algerian Arabic, and most teachers use Algerian Arabic with them to some extent, even though they're not supposed to. But the Standard Arabic that they're learning to read is as different from what they speak as the language of Chaucer from 21st-century American English. Even the most divergent Appalachian or inner city dialects are closer to standard English than the home language of the most highly educated middle-class Algerians is to standard Arabic.

Don't get me wrong: it's much easier than starting school in a completely different language. Even before independence, when TV was an unaffordable luxury and 90% of Algerians were illiterate in any language, a sufficiently motivated Arabic speaker could learn to read well enough to do it for fun, without ever passing through anything the colonial government considered to count as a school; that's what my own father did. And now that most children are watching cartoons in Standard Arabic from a young age, the gap is narrower than it used to be. Nevertheless, the difficulties it poses seem conspicuous to anyone lucky enough to have studied in their own language: how many children would be willing to read Chaucer in the original for fun?

You might suppose that the solution is obvious: speak "properly" to your kids! Or, alternatively: Make the spoken dialect into a written language! However, both ideas are almost equally taboo. The idea of teaching dialect at school seems as ridiculous to the average Algerian as it does to the average English speaker: we send them to school to learn stuff they don't know, not the language of the street! But, whereas many English speakers actively try to speak "correct" English, with their children and with everyone else, an Algerian who tried to speak Standard Arabic to everyone would be shunned; you can't seriously expect to be part of Algerian society without speaking the dialect. Of course, English speakers don't react well either when someone tries to speak too formally in an informal situation. But in most English-speaking social circles, it is possible - by the judicious avoidance of words like "judicious" and "avoidance" - to speak English in a way that is simultaneously informal enough to be friendly and prescriptively correct enough to be written down in an essay. That is not possible in Arabic, irrespective of social class: you have to choose one or the other. For me, that lack of a middle ground is what's really distinctive about the situation. For the foreseeable future, this means that most Algerian children will continue to be expected to learn both Algerian Arabic and Standard Arabic (not to mention French and English and sometimes Tamazight too), while having practically no opportunities to hold a conversation in Standard Arabic.

What's the best way to achieve that goal, and what evidence bears on that question? I've been reading around that a bit lately, but if you have any recommendations, please feel free to post them below!

Translating a pseudo-Welsh accent into French (or, over-explaining a joke)

Recently I came across Accros du Roc, a French translation by Patrick Couton of Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy Soul Music. In the original, Imp y Celyn ("Bud of the Holly" in Welsh) is a young musician from Llamedos, a small country full of druids and stone circles and harps where it rains all the time. He has a conspicuous Llamedos accent, which seems to consist mainly of doubling all his l's: "Not ellvish at allll, honestlly". For British readers, it's fairly obvious what's going on here: Welsh makes extensive use of the letter combination ll (transcribing a lateral fricative not found in English), so doubling the l's gives it a vaguely Welsh look without actually attempting the difficult task of representing a Welsh accent using an orthography as phonetically inexact as English's. Not a terribly funny joke, really, but it plays some small part in establishing our expectations for this character. But how could it be translated into French, or for that matter any other language?

Conveniently enough, France does have a sort of equivalent to Wales, a rainy, mountainous, coastal region with its own Celtic language and a lot of stone circles: Brittany. Breton does not make much use of the combination ll, but it does have a few characteristics that appear equally exotic to French speakers - in particular, the combination c'h (transcribing the velar fricative /x/) and the frequent use of the letter k (for /k/, reasonably enough). So Kreskenn Kelenn (one guess as to the name's meaning in Breton) talks like this:

Je vois un homme ki tient une hac'he de jet !

So in this case, it works out quite well - though I imagine the joke is lost on readers from, say, Quebec.

I gather that Soul Music has been translated into quite a few languages, but I don't think Arabic is one of them. What on earth would a translator do in this case? It would be kind of tempting to go for equating Celts with Berbers - there are a few stone circles in North Africa - and have Imp substitute ث ذ for ت د. But I don't think any Arab reader east of Algeria would get the allusion, and I doubt that the Middle East contains any ethnic group that can be satisfactorily thought of as playing the role for the Arabs that the Welsh do for the English. Then again, if I were an Arabic translator asked to take on Soul Music, I would give up immediately - any of the few Arabic speakers capable of getting enough of the rock music history allusions to be entertained by the book would be more comfortable reading it in English or French anyway. But that objection is not insuperable: after all, The Wasteland and Finnegan's Wake have been translated into Arabic (for some reason). Perhaps some day a genius will come along sufficiently reckless to give it a try...

From existential to indefinite determiner: Kaš in Algerian Arabic

One of the few characteristics of Algerian Arabic that are genuinely unique to Algeria is kaš كاش "some, any". At first sight, this rather frequent word must baffle Arabic speakers from other regions, to say nothing of learners of Arabic. However, it turns out to be a quite recent development, completed only in the 20th century, from two well-known Arabic words: kan كان "there is" (originally "was"), and ši شي "some, something, thing" (originally "thing"). I've just published a short article examining its usage and development: From existential to indefinite determiner: Kaš in Algerian Arabic (in the Proceedings of AIDA 11). Its core findings are summed up in this little graphic:

The center of the image has already been explained above. For the rest, you need to see examples of the five principal functions of kaš. The most central seems to be as an irrealis indefinite determiner, as in:

جا كاش واحد؟

ja	kaš	waħəd?
came	any	one?
"Did anyone come?"

However, it can also be used existentially in questions, as in:

كاش حليب؟

kaš	ħlib?
any	milk?
"Is there any milk?"

And, of course, it forms the second half of the extremely frequent negative existential "there is no":

ماكاش الزهر

makaš	əz-zhəṛ
NegExist	the-luck
"There is no luck."

In combination with the complementiser ma ما, it yields another two rather surprising constructions:

كاش ما شريت؟

kaš	ma	šri-t?
any	that	buy-2Sg?
"Did you buy anything?"

كاش ما جا؟

kaš	ma	ja?
any	that	came?
"Did he come (at all, by any chance)?"

For full details of how Algerian Arabic managed to produce all these functions by combining an existential marker and a quantifier, you'll have to read the article!

A rather similar grammaticalization seems to have taken place in Chinese for yŏu 有; can you think of any other comparable cases?

Gravitational waves and lexical diffusion

Recently, the detection of gravitational waves made headlines all over the world. These waves were only hypothesised a century ago, and have literally never been consciously experienced by a human being before. Apart from a few physics fans, most people had (still have?) never heard of them. That means that, this month, millions of people all over the world are learning, for the first time, how to say "gravitational waves" in their own language, entirely as a result of media coverage. For the official languages of First World countries, determining how to say "gravitational waves" was simply a matter of looking it up in a dictionary, or consulting a physicist; the groundwork had been laid long since for terms such as the following (morphemes separated by dots). In most European languages, even the term for "gravity" and/or "gravitational" had been borrowed wholesale from Latin, and all that had needed doing was to translate "wave" and add appropriate inflectional morphology:

• French: onde.s gravitation.nel.le.s (wave-Pl gravity-Adj-F-Pl)
• German: Gravitation.s.wellen (gravity-LK-wave-NomPl)
• Spanish: onda.s gravitacion.al.es (wave-Pl gravitation-Adj-Pl)

Of course, Latin is not the only classical language; Japanese, for one, had opted to coin a term out of morphemes borrowed from Chinese:

• Japanese: 重力波 (jū.ryoku.ha; weight-force-wave)

In the Third World, the naming problem is a little less straightforward. There are plenty of physicists speaking Arabic, for example, but it cannot even automatically be assumed that an Arabic-speaking physicist will be capable of talking about physics in Arabic; many not only work but even teach in a foreign language. Nevertheless, the mere fact of a language being extensively used in media and teaching guarantees that it already contains expressions for "gravity" and "gravitational", not to speak of "wave", and makes it probable that they had already been combined, as in the following expressions:

• Arabic: usually أمواج الجاذبية (ʔamwāj al-jāđib.iyyah, wave.Pl Def-puller.Abstr) - but NASA says this is wrong and it should be الأمواج الثقالية (al-ʔamwāj al-ṯiqāl.iyy.ah Def-wave.Pl Def-gravitation-Adj-FSg)
• Persian: امواج گرانشی (amvɑj-e gerɑn.eš.i, wave.Pl-LK heavy-Abstr-Adj)
• Turkish: kütle çekimsel dalgalar (mass pull-Abstr wave-Pl)

For languages not lucky enough to enjoy official status, the issue poses more difficulties. The BBC's Hausa service heroically managed to coin or find a term for "gravitational waves" in Hausa - a language with no specific word for "wave" - but one wonders how physicists, to say nothing of ordinary speakers, feel about it...

• Hausa: toroƙon maganaɗisun duniyoyi (tōrōƙon màgànàɗīsùn dūniyōyī, overflow-MGen magnet-MGen world.Pl)

What about Berber? Well, in principle the relevant words have been coined, probably more than once. If we go with Mazed's (2003) Amawal amatu n tfizikt tatrart, "gravitational waves" should be timdeswalin tizayzayanin. You may not be unduly surprised to hear that this gets zero hits on Google. There are dictionaries of proposed terminology for Tamazight (pan-Berber), but there are no fully Berber-language newspapers, and nobody teaching physics in Berber. Very likely the Berber-language radio/TV stations have spoken about this news, but if so, my experience of Algeria's Radio 2 suggests that they probably just switched into French to express it - and if they did use the neologisms, chances are virtually none of their listeners understood them.

What about Siwi, or Korandje? Come on - who are we kidding? If a speaker of either wanted to speak about gravitational waves, they would simply use the Arabic term (or possibly the French or English one). Nothing in the structure of these languages prevents them from coining the terminology for this - but the fact that these languages have no media or educational system of their own, and are spoken by communities too small to include any professional physicists, makes it extremely unlikely that their speakers will do so, and even less likely that any such coinages will be successful.

The moral is obvious: for a language's speakers to effectively be able to talk about the full range of topics associated with the modern world without resorting to code-switching or nonce borrowing, they need mass schooling and mass media in that language.

Which brings me to another recent news item: it appears that Morocco's Minister of Education, Rachid Belmokhtar, plans to start teaching scientific and technical subjects in French, even in secondary school (1 2). The most obvious disadvantage of such a policy is that it makes it impossible for students doing badly in French to understand these subjects, thus reducing even further their already limited chances. But its implications for Standard Arabic in Morocco bear considering too: this decision condemns an important part of its vocabulary to local oblivion.

A Soninke loan in Songhay

There are a rather large number of words in Songhay, the language of the Niger River valley between Timbuktu and southern Niger, which are almost the same as in Soninke, the language of the semidesert regions around the Mali-Senegal-Mauritania borders well to the west. Since most of the basic vocabulary is very different, these must be considered loanwords. But how do we tell which language coined them and which one borrowed them from the other? In some cases, this can be tricky, but in others it's quite clear-cut.

Three years ago, I discussed a Songhay-Arabic poem including the Timbuktu-area word sete "caravan". This word is well-attested elsewhere in Songhay, from eastern Mali to northern Benin (though not in the Sahara proper):

• Gao šeta "(camels) go on caravan", šetete "go in single file" (Heath)
• Hombori sèt-ò "convoy, caravan", sétt-ó "pack of horses" (Heath)
• Kaado sété "village delegation sent to seek food in times of famine" (Ducroz and Charles)
• Zarma sátá "group, troupe, team" (White and Kaba)
• Kandi sété "row" (Heath)

The root is also found in Fulani, eg Gambian Fula sete "caravan" (Gamble), Pular seteejo "traveller, caravaneer", setagol "go on a trip" (Bah), and Heath glosses it as a Fulani loan in his Hombori Songhay dictionary. In neither language, however, does it have an obvious derivation from some shorter or more basic form. For that, we need to turn to a third language - Soninke.

In Soninke, setú is the normal word for "to ride", glossed by Diagana "to be on top, to ride, to perch". By applying the productive morphological process C1V1C2V2 > C1V1C2C2V2, normally used to form imperfectives, we get sètté "caravan, cavalcade, group on horseback, riding". This etymology is not possible in Songhay, where "ride" is kaaru, nor in Fulani, where "ride" is maɗɗ- / waɗɗ-. We thus see that this commercially and politically significant word must have been coined within Soninke. That fits some aspects of the known history of the region: the early Soninke kingdom of Ghana played an important role in the development of the trans-Saharan trade, and even after its fall a diaspora of Soninke traders, the so-called Wangara, played an important role in tying the region together economically.

Feminine endings in the orthography of the Qur'an

Phoenix has started posting a rather interesting series on the orthography of the Qur'an and the linguistic features it reflects. Such features, it must be noted, need not always reflect the dialect of the Qur'anic text itself; they may reflect pre-existing orthographic conventions developed for the dialect of another region, most probably Jordan where the Aramaic script was first adapted to writing Arabic, or indeed may reflect another, less prestigious register of the speech of Quraysh. This proviso is not merely a theoretical point. Phoenix discusses one case, the spelling of /ā/ with wāw و, in which the spelling looks as though it reflects an older pronunciation than that found in Classical Arabic. The opposite also holds, however: in some contexts, strangely enough, the orthography of the Qur'an corresponds better to modern Arabic dialects than to Classical Arabic or to any of the Qur'anic reading traditions. Phoenix already discusses one such case, but the most striking to my eyes is the spelling of imra'at- امرأة "woman" in the following two verses:

إِذْ قَالَتِ امْرَأَتُ عِمْرَانَ رَبِّ إِنِّي نَذَرْتُ لَكَ مَا فِي بَطْنِي
when the wife of 'Imran said, "My Lord, indeed I have pledged to You what is in my womb" (3:35)

وَإِنِ امْرَأَةٌ خَافَتْ مِنْ بَعْلِهَا نُشُوزًا أَوْ إِعْرَاضًا فَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْهِمَا
And if a woman fears from her husband contempt or evasion, there is no sin upon them if they make terms of settlement between them - and settlement is best (4:128)

Why is the final t written with tā' ت in the first case, and with tā' marbūṭah ة in the other? In Classical Arabic and in every Qur'anic reading tradition I know of, both are pronounced with the same final consonant, t, followed in both cases by the same case vowel, u. Only at the end of a phrase or line is feminine -t- pronounced h, and that is not possible here. However, in almost every spoken Arabic dialect in use today (there are a couple of exceptions in Yemen), the word for "woman" - along with most other feminine nouns - is pronounced with a final consonant t in 'iḍāfah إضافة contexts like the first one (ie when possessed), and with no stop a(h) in other contexts like the second. In Algerian Arabic, for example, "the wife of Imran" would be məṛ-t ʕəmṛan مرت عمران, whereas "a woman" would be mṛ-a مرا. If you examine all the Qur'anic occurrences of this word on the QAC, you will quickly note that imra'at- is written with a tā' ت if and only if it is possessed, ie in 'iḍāfah, and otherwise is written with tā' marbūṭah ة.

However, whereas in the dialects this is true of almost all feminine nouns, in the Qur'anic text it seems to be much more restricted. Contrast nāqat- ناقة "she-camel" or ṣibġat- صبغة "colouring", which are written with tā' marbūṭah ة throughout, including when possessed. For jannat- جنة "garden", there is at least one case of an 'iḍāfah with tā' ت:

فَرَوْحٌ وَرَيْحَانٌ وَجَنَّتُ نَعِيمٍ
rest and bounty and a garden of pleasure (56:89)

Other cases, however, are written with tā' marbūṭah ة:

عِنْدَهَا جَنَّةُ الْمَأْوَىٰ
Near it is the Garden of Refuge (53:15)

How is this state of affairs to be explained, given that not only all the reading traditions but even the orthography of hamzas confirm that Qur'anic Arabic kept the case endings? No doubt the question can be - and probably has been - extensively debated, but on the face of it, it looks as though the scribes were familiar with two dialects: that of the text itself, presumably a high register of the dialect of Quraysh, and another one - perhaps a low register, or perhaps the dialect of another, more literate region - which, like modern colloquial Arabic, had already dropped case endings. The latter was not prestigious enough to be used for reading the Qur'an, but was sufficiently well-established in writing to influence its spelling. والله أعلم.

"Taharrush gamea" and the perils of reasoning from lexicon to culture

The media was strangely slow to report the shameful and horrible events of New Year's Day in Cologne, in which organised groups of drunk youths, most of them born in North Africa, systematically surrounded women coming out of the train station in order to sexually harass them and steal their valuables. Once they finally noticed, however, it took over the headlines for days on end. Scrambling to respond, the police issued a long and bureaucratic report including the following:

So liegen dem Bundeskriminalamt Erkenntnisse dazu vor, dass in arabischen Ländern ein Modus Operandi bekannt ist, der als "taharrush gamea (gemeinsame sexuelle Belästigung in Menschenmengen) bezeichnet wird. Darüber wurde z. B. anlässlich der ägyptischen Revolution von den Medien berichtet.
[It is thus found by the Bundeskriminalamt that in Arab countries there is known a modus operandi called "taharrush gamea" (group sexual harassment in crowds). This was reported on, for example, by the media on the occasion of the Egyptian revolution. (Update: See comments for a more precise translation.)]

The term as quoted there, misspelling and all, now gets over 116,000 hits on Google News. Most of these hits seem to take this somewhere the German police prudently did not go, leaping with shock or glee to the conclusion that, if Arabic has a name for this phenomenon, it must be deeply rooted in the Arab world indeed. Indeed, at least one prominent typologist who shall remain nameless followed in the same direction, blithely asserting that "there is nothing racist about saying that taharrush gamea (the Arabic term for the gang sexual assault of women) is an Arab custom, part of Arab culture". A closer look at the data reveals that this hasty reasoning is not only incorrect, but results in a profound misunderstanding of the problem for which this name was coined.

‍"Taharrush gamea" is a misspelled transcription of an Egyptian pronunciation of the phrase تحرش جماعي taḥarruš jamāʕiyy, literally "group (jamāʕiyy) harassment (taḥarruš)". Until this month, this phrase was no more familiar to me than to any of these reporters, but I had heard of the phenomenon it describes, although only in one country - Egypt. Abdelmonem 2015 and Ebaid 2013 provide some more background on the recent history of sexual harassment in Egypt. Basically, individual harassment has existed forever, there as in other countries, but on Id al-Adha 2006 a new, unprecedented phenomenon appeared: a mob of young men went on a "mass sexual harassment spree" after being turned away from a cinema. This event was captured on video and widely denounced online, but bloggers' denunciations were not enough to prevent it from being repeated in 2008, and then effectively turned into a political tool during the abortive Egyptian revolution after 2011.

This history suggests that the phenomenon, and therefore presumably the name, are less than ten years old. Corpus investigation confirms this: as I could confidently predict even before checking, it gets zero hits on Alwaraq.net, an extensive library of Arabic heritage texts ranging from the Umayyad period to near-modern times. Google Trends gives a more precise figure: it shows up on Google starting in 2013, only following the Arab Spring! However, the frequency of the term is so low that Google Trends' figures for it can hardly be reliable, and we may suspect that in reality it was coined sometime between 2006 and 2013.

The most obvious question this raises, given that most of the suspects are from Algeria and Morocco, not Egypt, is: were they even familiar with this phenomenon, let alone the term? Unfortunately, by 2015 they could well have been: it may have started in Egypt, but it is no longer an Egyptian monopoly. Horrified reports of it - all postdating the Egyptian revolution - can be found online for Morocco (2014), Jordan (2014), and even Saudi Arabia (2013, 2015). The obvious hypothesis is that the massive media coverage of such crimes following the Egyptian revolution was taken by some good-for-nothings as an inspiration rather than as a warning.

Obviously, any editorial writer who wants to draw conclusions from this term's existence should have started by asking themselves: how old is this name, and how widely known is it? Assuming that it represents some sort of age-old Arab custom suggests one set of conclusions, such the New York Times' superfically anodyne description of the attacks as a "culture clash". Knowing that the term seems to be less than ten years old, and has come into wider use only within the past three years, yields quite another: namely, that "mass harassment" is a new crime (or at least a new variant of an old one), appealing to a certain type of "man", and spread virally by satellite TV coverage and videos shared on social media. In which case, the role currently being played by the media may be somewhat less than constructive.

Party reactions to the officialisation of Tamazight in Algeria

Algeria's political parties are gradually responding to the proposed constitutional text. I've mocked their powerlessness and irrelevance before, but in this case, looking at their reactions gives an interesting guide to what kind of opinions on this matter are accepted today within the Algerian establishment, which, over the past couple of decades, has gradually reached a consensus on the importance of at least claiming to respect Amazigh identity.

The political core of this establishment (as distinct from the shadowy military/security core ultimately controlling it) consists of three parties, all supporting the same president: the flag-waving FLN, which used to be the only party during the socialist period; the more or less ideology-free RND, created to supplement the FLN; and (a distant and opportunistic third) the Islamist HMS/MSP. A wide variety of smaller, more independent officially recognised parties are variously courted or marginalised; the most important of these are the long-standing socialist FFS and the secularist RCD, together dominant in Kabylie; the Islamist Justice Party; and the Trotskyist Workers' Party. Parties without official recognition are excluded and as far as possible silenced. Of the parties previously mentioned, the FFS, RCD, and Workers' Party have included Tamazight on their election posters for decades, while the rest have gradually moved from reflexive opposition (in the name of national unity and the importance of Arabic) to more or less grudging acceptance. Their change of position is primarily a reaction to periodic Kabyle protests ever since 1980, but the Arab Spring also helped, insofar as it made much of the establishment want to put a little more distance between Algeria and the Arab world.

The FLN's secretary-general, Amar Saïdani, patted himself on the back for the amendment, claiming that "The FLN was the first party in government to demand the officialisation of Tamazight". The word "appropriation" comes to mind. The RND's Ahmed Ouyahia had more sociolinguistically interesting things to say (and said them in Kabyle); he's very clear on the idea of creating a standard Tamazight distinct from what people of any one region speak:

Ar ass-a, mazal kull jiha tesseɣṛay Tamaziɣt s elluɣa-s [...] maci s Tmaziɣt a-m hedṛeɣ-d s Teqbaylit. Gma acawi ad yefhem balak xemsin f-elmya. Ma aṭas. Gma si Lhugaṛ kif-kif, balak xemsa u ɛacrin f-elmya. Ilaq ad nexleq lluɣa-yagi n Tmaziɣt.
Up to today, each region still teaches Tamazight in its own language [...] I'm speaking to you in Kabyle, not in Tamazight. A Chaoui brother will understand maybe 50%, at most. A brother from the Hoggar likewise, maybe 25%. We need to create this Tamazight language.

And he backhandedly acknowledges that the task of Tamazight language planning has largely been tackled by people way outside the establishment:

Lḥaja d nniḍen, Ṛṛayes Butefliqa yefka-d liqtiṛaḥ-agi, isaṛeḥ-d d atmaten-is. Ur-d iṛuḥ ara s tkellaxt. A-k neqqaṛ di lluɣa n tmaziɣt, tikerkasin. Tagi- tagi ḥefḍeɣ-tt seg laɛṛuc.
Another thing, President Bouteflika made this suggestion acting frankly with his brothers. He didn't do it as a trick - or, as we say in the Tamazight language, tikerkasin (lies). That (neologism) I learned from the Arouch movement.

The president of the "establishment" Islamist party HMS/MSP, Abderrezak Mokri, responded by urging unity around both languages in the face of a common threat:

The language that's contesting Arabic in its own home is French, and the language that's making Tamazight disappear from its homelands is French. Arabic and Tamazight are sisters that have been living together and nourishing one another for centuries. The language that is dominating administration, and that officials are speaking in in official meetings, is French, and that is the language being mouthed by idle Westernizing misguided people in our country, for speaking between themselves or even with their sons and spouses. By God than whom there is no other god, were it not for Islam, we would be like Benin or Senegal or Cote d'Ivoire, speaking various dialects and able to communicate with one another only through French. The time has come for both languages, Tamazight and Arabic, to ally with one another, as they did in the past, in order to expel colonisation and the language of colonisation from the strongholds of sovereignty that it still occupies.

Abdallah Djaballah, of the more independent Islamist Justice Party, responded less enthusiastically:

[The draft Constitution] added the Tamazight issue, but neglected to address the characters that it should be written in - Arabic or Latin. This omission is deliberate and intended to serve those who call for it to be written in Latin characters. If that happens, then it would be extremely dangerous to the Arabic language, and will in practice empower French, making Tamazight a mere tool to serve the French language. That would be a major breach of the second most important principle governing Algerian society, and would call for a popular referendum.

The FFS, Algeria's oldest serious opposition party, seems not to have commented on the proposal yet, distracted no doubt by the recent death of its widely respected leader, Hocine Ait Ahmed. Its principal officially recognised rival in Kabylie, the RCD, responded with a fine bit of what the French call "langue de bois":

The second point, the officialisation of the Amazigh language, finally consecrates many generations' struggle for a legitimate demand essential for the harmony and credibility of the parameters defining the framework that is to host our common destiny. One cannot speak of reconciliation as long as the first language of North Africa, used by millions of speakers, is ignored by the basic law of the country. Nevertheless, this advance remains to be turned into an effective practice putting the Amazigh dimension, language, culture, and history, back into public life. In this regard, the promulgation of the organic law and the terms in which it is formulated will require citizens' attention.

Tamazight official in Algeria

Yesterday, Ouyahia made an announcement with momentous implications for Algerian language policy: the revised constitution that they've been working on is to make Tamazight (Berber) official. The section on language policy follows, with proposed revisions in bold (see مشروع تمهيدي لمراجعة الدستور, or in French: Avant projet de révision de la Constitution):

Article 3. Arabic is the national and official language. Arabic remains the official language of the State. A High Commission for the Arabic Language shall be created under the President. The High Commission for the Arabic Language shall be tasked particularly with working for Arabic to flourish and for its use to be generalised in scientific and technological fields, and with encouraging translation into it towards this end.
Article 3b. Tamazight is also a national and official language. The State shall work to promote and develop it in all of its linguistic variety used within the national territory. An Algerian Academy of the Amazigh Language shall be created, placed under the President of the Republic. The Academy shall refer to experts' work and shall be tasked with providing the necessary conditions for the development of Tamazight, with a view towards eventually making its official status concrete. The means of implementation of this article shall be determined by organic law.

Now anyone who's not cynical about the Algerian Constitution hasn't been paying attention. As I recall, Algeria has changed its Constitution more often than it's changed its president since its independence in 1962 - indeed, one of the proposed new changes, term limits, simply reverses a fairly recent change made specifically so the current president (now somewhere near his deathbed) could stay in power longer. And the fact that French is still dominant in much of the government today, decades after Arabic became official, gives some idea of how slow the implementation can be expected to be. The timing of this announcement - in the wake of massive, budget-busting oil price drops - makes it a transparent attempt to curry favour with part of the population without having to actually spend anything on helping them.

Nevertheless, justified cynicism should not blind us to the change this represents. It's not just that Tamazight is now to be official; it's that the idea of making Tamazight official is hardly even controversial any more, including among Arabic speakers. The extent to which this idea has become mainstream is as much a victory for one of the most justifiable demands of the Amazigh movement as the new article itself is.

10 years on

This year marks the end of Jabal al-Lughat's first decade. Hard to believe I've been doing this for ten years - when I wrote my first post (on N'Ko) in 2005, I formally hadn't even begun to study linguistics! It's been a great way to explore ideas not yet ready for writing up, to record observations or resources, and, sometimes, to get in touch with interesting people. This date seems as good an excuse as any to thank you all for your comments and support, and to wish you all a happy 2016.

It's been interesting to observe the changes in blogging over the years. When I started in 2005, the "blogosphere" was still new enough to be vaguely trendy. The term had apparently caught on in 2002, and that's also when linguistics blogging started to be a thing; Language Hat was started in 2002, and Language Log in 2003. Blogs tended to link to each other a lot, and you could follow the links back to see who was discussing what you had posted and in what context. However, that gradually changed sometime around 2011 or so, as Twitter and Facebook took over (a phenomenon that very much struck Hossein Derakhshan upon his release). For a long time now, most of my inbound links that aren't Google searches have been those shortened URLs habitually used by Twitter, or Facebook pages accessible only to somebody and their friends. Blogs are probably more numerous than ever, but I'm barely seeing a blogosphere any more, in the sense of an ecosystem of blogs interacting with one another; rather, most of it seems to be feeding into two big private aggregators, and a lot of the conversation is taking place there directly, with no blogs involved.

In case you were wondering: the pageview records only go back to 2010, but over the past five years, my top ten most popular posts have apparently been:

1. Does Arabic have the most words? Don't believe the hype (2013 - almost 3 times as many views as the next one)
2. Kabyle dialect geography and the Kutama-Zwawa divide (2006)
3. How different are Egyptian and Algerian Arabic, really? (2013)
4. Gaddafi Jr's speech (2011)
5. Who has more than 40 words for camels? (2007)
6. No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic (2009)
7. A little mystery: an unidentified Indic language in the Genizah collection (2013)
8. Wikileaks and Algeria's "language crisis" (2011)
9. Language use in Tunisian politics (2011)
10. Beni-Snous: Two unrelated phonetic forms for every noun? (2009)

All but two of these posts feature Arabic; apparently, rather more Internet users are interested in Arabic than in Berber or Songhay, understandably I suppose. Most of them wouldn't be anywhere near my own top ten; indeed, two of them are just quick and dirty passing comments on current events, with no further relevance. However, the Beni-Snous one seemed important enough to me that I gradually ended up developing it into an article: Syntactically obligatory code-switching? The syntax of numerals in Beni-Snous Berber. Of wider interest are several posts addressing popular conceptions and misconceptions: No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic and Does Arabic have the most words? Don't believe the hype remain fairly accessible debunkings of myths that unfortunately remain popular, while How different are Egyptian and Algerian Arabic, really? takes a step towards quantifying a question usually discussed much more impressionistically. Wikileaks and Algeria's "language crisis" also kind of fits this category, addressing misconceptions about Algerian sociolinguistics that seem to affect quite a few decision-makers.

So if I wanted to make this blog more popular, it seems that the way to do it would be to start posting regularly about popular myths about Arabic as reflected in current news stories. Needless to say, that's not in my plans - as long as I have anything to say about it, most postings here will continue to be esoteric, eclectic, sporadic, and of limited interest.

Raisins from Carthage to Siwa

Most Berber varieties have borrowed the word for "raisin" from Arabic, eg Kabyle azbib, or use a compound "dried grapes", eg Shilha aḍil aqurar. However, in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt the situation is rather different, as this Facebook post illustrates:

Location	Word for "raisin"	In Arabic script
Djerba	izummucen
Jadu	iz/ẓemmuken	ايزموكن
Nalut	ijemmusen	ايجموسن
Zuwara	ijemmucen	ايجموشن
Yefren, El-Qalaa	ijummucen, ijemmac	ايجمّوشن, ايجوموشن, اجماش
Siwa	ijeṃṃusen	إجموسن

The variation in the consonants is not completely regular, but note that there is a regular correspondences between k in Jadu and š in Yefren and Siwa (from palatal *ḱ), and that sibilant harmony is a fairly productive process in Berber.

As far as I know, this word's etymology has not previously been investigated, so I was happy to discover it this morning quite by chance. It happens to be attested in an ostracon from about 2000 years ago (give or take), found at the site of Al Qusbat, on the Libyan coast east of Tripoli:

This line in Neo-Punic - that is, the later Phoenician dialect spoken in North Africa - starts ldn`ṭ' `sr kkr' ṣmq, rendered by Jongeling and Kerr (Late Punic Epigraphy, 2005:24) as "for Donatus, 10 talents of dried fruits". As usual for Phoenician, the interpretation relies mainly on its much better documented close relative Hebrew: in this case, the relevant comparison is to the ṣimmuq-îm צִמֻּקִים֙ "raisins", attested 4 times in the Hebrew Bible. In Hebrew, the root of this word, ṣmq, means "to dry up"; in Arabic, the same root yields the rare forms ṣāmiq "thirsty", ṣamaqah "milk that has gone off". The direction of borrowing is therefore clear: from Phoenician into eastern Berber.

Now most of the attestations of this form are in a region where intense Punic influence is completely unsurprising: the coast of Tripolitania and southern Tunisia. However, any Classicist will remind us that Phoenician rule stopped at the Arae Philaenorum: eastern Libya was in Greek hands, and Phoenician never had any significant presence there. What, then, is this word doing in Siwa? The answer is simple, as I discuss in the introduction to my book Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt): modern Siwi seems to derive mainly from a Berber variety spoken much further west, which reached Siwa only during the Middle Ages. There very probably was a Berber language spoken in Siwa before that, but if so, it has left very few traces.

Austin in Augusta: how is it that non-performative non-assertions can be problematic?

Recently, a geography teacher in Augusta County, Virginia named Cheryl LaPorte set her students the following homework assignment:

"Calligraphy - the art of writing - is sacred to Muslims [sic]. It was born from the Arabic script of the Koran. [...] Here is the shahada, the Islamic statement of faith, written in Arabic. In the space below, try copying it by hand. This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy."

The shahada is the statement that "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God". Predictably, this made some parents very angry. Less predictably, it ended up making the national news, rather than remaining a question for Augusta County to worry about. Concerned editorials presented the situation as either an example of creeping Islamic indoctrination or a symptom of reactionary Christian ignorance, while concurring in any case that we should all be deeply concerned about it. So many emails poured in, threatening protests and violence, that the county was scared into closing the schools temporarily.

How could asking students to copy out a short phrase have this effect? Well, we know the objections of one parent at least, Kimberly Herndon (WHSV):

"I am preparing to confront the county on this issue of the Muslim indoctrination taking place here in an Augusta County school. This evil has been cloked in the form of multiculturism. My child was given the creed of the Islam faith to copy. This creed that is translated: There is no god but Allah. Mohammed was Allah's messenger. This is recited during their pledge to the Islamic faith. This creed is connected to Jihad in that it is the chant that is shouted while beheading those of Christian faith, or people of the cross as being called by ISIS. [...] Also unknowingly they [the children] were instructed to denounce our Lord by copying this creed of Islam."

Apart from the ridiculous ISIS connection, the keywords here are "indoctrination" - the idea that this assignment constitutes an attempt to make students Muslim, or at least to make them believe a particular ideology - and "to denounce our Lord by copying this", the idea that copying the shahadah amounts to declaring that Jesus is not God. Of these, it's the latter that is fundamental: the former makes little sense unless taken as a corollary of the latter.

If this is indeed Ms. Herndon's understanding of the situation, she would be well-advised to read John Austin's How To Do Things With Words. Austin, an Oxford philosopher, became famous in linguistics for pointing out that many sentences that superficially look like statements of fact are, in fact, actions in their own right: "When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., 'I do', I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it." These sentences he termed performatives. The shahada is a classic example of a performative sentence: by uttering those words under the appropriate circumstances, one becomes a Muslim. Such an outcome is clearly not desired by Ms. Herndon, and for the teacher to seek it would violate the US constitution.

However, as Austin points out in great detail, performatives are effective ("felicitous") only when appropriate circumstances apply. These are determined by social consensus ("accepted procedure"), and, where relevant, by sincerity of intention. In this case, Muslim scholars have devoted a good deal of thought to the question of what count as the appropriate conditions for the shahadah to be felicitous from their perspective - for some English samples, try eg ConvertingToIslam.com or Dr. Fouad - and copying out an untranslated phrase in a language you don't understand in order to complete your homework fails at the first hurdles: the student neither has knowledge of what is being said, nor certainty as to its correctness, nor sincerity in its assertion... In short, this exercise does not satisfy the conditions for performativity, and as such does not commit the student to the claim made in the shahadah. So there's nothing to worry about!

But surely Ms. Herndon would already agree that the children who copied this didn't actually "denounce our Lord", since they copied it "unknowingly"? If so, then her issue must lie elsewhere. "Indoctrination" is perhaps a relevant lead; the teacher presumably knew the meaning of the words, so, in Ms. Herndon's view, that presumably means that she was attempting to make them repeat words they wouldn't have repeated if they had known what they meant, which would be an abuse of authority. But that just leads us back to the original question: why wouldn't/shouldn't they have been willing to copy these words if they had known what they meant?

I'm not sure I have a philosophically sound answer, yet on that question I share the same intuition: I wouldn't sing or want my children to sing a song about Jesus being God, even though songs don't commit their singer to the statements they contain. It seems that statements felt as blasphemous, rather than merely false, continue to be felt as such even in contexts where they clearly can't be interpreted as assertions by the speaker. In that respect, they resemble swearwords, although with swearwords it goes even further - if you give an accurate quote of someone swearing, then you're swearing yourself, quotation marks be damned. In a Christian context, one might explain this by the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain. However, the fact that she didn't appeal to it, and the fact that this intuition is shared by non-Christians, suggests that that would merely be rationalisation.

This is not a domain I've worked on much, so let me open up the floor to any reader who's made it this far: what's going on here? Does anyone have a coherent and empathetic explanation for why some types of statements should be felt as problematic even when clearly not asserted?

Lunja in Sicily, and more Lunja from Dellys

I've now read quite a few Lunja stories, enough to say that there is in fact a core Lunja story which is virtually identical in the mountains of Morocco and Kabylie, as well as a few more scattered stories about Lunja. But the biggest surprise for me was that a Lunja story virtually identical to the northern Moroccan ones is told in Sicily. You can read it online in Crane's (1885) translation, "Fair Angiola", and compare it with several obviously much less closely related stories from the rest of Europe. The name is interestingly distorted: I can only suppose that it represents an etymological hybrid of Lunja with Angela.

Its presence in Sicily should not be too surprising; Sicily was ruled by North African Muslims for several centuries, who are ancestral to many Sicilians today, and they even tell stories of the pan-Arab trickster Juha (baptised as Giufa). But comparison of the two versions is instructive. In North Africa, after they escape, the hero is carried away by a vulture, and Lunja has to disguise herself as a dog (in Morocco) or a slave (in Kabylie) in order to find a place in his parents' household while waiting for his return - a transparent metaphor for the situation of a new bride, who in this part of the world traditionally comes to live at her in-laws' house under the thumb of her mother-in-law. In Sicily, it's the witch she escaped from who curses her to become a dog, and she can't come to live with the hero's parents until the curse is lifted. I don't know what social reality that corresponds to in Sicily, if any, but the difference in the story does correspond to a difference in marriage customs: in Sicily and the rest of southern Italy, newlyweds traditionally started their own household ("neolocal"), rather than living with the groom's parents.

I've also managed to learn a little more about the Lunja story in Dellys - enough to confirm that, despite the substantial differences, it must be cognate. Apparently, at some point in the story, the hero comes and asks "waš ʕšatək əl-lila ya lunja, ya lunja?" ("What was your dinner tonight, Lundja, Lundja?") and she replies "ʕšati nŭxala, wə-mbati mʕa zzwayəl" ("My dinner is bran, and my sleep is with the livestock"), or words to that effect. This is immediately recognisable as what happens in the better-known versions of the story after they run away, while the hero is a captive. It also seems that the superhero team consists of her brothers, which suggests some possible leads. But more investigation is required...

Lundja daughter of - whom? Some of a myth's many guises

One of the classic characters of north African folklore is Lundja or Nuja, a girl who... well, a girl, anyway. The name is widespread, but the story is somewhat more variable. Vermondo Brugnatelli and Hamid Oubagha record practically identical versions from western Kabylie (with the heroine named Lunja and Nuja respectively), in which a prince raised in luxury and isolation ventures forth to seek out Lunja, daughter of the ogress; they fall in love and escape by virtue of Lunja's wits, but the prince is swallowed up by a vulture on the way back, and Lunja disguises herself as a slave and toils for the king's household, regularly visited by the prince's soul in the form of a bird, until they manage to bring him back by offering the vulture a fat cow. In his fascinating but speculative article, Brugnatelli argues, based on some rather stretched comparisons with a widespread North African rain-making custom (which I might discuss later), the Ugaritic myth of Aqhat, and the Greco-Levantine myth of Adonis, that the prince in this story was originally a rain god, and Lunja his bride.

However, there are many versions of the story of Lundja - perhaps even many stories featuring Lundja. For Figuig (SE Morocco), Sahli (2008) records one where the connection with weather on which Brugnatelli speculates is made positively blatant, but in a manner difficult to reconcile with his specific hypothesis. In this version, Lundja is an ordinary girl, tied by her hair to a lote-tree by jealous comrades, who escapes only to stumble into the ogress's house. The ogress makes her her servant, and among other things requires her to tend her baby son, to whom Lundja sings Mi teḍṣid teffeɣ-d tfuyt, mi tilled taɣ tbica "When you smile, the sun shines; when you cry, the rain falls". She assigns her impossible tasks, but the birds help her to accomplish them. Eventually, her cousin shows up to rescue her, and Lundja manages to outwit the ogress in ways strikingly similar to Brugnatelli's version. She escapes with the ogress's bags of wind, sun, rain, and axes (perhaps originally thunderbolts?), and throws them one by one to the ogress each time she's about to catch them, delaying the ogress long enough for them to escape safely - and they live happily ever after. In this version, even more than in the western Kabyle one, Lunja's boyfriend is just a sidekick, and the real action is between Lunja and the ogress.

In Dellys, just a few dozen kilometres north of where Brugnatelli recorded his version, no ogress even features. Instead, Lundja is the daughter (or captive?) of Drig the ogre (دريڨ الغول drig əl-ɣul), who ties her long, long hair to his teeth when he sleeps to stop her escaping. To rescue her, they assemble a veritable team of superheroes: ضرّاب السيف đ̣əṛṛab əs-sif, the Sword-Striker; سمّاع الندى səmmaʕ ən-nda, the Dew-Hearer (to hear the ogre's snores from miles away); ضرّاب خطّ الرّمل, đ̣əṛṛab xəṭṭ əṛ-ṛməl, the Geomancer; and سلاّك الحرير من السدرة səllak əl-ħrir mə-s-sədra, the Disentangler of Thread from the Lote-Tree (to disentangle her hair from his teeth). Unfortunately, no one I know remembers much of the actual plot - and I've never come across anything similar in books or online, although the last of these "superheroes" clearly echoes the opening of the Figuig version of this story.

Brugnatelli tries to connect Lundja's name to those of a rain-making custom once widespread in the Maghreb, in which children dress up a ladle (Berber aɣenja) in women's clothes and go through the streets with it chanting a prayer for rain, while passers-by pour water on it. Whatever the plausibility of that connection, the name of Drig points in a rather different direction. In the context of an old North African port which received many Andalusi refugees in its day, one can hardly fail to be reminded of Roderic/Ludharīq لذريق, the last Gothic king of Spain, depicted in later legend as a usurper who kidnapped the daughter of one of his own noblemen. Could this be an Andalusi, or Andalusianised, version of the same folktale? Any leads would be welcome!

---

Reference:
Sahli, Ali. 2008. Muʕjam Amāzīγī-`Arabī (xāṣṣ bi-lahjat 'ahālī Fijīj) yaḍummu qawā`id hāđihi l-lahjah wa-jāniban min turāŧihā l-'adabī. Oujda: El Anouar El Maghribia.

Religion and dialect geography in Morocco and Algeria

In many parts of the Arabic-speaking world, different religious groups in the same town or region speak different dialects. Morocco is one of the best-studied cases: in almost any town, the Arabic spoken by Jews was somewhat different from that spoken by Muslims. A lot of popular sources reify this as a distinct language, "Judeo-Moroccan Arabic". The actual situation revealed by dialect mapping (specifically, by Heath's Jewish and Muslim Dialects of Moroccan Arabic, the source for most of this post) is a bit more complicated. The dialects spoken by Jews differed from each other almost as much as do the dialects spoken by the Muslim majority - in some cases, such as Tafilalt, even more - and those differences often (though not always) reflected the way their Muslim neighbours spoke. In that sense, Jewishness can be seen as just one among several sociolinguistic variables affecting the way a given person spoke. Nevertheless, there are a certain number of important features that are very widespread among Jewish dialects and rare among Muslim dialects, which make it possible to speak of, if not a Judeo-Moroccan Arabic language, at least a more or less coherent Jewish dialect group in Morocco. Some of these features really are almost exclusively Jewish within Morocco:

• merging s س with š ش and z ز with ž ج (this feature seems to have been emblematic, and was even extended to Jewish second language pronunciations of Berber)
• no -i- in the perfect forms of geminate-final verbs - thus dəqq-t دقّت "I knocked" instead of nearly universal dəqq-it دقّيت (also occasionally attested in Jbala dialects)
• relative marker di دي (similar to Jbala d), rather than li لي
• ama أما "which" - common in Algeria and Tunisia, but otherwise unknown in Morocco
• an allomorph -hu- of 3MSgAcc "him" when followed by a dative pronoun - common in Algeria and Tunisia, but otherwise unknown in Morocco

as well as a few lexical items, some archaisms:

• ṛa را "see"
• qum قوم "get up"
• dnba دنبة "tail"
• skkin سكّين "knife"

others borrowings (in fairly peripheral vocabulary) or probable neologisms:

• guf ڭوف‎ "body", from Hebrew
• gaṛfu ڭارفو‎ "fork", from Spanish
• ɣyyəṛ غيّر "eat breakfast"

However, far more of the features that made Jewish dialects distinctive in their 20th century locations are shared with a particular subset of Muslim dialects: the northern ones. Among the more striking features shared by Jewish dialects all over Morocco with Muslim dialects of the far north or the Jbala - and, in many cases, with "pre-Hilalian" dialects of old cities like Fez, or of coastal regions further east in Algeria or Tunisia or Malta - are:

• dual marker -ayn ـاين (an archaism)
• future marker maši ماشي
• bn بن "son" (an archaism)
• ħəbb حبّ "want"
• ʕməl عمل "do"
• ṣib صيب "find"
• ʕəbbi عبّي "take away"
• bzəq بزق "spit"
• fħal فحال "like", rather than bħal بحال

So it looks as though there was a fairly distinctive supra-regional Jewish dialect network, but forming part of an otherwise region-specific Northern dialect network. Two obvious possible explanations come to mind:

1. Most Moroccan Jews originally came from northern Morocco, and they kept northern features when they emigrated.
2. Most Moroccan Arabic speakers (at least in the towns, where most Jews lived) used to talk more like Northerners do today, and dropped these features in order to sound more like people from other regions.

There isn't much evidence for 1), so 2) is the most widely accepted explanation. That implies that mainstream (Muslim) Moroccan Arabic has been fairly heavily influenced by contact with Arabic dialects coming in later from further east. In fact - hard as it may be for students to believe - it means that mainstream Moroccan Arabic, even before TV, was already a compromise between the urge to maintain local forms and the urge to adopt trends coming in from the rest of the Arabic-speaking world.

So all of this is relatively clear for Morocco. What about Algeria?

For Algeria, nothing like Heath's religious dialect atlas exists or can be written, because almost all Algerian Jews had already abandoned Arabic well before independence in 1962. Algeria's Jews had received French citizenship in 1870, and all but the most isolated communities hastened to prove their loyalty to France by, among other things, adopting French as their home language. Then again, there isn't any dialect atlas of Algeria to begin with, so even where data on Jewish dialects exists, it's difficult to determine what features were distinctive or how they fit into a broader picture. Nevertheless, a few points can be gleaned. For western Algeria ("Oranie"), Cantineau (1940) paints a picture strikingly reminiscent of Morocco: all the Jewish dialects there shared phonetic and syntactic features specific among Muslim dialects to the mountainous coastal Trara region, around Nedroma and Ghazaouet. Unfortunately, he only mentions a handful of features, and gives very little specific data. For eastern Algeria ("Constantinois"), Cantineau reports elsewhere - again in rather general terms - that the Jews of Constantine and Annaba spoke sedentary dialects like those of the towns of Bejaia and Constantine and the mountains of Jijel and Skikda.

I haven't yet been able to see Cantineau's comments on central Algeria, but the vague picture he paints for these areas fits rather strikingly with the more detailed image given by Heath further west: in both Morocco and Algeria, the geographical dialect groups to which Jewish dialects belonged irrespective of location were eccentric "pre-Hilalian" ones spoken on the northern coast, at old ports and their mountainous hinterlands - even though those dialects do not themselves form a continuous territory. That raises a lot of questions about the region's linguistic history (which the label "pre-Hilalian" kind of sweeps under the rug), but those will have to wait for another time...

Do Siwi people have bodies?

For English speakers, it is mysterious and highly debatable whether we have souls, but obvious except to the odd philosopher that we have bodies. In other languages, this intuition doesn't translate so well; quite apart from the question of the soul(s), many languages - reportedly including Homeric Greek - don't seem to have a word for "body" in the sense of "the ​whole ​physical ​structure that ​forms a ​person or ​animal", notwithstanding the protests of NSM-ists. In Wintu, a language of northern California, Lee (1950:134) was only able to elicit kot wintu "all person". (Wintu is not that well documented, but in this case Lee's account agrees with later work; Schlichter (1981:242) gives winthu:n thunis "person altogether".) For Korandje, my data suggest the same, although further checking is needed; when asked, the oldest of my Korandje consultants came up with a precise equivalent of this expression, bɑ kamla "person whole", while others gave Arabic loans like ṣṣəħħəts (literally "health") or žžhaməts (which so far seems rather to mean "corpse").

In Siwi, the situation is slightly different. Unlike the hesitations and disagreements of Korandje speakers asked about this subject, Siwi speakers asked to translate Arabic jism "body" confidently reply aglim, and early wordlists confirm that they have been doing so for over a century. However, if you ask them to translate aglim, they equally consistently reply with Arabic jild "skin". A person or animal has an aglim, but so does a potato, and its aglim can be peeled off. To further complicate the semantic field in question, ilem also translates as jild "skin", but refers to a piece of skin rather than to the whole: kteṛṭiyya aksum ɣair ilem "You have brought me meat that is nothing but skin"; ilem en ṭad yekkes "Some skin came off his finger". This renders the interpretation of aglim questionable. Does it have two distinct meanings, "body" and "(whole) skin"? Or does it just mean "(whole) skin", and refer to the body only as the volume encompassed by the skin?

Thinking out the question here makes it obvious what I should try to elicit next time the occasion arises: how to say "The human body is covered with skin" or "A snake sheds its skin many times, but always has the same body". Any other suggestions for contexts that clearly bring out the relevant differences in meaning?

(I should mention that this question was inspired by a recent talk by Mustapha El Adak of the University of Oujda, arguing that all non-borrowed Berber words for "body" either include non-physical aspects of the person or relate specifically to a particular aspect of the body rather than referring uniformly to the whole.)

The clouds that own us: how animate is the weather?

Animacy - human or animal or object - often makes a big difference in grammar. However, what counts as animate, and when, is not always straightforward. In English, an adult or a child can only be "he" or "she", but a baby can already be "it"; an animal is usually "it", but a pet is quite likely to be "he" or "she". (And that's without even discussing sailors and Australians).

Going through some Tuareg texts from Mali recently, I found a rather eloquent passage describing the nomads' relationship to their land:

exắy năkkắneḍ, húllăn ăgg ăjăma wăr ăddobăt ád ikrəš ắkall făll ắkall, năkkắneḍ tijắrăken a-hənăɣ ílăn əntănắteḍ á-dagg nəkká d ắšăkšo, wắr noleh d ə́ddinăt wí n ɣərman, dihá-hənăɣ əttə́mălăn súdar e rə́zzejăn ɣás á nəkká, ášăl wa əssinḍărắn-anăɣ dắɣ teje ta n ătắram, ášăl wa ta n ăfắlla ášăl wa ta n əjúss, mušám wăddén á ikkắsăn erhitt-nắnăɣ y ắkall wa s ə́nta, á nəzzáy isidáw-anăɣ năkkắneḍ dătén tərə́zzekk-nắnăɣ.
Yes, as for us, a son of the wilderness cannot hold to just one place. Us, it's the clouds that own us, it's they that we go under, and the vegetation, we aren't like the people of the towns. There where staple foods are excellent for our animals is where we go. One day they toss us to the west, one day to the north, one day to the south. But it doesn't prevent our desire for the land which is what we know, it keeps us together with our flocks. (Heath 2005:18-21)

Now, -la- "own, have" does not have quite the same semantics as English "own"; you use it not only in reference to your property, but also to your children, and one can easily say "God owns us (yl-ânaɣ)" (Prasse 2010:30). Nevertheless, its subject is ordinarily human, as in English. The most obvious comparison here is with ownership of livestock. The clouds control where we go (by determining where vegetation will grow), just as we control where our flocks go; therefore, the clouds own us. Throughout the world's languages, control is commonly associated with higher animacy.

Quite coincidentally, I came across a clearer example on the other side of the world shortly afterwards. Omaha is a Native American language of the Siouan family, still spoken by a few elders in Nebraska. It has one of the most complicated systems of classificatory definite articles that I've ever seen: in particular, there are four articles normally used for inanimates, and several normally used for animates, depending on number, position, and whether they're moving, described in detail in Eschenberg (2005). As part of their efforts to revive the language, the Omaha Nation commissioned an iPad/iPhone app, effectively a small phrasebook/lexicon with audio and pictures. This happily includes a few minimal pairs, of which the most interesting for this post is, under "Weather":

nãží-kʰ(e) ubðĩ́bðã xtáaðe. "I like the smell of rain." (-kʰe: inanimate horizontal article. Transcribed differently in the app, but listen to the audio.)
nãží-akʰa ðištã́. "The rain has stopped." (-akʰa: animate singular "proximal" article)

This is systematic in Omaha, as noted by Eschenberg (2005:71-73); nouns such as "winter", "sun", and "snow" can (but need not) occur with animate as well as inanimate articles, and Eschenberg explicitly ties this to the fact that these entities have great power over people's lives and are not themselves readily controllable.

So is there any English parallel? You certainly wouldn't say "The rain, s/he stopped" in standard English. One possibility comes to mind, however: the curious habit of giving human names to hurricanes. Within weather, hurricanes are about the most powerful recurrent objects we are capable of perceiving at a human scale. And - what do you know - it turns out that some people do accept animate pronouns for named storms, strange though it sounds to me:

"This makes Patricia a 'Category Five' hurricane as she has sustained winds of over 157 mph." (ITV, 23 October 2015)
"Sadly, Patricia is not expected to weaken by the time she reaches Mexico and will hit when she’s a Category 5 hurricane." (Hollywood Life)

Obvious follow-up question: should global warming be treated as animate?

The cross-cultural ambiguity of "nation" in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Advance warning: 1. I am no expert on Hebrew, nor for that matter on semantics. 2. Comments relating to word usage are welcome below; attempts to refight the conflict are not.

One thing that's always puzzled me about pro-Israel discourse is the enormous weight it tends to place on the concept of nationhood. Over and over again, you find Zionists insisting that Israel is a nation, that Palestine is not a nation, that Palestine must acknowledge that Israel is a nation - as if nationhood were the key issue at stake. In pro-Palestine discourse, on the other hand, the question of whether either party is a nation hardly arises except in responses; who cares? Recently it struck me that this difference in rhetoric could perhaps be understood in semantic terms. What is a nation? And just how badly does this rather polysemous word translate?

When Netanyahu defends proposals to define Israel as the "nation-state of the Jewish people" (מדינת הלאום של העם היהודי), or declares that "we do not want a bi-national state" (איננו רוצים מדינה דו-לאומית), the word he's using is le'om לאום. In the Hebrew Bible, this word (better transcribed lə'ōm) is fairly uncommon, occurring 26 times in the plural and 5 in the singular (26 of them in the singular), usually in poetry and paired with its far more frequent near-synonym ʕām עָם "people, nation". It occurs in the singular in Proverbs, with general reference, and in Genesis 25, in which Jacob and Esau are each presented as a le'om, implicitly representing the nation made up of his descendants: respectively, Israel and Edom. Elsewhere, it occurs in the plural, especially referring to other nations (eg Psalms 47:3). In a more modern context, le'om is the word used for "ethnic affiliation" on Israeli ID cards: an Israeli citizen's le'om can be Jewish, Arab, or Druze, but, curiously enough, never Israeli.

In Arabic, the "nation-state of the Jewish people" is rendered as "دولة قومية للشعب اليهودي", and "bi-national state" as "دولة ثنائية القومية", both using the word qawmiyy "national", from qawm "nation, people". The latter word is very frequent in the Qur'an, occurring 383 times. Its usage there, however, is rather different. It never occurs pluralised (though it takes plural agreement). Whereas the only le'oms defined by name in the Bible are defined by common patrilineal ancestry, a qawm is defined by name in the Qur'an only in terms of their prophet or (more rarely) leader: qawmu Mūsā "the people of Moses", qawmu Firʕawn "the people of Pharaoh", qawmi Nūḥ "the people of Noah", qawmi 'Ibrāhīm "the people of Abraham"... Otherwise, it is defined in terms of its characteristics: most often, believing (aware, realising, grateful, etc.) or unbelieving (wrong-doing, misguided, self-wronging, etc.)

As might be expected based on this, the noun qawm is hardly ever used to refer to something like a "Palestinian nation", nor to a "Jewish nation", nor even to an "Arab nation" (Google returns derisorily small numbers of hits, in the low thousands or below). If you search for dawlah qawmiyyah "nation-state", what you mostly get is discussion of Israel (along with a few fringe movements). Qawmiyyah, "nationalism", is a more prominent concept in the modern era - above all, al-qawmiyyah al-ʕarabiyyah "Arab nationalism", ie the dream of a single pan-Arab state - but one with a rather ambivalent ring to it at best; there are still Arab nationalists around, but the Arab unity project has had a musty 1960s smell to it for a while, criticised as much from the right as from the left. Even apart from its content, the common Israeli demand for recognition of a "nation-state of the Jewish people" thus translates rather poorly - not because the concepts don't exist, but because they don't have similar connotations. Palestinians aren't normally speaking in terms of a "dawlah qawmiyyah of the Palestinian people", nor for that matter of "the Arab people"; whether Palestine is a nation-state or some other kind of state is a secondary issue.

When Mahmoud Abbas mentions "national institutions" or a "national unity government" in his UNGA speech - or meets with the Palestinian National Council - the word he's using, and the word any Arabic speaker would use, is waṭaniyy وطني, from waṭan وطن "nation, homeland". In the Palestinian declaration of independence of 1988, qawmiyy occurs once (in a token nod to Arab nationalism), whereas waṭaniyy occurs 13 times, in collocations like "national identity", "national independence", "national rights", "national personality", "national will"... The word waṭan doesn't occur in the Qur'an at all; the closest it comes is a single usage of mawāṭin "regions". It unambiguously refers to a land, not to a group of people. And, unlike qawm, it has a profound resonance in the context of Palestinian - and Arab - nationalism, and not just because it provides the adjective used in collocations like "national liberation" or "national anthem". It recurs nostalgically in the poems of Mahmoud Darwish ("What is the waṭan? It is the house, and the mulberry tree, and the chicken coop and the beehive, and the smell of bread and the sky") or Tawfiq Zayyad ("As you were, so you shall remain, my waṭan - present in the leaves of the oleander and the fragrance of jasmine"). Further afield, Nizar Qabbani's remarkable line comes to mind now more than ever: "O my waṭan, have they made you a serial of horror whose events we follow in the evening? Then how shall we see you if they cut the power?" And, of course, waṭaniyyah وطنية "patriotism" has far more positive connotations than qawmiyyah. All of this vocabulary places the emphasis away from notions of ethnic cohesion or common ancestry, focusing on a different common ground: the land itself.

The Hebrew translation of waṭan would appear to be moledet (מולדת) "homeland". This word does occur in the Bible, 22 times - but, like le'om, it carries there a sense much more closely tied to human kinship, referring to "kindred, family" as well as "birthplace, native country". Israel's declaration of independence refers to the land as the "national homeland (moledet)" of the Jews, and there seems to be a good deal of Hebrew poetry on the subject. However, collocations like "national anthem" or "National Council" or "national unity government" or "national liberation" all derive from le'om, not from moledet.

"Nation" in English usage is ambiguous: is a nation united primarily by its attachment to a given area, or by its common ancestry? Either language can express either idea. However, the best-established and most positively viewed terminology in Arabic focuses on the former, while in Hebrew it focuses on the latter. This difference is hardly the source of the conflict, but it does play some small part in impeding mutual understanding.

The original chupacabra?

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

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

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

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

Lyrics and language preservation?

The Berber-speaking oasis of Siwa in western Egypt, where I did doctoral fieldwork, has a rather extensive poetic tradition embodied in song lyrics. Practically every Siwi I spoke to quoted me some lyrics at some point, and songs in Siwi apparently remain a key element of parties. I included a few of these in my book about Siwi, among them four nicely arranged lines referring to Shali, the main town of Siwa:

Quṛ, ya lmendi, quṛ!	Dry, O wheat, dry!
Baba nnek yexsa Cali.	Your owner misses Shali.
Nan edderb n Cali,	People of the Shali road,
Sellemm-i af elɣali.	Give the beloved my greetings.

It wasn't until later that I finally received a copy of Bricchetti-Robetti's (1889) article "Sul dialetto di Siuwah", and not until this month that I finally got around to reading it carefully. When I did, I was surprised to find this poem transcribed practically word for word:

qor aimindi qor	قور ايمند قور
babenik jiksa - sciali	ببنك يخس - شالى
nani derbj ensciali	تندرب انشالى
salamuet - afelrhali	سلموت افلغالى

Apparently, these lyrics have been passed on orally for more than 120 years, with only minor changes.

There are many ways in which Siwa is different from Tabelbala, the Algerian oasis where I did the other half of my doctoral fieldwork. Linguistically, one that struck me early on was the variability of Tabelbala's language, Korandje, compared to Siwi. In Siwa, there was some interesting variation even within the speech of single individuals (1st sg. -ɣ- vs. -ʕ-, negative copula qačči/'ačči/ɣačči), but it hardly seemed possible to speak of dialects. In Tabelbala, not only did different villages take pains to distinguish themselves by different ways of speaking, but neighbours and cousins often showed substantial differences in pronunciation and even sometimes vocabulary. And whereas Siwis rarely seemed at a loss for words, in Tabelbala even the oldest speakers routinely had trouble finding a word, or disagreed on its meaning once they had remembered it.

Another striking difference is the low profile of Korandje poetry, if it exists at all. Whereas in Siwa I could hardly stop people from telling me lyrics, in Tabelbala my utmost efforts barely dredged up a few ditties which the speakers themselves considered absurdly simple. The poetry that men cared about and appreciated was in dialectal Arabic, and even that was far less prominent than in Siwa. (Some older women reportedly sing Korandje poetry in honour of the Prophet at regular Sufi gatherings, but I was unable to hear any of that; given its subject matter, I suspect the language used would be heavily influenced by Arabic.)

One possibility I'm tempted to consider is that these two facts are causally linked. In Siwa, songs are heard and sung in groups, and the best lyrics are widely circulated and - apparently - remembered for many decades; their rhythm and rhyme makes major rewording impractical. Logically, this should keep less frequently used vocabulary in circulation in much the same way as a written literary tradition, or a national broadcasting service. Without songs, for instance, would Siwi have kept a Berber word for "gazelle" (izem), an animal rarely if ever seen in the oasis today, but to which the beloved is constantly compared? In Korandje, on the other hand, the standardising force of songs and poetry is practically absent, and it's not obvious that anything else in their verbal arts (already sadly atrophied by television) compensates for it.

Does this reflect your experience, or contradict it? How do poetic traditions (or lack of them) in societies you're familiar with seem to affect the prospects for their languages?

From codeswitching to borrowing in une génération?

It's not unusual to hear sentences like the following from middle-class Algerian adults, especially women:

عندنا ان تيليفيزيون كبير
ʕəndna æ̃ tilivizyõ kbir
"we have a big TV"

شرينا لو تيلي
šrina lœ tele
"we bought the TV"

If I had in fact heard these from an adult, I would unhesitatingly classify them as code-switching, with a French noun phrase inserted into an otherwise Arabic sentence. That goes especially for the former - monolingual adults simply don't use the French indefinite article [æ̃ ] (un). In fact, however, I heard them from a monolingual 5-year old, born and bred in Algeria, who only took her first French class this term. Unless she knows more French than she or her parents are letting on, that necessarily makes them monolingual sentences. And that means that, for this young lady, [æ̃ ] (un) has become a borrowing into Algerian Arabic - an indefinite article used with words that take the definite article le.

Earlier, I noted that children don't typically initiate effective language change; and, in terms of output, this isn't a change at all. She's simply learned to produce the kind of sentences she hears all the time directly, without going through all the effort of learning French first. In terms of the underlying system, however, it's a significant change. Instead of having one indefinite article used with all nouns, she now has two: one with Arabic nouns, and one with French nouns. (Rather like the nouns borrowed from Berber that we looked at earlier, which can't take the Arabic definite article.) In Saussurean terms, one generation's parole (the relatively free Arabic-French codeswitching practiced by her parents) has become the next generation's langue. And that sort of change is by its nature something children, and only children, are extremely likely to lead.

(Note, by the way, that in French télévision is feminine; I'm not sure why she gives it masculine agreement, but probably this reflects the influence of the earlier borrowed form tilivizyun, which regular Arabic phonological gender assignment rules make masculine.)

Korandje from the 12th to the 21st century (popular article)

Korandje, the seriously endangered Songhay language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, is a longstanding research interest of mine. As far as I can see, it has the most complicated contact history of any language in the Sahara, with multiple extensive layers of loanwords from each of at least five languages which successively dominated the region. I recently wrote a short summary of the history of Korandje (as I understand it), aimed at a non-specialist audience, for a special issue of The Middle East in London. You can read it here:

Gaining a language, losing a language: Korandje from the 12th to the 21st century.

Berber substratum nouns in Beni-Tamer (Adrar, Algeria)

In most of the Arabic dialects of the Algerian Sahara that I've encountered, Berber influence is rather inconspicuous. Loanwords exist, of course, but they are so well adapted to Arabic structure that they tend to be difficult to spot; who would guess, for instance, that šəṛšmala "skink" came from Zenati Berber *a-sərm-šal (cf. attested Tashelhiyt asrmkal?)

In a few areas, however, Berber loans retain the Berber nominal prefixes a- and ta-, and hence stick out like a sore thumb. In such cases, they often keep Berber-style plurals as well, reproducing a Berber subsystem within the otherwise Arabic domain of the dialect's nominal morphology. The only major Saharan dialect that consistently does this, as far as I know, is Hassaniya in Mauritania and the Western Sahara. However, during fieldwork some years ago, I came across another case well outside of Hassaniya. The area around Adrar (medieval Touat), in southwestern Algeria, seems to have shifted from Berber to Arabic relatively recently, and the process is not complete even today. At least one village, Beni-Tamer just outside Adrar, accordingly borrows many Berber nouns with Berber nominal prefixes, including ones unfamiliar to other speakers from near Adrar that I met. I only spent a short time with the one speaker from Beni-Tamer that I met, but he gave me quite a few examples from his Arabic (he did not speak Berber):

With masculine a-:

• aždəl "garden near town"
• ažəlžim “hoe” (Taznatit ažəlžim)
• afdam “palm fibre” (cf. Hassaniyya fdām)
• afrag “palm-leaf fence” (Taznatit afrag, cf. Hassaniyya efəṛṛāg)
• aqənnin / qənnin "palm stump" (Taznatit taqənniħt)
• agžəm “cellar” (Taznatit ikzəm)
• amazzər “sloped spot in an irrigation channel”
• anfif “drainage hole” (Taznatit anfif)

With feminine ta-:

• tadmayt "garden outside town"
• tasgat “large basket” (Taznatit tasgawt)
• taṣəṛbiṭ “skink”
• tagəmmi “stable”

Most of these are not attested in Hassaniyya, and closely reflect the Taznatit Berber still spoken at Timimoun, confirming that they represent a substratum of Berber words retained by this town's people after they shifted to Arabic. This also fits with their semantic distribution, including a lot of agricultural terminology. At least one of them takes a metathesised Berber plural, originally with the Berber masculine plural suffix -awən: agžəm “cellar”, pl. agəžwamən. Unfortunately I didn't elicit plurals for the rest. I don't think I'll be able to go to Adrar in the near future, but it would be interesting to look at this dialect more...

Have you seen anything similar in a dialect you're familiar with?

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References: Hassaniyya from Taine-Cheikh, Dictionnaire hassaniyya-français; Taznatit from Boudot-Lamotte 1964, "Notes ethnographiques et linguistiques sur le parler berbère de Timimoun".