Chenoua and the rectification of names

According to Ethnologue - or even to the HCA - Chenoua (Tacenwit) is one of the larger Berber/Amazigh languages of Algeria, spoken west of Algiers from Tipasa almost to Tenes. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the speakers, who call their own language Haqḇayliṯ or Haqḇayləḵṯ - i.e. Kabyle. Chenoua is the name of one particular area, a mountain near Tipasa, and speakers from other areas are often entirely unfamiliar with the term; I recently learned of a first-language speaker who had reached her twenties without ever hearing of it.

This is not to say that they speak the same language in Tipasa as in Tizi-Ouzou! In fact, "Chenoua" is much more closely related to Chaoui than to what is usually called "Kabyle". But "Kabyle" is just an Anglicisation of Arabic qbayǝl - "tribes". It came to be applied to mountain-dwelling groups like this in the Ottoman period as a broad ethno-political category, not a linguistic one; around Jijel, communities who have spoken Arabic for many generations still call themselves Kabyle.

What should you call a language in a situation like this? "Chenoua" takes a part for the whole, and as such is confusing, as well as privileging one group of speakers over others. "Kabyle" matches speakers' traditional self-understanding, but misleads linguists, who are accustomed to using this for the much larger, not very closely related Berber variety spoken further west. "Western Algerian Berber" is potentially too broad; perhaps "Dahra Berber" is better, after the low-lying mountain range where most speakers live, but it presupposes a distinction from "Ouarsenis Berber" that is probably not linguistically justified.

But neither "Berber" nor the currently preferred term "Tamazight" correspond to traditional usage among speakers. "Berber" has never been used in any Berber variety; it has always been a term used by outsiders to label them, and in traditional coastal Algerian usage bǝṛbṛiyya actually referred to colloquial Arabic, not to Berber. And before the Amazigh identity movement gained ground in the late 20th century, most speakers in northern Algeria had never heard of "Tamazight".

In contexts like this, it makes no sense for a linguist to insist on using the name speakers use. Folk categories simply don't divide languages up at the same level as the one the linguists are interested in, nor for the same purposes. (In Bechar, šəlħa "Shilha" refers not only to several very different Berber varieties, but to the completely unrelated Songhay language Korandje). That doesn't mean denying the validity of folk categories; people can call whales "fish" if they want to. It does mean making sure not to get misled by them.

Nilotic father tongues

Back in the late 1990s as human genetic data started piling up, it became increasingly clear that there were a lot of language families where most speakers shared relatively recent common male-line ancestry, visible by looking at Y-haplogroups. George van Driem memorably turned this observation into the Father Tongue Hypothesis: that language expansions are typically male-led, with children often raised to speak their father's language rather than their mother's. Berber is one of the many families where this holds true; Afroasiatic, on the other hand, shows several quite different dominant Y-haplogroups depending on the subgroup, indicating a more complex story at an earlier stage. What about Nilotic?

Nilotic, the most geographically widespread family within the rather questionable "Nilo-Saharan" phylum, divides into three primary subgroups:

• West Nilotic was originally concentrated around the White Nile, in modern South Sudan, including such languages as Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk. Medieval-era expansions brought Luo speakers as far south as Kenya.
• East Nilotic languages are spread from southern South Sudan down to Tanzania, including such languages as Bari, Turkana, and Maasai.
• South Nilotic languages are concentrated in mountainous areas of Kenya and Tanzania, including languages like Nandi and Kipsigis.

It turns out that each of these subfamilies has a reasonable correlation with a Y-haplogroup. West Nilotic shows high rates of A1b1b2b-M13 (62% Dinka, 53% Shilluk, 50% Kenya Luo, 38% Nuer, 22% Alur). Its northern members also have a high frequency of B (54% Nuer, 27% Shilluk, 23% Dinka), which is nearly absent from the more southerly ones (6% Kenya Luo, 0% Alur). A1b1b2b-M13 is also frequent, to a lesser extent, in East Nilotic (33% Karimojong, 28% Maasai and Turkana, 17% Samburu - but 0% Camus), though significant rates of B are recorded only for Karimojong (33%). In South Nilotic, on the other hand, A1b1b2b-M13 is much less frequent (13% Pokot, 10% Marakwet, 8% Ogiek, and so on down to 2% Datog and 0% Sabaot), with B even rarer (11% Pokot), and the plurality of lineages usually belong to E1b1b1-M35 - a Y-haplogroup otherwise notably associated with Cushitic and Nubian speakers (50% Ogiek, 46% Datog, 45% Marakwet, 38% Sengwer...) - or to E2. E1b1b1-M35 is not unknown further north, but is far rarer (20% Shilluk, 15% Dinka, 8% Nuer).

None of this looks much like the result of a single male-led expansion. An obvious interpretation would be that South Nilotic primarily reflects communal language shift, probably from Cushitic judging by the well-studied stratum of Cushitic vocabulary in these languages. One might reasonably postulate a classical male-led expansion to explain the spread of West Nilotic within South Sudan; but, if so, one is led to the conclusion (already plausible on linguistic and historical grounds) that the Luo expansion southwards involved considerable assimilation of local men, notably Bantu-speaking (the Bantu-associated E1b1a1-M2 accounted for 33% of Kenya Luo sampled). Such assimilation also appears probable in East Nilotic, for which I unfortunately lack data from South Sudan.

In a broader perspective, A1b1b2b-M13 is frequent in several far-flung "Nilo-Saharan" groups along the southeastern fringes of the Sahara whose languages are only very distantly related, if at all, to Nilotic: Fur (31%), various Sudanese Maban (26%), and even Cameroon Kanuri (27%). It does not, however, seem to be frequent among Nubian speakers, much closer at hand.

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I won't attempt to exhaustively reference this post, which is basically open notes on work in progress, but key sources include Wood et al. 2005, Tishkoff et al. 2007, Hassan et al. 2008, Gomes et al. 2010, and Hirbo 2011. Note that I've combined different samples for Nuer and Dinka.

Feynman's Father's Fallacy

The first time I read this quote from Richard Feynman, I was quite convinced by it:

The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, "See that bird? What kind of bird is that?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is." He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you anything!" But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: "See that bird?" he says. "It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing-that's what counts." (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

And it would be true - in a world where no one else knows anything about birds. (That's probably not so far from the world you or I or Feynman grew up in as children.) If you don't know what nightingales are called, and neither does anyone else, then you can still learn about them - if you have the time and patience to go deep into the countryside to places where they live, and spend cold nights with a pair of infra-red goggles, or set clever traps deep in the countryside or something.

On the other hand, if you do know what a nightingale is called, you can find out enormous amounts about it by simply asking. You can scour Google Scholar for papers by people who did the hard part already; you can get birdwatchers talking about it; you can look it up in a reference manual; in short, you can benefit from the accumulated experience of many generations of observers, instead of having to reinvent the wheel yourself, only to have your knowledge perish with you in the end. If you know what it's called in other languages, you can find out what other communities of observers had to say about it - which, in some cases, may reflect much longer observation than English speakers have been able to undertake. Having found all this out, you can understand your own observations better. Maybe you've discovered something new! Or maybe you've misunderstood what you saw because you lacked a broader context. Either way, you'll know much more with the name than you're ever likely to be able to discover individually without it.

Two Bambara words in Gnawa songs of Meknes

Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and medical functions, usually called Gnawa in Morocco, Diwan in Algeria, and Stambeli in Tunisia. Aguadé's Die Lieder der Gnawa aus Meknes provides the lyrics of an extensive corpus of Gnawa songs from Meknes in northern Morocco. These songs are primarily in Arabic, but characteristically include a number of words with no plausible Arabic or Berber source, presumed to derive from languages of the Sahel. Their identification, however, is generally difficult, although Aguadé ventures a few suggestions drawn from Hausa. Anyone can comb dictionaries for sound-alikes, but similar forms may be found across unrelated languages of the Sahel with very different meanings. It would be much easier if the meanings were certain, but the singers do not necessarily know the meaning of such words, and the context often hardly narrows it down. Nevertheless, some cases can be identified more confidently than others.

Aguadé's song number 88, Lalla l-Batul "Lady Virgin" (pp. 128-129), is dedicated to a female genie whose song cycle corresponds to the colour yellow. Its refrain (accounting for 5 out of its 8 lines) is a lalla l-batul, saysay "Oh Lady Virgin, saysay". The word saysay has no meaning in Arabic or in Berber. In Bambara, however, sáyi means "yellow"; the refrain would then be "Oh Lady Virgin, yellow, yellow".

In his song number 90 (pp. 130-132), the refrain is fufu dənba ya sidi "fufu dənba, oh master" (repeated 14 times, including the opening line of the song). Bambara dénba means "mother". The first verse after the initial refrain is ma bɣatək kda ya sidi "she didn't want you like that, oh master"; no feminine singular subject to which this could refer appears anywhere in the Arabic text of the song, but the Bambara interpretation allows this line to be better understood. I'd like to relate the preceding fufu to Bambara fò "greet" and/or fɔ́ "say, speak" - "greet Mother" would seem contextually appropriate - but I can't quite see how the grammar would hang together.

Addendum: In song 5, Sidi Gangafu "Mr. Gangafu", almost every couplet ends in Bambaṛa or shortened ya Mbaṛa, so a Bambara etymology seems worth considering (although an allusion to Hausa is also found). As Aguadé notes, Ganga is simply a kind of drum used by the Gnawa, whose name is shared across most of the Sahel, so one would expect this name to mean something like "drum-player" or "drum-maker". In fact, Gangafu can readily be interpreted as Bambara gàngan-fɔ̀ "play the ganga-drum". "Drum-player" should properly be something like gàngan-fɔ̀-la, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to suppose that the Bambara used by slaves among themselves would have had some non-standard features, given that for many of them it would have been a second language to begin with.

Some Dellys manuscripts

(Not linguistics, just history - possibly self-indulgent at that.)

Quite a few years ago in Dellys, I was allowed to photograph a bundle of pages from different manuscripts grouped together in a single detached cover, labelled as belonging to my great-uncle (رحمه الله). (I wasn't very good with metadata at the time, so I apologise in case anything ended up in the resulting folder from a different source.) Both the internet and my ability to read premodern Arabic handwriting have advanced a lot since then, and I can now identify (more or less) six of the works which these were taken from:

• A commentary on al-Nawawī's Forty Ḥadīth - a selection of key sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)
• Muhammad Mayyāra's commentary on Ibn ʕĀshir's Guiding Helper - a condensed summary in verse of essential Mālikī fiqh (religious jurisprudence)
• Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī's Warning to the Neglectful, a book of religious exhortation
• Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī's Decipherment of the Symbols and Keys of the Treasures, explaining Sufi concepts and terms
• A linguistically focused commentary on al-Būṣīrī's Mantle - a poem in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)
• Ibn Mālik's Thousand-Liner - a condensed presentation of Arabic grammar in verse to facilitate memorisation
• A commentary on al-Abharī's Isagoge - an introduction to Aristotelian logic

Apart from these, there were a few pages of rhymed dua (supplication to God), which I can't find a source for online.

I still can't identify most of the commentators; it seems that plenty of commentaries have yet to be properly digitised. But the geographic spread of the authors is noteworthy, covering almost the whole span of the former territories of the Umayyad Caliphate: al-Samarqandī from Uzbekistan, al-Abharī from Iraq or Iran, al-Nawawī from Syria, Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī from Palestine, al-Būṣīrī from Egypt, Mayyāra and Ibn ʕĀshir from Morocco, Ibn Mālik from Spain. The chronological spread, on the other hand, is notably more concentrated: 10th c. (al-Samarqandī), 13th c. (al-Abharī, al-Nawawī, al-Būṣīrī, Ibn Mālik), 16th/17th c. (Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī, Ibn ʕĀshir). The 13th century doesn't necessarily spring to mind as a golden age of Islamic thought, but for the early 20th century curriculum this notebook presumably reflects, it was at least a golden age of school texts. (On the other side of the Mediterranean, it was also the age of Thomas Aquinas and Dante.) The absence of 19th century texts here might be accounted for by the rise of printing, but that cannot explain the paucity of texts from other recent centuries; even the 16th/17th century texts seem to be intended to open the door to understanding older works. The common purpose of these works should also be clear: all of them either relate directly to religion or are ancillary to the religious sciences.

The texts themselves accordingly therefore cast only a very indirect light on the context where they were being studied. A note carefully added in pencil on the inside cover sometime in the early/mid-20th century, however, is much more eloquent:

WARNING: The earth is a dark planet, lit by the moon at night and by the sun in the day. The earth is suspended in space by the power of Allah SWT; He made a gravitational power in the stars that attracts the earth towards them just as a magnet attracts iron. The earth is not carried on the horn of a bull, as claimed on p. 36 of this book in a ḥadīth of `Abd Allāh ibn Sallām when he asked the Messenger of Allāh SAWS about the earth "What was it created from?" and so on until he asked him "And what do these seven earths rest upon?" He replied "On a bull." He asked "And what is the bull like?" He said "A bull with 40,000 heads", etc. This ḥadīth has no basis, and has been deemed fabricated, and none of the learned have confirmed this ḥadīth - and Allah knows best.

This short comment feels like the entire modernist era in a nutshell - that late 19th/early 20th century moment of collision with the West, when this vast storehouse of traditional knowledge, stabilised over centuries by mnemonic verses and long insulated from external criticism, is suddenly confronted with an urgent need to sift out the grain from the chaff and go back to first principles, or risk losing intellectual as well as physical battles. We're still living through the aftermath; one result is a widespread suspicion of works formerly treated as unimpeachable, including some of those above.

Notes on East Saharan

Along the southwestern fringes of the Sahara, in the Ennedi and Biltine regions of northeastern Chad and the Darfur region of western Sudan, a few hundred thousand people, the Beri or Zaghawa, speak a language called Beria. Until well into the last century, the Berti people of Darfur and Kordofan still spoke a rather poorly documented related language, Berti; today they are reported to have all shifted to Arabic. Together, they make up the Eastern subgroup of the Saharan family (supposedly part of Nilo-Saharan). I've been looking over some of the literature on these languages lately, so here's a very brief summary on their historical phonology; it's mostly just for my own memory, but if anyone else is interested then great.

Beria is divided into a number of dialects (cf. Wolfe 2001, Anonby & Johnson 2001), of which the best described - thanks to Jakobi and Crass 2004 - is the eastern variety of Kube in Chad. Unfortunately for present purposes, this also seems to be a good candidate for the least phonologically conservative variety. The southeastern Dirong-Guruf varieties preserve /f/, reduced to /h/ in Kube and in the rest of Beria but retained as /f/ in Berti; there is reason to suspect that it was originally *p (for instance, intervocalic variation between /rf/ and /rb/). The western Wegi variety of Darfur preserves intervocalic voiceless stops, which Kube voices, and intervocalic /d/, which Kube merges with *r. There's a lot of cross-dialectal variation within Beria between /m/ and /b/, especially in initial position, which is difficult to account for through regular sound change; word-initially, despite its name, Berti seems to have /m/ in almost all words that have Kube cognates with /b/. Wegi and Dirong appear to preserve a distinction between /l/ and /n/ that has been lost in Kube; but Berti also has /n/ in such cases, so one wonders whether this might be a split rather than a retention, though there's no obvous conditioning factor. It's hard to say much about Berti phonology given the quality of the sources, but it also seems to shift /ɟ/ to [z] in some cases.

Berti is much more closely related to Beria than any other Saharan language, and there are plenty of transparent basic cognates, like "name" (Berti tir, Kube tɪ́r) or "night" (Berti gini, Kube gɪ̀nɪ́ɪ̀). The surprise is that there are also lots of very basic words with no obvious cognates, like the personal pronoun "I" (Berti su, Kube áɪ), or the numeral "one" (Berti sang, Kube nɔ̀kkɔ̀), or the adjective "little" (Berti batti, Kube mɪ̀na). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in Saharan; maybe more data will make things clearer, or maybe there's a contact context that needs to be better understood. Either way it makes subgroup reconstruction a lot trickier.

Book review: Zenati-Arabic Arabic-Zenati Lexicon, Haji (2019)

I got my hands on a copy of a recent dictionary of the Berber variety of Ouargla: Muʕjam al-mufradāt zanātī-ʕarabī ʕarabī-zanātī : Warqalah, Ngūsah, Tmāsint, Baldat ʕumar, ɣumrah, Maqrīn, Timīmūn wa-ḍawāḥīhā معجم المفردات زناتي-عربي عربي-زناتي : ورقلة، نڨوسة، تماسنت، بلدة عمر، غمرة، مقرين، تميمون وضواحيها, by Abderrahmane Haji, published 2019 with Afrmād in Algeria. The variety of Ouargla, Təggargərənt, is relatively well-documented thanks primarily to the texts and dictionary published by Jean Delheure. Delheure's work, however, was based on fieldwork between 1941 and 1976, and as such represents the speech of several generations ago. The primary merit of Haji (2019) is in presenting an up-to-date picture of Ouargla Berber as currently spoken and seen by a first-language speaker; it is also of sociolinguistic interest for presenting a heartfelt argument for linguistic diversity and "dialect" preservation from an essentially populist nationalist-conservative perspective. Unfortunately, however, apart from an understandable lack of linguistic training, the book is marred by an astonishing number of typographical errors (the Arabic text of the introduction gives the impression of never having been proof-read at all) and an orthography which fails to distinguish /ə/ from /a/; the author notes that he had to rapidly reconstruct the work from scratch after losing his original manuscript file.

The introduction starts by noting the constitutional position of "the Amazigh language" in Algeria and objecting that the variation across Berber is far higher than such a phrase might seem to imply, with only 2.4% (?) of vocabulary common across all varieties. He claims to be able to understand only 35% of Kabyle and 65% of Tuareg as against 80% of Chaouia, 95% of Tumzabt, and 95% of Timimoun; more surprisingly (typo?), he reports understanding only 40% of the rather similar varieties of Tiout, Boussemghoun, and Beni Ounif. A brief overview of Amazigh/Berber/Algerian history includes an original etymology of "Amazigh": he derives it from am jjiɣ, "as I left (it)", an idea made possible by Ouargli's tendency to merge š/ž with s/z, explaining his eccentric spelling of it as أمزيغ rather than أمازيغ. He then presents his objections to standardisation: "The attempt to create an Amazigh language in the laboratory, without immersion in its principles and the depths of its components spread across the nation is in itself self-destructive, and may find no one to feed it or protect it, being rootless and inauthentic and asocial... How can 17 dialects be reduced to one dialect which no one has deemed the source or the original? As Algerians say: 'When the crow tried to imitate the partridge, it forgot how to walk'." For good measure he takes such efforts to reflect "this savage project known as globalisation, which since 1945... has imposed what it (globalisation and pragmatism) considers appropriate for its ambitions and desires to let loose and satisfy the instincts and consumption in all its forms, and release blind freedoms and illusory democracy." Specifically, "dialectal diversity is a strong fortress and effective tool [against this project] which must not be reduced or destroyed for nothing."

The next section presents his perspective on the history of Arabic in Algeria. He seems to take for granted that the Kutama were descended from Himyar, and therefore that Kabyles are actually Arab, unlike Zenata (such as himself) who are indigenous, but who "learned Arabic of their own free will, far from the Hilalians and Riah and those under their influence, who preferred the wilds and transhumance, entering the town to buy and sell but leaving in the afternoon". He insists that, as with Berber, "In Algeria there are Arabics and not just one Arabic, which must likewise be gathered and corrected and preserved from oblivion." The main thrust of the section, however, is to argue against the exclusion of Arabic loanwords, since they are historically well-entrenched: "is it not true that most of English comes from French ... and most of French from Latin..? Is Arabic not our neighbour, even ahead of Islam being our religion"?

The next section briefly presents a linguistic geography of Algeria from a Saharan-focused perspective: Tuareg around Djanet, Tamanrasset, Borj and Tin-Zaouatine and Timelaouine; Regueibat (non-Amazigh) around Oued Daoura, Matar Ennaga, Hassi-Khebi, Tindouf, Ghar Djbeilat, and the Western Sahara; Zenati in Ouargla, Ngoussa, Goug, Beldet Amor, Temacint, Meggarine, Ghomra, Timimoun, Beni Ounif; Shilha in Tiout, Sfissifa, Boussemghoun, Chellala; Chaouia from Zeribet el-Oued to the Tunisian border, and from El Kantara to the edge of Souk Ahras; Kabyle in a rectangle from the edge of Setif to the sea of Bejaia and from Bouira to the edge of Algiers and Boumerdes - plus Zenati around Cherchell, as an afterthought.

He then briefly and polemically addresses script choice: "I write in Arabic, in accordance with article 2 of the Algerian constitution of 2016, and because Arabic came down from Paradise with Adam AS and Eve, and the Quran is in flawless Arabic... Moreover, Arabic is indisputably the oldest language in the world... Latin script destroyed the country and the people, and stole our goods and property, and split our unity; the people of the South reject it and don't want to learn it." He adds that Zenati has adopted plenty of Arabic loanwords, as well as others from "French and Hausa and Zarma and Bambara and Adadi[?] and other languages".

The next section is an overview of prior publications on Ouargla Berber, short yet replete with mistaken identifications ("Hodson" (sic: rather Hodgson) is identified as a general, René Basset as a member of the René missionary family) and apparently cut short in the middle of the first sentence to mention Delheure ("deleu").

Finally, he moves on to "the rules of Zenati" (قواعد الزناتية), summarizing the fully vocalised orthography he adopts (including new characters for ẓ, ṇ, ṃ, ṛ, but sadly no distinct solution for ə), and then describing the morphology. The headings adopted are "Feminine", "Verb", "Pronoun suffixed to the verb or noun", "Plural", "Negation", "Masdar", "Interrogative", "Warning", "Intimidation", "Calling for help", "Ululation", "Colours", "Relative pronoun", "Demonstratives", "Locative adverbs", "Nisba", "Paucal plural", "Free pronouns", "Demonstrative" (yes, twice), "Ownership", "Demonstratives suffixed to the noun", "Suffixed genitive pronoun", "Numerals and counting in Zenati", "Counting money", "Metre and poetry" (with basically no content), "Keys to Ouargli" (a list of function words). Many of these include asides on subjects that would not be expected based on the section title. These are followed by a series of paradigm tables: "Free pronouns", "Genitive pronoun suffixes", "Free pronouns" (absolute possessives), an unlabelled table of the conjugation of "say", "Conjugation of 'say' in the present then in the past", "Conjugation of 'say' in the negative'", "Conjugation of 'come' in the past then the present then the imperative", "Conjugation of 'give' with a first person subject in the past and the present and the imperative", "Conjugation of 'give' with a third person subject in the past and the present", "Form of exaggeration", ... and many other verb paradigms.

The remainder of the work is divided into three alphabetically ordered sections: a short phrasebook, "Phrases and expressions, Zenati-Arabic"; then the dictionary proper, "Zenati-Arabic dictionary of lexemes" and "Arabic-Zenati dictionary of lexemes".

On the whole, I found this work disappointing; with a better transcription system and some training in linguistics, the author could have created a definitive reference work rather than a miscellany. Nevertheless, serious students of the Berber varieties of the northern Sahara should not neglect it; it covers areas of modern life absent from earlier sources, and addresses some aspects of pragmatics neglected by more professional treatments.

More miscellaneous Darja notes

These may or may not be of interest to anyone but myself; I'm posting them essentially so I don't forget them.

A couple of idioms:

• ər-riħ f-əš-šbək الريح في الشبك "wind in the net" - empty talk
• ʕla šufət əl-ʕin على شوفة العين "on the sight of the eye" - as far as the eye can see
• ṣufa ṭayṛa صوفة طايرة "a flying piece of wool" - flighty, capricious
• tɣiḍni ʕəmṛi تغيضني عمري "my life makes me feel pity" - I feel sorry for myself
• qʷʕədna ki ʕəbd waħəd قُعدنا كي عبْذ واحد "we stayed like one person" - we kept working together

And another proverb: əɣʷləq bab-ək ma txəwwən jaṛ-ək اغُلق بابك ما تخوّن جارك "Close your door and you won't make your neighbour a thief" - I guess you could loosely render this as "Good fences make good neighbours". Note that the corresponding verb xwən "steal" خْون forms a minimal pair with xun خون "betray", confirming that semivowels are distinct from the corresponding vowels.

As discussed earlier, the name of the town of Djinet is pronounced variously with a final t or d. As a convincing argument for the latter pronunciation being more correct (if the historical evidence hadn't been sufficient), someone pointed out to me that people from Djinet are called jnanda جناندة. The version with t presumably reflects Turkish influence as well as folk etymology.

fut فوت "pass" is used as a serial verb in a construction whose exact semantics I need to figure out better, typically in subordinate clauses: ila fətt šədditu إلا فتّ شدّيتهُ "once you've grasped it..."

Two interesting bits of maritime vocabulary are walyun واليون "apprentice not-yet-sailor who cleans the fishing boat in port" and ṛədfun ردفون "shrimp net". For the latter, I wonder if the first element might be Spanish red "net"; but I can't see what the fun would be in that case. For the former, I hardly even know how to find out what the translation into other languages around the Mediterranean might be. Suggestions for etymologies are welcome!

(Update thanks to jitaenow on Twitter: walyun is from Neapolitan guaglione, and is ultimately cognate with "galleon".)

Delicious Berber apples

While most Berber varieties use an Arabic loanword for "apple", several are reported to preserve a non-Arabic word: Jerbi a-ḏəffu (Brugnatelli), Nefusi dəffu (Motylinski), Zuara a-dəffu (Baghni). This word was derived by Vycichl (1952) from Punic *tappūḥ, a derivation generally accepted in subsequent work; Kossmann (2013:146) explains various forms along the lines of ta-dəffaḥ-t as blends between this and the Arabic form. Such an etymology makes sense on extra-linguistic as well as linguistic grounds: domestic apples originated much further east, in Central Asia, so a loanword is expected a priori, and given the important role of Carthage in early North African history, Punic appears the obvious source.

Talking to a speaker from near Batna yesterday, however, I realised that the Chaoui word for "apple" is really aḍfu, with an emphatic d. This cannot be explained in terms of regular sound change from the Punic form: the distinction between d and ḍ is in general very stable in Berber, particularly in the absence of any adjacent emphatic or laryngeal, and the apparent loss of gemination is also irregular.

The solution is Berber-internal. In more westerly varieties (cf. Nait-Zerrad, p. 451), we find a root ḍf-t for "taste, savour": Ait Atta t-aṭfi (verb iṭfi-t), Tashelhiyr tiḍfi (verb aḍfu-t), Zenaga taṭfih - also borrowed into Korandje təṭfi. While its geographical distribution seems relatively limited, nothing about this root suggests a foreign origin, and its attestation in Zenaga suggests a priori that it goes back to proto-Berber. We may therefore plausibly assume that at some point it was familiar to Chaoui speakers, if it isn't still. An otherwise unanalysable term for "apple" would therefore have been reinterpreted as, essentially "the tasty one".

An unusual polysemy in Algeria and its cultural background

Today I heard nsəhhlu? “Shall we head off?” The verb səhhəl expresses two rather different meanings: transitive “make easy” and intransitive “head off, leave”. The former is well-integrated into the lexicon: the verbal template BəCCəD regularly forms causatives from triliteral adjectives and verbs, and sahəl “easy” accordingly yields səhhəl, just as barəd “cold” yields bərrəd “make cool”. The latter is much less so: the root shl has no particular ties to motion. A colexification of “leave” with “make easy” is not cross-linguistically common (see CLICS), and a linguist encountering it in isolation in some wordlist would surely be at a loss to account for it.

It is not, however, arbitrary or accidental. The missing link can easily be found by going beyond the lexicon proper into the realm of politeness: a standard expression used by people staying behind to say goodbye to people leaving is ḷḷah ysəhhəl “may God make it [the trip] easy”. (Algerian Arabic etiquette is pretty much all about knowing which blessing to use when.) The intransitive meaning is therefore indirectly derived from the transitive one.

Knowing this, and knowing the extent of lexical-typological convergence in this region, one might predict that a similar colexification should be found in Kabyle. Sure enough, consulting Dallet (1982), one finds sahəl “leave on a trip; (God) make a trip easy”. He even records the corresponding blessing to a person departing on a trip: ad isahəl ṛəbbi, yəlli tibbura! “may God make it easy and open the doors!” Unfortunately, the verb is simply an Arabic borrowing rather than a calque properly speaking, although it’s based on a different verb template than the Dellys Arabic one.

Miscellaneous Darja notes

With Twitter apparently determined to become an eX-network, the moment seems right for turning back towards blogging. I might change platforms (Substack sounds promising – any good ideas?), but in the meantime, let’s see if this is still working and post some miscellaneous notes on Dellys Arabic from my holiday.

Today, when a watch started randomly beeping, I heard a cousin say ʕəbbẓi næ̃mpoṛt waħda təħbəs “press any one, it’ll stop”. This is obviously the same construction as næ̃mpoṛt ħaja, and was indeed produced by the same person. So it seems that næ̃mpoṛt is indeed a fixed part of his grammar; but note that it is followed by an indefinite noun (ħaja ‘thing’, waħda ‘one’) rather than an interrogative pronoun as it would be in French (quoi ‘what’, qui ‘who’).

When I heard the verb ykạmiri ‘he’s filming’, I initially thought this was proof positive that the loanverb ending -i had become a productive denominal verbaliser (cp. kạmira ‘videocamera’); after all, there is no French verb camérer. But it turns out that camérer is attested in Algerian French, so the case remains ambiguous.

An old woman to a little girl: ya ṛṛwiħa ttaʕi! “oh my little soul!” The diminutive brings to mind Hadrian’s animula.

The mediopassive verbs ntkəl ‘be eaten’ and ntfəxswell up are old news to me, but somehow I had missed the corresponding participles mətkul ‘eaten’, mətfux ‘swollen’, which show that both verbs are to be analysed synchronically as n-passives (“Form 7”) with t-initial roots, though in both cases the t originally derives from a passive prefix or infix (“Form 8”).

On a trip up the mountain, I heard tuzzalt, which does indeed refer to ‘rockrose’, whatever the correct translation of tazalt might be. But the speaker was bilingual in Kabyle, so the pronunciation might not be representative of Dellys Arabic.

A colonial-era rhyming proverb that was new to me: ləmʕawna f-ənnṣaṛa wala lqʷʕad f-əlxṣaṛa ‘[even] helping the Christians is better than sitting around unprofitably.”

Onomatopeia for the sound of milking: čəqq čəqq čəqq. May help explain the Siwi verb…

As discussed on Twitter, skərfəj ‘grate (v.)’ seems to come from Italian scalfeggiare or something very similar. Along with spərpəħ ‘sprawl about’ it provides a rare example of what looks like a five-consonant root, but should perhaps better be interpreted as four-consonant with an otherwise poorly evidenced prefix s-; cf. sħaj ‘need (v.)’

Power and nephewhood from the Ahaggar to Hombori

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt, impf. ti-dubu-t). There are no compelling cognates for this in Berber outside Tuareg, as Naït-Zerrad's comparative dictionary confirms; at best, one might speculatively compare Siwi dabb "a lot" and Tarifit dab 'have an appetite', both within Macro-Zenati. The word can therefore not be reconstructed for proto-Berber. A better candidate for 'be able' in proto-Berber would seem to be *ăzmər; cf. Awjila, Kabyle əzmər "be able", Tamajeq əzmər "stand up to, endure", etc. The corresponding verbal noun a-dabu has, however, been borrowed from Tuareg into Standard Algerian Tamazight to provide the noun "power"; its widespread use in political discourse in reference to le pouvoir has made this one of the more successful neologisms.

The Tamahaq of the Ahaggar Mountains attests a second sense of dub-ət that seems to be isolated even within Tuareg. Foucauld glosses it (p. 153) as:

2. ("by extension") 'be able to succeed someone (to an office), by virtue of his being your maternal uncle'
3. ("by extension") 'have as maternal uncle'

It yields the equally Ahaggar-specific word tădabit "person(s) of either sex with the right to succeed to someone's suzerainty due to the latter being their maternal uncle", used in the Ahaggar instead of pan-Tuareg tegăze. Examples include (retranscribed, perhaps imperfectly):

Biska d Mənnək ăddoben Musa daɣ ăra n tăññaten.
Biska and Mennek are potential successors to Musa by virtue of being sisters' children.

Luki d Mikela ăddoben Musa kaskab.
Luki and Mikela are potential successors in suzerainty to Musa.

Barka wa-n ăkli yăddobăt akli hin Mămmădu kaskab.
Barka the slave has as maternal uncle my slave Mămmădu, in a maternal uncle-nephew relationship.

Note the very un-Berber-looking word kaskab, lacking even the characteristic Berber nominal prefix, in the latter two examples. In the not obviously related sense of "metallic part of a camel bridle", akăskabbu (Tamasheq kiskab) is attested throughout Tuareg; but kaskab, in the relevant sense, appears just as unique to the Ahaggar as this sense of dub-ət. Foucauld's entry on the term runs to three pages (pp. 918-920), with neat kinship diagrams, but starts "in the direct line of succession to suzerainty, from maternal uncle to nephew or niece (in a kinship relation of maternal uncle to child of full sister or maternal sister (when speaking of succession to suzerainty over vassals))". One might be tempted to link the first half to Tuareg kus "inherit", but the vowel and the absence of any good explanation for the second half militates against it.

Not to beat around the bush, both dub-ət and kaskab look like great candidates for non-Berber substratum vocabulary loaned into Tuareg, especially in the kinship sense. Considered from this perspective, a non-Berber comparison for the former immediately presents itself: Songhay *túbí "inherit (v.); inheritance (n.)", with its derivative *túbá "sister's child (of either sex)" (the latter may be absent in Zarma and Dendi; both are absent from Northern Songhay, which substitutes Tuareg loanwords). Reflexes of the former include Zarma, Gorwol, Hombori, Djougou túbú (in Hombori also "succeed as chief", just as in Tuareg), Gao and Timbuktu tubu (in Gao also "bequeath, leave (to)"), Kikara túbí ...; of the latter, Gorwol túbéy, Gao tubey / tuba, Hombori túbê, Kikara túbá, Timbuktu tuba. (For modern Timbuktu Heath instead documents kaaya for "inherit", but Dupuis-Yacouba recorded "toubou".)

To my mind, a borrowing from Songhay into Tuareg looks more appealing, as I would expect a high-low tone if it came from Tuareg to reflect Tuareg stress; but the opposite direction could also be defended. Either way, however, there can be no reasonable doubt, given the good formal match and perfect semantic correspondence, that the Ahaggar forms are related to the Songhay ones. (Oddly enough, Nicolaï appears to have missed this connection in his wide-ranging hunt for Berber matches, instead focusing on Kabyle (originally Arabic) ətbəʕ "follow".) Yet their distribution is almost the opposite of what one would expect: in both groups, they are attested only in the varieties least in contact with the other. This suggests that the contact situation they reflect happened quite early, rather than being recent.

---

(References consulted include, for Tuareg, the dictionaries of Foucauld, Heath, and Alojaly; for Awjila, Paradisi; for cross-Berber comparison, Naït-Zerrad; for Songhay, Heath, White-Kaba, Ducroz and Charles, Zima, and Dupuis-Yacouba, not to mention Nicolaï's La force des choses.)

Siwi corpus

A small part of the Siwi corpus I gathered during PhD and postdoctoral fieldwork is now publicly accessible online, with more planned. Despite my best efforts, there will undoubtedly be some number of errors in transcription and translation; hopefully being able to listen to the audio will make these easier to correct in the long term. (Feel free to comment here or by email.) Some of these recordings may be of particular interest:

• Four facts about Siwa, short as it is, is a perfect starting point for understanding Siwa anthropologically; the speaker chooses four questions about Siwa, of his own devising, and answers them.
• The story of the Prophet Joseph is probably the best long narrative I was privileged to record during my fieldwork, retelling a well-known Islamic story with energy and eloquence, and giving numerous examples of grammatical features rarely attested in shorter texts.
• Paradigm of the Siwi verb əlməd "learn" - does what it says on the tin, and as such makes a great introduction to Siwi verb morphology. Pay particular attention to the position of stress. Not all forms of the verb are included in this recording, but the remainder can easily be derived from these ones.

The speaker recorded in these, Sherif Bougdoura, was a thoughtful and intelligent person, trying to find the right balance between local and national cultures, who made his living as a repairman for lack of opportunities to take his education further. He sadly died young in a work accident several years ago. I hope these recordings will serve to preserve his memory as well as to facilitate linguistic analysis.

Instrument nouns between Dholuo and Arabic

In Dholuo (a West Nilotic language of Kenya), instrument nouns are formed using ra-...-i (the final -i is dropped after sonorants and semivowels), as in the table below (Tucker 1993:111-112, retranscribed). Both English and Arabic have comparable formations. In English, instrument nouns are occasionally formed with the -er suffix, like agent nouns. In Arabic, instrument nouns are more systematically formed, but with a variety of different patterns, starting with mi-..., or in modern colloquials with a feminine agent noun CaCCaaC-a.

However, taking a look at the cases listed by Tucker, we may note a striking cross-linguistic difference in distribution. In Arabic, all but three of the translated nouns use an instrument noun pattern of some sort, and two of the others use a more general verbal noun pattern; only "ladder" appears completely underived. In English, "peg", "billhook", "pestle", "tongs", "lid" all seem to be underived and simplex, and for several cases with zero-derivation (notably "hoe", "rake", "drill", "sign"), intuition suggests that the verb derives from the noun, the opposite of what we see in Arabic or Dholuo.

This suggests a typological difference in the structure of the lexicon: perhaps some languages "prefer" to mark instrument nouns as such and to form them from corresponding actions, while some prefer simple instrument nouns from which verbs may be formed indicating the corresponding actions. I wonder whether that holds up on a larger sample? What does your language tend to do, dear reader?

cut	toŋ-o	قطع	|	billhook, cutter	ra-tóŋ̂	منجل
slash	bẹt-ọ	مزّق	|	slasher	rạ-bẹ́t-ị̂	منجل طويل
hoe	pur-o	عزق	|	hoe	ra-púr̂	معزق
scratch	gwạr-ọ	خدش	|	forked rake	rạ-gwạ́r̂	مدمّة
see	ŋịy-ọ	رأى	|	mirror	rạ-ŋị́ị̂	مرآة
strain	dhịŋ-ọ	صفّى	|	strainer	rạ-dhị́ŋ̂	مصفاة
pound	yọk-ọ	دق	|	pestle	rạ-yọ́k-ị̂	مدقة
pierce	cwọw-ọ	ثقب	|	piercing instrument	ra-cwọ́p-î	مثقاب
hold	mạk-o	مسك	|	tongs	rạ-mạ́k-ị̂	ممساك
plug up	din-o	سد	|	stopper	ra-dín̂	سدّادة
hang	ŋạw-ọ	علّق	|	peg for hanging	ra-ŋạ́ŵ	علاّقة
cover	um-o	غطّى	|	lid, cover	ra-úm̂	غطاء
show	nyis-o	أظهر	|	sign	ra-nyís-î	علامة
climb	ịdh-ọ	صعد	|	ladder	rạ-ị́dh-ị̂	سلّم

Had Gadya in the Arabic dialect of Constantine Jews

Seeing as you can't turn on the news in France these days without hearing a certain more-French-than-thou provocateur fulminating against Arabs, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the Arabic dialect his parents or grandparents must have grown up speaking. There are a couple of recordings of the "Judeo-Arabic" of Constantine; a nice easy one to transcribe is Michael Charvit's recording of the originally Aramaic children's song Had Gadya, as traditionally sung at the Passover (Pesah) festival (translation here):

حاد ڨاديا، حاد ڨاديا، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجات القطّوس، وكلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجات الكلبة، وڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجات العصا، وضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا النار، وحرق العصا، والدي لي ضربت الكلبة، والدي ڨدمت القطّوس، والدي لي كلات الجدي، لي الدي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا الما، وطفّى النار، الدي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، الدي لي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا التور، وشرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، الدي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، الدي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا الدبّاح، دبّح التور، اللي شرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا ميلخ همّاڥات، ودبح الدبّاح، اللي دبح التور، اللي شرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا اقّادوش باروخ هو، ودبح ميلخ همّاڥات، اللي دبح الدبّاح، واللي دبح التور، واللي شرب الما، واللي طفّى النار، واللي حرق العصا، واللي ضربت الكلبة، واللي ڨدمت القطّوس، واللي كلات الجدي، واللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس

ħ̣ad gadya, ħ̣ad gadya, li šrali baba bzuz əflus, zuz əflus
u ğat əlqəṭṭus, u klat əlždi, lli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğat əlkəlba, u gədmət əlqəṭṭus, lli klat əlždi, lli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğat əlʕṣa, u dŭṛbət əlkəlba, lli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əldi klat əlždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus
u ğa ʔənnaṛ, u ħṛəq əlləʕṣa, u ddi li ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, u əldi gədmət əlqəṭṭus, u ldi li klat əžždi, li ldi šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğa ʔəlma, u ṭəffa ʔənnaṛ, əldi ħrəq əlləʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əlždi, əldi li šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğa əṭṭuṛ, u šṛŭb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əlləʕṣa, əldi š ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əlždi, əldi šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğa ʔəddəbbaħ, dəbbəħ əlṭuṛ, əlli šṛŭb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əlʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əžždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, bzuğ əflus
u ğa milax həmmạvat, u dbaħ əddəbbaħ, əlli dbaħ əttuṛ, əlli šṛəb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əllʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əžždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus
u ğaaaaaaaaa qqaduš baṛux huuuuuuuu u dbaħ milax əmmạvat əlli dbaħ əldəbbaħ ulli dbaħ əttuuṛ ulli šṛəb əlmaaaa ulli ṭəffa nnaaaaaaaaṛ ulli ħrəq əlʕṣaaaaa ulli ḍəṛbət əlkəlbaaa ulli gədmət əlqəṭṭuuuuuus ulli klat əžždiiiii ulli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əfluuuuuuuuuus

This recording should in itself be sufficient to dispel any misguided notion that "Judeo-Arabic" was a different language. All of it should be perfectly transparent to any Algerian Arabic speaker except a couple of phrases specific to Jewish culture: ħ̣ad gadya is Aramaic for "one kid goat" (the name of the song), milax həmmạvat is Hebrew for "the Angel of Death" (ملك الموت‍), and qqaduš baṛux hu is Hebrew for "the Holy One, Blessed be He" (referring to God). The word dəbbaħ ("slaughterer"), while obviously Arabic, might also be a religiously specific term for "shohet" (a kosher butcher) rather than the generic term for "butcher" - I'm not sure. Otherwise, every word in the rhyme is etymologically Arabic, although qəṭṭus "cat", zuğ "two", and flus "small coins" are ultimately from Latin or Greek. (Note the complete absence of Berber vocabulary.)

Nevertheless, we do see a few slightly unusual dialectal features. The most striking is the variation between different forms of the relative pronoun: normal əlli coexists with əldi, əddi, hesitant combinations of the two with li, and, oddly enough, ulli, as if this were coordination rather than subordination. The use of əldi, in particular, is reportedly characteristic of Jewish religious registers of Arabic; it looks as though the speaker was in the habit of using əlli in his normal speech, but aimed for əldi in this religious and formulaic context. We also find variation between (eastern) zuz and (central/conservative) zuğ for "two", and assimilation or non-assimilation of the article in əlždi or əžždi "the kid goat", probably a result of the deaffrication of ğīm before d. The loss of interdentals is fairly normal for old urban dialects.

Cardinal points in Northern Songhay

Following a recent message from Mohomodou Houssouba, I was wondering where the names of cardinal points come from across Northern Songhay. The first step towards answering is to realize that "cardinal points" don't seem to be an emic category across Songhay in general. In mainstream Songhay, mostly spoken along the Niger River, the river itself provides a more useful coordinate system: upstream (daŋgey), downstream (dendi), left bank (hawsa), right bank (gurma). The sun provides a useful supplementary axis - east (wayna-hunay, "sunrise") vs. west (wayna-kaŋey, "sunset"). North vs. south, on the other hand, is less significant; these tend to be referred to by the names of countries or regions, rather than using absolute terms. In Niger, for example, Hamadou Soumana Souna gives Azawa (ie Azawagh) for "north"; the Azawagh Valley is indeed north of the Zarma region, but it would be east of Timbuktu or Gao, which accordingly use other expressions.

In the Sahara, the river-based system is naturally of little use. Korandje instead preserves the east-west axis, using the same structure as mainstream Songhay varieties: inə̣w n ṭʕạ-yu "east" ("sunrise"), inə̣w n yạṛaħ-yu "west" ("sunset"). This is not, however, accompanied by any fixed north-south axis; for "north", elicitation sometimes yields bəlhadi, properly "the North Star", but this term is not used to describe locations in the way that "east" and "west" are, and there seems to be no proper equivalent to "south". I'm tempted to suggest that this reflects the oasis' general reluctance to think about its historic southern ties, but in a way it maps on to another, better-established three-direction coordinate system used in Tabelbala. The latter is not perpendicular, and not in my limited experience ever used for describing locations; rather, it relates to the wind directions.

	Korandje winds
ENE	asərqi
NNE	tumiyya
SW	ssaħliyya

As near as I can make it out by comparing a wind rose for Tabelbala's climate, it consists of asərqi "east-northeast wind", tumiyya "north-northeast wind", ssaħliyya "southwest wind". (In an unpublished source, Champault lists a fourth, qʷəbliyya "east wind", which I did not encounter.) Asərqi comes via Berber from the Arabic for "east", šarq; ssaħliyya from sāħil "coast"; qʷəbliyya from qiblah "direction of prayer (towards Mecca)"; but the source of tumiyya is unclear to me. (Suggestions are welcome.)

In the rest of Northern Songhay, spoken in and around the Azawagh Valley - as far as I gather from secondary sources - the relevant vocabulary is largely Tuareg-derived, with no attested Songhay survivals. Tagdal, spoken by the largely nomadic Igdalen, has borrowed the system whole from (Tawellemmet) Tamajeq: "west" is ataram, "east" dinnik, "south" ággaala, "north" támmasna. (Among these, "north" is originally a toponym, "desert".) Tasawaq, spoken in the oasis of In-Gall, differs only in the name for "east": alkubla (from Arabic alqiblah "direction of prayer"). Emghedesie, the extinct variety of the town of Agades, agrees with Tasawaq on "east" and "west", but uses toponyms for "north" and south", respectively air (ie the Air Mountains) and asudán (Arabic as-sūdān "(land of the) Blacks"). (Note, however, that Tayart Tamajeq too uses ayəṛ for "north".) I have no data on Tadaksahak directions for the moment.

	Korandje	Emghedesie	Tasawaq	Tagdal
E	inə̣w n ṭʕạ-yu	elkúbla	alkúbla	dinnik
W	inə̣w n yạṛaħ-yu	atáram	átáram	ataram
N	(bəlhadi)	air	támasna	támmasna
S	-	asúdan	ágala	ággaala

Lemurian Arabic

In the western ports of the continent of Lemuria, on the old trade route to Uqbar and thence to Atlantis, a dialect of Arabic has been spoken since probably the 6th century AD or so. Its longstanding isolation from other Arabic dialects, and its speakers' bilingualism in neighbouring Lemurian languages, has allowed it to develop some rather unusual features. Like all Arabic dialects, it has lost the final short vowels preserved in Classical Arabic; but, unlike any other surviving dialect, it has largely preserved case and mood marking, thanks to extensive final-syllable ablaut.

For example, the noun "book" is conjugated as follows:

	SG	PL
NOM	kitoob	kitaaboot
ACC	kitaab	kitaabeet
GEN	kiteeb	kitaabeet

One thus says royt ilkitaab "I saw the book", sagatʼ ilkitoob "the book fell", deexil ilkiteeb "inside the book". The resulting system is rather reminiscent of Old Irish, among other languages of our own timeline.

Sadly, a full documentation of this fascinating dialect will forever be wanting, due to the difficulty of travelling to fictional destinations and of getting recording equipment to work properly in fantasy universes. However, I trust that the available data is sufficient to establish that phonetic changes such as the loss of final short vowels need not automatically imply the loss of morphological information that the lost phonemes had encoded.

A new Songhay alphabet

In 2019, a new alphabet was invented for Songhay, joining a long list of West African script creation efforts from the 19th century onwards. It may sink without a trace like Garay, or (less probably) it may enjoy a success comparable to that of N'Ko; even in the former case, however, it may be of interest as a case study in script creation. I will therefore summarize what little I know about it below.

According to this page, the script was invented by Ibn Achour Ousmane Touré in 2019, based on livestock marks used by Songhay villages, towns, and regions. He intended it to allow Songhay speakers to write in their own language rather than in French or Arabic, and thus to enable them to continue and progress, following in the footsteps of the Songhay Empire, which he supposes must have had its own writing system at some point. (Songhay is, of course, sometimes written - officially in a Latin-based orthography, unofficially also in Ajami Arabic - but is frequently not thought of as a written language; the primary target of education is literacy in French and/or Arabic, and most locally available printed materials are in one of these languages.) A volunteer committee was set up to promote the script, including the inventor himself, Dr. Imirana Seydou Maiga (secretary), M. Housseiny Ibrahima Maiga (expert advisor), and M. Faissal Kada Maiga (general coordinator and secretary of information). This group seems to use Arabic as their primary language of wider communication, and consists at least in part of Songhay diaspora in the Arab world; the secretary and coordinator seem to have spent time in Saudi Arabia, and the latter is reported to be based in Libya. One might speculate that the script offered them a "third way" to get past the French-Arabic binary.

The alphabet is as follows:

A series of YouTube videos, and posts on Afkaar.Online, clarify the orthography. The writing direction is right to left, and the alphabetic order is obviously inspired in large part by Arabic; there is no capitalization. The diacritics are explained here (titled Hantum maasayan "adding diacritics to writing"):

Vowel length is marked with a macron over the vowel, and vowel nasalization by a tilde (both betraying the influence of a Latin-based transcription); if placed over a consonant rather than a vowel, these respectively indicate that the consonant should be followed by aa or ã. (In this sense, if not in the more usual one, the script has a default vowel a.) In principle, all other vowels are marked plene (though short a occasionally seems to be omitted). Consonant gemination is indicated by a circle over the consonant. The dot under the letter n is dropped when it assimilates to a following consonant (Arabic ikhfā'), a feature inspired by Quranic orthography. (The text above gives an example of final dotless n with a tilde over it at the end of maasayan; this combination is not explained as far as I can see.) Besides this, dots distinguish affricates (dot above) from palatoalveolar sibilants (dot below), and d and g (no dot) from z and ŋ (dot above). The letter for ñ is close to being a graphic hybrid of ŋ and j, appropriately enough.

The system is completed by a set of numerals, using place notation (titled Soŋay-k(a)buyaŋo "Songhay counting"):

Punctuation evidently includes hyphens, used somewhat inconsistently at morpheme boundaries (thus the nominalizing suffix -yan/-yaŋ is not hyphenated in the two previous examples, but is hyphenated in denden-yaŋ "learning"), but fairly consistently in compounds (e.g., in the same post, Soŋay-senni m(a) duuma "may the Songhay language last"). Until examples of longer texts are available, little else can be said about punctuation.

If further data becomes available, I will update this post; if you know of any, comments are welcome! Particular thanks to "Oudi" for indispensable clarifications.

The *Bugzu of Bagzan?

Mt. Băgzăn, at the heart of the predominantly Tuareg-speaking Air massif in Niger, bears a not very Tuareg-looking name. The only Berber meaning for the root BGZ found in Nait-Zerrad is a word used by the neighbouring Iwellemmedan, taken from Alojaly's dictionary: ebăgez, pl. ibəgzan "vessel for dogs or for rubbish"; this corresponds regularly to Tahaggart ebăǵăh, pl. ibəǵhan "crude vase or plate (used for giving dogs their food and for gathering rubbish)", with a feminine tebăǵăht, pl. tibəǵhin "flat, slightly concave instrument used as a dustpan" (Foucauld). Not a root one would want to reconstruct very far back in Berber, nor an obvious source for the name of a mountain.

Hausa provides a surely related form that may shed light on the term's history: the ethnonym būzu < *bugzu (by Klingenheben's Law, as shown by the pl. bugā̀jē) "serf of the Azben [Air] people" (Bargery). The term refers to ex-slaves, iklan, what in Mali would be called Bella. It presumably does not share an etymology with būzu pl. būzā̀yē "undressed skin mat, loin-cloth", with no *g, for which Skinner (1996) gathers plausible cognates elsewhere in Chadic.

Combining the two, we get what looks like a brief glimpse of morphology: the homeland of the *Bugzu is *Bagzan (perhaps their manufactures included crude plates). From a Tuareg perspective, -ăn looks like a masculine plural ending; but the specific vowel alternation would be hard to explain Tuareg-internally, though Tuareg has a-ablaut in other plural types. From a Chadic perspective, one is reminded of the -n plurals of Bade and Ngizim, e.g. Bade zawa-n pl. zawa-n-ən "stick" (Schuh ms), Ngizim gâzbə́r̃ pl. gázbàarín "tall" (Schuh ms, 1972); Ngizim even offers parallels for the vowel alternation, and a-ablaut plurals are widespread in Chadic more generally. The Bade-Ngizim subgroup includes geographically the closest Chadic varieties spoken to the Air besides Hausa, located almost due south of the Air, so it seems a promising point of comparison; could the *Bugzu have spoken a since lost West Chadic B.1 language? But of course, nothing guarantees that Bagzan should be an old plural; perhaps -ăn was a locative suffix, or something else entirely.

I wouldn't be surprised if some early 20th century work proposes this connection, but I haven't come across it in the literature so far; if you have, let me know.

Clitic doubling in Arabia: An update

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

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

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

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