Foucauld's Tuareg (Tamahaq) dictionary on Wikisource

A reader of this blog, Julian Jarosch, wrote in to announce a collaborative project that will very likely interest some other readers:

The purpose of writing to you is to ‘promote’ a project I started some years ago: digitizing Charles de Foucauld’s Dictionnaire touareg – français on Wikisource. You probably already know that Wikisource, like Wikipedia, is an open and collaborative project. So far, I’m working on this alone. I’ve transcribed 13% of the text, almost all of which is not yet proofread. Wikisource provides quality management tools, so each page is marked and colour-coded for proofreading status.
The digital text has some cross-references as links; more could be added once it is complete. All Berber words and phrases are marked as such in the html code. I’ve appended an ebook version of the digital text, generated automatically from the online version, to demonstrate just one derived usage. Deriving a print edition or an enriched structured XML version should be feasible as well. I also experimented with automatically ‘updating’ Foucauld’s mode of transcription, but this proved to be too complicated, due to the ambiguities in his use of 〈i〉 and 〈ou〉.
I hope you find this useful and solid work. In principle, I’d like to spread word about this project in Berber linguistics; I just hardly get around to it, since I pursue this in my spare time.

For anyone who wants to help with this project, the link is: Livre:Foucauld, Dictionnaire touareg.djvu.

Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara, finally out

Just a quick alert: my article about Islamic prayer time names that I discussed here almost two years ago (post) is finally out! If your institution has a subscription, you can view it at the following link:

Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara

Or you could email to ask me for a copy.

Dreams and tales in Siwa and Ouargla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving language?

In a natural segue from Ibn Khaldun, I've been reading Ernest Gellner - specifically, Words and Things, his attack on Linguistic Philosophy (that is, on Wittgenstein and his followers at Oxford). As he presents it, Linguistic Philosophy amounted to, essentially, the descriptive study of lexicography and semantics. Since meaning is defined by usage, any statement that would be accepted as true in ordinary language is ipso facto true, and any philosophical argument suggesting otherwise can only be the result of some semantic misunderstanding; a philosopher's only legitimate goal is to figure out how words are used in ordinary language to prevent such misunderstandings. The key weak point of this view, for Gellner, is its underlying assumption that ordinary language is unimprovable:

To "observe how we use words" is to make statements, in ordinary language, about the role, function, effects, and context of expressions. But in doing this, the concepts and presuppositions of that ordinary language are taken for granted and insinuated as the only possible view [...] It is true that certain things may be said in favour of ordinary language. It would not be in use, and it would not have survived were it not wholly without merit. But this argument, as in politics where it is often used to buttress conservatism, proves fairly little. Very silly and undesirable things often survive, and neither society nor language is such a tightly integrated whole as would disastrously suffer from alteration of some one part. (pp. 195-197)

For Gellner, contra Wittgenstein, ordinary language can be improved upon by the very activity of reflecting on it, leaving a positive role for philosophy after all:

[T]here are many language games which become unworkable when properly understood: where self-consciousness not merely does not "leave everything as it is" but simply necessitates change. Many "conceptual systems", in primitive societies and in advanced ones, contain confusions and absurdities which are essential for their functioning. To lay them bare is to make such a framework unworkable. (p. 206)

The notion of improving language (my paraphrase) would need a lot more working out than I see in this book, but presumably means something like "make the concepts and presuppositions underlying language use more internally coherent and in better accord with non-linguistic experience."

Such a standard would not necessarily imply that one language can be superior to another. For one thing, while such concepts and presuppositions certainly play a role in language use, they don't seem to be critical to the definition of a language; you can change them and leave the language sufficiently intact to be mostly understood by speakers who have retained the old ones. A single language has room for many different kinds of language use.

However, it would suggest a potentially interesting alternative to a purely descriptive approach to linguistics. If Linguistic Philosophy was the effort to identify ways in which attention to ordinary native speakers' usage might correct misunderstandings embedded in philosophical thought, would Philosophical Linguistics be the effort to identify ways in which attention to philosophical thought might correct misunderstandings embedded in ordinary native speakers' usage?

Sapir-Whorf is no shortcut

Lately the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - that the language you speak influences the way you think - has had a bit of a revival; investigators such as Boroditsky or Levinson have finally managed to demonstrate small Whorfian effects on colour perception and sense of direction. Unfortunately, these successes only underscore how difficult it would be to make a convincing case for the version of this idea that perennially fascinates the public: the idea that language determines aspects of our worldview. Well before Sapir or Whorf, Nietzsche summarises it in Beyond Good and Evil:

"The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar - I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions - that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the concept of the subject is least developed) look otherwise "into the world", and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims [...]" (Walter Kaufman's translation)

If a community's grammar really does affect its worldview, two centuries of speculation have hardly brought us any nearer to proving it, much less figuring out how. The commonsense converse, that a community's worldview affects its grammar, is rather better supported. But this idea's attraction for intellectuals, I think, is basically technological: it holds out the promise of being able to change the way people think "just" by changing the way they talk, as envisioned for Newspeak and Láadan. Ironically, it's observably true that imposing a new language on a previously monolingual community usually implies major changes in the way they think - that's what happens when you introduce compulsory schooling - but that has less to do with the language than with the institutions diffusing it.

The technological question remains, then: can we redesign some aspects of our language to help us think more effectively?

For grammar, the answer is not obvious. For the lexicon, however, the answer is yes, and we do it all the time. If something seems to need a name, we give it one - "mouse" or "selfie". Sometimes we choose a name that transparently encodes an property of this item that's particularly important to remember - "henbane" or "fool's gold". Ask any taxonomist whether the existence and form of a name matters, or any mathematician whether all notations are equal.

But this isn't actually the shortcut that some science fiction would have us believe. Many readers probably know that "henbane" is some kind of plant, but couldn't identify it if it was sitting in front of them, much less take advantage of knowing the name to prevent some unfortunate fowl's death. Understanding a given domain requires you to have words for the items signified by its technical vocabulary, but the most important part of that is learning to identify and think about the referents. Hundreds of New Age texts attest to the fact that you can use the vocabulary of quantum mechanics without understanding the first thing about it.

This points the way towards a solution, but not a very linguistic one: If you want to make your language better for thinking with, then first learn to perceive and think about the world more clearly yourself, and then share what you learn (and the labels you've given to it) with other interested speakers. Make a point of spotting and labelling relevant differences between things or situations, and involve yourself in a wider range of situations than you're used to. A sign is a link between word and world - between the set of all possible combinations of phonemes, meaningless in themselves, and the set of everything the speaker has some idea how to recognise. Expanding the former is meaningless unless you're expanding the latter.

Ibn Khaldun: Arabic dialects are independent languages

In Part 39 of the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, Ibn Khaldun discusses Arabic dialectology and language contact, reaching substantially correct conclusions marred only by the lack of attention to the role of purely internal developments in language change. The section is worth reading, if you haven't already come across it; it gives some idea of just how divergent the different Arabic "dialects" already were in his time. Like a lot of his work, if he had written it today, it would get many Arab nationalists up in arms! The translation is my own, and needs double-checking - appropriately, the Arabic of Ibn Khaldun is often difficult for modern Arabic readers.

"That the language of the city dwellers and townsmen is a language independent of the language of Mudar [Classical Arabic]

Know that the customary medium of discourse in the towns and among the city-dwellers is not the old language of Mudar, nor the language of the people of the generation (of Arabs). Rather, it is a different language, independent, and far from the language of Mudar and of this generation of Arabs in our time. Indeed, it is further from the language of Mudar (than the language of modern Arabs is).

The fact that it is an independent language is obvious; witness how many changes it has which grammarians consider as solecisms. Nevertheless, it varies in its expressions depending on the town. The language of the Mashriq is somewhat different from that of the Maghreb, and likewise that of Andalus from both. Yet each succeeds, with his own language, in realising his purpose and expressing what is within him. That is what is meant by "tongue" and "language". The loss of case-/mood-suffixes is not a problem for them, as we have already said regarding the Arabs of the present day.

As for the fact that it is further than the language of this generation (of Arabs) from the original language, that is because distance from the language depends on mixing with non-Arabness. The more one mixes with non-Arabs, the further one gets from the original tongue, because habits are acquired by learning, as we have said, and this (linguistic) habit is a mixture of the original habits which the Arabs had and the secondary habits which the non-Arabs had. So the more they hear it from non-Arabs and grow up with it, the further they get from the original habit.

You may observe this in the towns of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb and Andalus and the Mashriq:

• As for Ifriqiya and the Maghreb, the Arabs there mixed with the non-Arab Berbers as they spread their civilisation among them. Hardly a town or a generation was isolated from them. Thus non-Arabness came to predominate over the Arab tongue which they had had. It became a different, mixed language, within which non-Arabness predominated for the reasons outlined. So it is further from the original tongue.
• Likewise the Mashriq. When the Arabs prevailed over its nations, the Persians and the Turks, they mixed with them. Their languages then spread among them through the labourers and farmers and captives whom they took as servants and nannies and wet-nurses. As a result, their own language was corrupted by corruption of their (linguistic) habits, until it became a different language.
• Likewise the people of Andalus, with the non-Arab Galicians and Franks.

All the people of the towns from these regions came to have a different language, specific to them and distinct from that of Mudar [=Classical Arabic], and distinct each from the other - as we shall recall. It is as if it were a different language due to their generations' mastery of the linguistic habit of it. And God creates and decrees what He will."

A Mexican colony in Louisiana before Columbus?

In the latest issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics, Cecil Brown, Soren Wichmann, and David Beck announce a rather interesting finding: that Chitimacha [is] A Mesoamerican Language in the Lower Mississippi Valley. I don't know much about any of the languages involved, but insofar as I can judge it, it strikes me as quite convincing. They find 91 cognates between Chitimacha, a language of southern Louisiana, and Totozoquean, a language family of southern Mexico consisting of Totonacan and Mixe-Zoquean. Most of these cognates are very straightforward, with identical meanings and obviously similar, regularly corresponding sounds, and 36 of them involve words basic enough to be on the 100-word Swadesh or Leipzig-Jakarta lists. The grammatical similarities are rather less extensive, but there are a few. So, pending other specialists' comments, it looks like Chitimacha was brought to Louisiana by a migration across the Gulf of Mexico, from somewhere around the Isthmus area.

There is some useful shared cultural vocabulary, including "paper", "to write", "lime", "maize (corn)", "leached corn", and "to shell corn", and it looks like Caddo - spoken just upriver - in turn borrowed much of its maize-related vocabulary from Chitimacha. In combination with archeological evidence, this leads the authors to favour a migration date either some time around 850 AD, when the Caddo began low-level maize cultivation, or sometime around 1200-1450 AD, when they intensified it. Such a late date seems a little troubling, given how few cognates are to be found; Korandje separated from Songhay around 1200 AD, and there are well over 200 shared items there, mostly belonging to basic vocabulary. The ancestor of Chitimacha would have to have already been rather different from any other Totozoquean language even before they reached Louisiana; but then why did they apparently leave no trace in Mexico itself? Perhaps a study of southern Mexican place names could shed some light on the question.

This looks like historical linguistics at its best: a surprising long-distance connection affecting both language and culture. Now it's up to the historians and archeologists to fill in the gaps: why did southern Mexicans find it worth while to cross the Gulf to Louisiana in significant numbers?

Good prescriptivism?

People tend to enter their first linguistics classes with a vague but strongly felt idea, instilled by English teachers or by society at large, that some ways of speaking are bad, illogical, sloppy, rule-breaking, etc. One of our first tasks is thus to explain to them that, actually, such ways of speaking are just as logical and law-governed as standard English, they're simply obeying a different set of rules. Not infrequently, we follow that up by telling them everything that's wrong with the prescriptive rules of Standard English, based ironically on a very similar set of tropes: they're illogical (stop splitting infinitives because you can't do that in Latin), they're historically inaccurate (don't use singular they even though the King James Bible does), they're incompatible with the rules of modern spoken English (eg "it is I") to the point of confusing them into gross solecisms ("they gave it to John and I"). Unless we're careful, the students end up walking away from all that with the impression that linguists think prescriptivism is bad, full stop. That, however, would be a mistake. As irritating as these problems and misconceptions are, they don't affect the case for having a prescriptive standard language - just the extent of its ambitions and the details of its usage.

Prescriptivism, of course, is all about power: who gets to talk how where, and who gets to say how they should talk. As good libertarians, our first reflex might be to say that this is all unnecessary: let everyone decide for themselves! That has two different problems. The first is that, when people decide for themselves, what they end up with is in fact a set of implicit rules for what's appropriate in which circumstances, and if you want to make life easier for visitors from other cultures, the least you can do is make those rules explicit somewhere. The other is that, in the event of any clashes, it's the more powerful individual that gets to decide, which is a particular problem in the case of public services. You want a driver's license, and you only speak English? Sorry, our local transport officials aren't really comfortable with English, so you'd better brush up on your Russian.

The latter example may sound like fantasy to American or English readers (not so much to the Irish or Welsh), but it's rather close to reality in a lot of the world. If you understand Arabic, have a look at this video of Moncef Marzouki, one of the two current presidential candidates in Tunisia, having a go at his Tunisian interviewer for using too many French words: "Respect the Arabic language! Plutôt, what does plutôt mean? You say plutôt, what's that? My sister in Douz won't understand plutôt. [...] [Interviewer: It's a chance for her to learn...] No, she needn't learn - you learn the language of Tunisians!"

It's populism, of course - but, like a lot of populism, it makes a good point. Why the heck should the average citizen have to speak a foreign language to deal with officials and other elites in his/her own country? (Especially in one as close to monolingual as Tunisia?) In such a situation, if the populace doesn't prescriptively impose their language preferences through concerted action, the bureaucracy will simply impose their own in one-to-one interactions.

Berber subclassification: Reading Nait-Zerrad

Kamal Nait-Zerrad's 2001 article "Esquisse d'une classification linguistique des parlers berbères" presents a good deal of useful data, but does so in a manner that I find makes it rather difficult to figure out what's going on without plenty of pencil work. In case anyone else has the same experience, here's my take on it. I will not focus on, or even necessarily present, his interpretation here - read the article for that; rather, I'm more interested in figuring out the implications of the data he presents in the light of other work before and since, and in the light of accepted principles of historical-comparative linguistics.

First, he looks at a number of morphological and phonetic isoglosses:

1. The 3rd person singular preterite of CC verbs: yərra vs. yərru. Following Kossmann (2001), we now know that these are actually CC+glottal stop, so the data exemplifies two different sound changes: the relatively trivial *-aʔ > -a, and and the more surprising *-aʔ > o > u. The former is the commonest outcome; the latter is exemplified by: Ait Seghrouchen, Figuig, Beni Snous, Bissa, Timimoun, Mzab, Ouargla, Nefusa. (Ghadames still has o).

2. The proximal demonstrative suffix: -a vs. -u. Again, -a is the default, but -u appears in the same set of varieties as seen in 1, plus one more: Iznasen.

3. The 3rd person singular aorist of CCV verbs: ad yəbḍu vs. ad yəbḍa. Here, -u is the default, and is closer to the original, while -a has spread from the preterite. This applies to the same set of varieties as 2 (excluding Nefusi), plus several more: Rif, Metmata, Chaoui, Jerba.

4. Initial vowel dropping: a- vs. 0-. A number of *(t)a-CV-initial nouns drop the original vowel of the prefix in the same set of varieties as 3, plus Nefusi, Chenoua, and Siwa.

5. Velar softening: in many varieties, in many words, what would elsewhere be k/kk/g/gg corresponds to c/čč/j/ǧǧ. The latter outcome is observed in the same set of varieties as 4, minus Nefusi.

6. Final *-əv: this is retained as such in Ghadames and Awjila, and as constrative length in Zenaga. Otherwise, it becomes -u in most varieties, but -i in the same varieties as listed in 4, plus El-Fogaha (with a few question marks where the author had insufficient data). Cf. Kossmann (1995).

All of 1-6 pick out Zenati varieties, but the exact set differs: 1-2 pick out a core Zenati consisting almost entirely of northern Saharan varieties, while 3-6 pick out a broader Zenati including the semi-arid mountainous lands stretching from the Rif to southern Tunisia, and vary in their inclusion of varieties further east (Nefusi, El-Fogaha, Siwi). Chaker (1972) cites 1-2 and 5 as possibly justifying a Zenati subgrouping, while Kossmann (1999) defines Zenati in terms of 3, 4, and one other morphological innovation, and then cites 5 and 6 as common phonological innovations.

7. Negative intensive theme: retention/loss. The negative intensive is retained in northwestern Morocco (Rif, Iznasen, Senhaja, Ait Seghrouchen, Figuig); in Bissa; in Tuareg and in the nearby oases of Mzab, Ouargla, and Ghadames; and in Jerba. Its loss everywhere else (according to his data, which should be re-checked) shows no prominent genetic patterning, and hence is probably relatively recent.

Then, he moves on to vocabulary, examining 11 lexical variables which I would summarise as follows:

Several forms appear specifically Zenati: irəḍ in the sense of "be dressed" (though it is more widespread in other senses), igur for "go", əɣs for "want", azəgrar for "long", anilti for "shepherd". Of these, El-Fogaha and Siwa share only əɣs for "want", whereas Nefusi shares all except "go in". adəf "go in" is Zenati-specific in the west, but more confusing in the east, being attested in Ghadames and (as an alternative to əggəz) in Air Tuareg.

Several forms appear specifically Tuareg: răgăz for "go", amaḍan for "shepherd", əggəz in the sense of "go in" (elsewhere "go down"), zəgrət (with the extra t) for "long".

One form unites southern/central Morocco with Kabyle: awtul "hare" (vs. pan-Berber a-yərẓiẓ.)

A couple of forms unite Libyan varieties with Tuareg, contrasting with Algerian and Moroccan varieties, in defiance of any plausible genetic classification, reminding us that a tree does not tell the whole story here:

• iziḍ "donkey" (Tuareg, Ghadames, Nefusi, Siwa, Awjila) vs. aɣyul (everywhere else except El-Fogaha)
• tufat/tifut/tafyi "tomorrow" (Tuareg, El-Fogaha, Siwa respectively) vs. azəkka (everywhere else except El-Fogaha, Awjila, and Zenaga)

Based somehow on all this, he proposes the following very odd tree:

1. Group 1
   1. Senhaja, Middle Atlas, Shilha, Kabyle, Zenaga
   2. Tuareg
   3. El-Fogaha
   4. Awjila
   5. Siwa
2. Nefusa
3. Ghadames
4. Group 4 ("Zenati")
   1. Ait Seghrouchen, Beni-Snous, Timimoun, Figuig, Bissa, Mzab, Ouargla
   2. Iznasen, Jerba
   3. Rif, Metmata, Aures
   4. Chenoua

Apparently, to get this he operated by successively applying at each stage the criterion from his list that divided the data into the lowest number of groups possible, without attempting to distinguish innovations from retentions, much less judge the relative likelihood of independent innovation. The fact that even such a crude method was still able to produce a recognisable Zenati subgroup either says something about the robustness of this distinction or about the selection of features. What this data set actually tells us, bearing in mind that shared retentions have no implications for subgrouping and that Zenaga fails to participate in a number of innovations that otherwise seem pan-Berber or nearly pan-Berber, is something quite different:

• There is definitely a Zenati subgroup, as has been known at least since Destaing (1915), but its boundaries are a bit fuzzy. (If this reminds you of the situation of "Hilalian" g-dialects, that's probably not a coincidence.)
  • Western Zenati:
    • Core (mainly Northern Saharan): Ait Seghrouchen, Figuig, Beni Snous, Bissa, Timimoun, Mzab, Ouargla
    • Transitional (the High Plateau and its edges): Rif, Metmata, Chaoui, Jerba
    • Peripheral:
      • Chenoua (north-central Algeria)
      • Nefusi (northwestern Libya)
  • Eastern Zenati (Libya/Egypt): El-Fogaha, Siwa
• There is definitely a Tuareg subgroup, as has always been known: Ahaggar, Iwellemmeden, Air, Taneslemt.
• There just might be a subgroup combining Kabyle with Senhaja, Central Morocco and Shilha: they share the innovation *-əv > -u, and the word awtul "hare". The evidence for it is very weak, though, especially since *-əv > -u is also found in some Tuareg varieties.

The rest of the common features almost all look like shared retentions.

Out now: The development of dative agreement in Berber

After about two years in the pipeline, an article summarising the results of my British Academy research on agreement in Berber has just come out in Transactions of the Philological Society. If you have access to Wiley Online Library, you can read it online: The development of dative agreement in Berber: beyond nominal hierarchies. If you're interested but don't have access, email me to ask for a copy. Here's the abstract:

Diachronically, agreement commonly emerges from clitic doubling, which in turn derives from topic shift constructions (Givón 1976) – a grammaticalisation pathway termed the Agreement Cycle. For accusatives, at the intermediate stages of this development, doubling constitutes a form of Differential Object Marking, and passes towards agreement as the conditions for its use are relaxed to cover larger sections of the Definiteness and Animacy Scales. Berber, a subfamily of Afroasiatic spoken in North Africa, shows widespread dative doubling with substantial variation across languages in the conditioning factors, which in one case has developed into inflectional dative agreement. Examination of a corpus covering eighteen Berber varieties suggests that low Definiteness/Animacy datives are less likely to be doubled. However, since most datives are both definite and animate, these factors account for very little of the observed variation. Much more can be accounted for by an unexpected factor: the choice of verb. “Say” consistently shows much higher frequencies of doubling, usually nearly 100 per cent. This observation can be explained on the hypothesis that doubling derives from afterthoughts, not from topic dislocation.

Linguistics for high schools: what would a syllabus look like?

Today, just for fun, I'd like to invite you to discuss a topic a little off the beaten track for this blog: how much linguistics should a high school graduate know? The question may seem bizarre - there have been occasional efforts to introduce linguistics courses into high schools (MIT, Milwaukee), but you don't expect to see "linguistics" on a high school curriculum. Still, let's not get confused by labels. Linguistics is inextricably woven into language teaching, and even the most resolutely monolingual curriculum includes at least the school's own language. (I recently happened to come across an 8th grade final exam from 1895 from Kansas; no foreign languages were featured, but no less than two out of the six subjects tested, Grammar and Orthography, rely heavily on linguistic concepts.)

One useful way of separating linguistic education from language education is to look at universality. Some of what you learn in English class is useful across practically all languages, like the idea of a verb or of a vowel. Some of it is much more parochial; the fact that the plural of "child" is "children" is a historical accident relevant only to English and, at best, its closest relatives. Such parochial facts can be vital, of course; if you're going to grow up in an English-speaking country, you'd better be able to form your English irregular plurals correctly. But the more general concepts have a deeper interest; they help you analyse what you're saying, and make it easier to learn new languages. Unfortunately, those concepts are precisely the ones that have suffered most in recent decades. In the UK, at least, my own experience suggests that most high school graduates can't even reliably tell a noun from a verb. In theory, the latest changes to the English syllabus should change that - but given that many of the teachers were hardly taught any grammar either, one wonders how successful the reform will be.

In any case, if I were designing a syllabus, here is what I would suggest to start with. I'd be interested to see what other linguistically oriented people think:

Phonetics has never been a focus of early education, apart from the minimum necessary for teaching a child to read and write (and even that gets de-emphasised in some approaches). This is a shame, because the younger you are, the easier it is to learn to hear and pronounce unfamiliar sounds. Why not learn:
- The IPA, or at least the most commonly used symbols in it; be able to pronounce and recognise them. This should include tone if at all possible.
- Basic articulatory phonetics: how the configuration of your vocal organs relates to the sound produced, and how to use this knowledge to pronounce unfamiliar sounds. (If your language uses Devanagari, you should have an advantage, as this is practically built in to the alphabet anyway; students of tajweed too will come across this issue at some point.)
- Phonology: the concepts of the phoneme and of conditioned allophones. That way when you learn another language you'll at least know why some sounds give you so much more trouble than others.
- Metric structure: syllable, foot, etc. (Yes, I know the concept of syllable is controversial, but you'll need this to be able to study poetry anyway.)

Morphology is a lot more language-specific than the other topics here, but one should at least know:
- How to decompose a word into its component morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, templates, roots...), and guess its meaning from them if necessary.

Syntax: Unlike phonology, this has traditionally been deliberately taught, and you should certainly know:
- The parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc... and how to tell them apart.
- Argument structure and case: subject, direct object, nominative, accusative, etc.
- How to to break down a sentence into its phrase structure: what modifies what? What is a phrase, and what is its head? For best results, try being able to diagram it.

Unfortunately, it's not quite so simple: all three of those - especially the latter - are the subject of major controversies between different syntactic theories... (Two good Language Log posts on this issue: parts of speech and sentence diagramming.) If you teach whatever theory happens to be traditional where you're from, you may not make any friends in academia, and you risk perpetuating some old misconceptions; but you will certainly leave your students much better prepared to learn any more current theory - or any language - than if they had studied no grammar at all.

Historical linguistics and sociolinguistics: The language you speak most likely has relatives, and certainly contains words borrowed from other languages. You should understand:
- That there is normally variation inside a single language, which people often use to signal their social position and to identify the social position of others, and over which people's control is limited.
- That languages change over time as some variants become obsolete and others emerge, and in what ways they change - sound shift, semantic shift, borrowing, morphological and syntactic change...
- That different changes accumulating in different areas can split what used to be one language into several, and that people can abandon one language and start speaking another one instead.
- That sound shifts are usually regular, and that this regularity can be used to identify potential cognates (making it easier to learn languages related to ones you know.)

There should certainly also be some semantics and pragmatics in this list, but I'm not feeling especially inspired on either subject at the moment - any thoughts?

Some Tuareg-Songhay loans

I'm almost three-quarters of the way through Heath's Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali). The main interest lies in its efforts to reduce the bewildering complexity of Tuareg morphology to some sort of order, an impossible task which it accomplishes more successfully than any other Tuareg grammar I've looked at so far. Aside from this, however, it's raised some interesting etymological issues.

I've wondered for years where the Korandjé verb wəy "gather (firewood)" comes from. It normally appears in the idiom a-wwəy-ts skudzi [3Sg-gather-hither wood] "she gathered in firewood". On p. 333 of Heath's grammar, I found the explanation, in the following example:

i-wwáy=ədd i-sǽɣer-æn
3MaSgS-bring.Reslt-Centrip Pl-firewood-MaPl
[He] has brought firewood here.

The Tamasheq verb in question, awəy in the imperative, is simply the normal Berber word for "take, bring" (which in Korandjé is expressed with a Songhay verb, zəw), so I would have hesitated to connect them based on a dictionary entry alone. But given this attested usage with "firewood", the semantic specialisation poses no problems. What does surprises me is that it was borrowed as a bare stem, rather than with a fossilised 3rd person prefix y/i - contrast yəf (Tashelhiyt y-arf "roast", not attested in Tamasheq), ikna "make" (Tamasheq i-kna). Usually, only stems that start with a syllabic onset are borrowed into Korandjé without the y/i.

Another probable loan into Korandjé that I noticed going through the grammar is Korandjé ləwləw "shine, gleam" - cp. Tamasheq m̀ələwləw "shine".

However, a number of words have gone the other way - from Songhay into Tuareg. Heath comments on many of these in his dictionary (eg kə̀rikəw "practice sorcery"), but not all. One that struck me is the verb ḍùkr-æt "become angry at", obviously related to Gao Songhay dukur "be angry"; I don't recall seeing this verb elsewhere in Berber (not even in Alojaly's dictionary of Tamajeq), whereas it's widespread in Songhay.

Obviously cognate are Tamasheq é-tæqq "male ostrich" and widespread Songhay forms such as Gao taatagey, Fulan Kirya taataɣey "ostrich" (the shift of g to ɣ next to non-high back vowels is regular in several Songhay varieties, and in Tamasheq qq is the geminate equivalent of ɣ). The word is generic in Songhay but specific in Tuareg - the opposite of what we saw with "bring" - which suggests to me that it was borrowed into the latter, as does the fact that I don't find the term in Alojaly's Tamajeq dictionary. However, since ostriches are extinct in most Berber-speaking areas, it's difficult to prove the direction of borrowing.

Berber: classification, Tasahlit, roots vs. stems

Today seems to be a good week for comparative Berber linguistics - the day's haul is worth sharing:

Maarten Kossmann has uploaded his preliminary classification of Berber varieties based on shared innovations: Berber subclassification (preliminary version). He divides Berber into seven blocks:

1. Zenaga block (Zenaga of Mauritania, Tetserrét in Niger)
2. Tuareg block
3. Western Moroccan block (SW Morocco, Central Morocco, i.e. Tashelhiyt and most of Tamazight)
   possibly including NW Moroccan Berber (Ghomara, Senhadja de Sraïr)
4. Zenatic block (Eastern Morocco, Western Algeria, Saharan oases, Tunisia, Zuara) extending towards the east with Sokna, Elfoqaha, Siwa
5. Kabyle (N Algeria), possibly linked to the western Moroccan block
6. Ghadames (Libya), probably to be linked to Djebel Nefusa (Libya)
7. Awdjilah (Libya)

By and large, this appears very plausible, although it should be noted that Tunisian Berber and Zuwara are already somewhat peripheral to Zenati, not sharing western Zenati's innovative distribution of initial vowel dropping, and El-Fogaha is even more so than Siwa or Sokna. (As he notes, the much greater homogeneity and clearer boundaries of Zenati in the west imply that this group arrived in Algeria and Morocco from the east.) But, in principle, it is still necessary to identify specific innovations characteristic of each of these groups. It is also clear that the Zenaga block is by far the first split on the tree, and the list ought ideally to reflect that. But the moderately high degree of mutual intelligibility poses serious obstacles to applying the family tree model to Berber, as he discusses.

The most interesting Kabyle varieties for historical reconstruction are the little-known ones of the extreme east, "Tasahlit". As it happens, Abdelaziz Berkai has just uploaded his recent thesis, a dictionary and sketch grammar of the Tasahlit of Aokas: Essai d’élaboration d’un dictionnaire Tasaḥlit (parler d’Aokas)-français. The quality of his work appears excellent, and this will no doubt be a very useful resource. The choice of dialect, however, is not entirely ideal. It is clear from Basset's dialect atlas, and from the all too rare comments in Rabdi's grammar on neighbouring varieties, that the vocabulary of Aokas is still quite close to that of Bejaia; the really divergent varieties seem to be those of the Babor Mountains and Oued el Bared, approaching Jijel, and those are the ones most likely to give an insight into the dialect of the now largely Arabised Kutama.

I haven't yet had time to properly look at Samir Ben Si Said's thesis, De la nature de la variation diatopique en kabyle: étude de la formation des singulier et pluriel nominaux, but it tackles the synchronically as well as diachronically thorny problem of Berber non-concatenative morphology, and argues for an approach based more on roots than on stems, contrasting with another important study I've been working through lately, Heath's Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali).

Subject-verb order in Tumzabt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, they provide no examples to illustrate this claim.

Néologismes en n- en berbère siwi

(experimentally posting in French - opinions?)

Très tard, j'ai commencé cet été à mieux organiser mes notes léxicographiques sur le berbère siwi d'Egypte. Ayant atteint 2300 mots après avoir transcrit trois carnets, je prend une pause pour donner une observation qui pourrait être utile un jour à l'aménagement linguistique, si ce dernier est envisageable pour un parler aussi minoritaire ... Pour former les noms déverbaux, le berbère siwi d'Egypte utilise souvent une stratégie analytique assez différente des stratégies morphologiques préférées ailleurs en berbère : la particule du génitif, n, + le nom verbal. J'en ai neuf exemples clairs, pour ne pas parler d'autres cas plus opaques. Le nom peut être le complément du verbe :

• ačču manger : n-ačču nourriture
• aknaf rôtir : n-aknaf viscère / aubergine rôti
• alessa se vêtir : n-alessa vêtements
• tiswi boire : n-tiswi boisson

ou bien l'instrument pour faire l'action du verbe:

• ančlaħ glisser : n-ančlaħ planche de dune
• asebded arrêter : n-asebded bouton d'arrêt
• aṣṣey tenir : n-aṣṣey poignée
• azerzi chasser (les mouches) : n-azerzi chasse-mouche

ou même, plus rarement, le lieu :

• aɛenɛen s'asseoir : n-aɛenɛen la planche transversale d'un chariot sur laquelle on s'asseoit

Comme le montrent "planche de dune" et "bouton d'arrêt", cette forme reste encore productive. La plupart des nouveautés prennent naturellement les noms arabes utilisés par leurs vendeurs, mais si les siwis voulaient adopter des formes puristes, il serait facile d'appeler, par exemple, la télé n-aẓeṛṛa - alors que, en fait, le néologisme le plus connu à Siwa, chez ceux qui s'en intéressent, est la curieuse forme elmeẓṛa, apparemment dérivée de tiliẓṛi à partir de transmission orale.

On finding the sources of shared items, OR: The irrelevance of anteriority

Similarities between different languages are data. It's easy to come up with any of several wildly different measures of such similarities, typically by applying edit distances to wordlists (as in the ASJP*) or texts, but the result should not be mistaken for an analysis - it's just a measurement, a compression of the data. It doesn't tell you anything about the causes of these similarities on its own. Historical linguistics is not the measurement of similarities, but the effort to find the hypothesis about past events that best explains them. Your H₀, of course, is always "coincidence". Once you've rejected that, you're left with the trickier task of disentangling contact from common ancestry - trickier because, quite often, they partially overlap.

To understand linguistic causation in the past, an essential starting point is to look at it in the present. Suppose that you are a native speaker of English:

1. If you say "football" or "garage" to your child while speaking English, it's because you grew up speaking English, and you know that this is what other English speakers say. The fact that French speakers happen to call it "football" too, if you're even aware of it, has nothing to do with your choice of words.
2. If you say "football" or "garage" to your child while speaking French, it's because you later studied French, and you know that this is what French speakers say. The fact that it's also what English speakers say no doubt made it easier to memorise, but if French speakers had named them something else, you would be doing the same.

We thus see that, for shared words, inheritance from either of two radically different languages can yield precisely the same outcome. The fact that English and French share these words in the first place is obviously due to contact (in each direction). The fact that your child is growing up with them, however, is because you're faithfully passing on the existing norms of one or the other language, not because you're combining them. In historical linguistic jargon, the use of the word "football" is at this point being inherited, not borrowed. Thus, if an English-monolingual Cajun says "stupid", it's not because he's managed to hold on to his ancestors' French word "stupide", it's because that happens to be the English word for it.

So, if we have a word in language A, and find the same word in two potential source languages B and C, we can't determine which it came from by looking at which language was spoken in the area earlier, or which was spoken by the speakers' ancestors. We can only determine which it came from by determining which language (if either) was transmitted as a whole, and the evidence for that can only come from forms that aren't shared between B and C. I leave the application of this to Levantine ʕāmmiyya as an exercise for the reader.

---

* It's beating a dead horse at this point, but: this Automated Similarity Judgement Program? It, too, finds that Levantine is way closer to Standard Arabic than to Aramaic, just like any historical linguist could have told you from the start.

Zombie hypotheses and the Zeitgeist

Everything I've been saying for the past 3 posts is basic textbook stuff, reflecting a stable consensus among Semitic historical linguists over, oh, the past two centuries or so. Why, then, is this zombie hypothesis that Levantine Arabic comes from Aramaic still popular in parts of the Levant? That's no great mystery: it comes from a more general movement to emphasise Levantine (and especially Lebanese) culture's continuity with the pre-Islamic Levant, and downplay the influence of Arabs. (Similar efforts have been made in North Africa, notably Abdou Elimam). As far as I can tell, the unstated reasoning goes something like this:

1. Levantines are descended from the Aramaic-speaking natives of the land, not from Arab immigrants.
2. Levantines' language contains a lot that sounds like Aramaic.
3. Therefore, Levantine is a continuation of Aramaic, not of Arabic.

Step 3, of course, does not follow from Steps 1 and 2. Step 1 is irrelevant to the whole question; the language of your ancestors is very often not the ancestor of your language (ask any Irishman, or any Egyptian). Step 2 is necessary but insufficient for getting to Step 3, since the statement is just as true of Classical Arabic - or of Akkadian, or Ethiopic - as it is of Levantine; we've already seen that deciding linguistic ancestry requires a more sophisticated toolkit.

Nevertheless, this impulse to emphasise continuity and downplay movement deserves more attention. In the Arabic-speaking world, the conspicuous problems with the existing political and economic order, and the humiliating contrasts between the ideals of pan-Arabism and the reality of closed borders and unchallenged occupations, provide an obvious local motivation to downplay Arab identity, and language is so central to pan-Arab identity that it could hardly be left unchallenged. But the impulse is not unique to the region; in some respects, it faithfully reflects wider intellectual trends of the late 20th/early 21st century.

During this era, immediately following some of the largest migrations and invasions in human history, many archeologists and historians have come to feel more and more uncomfortable with the very idea of either. Changes in material culture previously seen as the result of migration were re-explained as diffusion or independent innovation, and reports of barbarian invasions were reinterpreted or dismissed. In some ways, this has been a useful corrective to a previous era's overemphasis on migration; it has arguably made linguists more conscious of the familiar fact that language shift does not necessarily imply invasion, much less population replacement. In others, its influence has been rather less helpful. Linguists reached the late 20th century with a well-tested toolkit for studying the origins of basic vocabulary and morphology, its predictions spectacularly confirmed by such discoveries as laryngeals in Hittite and labiovelars in Mycenaean Greek. Applying this to most Old World languages, and many American or Australian ones, yields a story of discontinuity (be it through language shift or population replacement) that would be familiar to any 19th-century philologist, but that grates somewhat on postmodern ears. Of course, the same toolkit often allows us to detect substrata - elements left over from the population's previous language after they shifted to another one - but that's not enough to satisfy everybody.

A few linguists have responded by trying to change the rules of the game, insisting that the origins of a language should be determined not by vocabulary and morphology, as is normally done, but by purely structural features. This is an important component of Wexler's generally rejected claims that Yiddish is non-Germanic (and that Modern Hebrew is non-Semitic), and is the very essence of Lefebvre's somewhat more popular claims that Haitian Creole is just relexified Fongbe (and almost anything else with "relexification" in the title.) This approach runs into severe problems almost instantly - establishing the history of syntactic or semantic patterns is far more difficult than establishing the history of vocabulary or morphology, simply because the former are far less arbitrary and are chosen from a far smaller set of possibilities. To make matters worse, we also find major discontinuities in such patterns in cases where both the population and the vocabulary were relatively stable, such as the transition from Old English to Modern English. Johanna Nichols' efforts point towards the possibility of getting around this by identifying highly time-stable typological features, but the results, at their best, are not nearly fine-grained enough to support narratives of continuity in any specific location. "Continuitarians" in the Arab world apparently haven't gotten around to adopting this approach yet, except occasionally in Morocco, where academic linguistics is unusually advanced for the region; they surely will, however, when they realise that it could be extended to cases like Egypt, rather than being limited to the Fertile Crescent.

For much of the world, especially Europe, a complete lack of ancient written documentation makes another response available: simply argue that the language currently spoken there must have been spoken far earlier than previously assumed, and hence got there not through invasion but through some more peaceful process. This yields the various Paleolithic Continuity Hypotheses. The main problem with this for linguists is that it forces us to postulate a much lower rate of linguistic change for the past than is observed for languages with a long written history, or even for unwritten languages that happen to have been recorded as long intervals; as a result, these hypotheses have remained fairly unpopular. For the Middle East, however, the point is moot: writing has a longer history there than anywhere else on the planet, and that history reveals regular episodes of language extinction, language shift, invasion, migration, exile, and everything else that we're supposed to be de-emphasising.

So if you really want to emphasise your languages' continuity with your ancestors', these are two more promising ways to do it. But I would suggest that there's no reason to bother. If your current identity isn't working out for you, and you don't think you can reform it, why not work on creating a genuinely new one, rather than perpetuating the obsession with heritage by digging around in history for an even older one? It worked out pretty well for America, after all.

Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 3

We've seen that historical linguists decide which languages share a more recent common ancestor on the basis of shared innovations (or their absence). But if you're paying attention, you may have noticed a potential problem here: innovations can be shared for at least three reasons:

• Common ancestry - the reason why, for example, Proto-Indo-European intervocalic *s has changed to r both in Spanish and in French.
• Contact - for example, the change of r (the rolled r you get in Spanish) to R (the uvular r you get in French) started in French, but spread to other European languages such as German, probably due to the prestige of French among the upper classes (actually there's some debate about the direction of spread - see eg this paper by Kostakis - but either way it spread through contact)
• Chance - for example, θ (th) has changed to t both in Jamaican English and in Levantine, but not because they share any common history or close ties.

So, when it comes to shared innovations, what can we do to distinguish the "confounding factors" of chance and contact from common ancestry? There are two obvious general approaches. The most securely reliable is to establish relative chronology: if change A was applied to the outputs of change B, then obviously change B is the older. Unfortunately, many pairs of changes are commutative - the relative order makes no difference to the output. That often forces us to resort to the more probabilistic criterion of number of changes: if language A shares a lot of common innovations with language B to the exclusion of C, and only a couple with language C to the exclusion of B, then it's more parsimonious to group A with B and find some other explanation for those shared with C. For better results, we can weight the innovations according to the chances of them occurring independently: for example, a change of ð > d is rather common worldwide, whereas a change of ɬʼ > ʕ is rather unusual.

Levantine Arabic provides a useful case study: as NNT correctly pointed out, it shares a couple of innovative sound changes with Aramaic, in particular θ (th) > t, ð (dh) > d. (The hamza-y correspondence is a different issue - there's massive variation within Classical Arabic on where and whether hamza is realised, as can be seen from the different Qur'an reading traditions, and the consonantal orthography of Classical Arabic obviously reflects a dialect in which, like the majority of present-day dialects but unlike Modern Standard, hamza was hardly ever pronounced). Yet we have seen that Levantine Arabic does not share most of Aramaic's defining innovations, and does share important innovations of Arabic, such as the reflexes of proto-Semitic *g, *θʼ, *ɬʼ, and (depending on reconstruction) *š, the replacement of "say" (originally 'amar-) with qāl-, the metathesis of ʕam- "with" to maʕ-, or almost every detail of the extremely intricate broken plural system. How can this be explained?

If the explanation is common ancestry, then we should find the changes θ > t, ð > d only in Levantine words that are not Arabic innovations. In fact, however, we find them in words such as itnēn "two", in which the i- is an Arabic innovation - cp. Arabic iθnayni (acc/gen), Aramaic trēn, proto-Semitic *θn-ay-n(a). This hypothesis would also fail to account for the rest of the observations; if Levantine shares a more recent common ancestry with Aramaic than with Arabic, and is spoken exclusively in an area once dominated by Aramaic, then why on earth did it pick up so many innovations from Arabic while remaining immune to practically all the innovations Aramaic went through except these two? Both the criteria given above therefore point away from common ancestry as an explanation.

This suggests that we should consider contact. At first sight, you might think the answer is simple: Aramaic speakers couldn't pronounce interdentals, so they left them out of their Aramaic-accented Arabic. But that hypothesis would be absurd. By the late pre-Islamic era, all known varieties of Aramaic did in fact have the sounds θ and ð, due to a later development of t > θ, d > ð after vowels (except when doubled). We find these sounds alive and well in the only surviving Levantine Aramaic dialect, that of Maaloula: eg xoθla "wall", ḳrīθa "village", eḥða "one (f.)". Why, then, would Aramaic speakers change these sounds to t, d in Arabic?

How about the opposite contact situation: Arabic speakers living on the fringes of the Aramaic-speaking world copied the shift θ > t, ð > d from their neighbours, while those living further inland stuck with the traditional pronunciation? That is more plausible, but still a bit problematic. The development of t > θ, d > ð had already happened by 250 BC in Aramaic, so the shift would have to have been borrowed before that; but Arabic-speaking groups which used Aramaic as their high language, such as the Nabataeans or Petra, are only well-attested later than that.

A third, more subtle contact explanation seems preferable. Aramaic speakers would certainly have taken advantage of the many similarities between Aramaic and Arabic to reduce the burden on their memories. But, whereas θ and ð are extremely common in Aramaic, in Arabic they are quite rare: in the Qur'ān, t is ten times commoner than θ, and while ð is about as common as d overall, practically all of its occurrences are limited to demonstratives. A good rule of thumb for the Aramaic learner of Arabic to apply would therefore be "replace Aramaic θ, ð with t, d except in demonstratives"; 9 times out of 10, the result would be correct Arabic, and the 10th time it would still be comprehensible. In such an environment, where Aramaic-speaking learners of Arabic outnumbered native speakers, it's not hard to imagine the distinction disappearing. If so, the loss of interdentals in Levantine would indeed reflect Aramaic influence - as a result of Aramaic speakers' effort to avoid Aramaic forms!

Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 2

Last time, I promised to look at the "ratio of content ⊂ Arabic & ⊄ Aramaic". To do that, we need two things: data on the frequency of different words and morphemes, and etymologies for each word and morpheme. If this were English, I could offer you a 450-million-word online digital corpus for the former, and the OED for the latter. For Levantine Arabic the pickings are a bit scantier. There are indeed several digital corpora of Levantine Arabic, but none of them are publicly available, and none have published any frequency data that I can find offhand; and for etymologies, you have to consult, by hand, as many dictionaries (of several languages) as it takes.

So for present purposes, I will use a much smaller substitute, which can hardly be accused of any partiality to Standard Arabic: namely, a selection from Said Akl's Roomyo w Julyeet (CORRECTION: introduced by Said Akl), which I was lucky enough to run into at an Oxfam a few years ago. I picked a well-known section of the play whose language seemed relatively simple, with little or no visible Standard Arabic influence - the lines starting from "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" (p. 62), including Romeo's reply and Juliet's reply to him (finishing on the second line of p. 63) - and counted morpheme frequencies (retaining his eccentric orthography). The 26 morphemes that occurred more than once account for about two-thirds of the selection, so looking at their etymologies gives us the maximum of information for the minimum of effort - and here they are. Only those that are unambiguously Arabic or unambiguously Aramaic are relevant to our purpose; the rest may be dismissed as "confounding factors":

1. w(e) و "and" (11 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
2. b(e)- / m- بـ٬ مـ [marker of the indicative imperfect] (10 occurrences): Innovative. This form is found as such neither in Classical Arabic nor in Aramaic, and its etymology poses some difficulties; if you know of any convincing work on this, let me know in the comments.
3. -aq ـك "you m. sg. oblique" (9 occurrences): Arabic. Both Aramaic and Arabic have cognates of this, but in Aramaic the consonant has changed to kh, whereas Levantine - like Arabic - has kept the original k.
4. ¢esm اسم "name" (6 occurrences): Arabic. Both Aramaic and Arabic have cognates of this, but in Aramaic the consonant is sh, whereas in Levantine - as in Arabic - it's s. (There is controversy over which value is original.)
5. la "no, not, neither... nor" (5 occurrences): "Confounding". The form is shared identically by Arabic and Aramaic; the usage is actually closer to Arabic (where it negates verbs only in the imperfect and the negative imperative) than to Aramaic (where it negates verbs in all tenses), but we'll score it as shared.
6. -u / -h / -vowel length (depending on context) ـه "him, his" (5 occurrences): Arabic. Aramaic -eh could explain the h form and the vowel length form, but the -u can be satisfactorily derived only from Arabic -hu.
7. quun كون "be" (4 occurrences): "Confounding". In reality this is much more likely to be Arabic, since the normal Aramaic root for "be" is hwy, but kwn is attested in this sense in Aramaic too.
8. men من "from" (4 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
9. ḍall ضل "remain" (4 occurrences): Arabic. There is no Aramaic source for emphatic D.
10. (e)l الـ
    • "the" (4 occurrences): Arabic. (Aramaic originally used suffixed -aa, which later lost its definite sense.)
    • [relative marker] (3 occurrences): Innovative, but based on extending the functions of the Arabic definite article, and probably on shortening a form similar to Classical Arabic alladhii, which it resembles rather more than the Aramaic relative marker dh-.)
11. ¢ent انت "you (m. sg.)" (3 occurrences): Arabic. In Aramaic, the n disappeared, assimilated to the following t.
12. ma ما "not" (3 occurrences): Arabic. In Aramaic, maa is never used as a negator.
13. law لو "if" (3 occurrences): Arabic. (Aramaic does not generally use this, but where traces of a cognate are found, as in some frozen combinations, it takes the form luu, not law.)
14. cu شو "what?" (3 occurrences): Original, from Arabic. Found as such neither in Arabic nor in Aramaic, but its generally accepted etymology is Arabic, from a contraction of أي شي هو "what thing is it?".
15. sammi "name (v.)" (3 occurrences): Arabic, for the same reason as esm above.
16. e- / Ø- أـ [first person singular subject marker] (3 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
17. t- تـ [second person masculine singular subject marker] (2 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
18. -ni ـني "me" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
19. -a ـا "her" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". At first sight the loss of the h makes it appear closer to Aramaic than to Classical Arabic - but the h was also lost in -u "him", which cannot be explained as Aramaic.
20. -t ـت [feminine singular construct state marker]: "Confounding". The form is compatible with Arabic or Aramaic origins (Aramaic had th, but we would expect that to be turned back into t, since Levantine has no interdentals.) The function straightforwardly existed in Aramaic; in Classical Arabic, it did not, but the pre-pausal pronunciation of -at- as -ah provides an obvious source for it to develop from, and indeed it exists in practically all modern dialects (including those of the Arabian peninsula). If you're feeling really generous, though, you might ignore the latter fact and award this one to Aramaic.
21. ¢ana أنا "I" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
22. hu هو "he" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". At first sight the Aramaic form huu is closer than Classical Arabic huwa, but loss of final vowels is regular in Levantine Arabic, so you would expect huwa to become hu anyway.
23. ya يا "oh" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
24. ¢aw أو "or" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
25. xebb حب "love" (2 occurrences): "Confounding". Shared by Arabic and Aramaic in effectively identical form.
26. jez¢ جزء "part" (2 occurrences): Arabic. I haven't noticed an Aramaic cognate, but even if there is one, the palatalisation of the j (from original g) marks it as Arabic.

So, out of these 26 items - which together account for 107 out of the 161 morphemes in this selection - 10 are unambiguously Arabic (accounting for 46 morphemes), and none are unambiguously Aramaic. 15 items (accounting for 91 of the morphemes) could equally well be Arabic or Aramaic, and as such are irrelevant to determining which one predominates within Lebanese Arabic. (If you decide to be really generous to Aramaic, you might shift -a, hu, and -t to the Aramaic column, accounting for a grand total of 6 morphemes versus Arabic's 46.) The remaining single item, the imperfect prefix b-, is a later innovation whose history is unclear; even if someone found an Aramaic etymology for it and added it to all the unlikely cases mentioned, the ratio of "content ⊂ Arabic & ⊄ Aramaic" to "content ⊂ Aramaic & ⊄ Arabic" for this list would still be about 3:1. On a less generous and more plausible calculation, it's infinite (46:0). Either way, by this criterion, too, Levantine is Arabic, not Aramaic.

If you pick a long enough text, of course, you will eventually find an Aramaic loan or two. There are quite a few Aramaic loans in Levantine Arabic, depending on the dialect, and they must really stand out to a Levantine speaker studying Aramaic. But even in the most heavily Aramaic-influenced dialects, they occur far less frequently than unambiguously Arabic forms. While historical linguists' usual definition of language origin does not rely on any explicit frequency criteria, in all the cases I've seen, the most frequent source of vocabulary by token count for a sufficiently large text turns out to be what historical linguists would consider as that language's parent. In Levantine Arabic the effect is even stronger, since not only is the basic vocabulary of Arabic origin, so is most of the learned vocabulary.

Now, after all those calculations, I'm sure you're eager to read the lovers' dialogue, so here it is:

جلييت: يا روميو! يا روميو! ليش انت روميو؟
نكور بيك٬ ورفود اسمك٬
أو٬ إذا ما بدك٬ حلوف إنك بتحبني
وأنا ببطل كون من عايلت كابيولت.

روميو: بضل عم بسمعا
أو بحكي معا؟

جلييت: إسمك بس عدوي.
انت، بتضل انت زاتك٬ ولو ما كنت منتغيو.
و شو المنتغيو؟ لا هو إيد ولا إجر
ولا دراع ولا وج ولا أي جزء
من جسم الإنسان؟ آه، كون اسم تاني!
و شو فيه الاسم؟ ال منسميه ورد
لو شو ما سمينا بتضل ريحتو حلوة،
و هيك روميو، لو ما تسمى روميو
كان بيضل محتفظ بهالكمال المحبوب
ال بيملكو بدون عيب. يا روميو، تجرد من اسمك،
ومقابل اسمك ال هو مش جزء منك،
خدني أنا كلي!

And in the original orthography:

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...