Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 1

Following in a long tradition of people imagining that knowing a few languages or a bit of mathematics implies they already know linguistics better than any self-styled specialist, the quasi-celebrity author Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently decided to claim that "Levantine is modernized Aramaic". (Let's not comment further on the attached table, whose attempt at Standard Arabic is painfully bad, and which omits the whole Aramaic column except for the title. Also, let's not confuse it with the separate question of how distant Levantine is from Standard Arabic.) The ensuing Twitter "debate", while of little value in itself, nicely illustrates a number of common misconceptions, some of them worth responding to in a less cramped medium. I'll start with the most explicitly political one, since it's bound to colour responses to any purely academic argument:

You just call it Arabic because Arabic is used for "high" functions in the region; If we were diglossic Levantine/Aramaic instead of Levantine/Arabic you would say the same.

Less than 90 km from NNT's hometown is a village where they do in fact still speak Aramaic, while of course still being diglossic in Arabic: Maaloula, in Syria. Despite heavy Arabic influence, this village's language has never once been mistaken for Arabic; its own people call it siryêni, and European Semitists recognised it as Aramaic as soon as even simple wordlists became available. If you happen to be Levantine, try listening to some of it (eg here) - how much of that do you understand? The same is true of other relict Semitic languages within the Arabic-speaking world, such as Mehri or Jibbali or Soqotri or Neo-Mandaic. I have more than one book in which Soqotri or Jibbali speakers attempt to prove that their languages are really Arabic, for much the same reasons that NNT wants his language not to be Arabic - but, notwithstanding the speakers' desires, Semitists had no trouble proving that these languages were not descended from Arabic. Conversely, the "high" languages of Malta have always been English and Italian, yet, despite Maltese nationalists' best efforts to show that Maltese was really Punic, European Semitists had no difficulty in identifying it as descended from Arabic. So, no, Semitic historical linguists do not base their decisions on what kind of diglossia happens to be around, nor were all those 19th-century German Orientalists secret agents sent back in time by the Baath Party. To the contrary, almost all Semitists I've known would be far more excited to discover that some undocumented variety was a new Semitic language than to find out that it was "just" another dialect of Arabic.

"Proving" Levantine comes from Arabic rather than Aramaic like "proving" Spanish comes from Italian, not latin.

How do linguists know that Spanish is descended directly from Latin, not from Italian? Simple: we look for cases in which Italian has made a change - innovated - and Spanish hasn't. Such cases are easy to find: for example, in Italian original *fl has become *fi (thus fiore "flower") and original long *e in open syllables has become i (thus di "of"), whereas in Spanish original *fl remains fl, and *e e (thus flor, de). If Spanish were descended from Italian, then these changes would all have had to have happened and then reversed themselves in Spain, which is very unlikely. We can know which form was original not just because in this case we have copious ancient data, but also by using comparative-historical reconstruction. The full toolkit would take too long to explain here (my favourite textbook is Lyle Campbell's Historical Linguistics), but basically, we:

• establish sets of sounds corresponding systematically to one another;
• figure out whether these correspondence sets systematically occur only in certain environments, and, if so, see whether there are any other correspondence sets occurring only in non-overlapping environments that they can be unified with.

This procedure allows us to prove that the ancestor language must have distinguished at least as many phonemes as members of the resulting set of correspondence sets, and - combined with a large body of knowledge about likely and unlikely sound changes - gives us a good chance of determining what the actual sound of those phonemes were. This technique was, of course, developed mainly for reconstructing unattested languages, but way back in the 1950s, Charles Hall decided to test it by applying it to Romance. The result was, as you might hope, Vulgar Latin.

Now, let us apply this to Levantine, Arabic, and Aramaic. Reconstructing the common ancestor of Aramaic and Arabic (see eg here or even just here) shows that Aramaic features a number of innovations not shared with Arabic; conveniently, many of these are mergers. In particular, in Aramaic *`, *ʁ (gh), and *ɬʼ (lh) all merge to ` (ayin); *x (kh) and *ħ merge to ħ (heth); initial *w and *y merge to *y. In Arabic, all of these distinctions are maintained. Now, the nice thing about mergers is that they can't be reversed; once two formerly distinct word classes feature the same phoneme, there's no way for the ordinary speaker to recover the distinction. A monolingual Aramaic speaker has no way of telling that the ` in 'ar`ā "earth" (< *'arɬʼ- + -ā) used to be pronounced differently from the ` in ṭar`ā "door", or in `aynā "eye". In Levantine, all of these distinctions are normally maintained, just as they are in Arabic; أرض has none of the consonants of عين. QED. (In fact, historical linguists have also succeeded in identifying some Aramaic loans into Levantine Arabic by finding the small minority of words in which these distinctions were lost.) In fact, you don't even need to look at phonology to figure this out; the grammar provides plenty of clues. In Aramaic, for example, almost every noun ends in -ā, except in a few specific contexts. This is an innovation specific to Aramaic, accomplished by gluing a former demonstrative on to the end of the noun, and preserved in every modern spoken Aramaic variety. In Arabic, it never happened - nor, obviously, in Levantine.

Of course, NNT shows no signs of even being aware of the relevance of regular sound correspondences, mergers, or any of the other elements in a historical linguist's toolkit, much less of accepting them as definitive criteria for language classification. At one point, however, he vaguely expresses the criterion he thinks should be definitive:

To prove that Levantine derives from Arabic WITHOUT Aramaic route you need to finds ratio of content ⊂ Arabic & ⊄ Aramaic. Not done.

Now that we've seen a little bit of how linguists determine what comes from Arabic and what comes from Aramaic, we're ready to look at the results of this criterion in the next post. You should be able to guess the answer already...

Sondage pour les algériens bilingues arabe/français

Même si j'écris généralement en anglais, je suis sûr que ce blog a quelques lecteurs algériens qui sont bilingues arabe/français. Si vous appartenez à cette catégorie, et si vous avez quelques minutes pour aider une doctorante algérienne à l'Université de Florida en ses recherches linguistiques, vous pouvez faire ce sondage. Je joins la lettre que j'ai reçue.

---

Bonjour,

Nous menons une étude sur les algériens bilingues arabe/français. Si vous souhaitez participer, connectez-vous sur le lien ci-dessous. Soyez sure que vos réponses seront anonymes. https://ufl.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6QjKS7nNFYDYlBr

Si le lien ne s'ouvre pas, copier et coller le dans votre navigateur.

Pour ceux d'entre vous qui souhaiteraient terminer le sondage en deux fois, n'envoyez pas vos réponses, simplement quittez le sondage en fermant votre navigateur. Une fois connectés à nouveau vous pouvez continuer là où vous vous êtes arrêtés (les phrases peuvent apparaître dans un ordre différent).

Le sondage a plusieurs listes de phrases. Après avoir complété et envoyé le sondage, vous pouvez (si vous le souhaitez) entrer dans le lien une nouvelle fois et compléter une autre liste. Nous tenons à vous rappeler que vous ne devez pas compléter la même liste. Si on vous donne la même liste, veuillez quitter le sondage.

Vous pouvez transmettre ce message à d'autres algériens bilingues, mais s'il vous plaît ne l'affichez pas sur Facebook.

S'il vous plaît essayez de compléter l'enquête le plutôt possible avant sa fermeture.

Merci d'avoir partagé votre temps et vos idées.

Souad,

University of Florida

A South Arabian loan into Libyan Berber?

From Morocco to Oman, there is a long tradition of imagining that the Berbers of North Africa and the Mehris of South Arabia speak the same language. This is by no means confined to pan-Arab nationalists - Siwis have told me more than once that some friend of a friend had met non-Arabic-speaking Yemenis and understood their language, and I'm told many Mehris have the same belief. I've previously discussed some possible reasons for this belief, as well as the more obviously propagandistic claim that Arabic descends from Berber; both are false.

Nevertheless, it is true that significant numbers of Yemenis participated in the Arab migrations to North Africa during the Islamic era, and it's not inherently implausible that some should have brought their languages with them. In fact, I just came across what looks very much like a South Arabian loan into the northwestern Libyan Berber variety of Zuwara (At Willul).

In Zuwara, the usual word for "father" is baba, as in many other Berber varieties, but in a few collocations such as əg tíddart n ḥíbi-s "in her father's house", a different term ḥibi is substituted (Mitchell 2009:303, 341). This word is unlikely to be proto-Berber, since proto-Berber did not have a phoneme /ḥ/ and since it is quite unusual within Berber. And as far as I know, it is not used anywhere in Arabic (although Libyan dialects are not that well documented). One could try to link it to ḥabīb-ī "my beloved", but that would be phonetically irregular and semantically unlikely, since this term is normally used in the context of romantic love or of a child by their parents.

However, the normal word for "father" in Mehri is ḥīb "father" - ḥayb-ī "my father", ḥīb-as "his father" (Watson 2012:149). In fact, Mehri adds this ḥ prefix to a number of kinship terms: ḥāmē "mother", ḥabrē "son", ḥabrīt "daughter" (ibid), as well as a number of other common nouns. Its function is to mark definiteness (ibid:64). But no such definite article has ever existed in Arabic or in Berber, so the only possible explanations for the similarity of Zuwara ḥibi are pure coincidence or borrowing from Mehri into Berber (perhaps via an Arabic dialect?). It will be interesting to see if other cases turn up.

And as long as I'm talking about Libyan Berber, I really ought to mention Marijn van Putten's new book A Grammar of Awjila Berber (see his announcement at Oriental Berber).. This careful analysis of all the unfortunately limited data available on the very unusual Berber variety of Awjila, in the far east of Libya, is an important resource for Berber historical linguistics. I hope that things settle down in Libya soon enough to make a fuller description possible, but for the moment, this work appears unlikely to be superseded.

Some minority languages of the Mosul Plain

For most of the past decade, while first the rest of Iraq and then Syria (150,000 dead, 2.5 million refugees) have burned, Northern Iraq has seemed like a relative oasis of calm. That has changed rather suddenly: with ISIS' religious persecution, and now American airstrikes, Northern Iraq and its minorities are suddenly prominent in the headlines. The headlines throw into sharp relief the region's status as perhaps the most religiously diverse place in the Middle East - but what they may not show is that this region is also a small-scale "residual zone" preserving rather more linguistic diversity than is typical for such a small area in the modern Fertile Crescent (not just Arabic and Kurdish!)

The most endangered language of the region is certainly Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), or Sûreth (ܣܘܪܝܬ). Once, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Middle East, spoken in various dialects from Gaza to Basra, and written as far afield as China and India. By the early 20th century, it was restricted to a few hundred far-flung mountain villages; the largest dialect group, NENA, was centered on the Christian (Assyrian and Chaldean) villages of the Mosul Plain, such as Tel Kef (Telkepe) and Qaraqosh, and across the border in Iran and Turkey; a detailed map is available at Cambridge's NENA Database. Today, those who have stayed behind in ever harder conditions are substantially outnumbered by their diaspora in cities such as Detroit or Sydney, whose children increasingly just speak English - and, as of the past couple of days, media accounts suggest that fleeing refugees have left the Mosul Plain villages practically empty. Their exodus is rather reminiscent of what happened about a century ago: during the Armenian/Assyrian Genocide, the NENA-speaking Assyrians of Hakkari fled from Turkey never to return, taking refuge in Iraq and finally in Syria. It remains to be seen whether this exile will be as lasting as the previous one. If you're wondering how the language sounds, the NENA Database site has a number of recordings, some transcribed, such as The Story of the Cobbler; others can be heard at Semitisches Tonarchiv.

While Kurds prefer to consider Kurdish as one language, the two main Kurdish varieties of northern Iraq - Sorani and Kurmanji - are strikingly different from one another, and are usually considered as separate languages by academics. The smaller Gurani language, (see DOBES), spoken in northwestern Iraq and also commonly labelled Kurdish, doesn't even belong to the same branch of Iranian as Sorani and Kurmanji. Many of its speakers belong to loosely Shia-affiliated minority religions, such as the Ahl-i Haqq and the Shabak, considered by ISIS as beyond the pale.

The other minority group unfortunate enough to have been pitched into the headlines, Yezidis, do not have a language of their own; they speak Kurmanji Kurdish. However, the Yezidis are associated with a unique writing system. In the early 20th century, manuscripts summarising Yezidi beliefs written in a unique alphabet (such as the Meshefa Resh "Black Scripture") came into the possession of Western researchers, and the alphabet in question duly found its way into compendia such as Diringer (1968). Later research, though, suggests that both these manuscripts and the alphabet they were written in were created for Western consumption, likely by a non-Yezidi bookseller, rather than representing a Yezidi tradition (Kreyenbrook and Rashow 2005, EI).

The region's Turkmen, many of whom have also apparently been persecuted by ISIS for their Shiism, speak a Turkic variety close to Turkish and Azeri. From what little information I've seen, it seems unlikely to qualify as a separate language, but does not seem to have attracted much research.

The Arabic dialects of northern Iraq - the so-called qeltu dialects, for their unique pronunciation of the word "I said" - are also quite interesting in their own right; the spoken Arabic dialect of Abbasid Baghdad seems likely to have belonged to this group. However, that is another story for another day...

Northern Songhay comparative wordlists

Linguistically, the northern and southern shores of the Sahara have remained surprisingly distinct, and most Saharan groups are easily identifiable as outposts of one or the other. Occasionally, however, a greater degree of language mixture is found. Nowhere is trans-Saharan language mixture more prominent than in Northern Songhay, a group of languages spoken in Niger, Mali, and Algeria combining a Songhay base with an enormous Berber superstratum, including Korandjé, a southwestern Algerian language I've been working on for a few years now.

Following an inquiry I recently received, I've been comparing Korandjé data to the Northern Songhay comparative wordlist in Rueck and Christiansen (1999). In the spirit of open data, you can view the wordlist (with a few remaining gaps to be filled) here: Korandjé 380-word list for Northern Songhay lexical comparison. Draft version, 14 July 2014. The results should be treated as provisional, since the Tasawaq part of this wordlist in particular appears a bit unreliable and since a few gaps remain in the Korandjé and even Tadaksahak lists, but are nevertheless interesting.

Counting cognates makes it very clear that Korandjé is the outlier, as might be expected based on geography:

	Korandjé	Tadaksahak	Tagdal	Tabarog	Tasawaq
Korandjé	–	139	140	141	152
Tadaksahak	139	–	242	238	214
Tagdal	140	242	–	304	237
Tabarog	141	238	304	–	229
Tasawaq	152	214	237	229	–

The other three Northern Songhay varieties (treating Tagdal+Tabarog as one variety) form a linkage, which, following Wolff and Alidou's suggestion, we might label Azawagh Songhay - from west to east: Tadaksahak, Tagdal+Tabarog, then Tasawaq. On this wordlist Korandjé is clearly closest to Tasawaq, but that's only because Korandjé and Tasawaq have both kept more Songhay vocabulary, a fact irrelevant for subgrouping. The only innovation in vocabulary that Korandjé and Tasawaq share to the exclusion of the rest is the borrowing of numerals from 5 up from Arabic, and if you look at the sound correspondences it's clear that Tasawaq and Korandjé each borrowed their current numerals separately from different dialects of Arabic. Tadaksahak, Tagdal, and Tabarog all show almost the same number of items shared with Korandjé due to common borrowing from Berber, and most of that is due to shared borrowings of widespread Berber words that could easily have happened independently. The use of a Berber form originally meaning "weaver" for "spider" in Korandjé and Tadaksahak alone is striking, but very likely coincidental.

Another way to look at this is to note that 188 of the 332 items are shared across all of Azawagh Songhay, whereas only 108 are shared across all of Azawagh Songhay plus Korandjé. Of the latter, only 9 are Berber or Arabic loans, while 99 are Songhay retentions:

eye, ear, mouth, head, hair, neck, milk, belly, foot, hand, skin, blood, urine, liver, person, man, woman, owner, name, dog, cow, donkey, (venomous) snake, louse, meat, fat, stick, grass, rope, salt, pot, pit (hole), iron, fire, smoke, ashes, night, sun, day, yesterday, wind, water, stone, one, two, hot, cold, long, old, lots, red, black, white, dry, full, what, where, near, far, and, sit down, stand up, lie down, sleep, bite, eat, drink, suck, laugh, cry, see, hear, know, love, give, steal, hide, give birth, die, kill, walk, run, fall, wash, pierce, hit, tie, do, sew, bury, sandals, horse, truth, falsehood, finish, dig, stand, find.

This list is dominated by basic, rarely loaned words: nearly half of it overlaps with the Leipzig-Jakarta list. However, more culturally specific shared retentions such as "iron", "owner", "cow", "donkey", "horse", "pot", "sew", and "sandals" remind us that the split of Northern Songhay is after all rather recent (much more so, in fact, than these words alone might suggest).

These pan-Northern retentions, however, by no means exhaust the Songhay lexicon of Northern Songhay. Korandjé alone retains some 183 list items of Songhay origin, at least 135 of them shared with Tasawaq, while for many words (eg "four", "green"), only Tasawaq has kept Songhay forms. Well over 227 items have Songhay equivalents in at least one Azawagh Songhay variety, and more than 241 have equivalents either in the Azawagh or in Korandje. If the even more conservative (but extinct) Emghedesie variety were added to the list, that number would no doubt be even larger. Proto-Northern Songhay certainly had a significantly larger Songhay lexicon than any of its descendants does.

---

[Later addendum]: Removing all words with Arabic-derived Korandje forms from the list makes no difference to the classification; the table ends up like this:

	Korandjé	Tadaksahak	Tagdal	Tabarog	Tasawaq
Korandjé	–	135	136	138	142
Tadaksahak	135	–	188	186	174
Tagdal	136	188	–	231	188
Tabarog	138	186	231	–	181
Tasawaq	142	174	188	181	–

Grammatically analysing "Sahha Ramdankoum!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Figuig to Igli: Berber in the Algerian-Morocco borderland

The number of good Berber descriptive dictionaries has been slowly but steadily increasing in recent years, but Hassane Benamara's new Dictionnaire amazigh-français : Parler de Figuig et ses régions (Rabat: IRCAM, 2013), which I was lucky enough to be lent a copy of lately, is surely one of the best. Apart from being quite unusually large (800 pages), it incorporates examples, multiple senses, pictures of items difficult to describe, an appendix with encyclopedic information on culturally specific words such as festivals and childrens' games. It incorporates a few neologisms useful for schooling, but takes a fairly inclusive attitude towards Arabic loanwords. There are barely 15,000 people in Figuig, but, astonishingly enough, this is actually the second dictionary of Figuig Berber published by a native speaker; the first, Ali Sahli's معجم أمازيغي-عربي (خاص بلهجة أهالي فجيج) (Oujda: Al Anwar Al Maghribia, 2008), was a good effort, but is substantially shorter and used a less accurate transcription. (There's even another linguist from Figuig, Mohamed Yeou, threatening to make a third dictionary – if he goes ahead with the project, he'll have a high hurdle to clear.)

Across the border in Algeria, the situation is rather different. A number of towns across a wide area around Bechar and Ain Sefra speak Berber varieties closely related to that of Figuig, collectively imprecisely termed "Shelha". Some of them seem to be shifting to Arabic (on my latest trip, I was told that in Lahmar they had stopped speaking Berber with their children, and for Igli I had heard the same much earlier.) But little effort – and no official effort, as far as I know – is being made to document them. The only (very) partial exceptions of which I am aware are Igli and Boussemghoun.

For Igli (population 7000), I have already described the local Scouts' efforts to put together an online dictionary. More recently, however, I came across a laudable local attempt at approaching the problem academically: Fatima Mouili's The Berber Speech of Igli, Language towards Extinction. After a very brief summary of Igli grammar and phonology, unfortunately made frequently illegible by font problems, the author discusses the reasons for language shift. Corresponding to my impressions for the region, including Tabelbala, she cites emigration and the desire to ensure educational success as important drivers; others are more surprising, including the immigration of refugees expelled by the French from a nearby village during the Algerian War of Independence. Apparently, her thesis discusses similar issues, for those with 59€ to spare...

For Boussemghoun (population 4000), a few articles and a book by Mohamed Benali may be cited, all focusing – as far as I can see – exclusively on the sociolinguistic situation of Berber in the town. A local Berber-language poet billed as "the Ait Menguellet of Boussemghoun", Bashir Oulhaj, has a considerable presence on YouTube, eg here; he's even been interviewed, by Figuig News. It seems to be treated as the centre for Amazigh identity in the region; the HCA has even organised a symposium there. Nevertheless, little if any descriptive work has been published on its variety of Berber.

Taken together, there are probably more speakers of Berber in southwestern Algeria than in and around Figuig. Why the difference, then? Is it because linguistics is better represented in Moroccan universities than in Algerian ones? (Notwithstanding some interesting work coming out of Algeria, I think that is fair – it would be hard to think of any linguist working in Algeria with a profile comparable to Abdelkader Fassi Fehri, for example.) Or is it because the Amazigh movement in Morocco is less closely associated with one side in the "culture war"? (Benali observes that, while most Semghounis wanted Berber to be taught in schools, they rejected the installation of an HCA office due to distrusting their politics.) Or are there more specific, purely local factors explaining the difference? That would be worth a study in itself – though perhaps not as much so as the Berber varieties in question!

Why Yiddish is not Slavic, and language families are not families

Recently I came across a popular article, Where Did Yiddish Come From?, discussing Paul Wexler's eccentric claim that Yiddish is a "relexified" Slavic language (and Modern Hebrew, in turn, "relexified" Yiddish). To make any sense of this claim, we have to stop and consider what historical linguists mean when they talk about language origins.

If you want to learn a language perfectly, the best way to start is to pick it up as a child from your family and the community they're part of. That way, you and your generation end up speaking the same language as your parents and their generation, modulo a few little innovations you threw in just to annoy them. As those little innovations pile up, generation on generation, sooner or later you end up speaking something that the first generation wouldn't have been able to understand. In such a scenario, everyone agrees, the latest generation's language – let's call it B – is descended from the first generation's (A). If some of the children of that first generation moved far away early on and went through the same process of gradual change, their descendants speak another language, C, which speakers of B can't understand, but which is also descended from A. So we say that B and C belong to the same language family, just as their speakers belong at some remove to the same extended family.

If you're reading this, it's probably too late to learn a language that way. (Sorry.) You can still learn another language, say B, but the odds are that, at best, you'll always speak it with a bit of a foreign accent, and keep using expressions that make sense in English but sound weird to native speakers. If you're just an individual migrant learning it to fit in, that won't matter in the long run – your kids will learn the language in the playground and come back speaking it better than you do. But what if it's not just you that's learning it, but also your spouse, and your brothers, and almost everyone you know? What if your whole community is starting to prefer to speak this language with their kids, instead of the one they grew up with? In that case, the kids will still end up speaking it – but instead of speaking it like natives, they'll probably end up speaking it with your foreign accent and all those expressions of yours that native speakers laugh at. In that scenario, does the kids' language (let's call it D) belong to the same language family as B and C, or not? That's the ambiguity that Wexler is playing with.

The obvious answer – and the one most linguists would give – is yes*. For one thing, assuming you did a half-decent job of learning B, it's the same language – speakers of D can understand speakers of B, and vice versa, even if they laugh at each other's crazy accents. The influence of Gaelic may pervade Irish English, but Irish English is still English, not some Celtic language. It's the vocabulary and the morphology that really make English understandable – a weird accent or a funny way of putting things is just not that big an obstacle on its own. Wexler proposes exactly the opposite criterion: "Yiddish – in contrast to its massive German vocabulary – has a native Slavic syntax and sound system – and thus must be classified as a Slavic language" (1993:5). The origins of Yiddish syntax and phonology I can't comment on, but there's a good reason why historical linguists normally prioritise the vocabulary and the morphology over the syntax and phonology, even apart from the one just given. Vocabulary and morphology are eminently reconstructible, using the comparative method. Phonology, on the other hand, can only be reconstructed from vocabulary, and syntax is notoriously hard to reconstruct at all. If language families were to be defined based on phonology and syntax, it would hardly be possible to define them, much less reconstruct them or state regular correspondences between them.

In short, saying that Yiddish (much less Modern Hebrew) belongs to the Slavic language family is just a word game – in the sense that historical linguists normally use the concept of "language family", it doesn't, and wouldn't even if every last Yiddish speaker happened to be of Slavic ancestry and to speak Yiddish with a heavy Slavic accent. But such word games do not vitiate Wexler's work. After a large enough community has shifted to a different language, it is usually possible to find traces of their former language – although identifying them as such, rather than as later borrowings, may be hard. That's what Wexler is trying to do for Yiddish, and that's how he supports his claim that Yiddish speakers' ancestors used to speak a Slavic language.

---

* However, the question can easily be made more controversial. Suppose you and your community didn't learn it that well to start with, and aren't trying to imitate native speakers anyway? In that case, the kids will end up speaking something that sounds utterly ridiculous to native speakers; the basic words are recognisable, but the way they're put together seems all wrong. Whatever Tok Pisin is, most people would agree that it's not English. A few people would defend the claim that Tok Pisin belongs to the same family as English, on the basis that that's where the vocabulary comes from, but most would say that it doesn't belong to a language family. The language family model presupposes that the language is being passed on reasonably well as a whole, including not just vocabulary but also some amount of grammar; if all that's learned is a bunch of words, the model breaks down. The border must be drawn somewhere between the extremes of Irish English and Tok Pisin, but linguists can and do disagree on where exactly to draw it.

The Subclassification of Songhay, now online

After more than a year, I can now finally put a PDF of my article The Subclassification of Songhay and its Historical Implications online for whoever may be interested. The abstract follows:

This paper seeks to establish the first cladistic subgrouping of Songhay explicitly based on shared arbitrary innovations, a prerequisite both for distinguishing recent loans from valid extra-Songhay comparanda and for determining how Songhay spread. The results indicate that the Northern Songhay languages of the Sahara form a valid subfamily, even though no known historical records link Tabelbala to the others, and that Northern Songhay and Western Songhay (spoken around Timbuktu and Djenné) together form a valid subfamily, Northwestern Songhay. The speakers of Proto-Northern Songhay practised cultivation and permanent architecture, but were unfamiliar with date palms. Proto-Northwestern Songhay was already in contact with Berber and probably (perhaps indirectly) with Arabic, and was spoken along the Niger River. Proto-Songhay itself appears likely to have been in contact with Gur languages, confirming its relatively southerly location. This result is compatible with two scenarios for the northerly spread of Songhay. On Hypothesis A, Northern Songhay spread out from an oasis north-east of Gao, probably Tadmakkat or Takedda, and Northwestern Songhay had been spoken in areas west of Gao which now speak Eastern Songhay. On Hypothesis B, Northern Songhay spread out from the Timbuktu region, and Western Songhay derives from heavy “de-creolising” influence by Eastern Songhay on an originally Northern Songhay language. To choose between these hypotheses, further fieldwork will be required.

Comments welcome!

Beni-Snous Berber

I have the pleasure of announcing that my article with Fatma Kherbache, Syntactically conditioned code-switching? The syntax of numerals in Beni-Snous Berber, has just been published online in the International Journal of Bilingualism. Long-term readers may recall that, five years ago now, I noticed an astonishing claim in Destaing's grammar of Beni-Snous Berber (spoken near Tlemcen, in western Algeria): that, with numerals above ten, they only used Arabic nouns. In this article, I finally try to get to the bottom of this, based both on Destaing's corpus and on data gathered by my co-author from the half-dozen or so last speakers; the real situation turns out to be a little more complicated than Destaing described, but his claim is correct as a statistical generalisation. Syntactically conditioned code-switching as a systematic part of otherwise monolingual discourse has rarely been described, but one other instance is reported – numeral+noun combinations in the Jerusalem dialect of Domari, an Indic language of the Levant spoken by the Dom "gypsies". Comparing the circumstances of switching in both languages supports the generalisation, building on Myers-Scotton's work, that syntactically conditioned code-switching (Matras' "bilingual suppletion") can only happen when a word shared by both languages has different selectional requirements in each language.

Standard Arabic and cartoons

In the Arab world, practically all cartoons are dubbed in Standard Arabic, rather than in the different countries' spoken varieties. Until recently, Disney was the exception, using Egyptian Arabic; its decision to use Standard Arabic like everyone else has attracted some controversy (New Yorker, Language Log, Arabic Literature, MEI), although it will be very welcome in the Maghreb, where kids don't understand Egyptian anyway. In general, however, there's a strong consensus in favour of Standard Arabic in cartoons; it's seen as a good way to get children used to Standard Arabic, and thus prepare them for school. What are the effects of this?

Let's start by looking around us. We see that younger generations understand Standard Arabic rather well, and have a much larger Standard Arabic vocabulary than earlier generations did at the same age. A cursory search suggests that cartoons have played a role in this; for example, Weyers 1999 shows that American students of Spanish improved their listening comprehension and used a larger vocabulary after watching a Spanish-language telenovela, and Blosser 1988 that Hispanic children, once they've mastered the basics of English, improve their English by watching more TV (although this does not seem to work below the age of 2). So parents are probably right to think that Standard Arabic cartoons are helping their kids learn Standard Arabic.

However – let's be honest – those same younger generations remain largely unable to write a grammatically correct paragraph in it, and normally speak in Standard Arabic only to quote prestigious texts or to parody TV presenters or politicians. This suggests that what they're gaining from it is limited to what Weyers 1999 identified for learners of Spanish: better comprehension and a larger vocabulary, but not better production. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, in Algeria at least, Standard Arabic is effectively a read-only language: everyone under a certain age can understand it and read it, practically no one can express themselves in it correctly or confidently. So, as an educational tool, cartoons have their limits.

But education isn't everything. Cartoons are one of the most secure domains of spoken Standard Arabic, right up there with news broadcasts, documentaries, and historical soap operas, and well ahead of teaching, sermons, political speeches, and interviews, all of which often use varying amounts of dialect. For younger children, unless their parents read to them, cartoons may well be the only context other than school and prayer where they regularly hear Standard Arabic (cp. Hamzaoui 2014), and in any case are one of the first contexts they learn to associate with Standard Arabic. Shouldn't we be asking how this affects their feelings about the language?

Speaking in Oran

It's a bit last minute, but I'm glad to announce that I will be giving two talks in Oran over the next few days:

• "Le contact linguistique au Sahara" at 2:00 pm, 29 April, at CRASC (Centre National de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle), Technopole USTO, Oran.
• "L'histoire du korandjé, une langue algérienne méconnue" at 10:00 am, 30 April, at CEMA (Centre d'Etudes Maghrébines en Algérie), Cité du Chercheur (ex-IAP), University of Oran Es-Senia.

It would be a pleasure to see some readers of this blog there.

Siwi addressee agreement and demonstrative typology

My article "Siwi addressee agreement and demonstrative typology" has just been published, in STUF 67:1. In this article, I discuss the semantics of Siwi demonstratives, focusing especially on a phenomenon that I briefly covered in a post from 2012, Siwi: addressee agreement and addressing Aljazeera. Here's the abstract:

Siwi, a Berber language of Egypt, shows gender/number agreement of medial demonstratives with the addressee. Such phenomena are crosslinguistically very rarely reported, and are not discussed in major surveys of the typology of demonstratives (Diessel 1999; Imai 2003). However, within person-oriented demonstrative systems, such marking amounts to an iconic representation of addressee anchoring. The pragmatics of Siwi demonstratives thus cast light on the nature of the mapping from person to place that such systems reflect (Greenberg 1985). Comparative eastern Berber data suggests that demonstrative addressee agreement may be more widespread than the literature reflects.

Darja notes 3: Diminutive kumquats and affricate phonology

Continuing the Darja theme of my previous posts, I learned a new word today, from a speaker of the traditional dialect of Algiers: تشوينة čwina "kumquat".  This is obviously the diminutive of تشينة čina "orange" (a borrowing from Spanish), just as مشيمشة mšimša "loquat" - another originally Asian fruit - is of مشماش məšmaš "apricot". But its form is a handy clue to the sound system of Algerian Arabic.

Some years ago, Jeffrey Heath wrote a key study of Moroccan Arabic phonology, Ablaut and Ambiguity. Among the questions he tackled was the status of تش č: one phoneme, or two? One way to check is to look at its behaviour in diminutives. Words beginning with two consonants in a row form their diminutives by inserting an i after the two consonants, eg لسان lsan "tongue" > لسيّن lsiyyən "little tongue". Words beginning with one consonant followed by a vowel form the diminutive by replacing the vowel with و w and adding i after it, eg شيخ šix "old man" > شويّخ šwiyyəx "little old man". We thus see from تشوينة čwina that تش č behaves like a single consonant in Algerian Arabic, not like a cluster of two consonants. Since ج j is pronounced as an affricate in the north-central dialect under discussion, this conclusion makes sense. For Morocco, judging by Heath's account, the situation is more ambiguous, and speakers don't really seem sure how to form the diminutive; perhaps the same is true in other parts of Algeria.

More Darja: sea creatures, folk tales, etc.

I’m just back from Algeria, with plenty of work to get to – but before they fade from my memory, here are a few more miscellaneous observations, written down on the plane with help from my notes...

On this trip I took the small, lavishly illustrated book Sea Fishes and Invertebrates of the Mediterranean Sea, by Lawson Wood (London: New Holland, 2002). It proved very useful for checking species identifications, a task I attempted earlier with mixed results in Souag (2005). Since I was on holiday, I didn’t attempt to track down fishermen and do a proper job of identification, but showing it to a cousin yielded the following lexicographical haul:

Previously unrecorded names: rbibət əs-səlbaħa ربيبة السلباحة (“eel’s stepdaughter”) “brittlestar” (Ophioderma longicauda); bu-jəɣləllu بوجغللّو (“snail”) “sea hare (Aplysia sp.)”; langušṭa لانڤوشطة “lobster”; ɣəṭɣuṭ غطغوط “damselfish (Chromis chromis)” (also used in the expression: kħəl ɣəṭɣuṭ كحل غطغوط “pitch-black”); šuṭ شوط “barracuda (Sphyraena sphyraena)”.

Names recorded in Souag (2005) without identification: ṭṛiʕ طريع “Neptune grass (Posidonia oceanica)”; šadiyya شادية “violet sea urchin (Sphaerechinus granularis)”; bərjəmbaluq برجمبالوق “comber (Serranus cabrilla)”; ẓṛiṛga زريرقة (“little green”) “rainbow wrasse (Coris julis)”; luq لوق “striped grouper (Epinephelus costae)”; kəħla كحلة (“black”) “saddled bream (Oblada melanura)”; ʕin əl-ħəjla عين الجلة (partridge-eye) “ornate wrasse (Thalassoma pavo)”; čalba تشالبة “cow bream (Sarpa salpa)”; buriyya بورية “boxlip mullet (Oedachilus labeo)”.

Names differently identified in Souag (2005): zarniyya زارنية “great amberjack (Seriola dumerili)” (previously: derbio or leerfish); čarniyya تشارنية “blue runner (Caranx crysos)” (previously: grouper).

Minor differences in identification: šaɣəṛ شاغر “white bream (Diplodus sargus sargus)” (previously: sea bream); bu-snan بوسنان (“toothy one”) “two-banded bream (Diplodus vulgaris)” (previously: young šaɣəṛ = sea bream); fərxa فرخة (originally “chick”) “dusky grouper (Epinephelus marginatus)” (previously: young čarniyya = grouper).

Confirmed: bu-zəllayəq بوزلاّيق (“slippery one”) “blenny (Parablennius sp.)”; qaṛuṣ قاروص “sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax)”; gʷrəng ڤُرنڨ “conger eel (Congerconger)”; mustila موستيلة “forkbeard (Phycis phycis)”; ẓənkuṛ زنكور “wrasse (Symphodus sp.)” (previously: wrasse); ruži روجي (French rouget) “striped mullet (Mullus surmuletus)” (previously: mullet).

There are plenty of etymological difficulties among these, but clear non-French Romance loanwords include šaɣəṛ (Latin sargus), čarniyya and zarniyya (Latin acernia), čalba (Latin salpa), gʷrəng (Latin conger), and, judging by the š, langušṭa. bərjəmbaluq is from Turkish, cp. balık “fish”, but I still can’t identify the first part.

Moving from wild sea life to domestic animals, reminiscences of life before independence brought up a number of words I had rarely or never heard: nhəš نهش “bite (eg donkey)”, ṣǔkk صكّ “kick (with hind legs)”, ṣhəl صهل “bray”, ɣrəz غرز “stop giving milk (cow)”, tkəlləl تكلّل “curdle”, bəgṛa ṭṛiyya بڤرة طرية “a cow who has recently given birth”, ɣǔṛfa غرفة “1^st story floor” (2^nd story for Americans). yəmni يمني and šəlli شلّي for “right” and “left” were equally new to me; usually I’ve heard ymin يمين and šmal شمال, or feminine yəmna يمنى and yəsṛa يسرى.

The genre of folk tales is just about extinct in Dellys, as far as I can tell, but it too came up in a few reminiscences. A tongue-twister (say it ten times fast!) alludes to a short anecdote: dadda ʕaḅḅʷa lli ḅḅʷa l-bab دادّا عبّا اللي ابّوا الباب “Dadda Abba who carried the door on his back”. I’m unlikely ever to hear the tales of lunja bənt drig əl-ɣul لونجة بنت دريڨ الغول “Lunja daughter of Drig the monster” or bəgṛət l-itama بڤرة اليتامى “the orphans’ cow” in Dellys, but the fact that versions of them have been collected all over the Maghreb – such as this Kabyle version of Lunja summarised in English, or the song Tafunast igujilen –  is some consolation; indeed, a version of the latter tale is popular even in Siwa. From near the ending of the latter comes the following rhyme: when the orphan brother invites his sister to run up the ladder and escape the well, she says ħsən w-əlħusin fi ħəjri, ma nəqdər nəjri حسن والحسين في حجري، ما نقدر نجري“Hasan and Husayn (her twin sons) are in my lap, I can’t run”.

Usually I don’t take much interest in French loanwords, but I noticed one that looks as if it has undergone quite a curious semantic shift: puṭaži پوطاجي means “kitchen counter”, from French potager “kitchen garden” (or some non-standard dialect of French?) Behnstedt and Woidich report that in Biskra this form means “kitchen”; I wonder whether that is a further semantic shift or a misunderstanding.

Finally, to follow up on the last post’s themes, I found two more words which have retained Berber nominal affixes, again without plurals (pardon the etymology): taklufit تاكلوفيت “meddling”, tayhudit تايهوديت “malice”. (From my 2005 paper, I can also add the fig breed timəlwin تيملْوين, and the seaweed species tubrint توبرينْت). However, this strategy is quite atypical; much commoner is to drop the Berber affixes and substitute Arabic ones as appropriate, as in jəgjiga جڤجيڤة “dandelion” (Kabyle tajejjigt “flower”) or məjjir مجّير “mallow” (Kabyle məjjir).

Random Darja notes

I'm currently on a short break in Dellys, which is providing many incidental opportunities for linguistic observation. Here are a few, randomly chosen and not guaranteed to interest anyone but me:

- What kind of insufferable pedant "translates" merguez مرڤاز into Standard Arabic, on a butcher's signboard I spotted, as naqāniq نقانق "sausage"? And would they still do so if they were aware that the latter is a Greek loanword, deriving from loukanikos? Sometimes I feel that the problem with Modern Standard Arabic, for Algeria, is precisely that it's modern and standard: too extensively modernised to connect Algeria satisfactorily with its pre-colonial past, and too standardised for Algerians to feel comfortable tinkering with its vocabulary.

- There are very few Berber loanwords here that retain the nominal prefix, but I heard one or two new ones. The list so far: amalu أمالو "wet shady spot", axiṛ أخير "good morning", aqsil / lə-qsil أقسيل "grass sp.", tirẓəẓt تيرززت "small wasp", taɣənnant تاغنّانْت "stubbornness". None, unfortunately, seem to have plurals...

- Talking of which, I registered for the first time the handy "conjunction" məqqaṛ مقّار "at least", a concept I had previously had to express using French (au moins) or Standard Arabic (ʕala l'aqall) when speaking Darja. This conjunction is shared with Kabyle, but also with Andalusi Arabic (makkār مكّار) – Corriente derives it from Greek ō makarie "lucky you", but I'm not sure whether to accept that etymology.

- I belatedly realised that ṣəṛwəl صرْول, cypress, is actually from Arabic sarw سرو, with an unexplained extra letter. Another case in point: rəɣwən رغْون "to foam up" – cp. rəɣw-a رغوة "foam (n.)". Where extra letters like these come from is one of the great mysteries of Semitic, frequently discussed but never really explained.

- There's not much true code-switching into French going on here, at least not in my social circle, but I did overhear the following excellent sentence: ṛana en plein ṭyab رانا آن پلان طياب "we're in the middle of cooking". Note that en plein is selecting for a verbal noun: one could say ṛana mʕa ṭṭyab رانا معا الطياب "we are (busy with) cooking" with a preposition and a verbal noun, or ṛana nṭəyybu رانا نطيّبو "we are cooking" with a finite verb, but not *ṛana ṭṭyab.

- An interrogative relative clause with an unexpected nominal head: makaš drari mʕa-mən təlʕəb ماكاش دراري معامن تلعب "there are no kids for her to play with". The negative existential context is presumably what favours it.

Ghardaia: etymology, spelling, and politics

How is it possible that, in Algeria – a state normally obsessed with the need to combat divisive ideas – openly sectarian slogans like "Malikism, Malikism, national power" or "The Ibadi is the enemy of God" can be shouted by rioters and painted on the walls of burnt-out shops, in 2014? What's going on is far too localised to be explained in terms of "Arabs" and "Berbers" (contra AFP); at most, it's between Chaamba (Sh`ānba) and Mzabis (Mozabites). But the Mzabis speak Berber, practice Ibadi Islam (a small minority sect), are native to the town, and have a famously strong mercantile tradition; the Chaamba speak Arabic, practice Maliki Islam (like the rest of Algeria), used to be nomads with a strong martial tradition, and by and large are less well off. The potential economic and political causes for resentment should be obvious – and, indeed, the shops ransacked generally belonged to Mzabis, and the largely Arab local police stood aside. It is not surprising that both sides are using broader identities – Arab or Berber, Maliki or Ibadi – to appeal for help, and the Chaamba rioters are clearly demonising Ibadis, but it's housing shortages that reportedly initially triggered these riots.

Oddly enough, however, not only language but even etymology is being used as a tool of division. As I looked through page after depressing page on the events, I was surprised to notice that, while Mzabi pages, and neutral ones, spelled Ghardaia غرداية (Ghardāyah), Chaambi pages rather consistently spelled it غارداية (Ghārdāyah). The latter spelling turns out to be based on a folk etymology, deriving the name of "Ghardaia" from Arabic ghār "cave" plus Dāyah, the name of a woman – who some Chaamba claim was from the Arab tribe of Said Atba, proving that Arabs got there before the Mzabis did (قبائل الشعانبة… بنو سُليم الجزائر.) Mzabis have a version of the same etymology, in fact (chanson amazigh mozabit) – but according to them, Daya was a saintly Ibadi woman from Touat, proving that they were there first.

Either version is problematic, since the name is pronounced ɣərdāya (Berber taɣərdayt), not ɣārdāya. The Said Atba idea is especially implausible: in 1053, when Ghardaia was reportedly founded, Ibadi Berbers had been trading across the Sahara for centuries, whereas Arab nomads had barely begun to reach the area. Phonetically, the more obvious etymology is Mzabi Berber taɣərdayt "mouse" – but who'd name a town "Mouse"? Delheure suggested a derivation from tiɣərdin "shoulders", a term found in Ouargli Berber, based on its topography (followed eg here). Dabouz compares it to a Nafusi term reportedly meaning "land next to a wadi". No proposal seems entirely satisfactory, which is itself an indicator of the placename's antiquity.

Be that as it may, this pointed use of "cave of Dāyah" reinforces my impression that what's going on is a mapping of economic grievances onto ethnic/religious categories. Adding this one letter effectively says "Mzabis own this place, but by rights it should be ours" – a thoroughly wrong attitude. الله يهديهم ويهدينا!

Book out: Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt)

I am very happy to announce here (a couple of days late) that my book Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt) has now come out. The oasis of Siwa in Egypt, already famous in Classical times for its Oracle of Ammon, is by far the easternmost place where Berber is spoken. As a result of its isolation from the rest of Berber, and of a history that includes significant immigration and language shift, the Berber variety spoken there is highly distinctive (and not mutually comprehensible with Moroccan or Algerian Berber). On the one hand, some of the most persistent quirks of Berber grammar have been substantially simplified; on the other, even highly irregular core Berber morphology has been retained, and massive influence from Arabic – including the borrowing of productive root-pattern morphology – has generated new complexities. Based on part of my doctoral thesis but significantly expanded, this book:

• proposes a classification of Siwi within Berber, and a corresponding probable account of where this Berber variety originated;
• describes the grammar of Siwi, in greater detail than any previous work;
• establishes how, and how much, long-term contact with Arabic has affected its grammar;
• examines the dialectal affiliations of Arabic loans in Siwi, providing further evidence that this contact involved very different varieties at different periods;
• provides a number of fully glossed Siwi texts of different genres, illustrating Siwi grammar and casting light on Siwi culture.

Thanks once again to everyone who helped in this process, and especially my friends in Siwa. To all those who find this sort of thing interesting, I hope the book comes in handy!

Korandjé tale (Conte en korandjé - قصة بلبالية)

In the early 1950s, the French anthropologist Dominique Champault made a number of sound recordings in Tabelbala. Champault’s recordings have recently been made available online by the Centre de Recherche en Musicologie, through Cécile Funke’s archival work. Many are in Arabic or French, but the Korandjé ones are an irreplaceable resource for the study of the language; in her time, the language was under rather less pressure and verbal arts were in much better health.

One of the easiest recordings for me – the sound quality is good, and the language simple – is a short folk tale about a cat, narrated by Zohra Adda (70-01):

Like “the house that Jack built”, this cumulative tale helps children learn to understand recursive causation. There are a few dialectal or idiolectal differences from the Korandjé I’ve heard, minor but striking to my ears. Following Marijn van Putten’s example, I’ll put it up here – comments very welcome! Etymology is marked by colour: yellow for Arabic, blue for Berber, and unmarked for Songhay.

عيحاجانيس عسكاتنيسي: – حاجيتك ما جيتك

ʕa-yħaža=ni.s ʕa-s-kka-t=ni.si:

1Sg-tell=2Sg.to 1Sg-not-come-hither=2Sg.to

I have told you, I haven't come to you (ie “Once upon a time”):

Je t’ai raconté, je ne suis pas venu à toi (c’est à dire “Il était une fois”) :

Comments: This is an alarmingly literal translation of the widespread North African “Once upon a time” formula, ħajit-ək ma jit-ək. This fixed formula is barely interpretable in Arabic, but one grammatically possible parse corresponds to the Korandjé here. iħaža, of course, is a Maghrebi Arabic loan, from ħaji “tell a story” (possibly via Berber).

1. إيشنّ احّلّق موشفُكدّا. – خلق الله قطا صغيرا

išann a-ħħəlləq muš=fʷ kadda.

God 3Sg-create cat=one small

God created a little cat.
Dieu a créé un petit chat.

Comments: išannu, historically a compound “our master”, has fallen into disfavour in modern Tabelbala; most speakers now prefer the dialect Arabic equivalent mula-na. ħəlləq “create” is from Maghrebi Arabic xləq, with an irregular shift x > ħ, probably the result of place dissimilation, paralleled in the Arabic of the Touat region (cf. Bachir Bouhania). Songhay, Berber, and local Arabic all have more or less the same word for “cat”, so it’s difficult to say which source Korandjé got the word from; provisionally, I assume it’s inherited.

2. آدر آبينبش. – ذهب يخدش

a-a-dər a-ab-inbəš.

3Sg-PF-go 3Sg-PROG-scratch

He went scratching (in the ground).
Il est allé gratter.

Comments: inbəš “scratch” is Maghrebi Arabic nbəš.

3. افُّ ابساتاكا اتّاس: توغ نبابتلاّ؟ – مر به أحد فقال له: عمّا تبحث؟

a-ffʷ a-bbsa-t-a.ka a-tts=a.s tsuɣ n-bạb-tsə̣llạ?

Nom-one 3Sg-pass-hither=3Sg.at 3Sg-say=3Sg.to what 2Sg-PROG-seek

Someone passed by him and told him: What are you looking for?
Quelqu’un est passé à côté de lui et lui a dit : Qu’est-ce que tu cherches ?

Comments: I’ve never heard any modern speaker pronounce “seek” as emphatic; the pronunciation I always heard was [tsɛlla] / [tsɨlla]. For the etymology of this Berber loan, cf. Zenaga pf. yə-llāh, impf. yə-ttälla(a)h “chercher” (Taine-Cheikh 2010); unusually, it seems to derive from the imperfective rather than the perfective.

4. ايتا عابتلاّ (ذ) إدرامن. – ها أنا أبحث عن النقود

əytsa ʕ-ab-tsə̣llạ (ḏ) idṛạmən.

lo 1Sg-PROG-seek (?) money

I'm looking for... money.
Je cherche... de l’argent.

Comments: There’s a clearly audible ḏ before “money”, but I can’t figure out a plausible reason for it. əytsa “lo!” is probably Berber, cp. Kabyle aṯan. idṛạmən “money” is a formally plural noun taken from Berber, ultimately from Arabic dirham (itself from Greek drachma).

5. ما نبغ إدرامن؟ – لماذا تريد النقود؟

mə n-bə̣ɣ idṛạmən

why 2Sg-want money

Why do you want money?
Pourquoi veux-tu de l’argent ?

Comments: “Want” is one of two quasi-verbs in Korandjé – the other is “exist” – that does not take mood/aspect morphology. I’ve heard maɣạ and mạʕạ for “why” > Berber ma-ɣər, but never just ma/mə as here. bə̣ɣ “want” looks suspiciously like Arabic bɣa, but actually it has a regular Songhay etymology, *baga.

6. عمذينذي فركا. – لأشتري بها حمارا

ʕə-mm- ə dzay=ndz.i fə̣ṛka.

1Sg-IRR- uh buy=with.3Pl

So I can buy a donkey with it.
Pour que j’en achète un âne.

Comments: Modern speakers usually have a slightly more reduced vowel in “buy” – [dzɛi], or even just [dzɨi]. Note the 3Pl, agreeing with idṛạmən.

7. ما نبغ فركا؟ – لماذا تريد حمارا؟

ma n-bə̣ɣ fə̣ṛka

why 2Sg-want donkey

why 2Sg-want donkey?

Why do you want a donkey?
Pourquoi veux-tu un âne ?

8. عمنڤّر لابو. – لأنقل الطين

ʕa-m-dza- ʕa-mm- ə- nəggə̣ṛ lạbu.

1Sg-IRR-bu- 1Sg-IRR- uh- transport clay

So I can bu- so I can- uh- transport clay.
Pour que j’ach- pour que je- euh - transporte de l’argile.

Comments: I’ve never heard “clay” with an emphatic vowel either; modern speakers usually say [læ:bu]. nəggə̣ṛ is presumably from Arabic naqala “transport”, but I need to double-check its meaning is also normally not emphatic now.

9. ما نبغ لابو؟ – لماذا تريد الطين؟

ma n-bə̣ɣ lạbu?

why 2Sg-want clay

Why do you want clay?
Pourquoi veux-tu de l’argile ?

10. عمكا آضّب. – لأصنع الطوب

ʕa-m-kạ ạḍḍə̣b.

1Sg-IRR-hit brick

So I can make bricks.
Pour que je fasse des briques.

Comments: kạ ạḍḍə̣b “make (lit. hit) bricks” is a fixed expression; kạ can be used in some other contexts to mean “work”. ạḍḍə̣b “brick” (pl. iḍḍụbən) is a Berber-style adaptation of Arabic al-ṭūb, which, transmitted via Spanish, also gives us English adobe.

11. ما نبغ آضّب؟ – لماذا تريد الطوب؟

ma n-bə̣ɣ ạddəb?

why 2Sg-want brick

Why do you want bricks?

Pourquoi veux-tu des briques ?

12. عمكيكي ڤا. – لأبني بيتا

ʕa-m-kikəy gạ.

1Sg-IRR-build house

So I can build a house.
Pour que je construise une maison.

13. ما نبغ ڤا؟ – لماذا تريد بيتا؟

mə n-bə̣ɣ gạ?

why 2Sg-want house

Why do you want a house?
Pourquoi veux-tu une maison ?

14. عمّيكنا محمّد نذا فاطنة إمّيـ – أصنعها، محمد وفاطمة يـ

ʕa-mm-ikn-a muħəmməd ndza fạṭna, i-mm-i-

1Sg-IRR-make-3Sg Muhammad and Fatima, 3Pl-IRR-h-

I’ll make it, and Muhammad and Fatima, they’ll- (Je la construirai, et Mohamed et Fatma, ils –)

Comments: Note that fạṭna “Fatima” shows place dissimilation, a regular process in many Atlas Berber varieties, suggesting that this version of the name reached Korandjé via Moroccan Berber rather than directly via Arabic.

15. عمذاكا محمد نذا فاطنة. – لأضع فيها محمدا وفاطمة

ʕa-m-dza=a.ka muħəmməd ndza fạṭna.

1Sg-IRR-put=3Sg.at Muhammad and Fatima

So I can put Muhammad and Fatima into it.
Pour que j’y mette Mohamed et Fatma.

16. ما نبغ محمد نذا فاطنة؟ – لماذا تريد محمدا وفاطمة؟

ma n-bə̣ɣ muħəmməd ndza fạṭna?

why 2Sg-want Muhammad and Fatima

Why do you want Muhammad and Fatima?
Pourquoi veux-tu Mohamed et Fatma ?

17. عمكيكيغيس تا- إمّيسرحغيس تاوالا. – لأبني لي قـ- ليسرحوا لي قطيعا

ʕa-m-kikəy=ɣəy.s ta- i-mm-isrəħ=ɣəy.s tsawala.

1Sg-IRR-build=1Sg.to fl- 3Pl-IRR-herd=1Sg.to flock

So I can build myself a fl- so they can herd for me a flock.
Pour que je me construise un tr– pour qu’ils me paissent un troupeau.

Comments: isrəħ “herd, graze” is Arabic srəħ. tsawala “flock (cared for by turns)” is Moroccan Berber, and is probably a later re-borrowing of the same word that yields Korandjé tsara “(a) time”.

18. ما نبغ تاوالا؟ – لماذا تريد قطيعا؟

mə n-bə̣ɣ tawala?

why 2Sg-want flock

Why do you want a flock?
Pourquoi veux-tu un troupeau ?

19. عمكواكا هوّا. – لأستخرج منه الحليب

ʕa-m-kaw=a.ka huwwa.

1Sg-IRR-remove=3Sg.at milk

So I can get milk from it.
Pour que j’en obtienne du lait.

Comments: As with “buy”, modern speakers usually have a rather more reduced vowel in “remove” – more like [kçəu].

20. ما نبغ هوّا؟ – لماذا تريد الحليب؟

ma n-bə̣ɣ huwwa?

why 2Sg-want milk

Why do you want milk?
Pourquoi veux-tu du lait ?

21. عمكواكا ڤي. – لأستخرج منها السمن

ʕa-m-kaw=a.ka gi.

1Sg-IRR-remove=3Sg.at ghee.
Pour que j’en obtienne du s’men.

Comments: By an amusing coincidence of sound and meaning, gi means more or less the same as English “ghee”.

22. ما نبغ ڤي؟ – لماذا تريد السمن؟

ma n-bə̣ɣ gi?

why 2Sg-want ghee

Why do you want ghee?
Pourquoi veux-tu du s’men ?

23. عمْيننذا رسول الله ن تالبّسْت(؟). – لأدهن به ؟؟ رسول الله

ʕa-m-yən=ndz.a ṛạsuləḷḷạh-n tsagʷḍḍə̣st[?].

1Sg-IRR-anoint=with.3Sg Messenger_of_God GEN lock

So that I can anoint with it the Messenger of God’s hair-lock.
Pour que j’en oigne le ?? de l’Envoyé du Dieu.

Comments: I can’t seem to make out that last word – the speaker tails off – but it seems to have the Berber feminine circumfix. ṛạsuləḷḷah is an Arabic compound, rasūl “messenger” and Allāh “God”. By the way, despite appearances, n is not Berber – given the associated word order, it can more plausibly be derived from an irregular shortening of Songhay wane (see Kossmann).

Korandjé is generally thought of as a contact-intensive language – so how mixed is this sample? Well, there are two ways to count (excluding, in any case, bound morphemes and incomplete words), depending on what we do with words that occur more than once. If we count by token, then we count the same word each time it appears; if we count by type, then we count the same word only once.

By token, we have 84 words: 52 Songhay, 12 Arabic, 20 Berber. So 62% of the text is Songhay, 14% Arabic, and 24% Berber.

By type, we have:

• 24 Songhay words: ka “come”, išannu “God”, -fu “one”, kadda “small”, dri “go”, bsa “pass”, tsi “say”, tsuɣu “what”, bəɣ “want”, dzay “buy”, fəṛka “donkey”, lạbu “clay”, kạ “hit, work”, dza “put, do”, ndza “and, with”, kikəy “build”, kaw “remove”, huwwa “milk”, gi “ghee”, yən “anoint”, aɣəy “I”, ni “you”, ana “he/she/it”, ?muš “cat”
• 8 Arabic loans: iħaža “tell (a story)”, ħəlləq “create”, yinbəš “scratch”, yisrəħ “herd”, ṛasuləḷḷạh “the Messenger of God”, muħəmməd “Muhammad”, fạṭna “Fatima”, nəggə̣ṛ “transport”
• 8 Berber loans: idṛạmən “money”, ạḍḍə̣b “brick”, ikna “make”, tsawala “flock”, əytsa “lo”, tsə̣llạ “seek”, ma “why”, tsagʷḍḍə̣st “hair-lock”

So this rather repetitive text has a total vocabulary of only 40 words; 60% of its vocabulary is Songhay, 20% Arabic, and 20% Berber.