Arabic threatened in Qatar?

In a development that doesn't surprise me but will probably surprise anyone who hasn't been following developments in the Gulf, an educationalist is warning that Arabic is threatened in Qatar, and some Arab children are growing up not speaking it. Recall that Qataris are a rather small minority in Qatar, outnumbered by guest workers from all over the world, mainly from South Asia (especially Kerala), the Arab world, and the Philippines. English has become very much a lingua franca there, and much of the population speaks it far better than Arabic, if they speak Arabic at all.

Qatari children's exposure to English often begins soon after birth, with the hiring of a nanny who is unlikely to speak much if any Arabic, and certain not to speak the Gulf dialect - or as Ms. Al Misnad put it, "the education of the children is left to foreign housemaids, who teach their own language and customs." It continues at school, where about two-thirds of their fellow students are non-Qatari (in practice probably less, due to many expat kids attending expat schools); English is a mandatory subject from first grade up, and the many American universities opening campuses in Qatar are commonly English-medium (for instance, CMU.) In short, it's easy to lead a fairly full life in Qatar with little Arabic, and easy to envision Qatari kids of this generation acquiring English natively.

However, apart from other issues like not giving any statistics or details, the article suffers from the common conflation of classical and colloquial Arabic. "In addition, parents would rather talk to their children in the dialect of their country of origin rather than in classical Arabic, a factor which is also contributing to a general decline in the understanding of the classical language" - as if parents have ever talked to their children in classical Arabic for the past millennium, or as if it were desirable that the children should grow up not speaking their own dialects!

Frananglais in Cameroon - but what exactly is it?

The BBC has recently reported that "Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais - a mixture of French, English and Creole - is affecting the way students speak and write the country's two official languages." An interesting language contact story, in a remarkably multilingual country none of whose own languages are used for official purposes; shame you can read straight through the article without being any the clearer on whether Frananglais is a system in its own right or just what they choose to call the local brand of code-switching between the two. Many of their examples suggest a French syntactic frame with English vocabulary inserted ("Tu as go au school", "Tu play le damba tous les jours?") - raising the possibility that certain English words consistently replace their French counterparts, while others remain in French - but other examples suggest plain old code-switching, ie shifting from one language to another in mid-sentence ("Tout le monde hate me, wey I no know", "je ne suis pas sure about this"). The one other example of frananglais I could find online is very much in line with it having a French frame with English words (and at least one Italian one) inserted, but there simply isn't enough data to see whether the replacement is systematic or ad hoc. I wonder if anyone can tell me :)

Quand je tellais aux djo de came put leur hand dans la marmite ici ,les djo me tellait que je ne suis pas reglo,que sam est un reglo,l'autre que france foot ne prenait pas en consideration de tels votes,et l'autre que je devais plutot appuyer ma petite au lieu de stay ici un saturday afternoon a game come les muna.(au fait moi je l'ai appuyé hier).Je remercie tous les toileurs qui ont sensibilisé le peuple et qui continue a do leur work reglo.Un seul mot....................jusqu'à ce que notre muna soit en haut sur tous les yahoo de ce web.Je vous en prie camez ici sur yahoo italie,la situation se fait inquietante,que les djo des state là quando tout le monde ici en europe nang deja began a do ce qu'ils Know.C'est notre arme segrete,la force du muna c'est le jour,et nous les grands continuons a work meme la nuit grace aux djo des state.J'ai began a speach avec notre frananglais parceque les djo tell qu'ils y'a des Mazembe ici qui boblé nos tactiques et vont les appliquer pour eux memes.Alors il faut qu'on leur show qu'on peut speach sans qu'il ne yah rien..... - Saittout, le 26/10/2006 à 15:33, Lions Indomptables

UPDATE: Language Log has a helpful post on this, citing some literature. See comments also - apparently it is very much a system rather than code-switching.

Semitic snake spells pop up in Pyramids

Prof. Richard Steiner claims to have deciphered a previously incomprehensible section of an ancient Egyptian inscription as a spell against snakes written in a Semitic language. Dating from 2400 BC, this spell, engraved on the pyramid of King Unas, would be the oldest attested West Semitic inscriptions (apparently in the dialect of Byblos), and nearly as old as the oldest Akkadian inscriptions. The idea of Semitic speakers being seen in ancient Egypt as specialists in snake magic is strangely reminiscent of the story of Moses.

Unfortunately, the talk in which he announced this is only available in Hebrew ("Proto-Semitic Spells in the Pyramid Texts") - he is apparently writing up a publishable work on the subject in English - but the link contains the texts themselves (p. 7) and their transcriptions (pp. 3-4) - the bold bits are those claimed to be Semitic, while the rest is regular Egyptian. He also has up a response in English to criticisms of his claim, which apparently were not long in coming. My Hebrew is not nearly good enough to understand most of the translations he gives, but here's a couple of bits I think I got:

236: ''kbbh iti itii bitii'' = Chant: Come, come, to my house!
281: ''mmin inw 333 twb ś if w-inw hnw'' = Who am I? Rir-Rir - sweet of smell in my nose - I am they. (there just has to be a translation error in this one - probably made by me)

From these, you can see a number of recognisable Semitic words - ''iti'' for "come" (Arabic أتى 'atā, Syriac 'atā), ''bit'' for "house" (Arabic بيت bayt, Hebrew bayit, Syriac bayt-ā), ''mmin'' for "who?" (Arabic من man, Hebrew mîn, Syriac man), ''twb'' for "good" (Arabic طيب ṭayyib, Hebrew ṭôb, Syriac ṭāb)... Specifically Canaanite features, if any, are less conspicuous; the assimilation of Proto-Semitic ''n'' to a following consonant presumably found in ''if'' "nose" (Arabic أنف 'anf, Hebrew 'āp) is found in Canaanite, but also in Akkadian.

Manly numbers in Tashelhiyt Berber

I've been looking at how and why Arabic numbers have been so widely borrowed into Berber, and came across a rather illuminating quote:

"Also, for the numbers 3-29 one frequently chooses the Arabic terms (ie. those in §171.) The women and small children of the Tazĕrwalt-Shlûḥ by preference count (as far as possible) with the Berber numbers, the men by preference (from 10 up) with the Arabic ones. Therefore the Shlûḥ call the Berber numbers laḥsâb (الحساب) ntimġârin, and the Arabic ones laḥsâb niirgâzĕn - ie women's counting* vs. men's counting."

("Auch für die Zahlen von 3-29 wählt man häufig die arabischen Bezeichnungen (s. diese in §171). Die Frauen und kleinen Kinder der Tazĕrwalt-Schlûḥ zählen lieber (soweit es angeht) mit den berberischen Zahlen, die Männer lieber (von 10 an) mit den arabischen. Deshalb bezeichnen diese Schlûḥ die berberische Zählweise als laḥsâb (الحساب) ntimġârin, die arabische aber als laḥsâb niirgâzĕn - also als die Frauenzählweise, bezw. Männerzählweise." - Stumme 1899:102)

If you're interested, and in the vicinity of Cambridge in March, I'll be talking about this issue at CamLing.

* Shurely "old women's counting"?

Bibliography:
Stumme, Hans. 1899. Handbuch des Schilhischen von Tazerwalt. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs.

Black = free: a nice case of polysemy in Songhay, and its converse

Looking through Jeffrey Heath's 1998 dictionary of Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language spoken in and around Timbuktu, I was struck by the following entry:

bibi * a) [intr] be black, dark [cf bii 2] [INTENS: tirik! T, fi! N] * be freeborn, noble (not a slave) * LOCUT: bañña nda bibi slave and freeman alike * [final in compounds involving sorcery, => čiini-bibi * b) [adj] black, dark * c. [n] soot, burnt residue.

It contrasts satisfyingly with the sort of polysemy you tend to get for "black" on the other shore of the Sahara, as in this Kabyle entry from Dallet 1982:

akli (wa), aklan (wa) || Negro. || Slave, servant. || Butcher; profession reserved for the inferior class of aklan (slaughterer and wholesale and retail vendor in the market.) || Male first name often given to a Kabyle child as a prophylactic measure (against envious gazes and the evil eye.) Antonym: aḥerri [free].

It would be interesting to examine the connotations of "black" in more languages...

Aboriginal language of the Ahaggar

Tuareg oral tradition records that, when the Tuareg arrived in the Ahaggar (Hoggar) Mountains of southern Algeria sometime in the first millennium AD, they encountered people called the Isăbătăn - a sparse population of hunters and goat herds, stereotyped in popular anecdotes as stupid. Parts of the Dag-Ghali tribe claim descent from them. What language did they speak? We may never have enough data to know for sure, but Tuareg stories provide possible clues, sometimes putting seemingly nonsensical, or at least non-Tuareg, words into the mouths of Isăbătăn characters. I recently came across an example, quoted from Pandolfi 1998:132 in Kossmann 2005:15 (transcription slightly modified):

Ikkəršərmadən tangarən damadən.
The ants come in and go out.

The morphology of the sentence is Tuareg - -ən is the normal Tuareg masculine plural suffix, while i- is a normal Tuareg nominal plural prefix. But the lexical stems - -kkəršərmad- "ant" (?), tangar- "come in", damad- "go out" - have no obvious Tuareg or broader Berber cognates. Unlikely as it is, it would be interesting if one of my readers happened to recognise an obvious source for these...

Bibliography:
Kossmann, Maarten. 2005. Berber Loanwords in Hausa. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
Pandolfi, Paul. 1998. Les Touaregs de l'Ahaggar (Sahara algérien). Parenté et résidence chez les Dag-Ghali. Paris: Karthala.

Maghreb sociolinguistics

I've just come across a couple of interesting posts on the North African sociolinguistic situation. On Aqoul, Shaheen discusses a topic close to my heart - how the dominance of French hurts the Maghreb's economy and makes new ideas take longer to reach it:

The ubiquity of French not only aggravates the dependence of the Maghreb to France, it impedes the region's ability to develop beyond its traditional (colonial) ties. Worse, it not only serves as an economic chain, it culturally acts like an albatross around their necks: everything, from law to social models is borrowed from France. Considering how inefficient and sterile French models and intellectual production can be today in most fields when compared to their anglo-saxon counterparts, the Maghreb is riding a losing horse. It isolates individual Maghrebis from most scientific and economic literature...

Some of the comments are worth reading as well, and the author links to published online papers (bibliography in a blog post - always a trend worth promoting!)

In a more personal post, "Filjazair" describes Algeria's linguistic "schizophrenia", as it appears to a heritage learner:

I hear, a lot, things like: "Don't bother learning darija, it's not worth it"; "You don't need to learn fusha [formal Arabic], nobody speaks it"; "Our language [Arabic, formal Arabic] is being corrupted - we're still in the age of colonisation!" (this from one student who'd heard that another student had to write her university thesis in French); "Everybody speaks French, that's all you need"; "Everybody speaks darija, that's all you need."

Chaos.

So I'm in a French class with Algerians who already know a lot of French but speak it sloppily, and who feel a need - because of work, because of school, because of future prospects - to get better. This week I start formal Arabic lessons with a tutor downtown. And along the way I'm trying to pick up snippets of darija to use in the street, so as not to have to use too much of the French or Arabic I'm learning, because French marks you as a foreigner (or worse, a snob - an Algerian in contempt of her Algerianness) and because nobody actually speaks the formal Arabic.

-n't infixation in English

Consider the following word:

Finally one said "It's astonishing. Frankly astonishing. The man has actually got charisn'tma."
"Your meaning?"
"I mean he's so dreadful he fascinates people. Like those stories he was telling... Did you notice how people kept encouraging him because they couldn't actually believe anyone would tell jokes like that in mixed company?" - Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay, 1996, p. 289

This word may not be original to Terry Pratchett, incidentally - this document suggests it appeared in a show called My Word! back in 1976. It gets 90 ghits, (including one in Polish), concentrated disproportionately in reviews:
* "...cardboardy Paul Walker, whose lack of presence ('charisn'tma'?) sucked much of the life out of..."
* "Collectively, they exude charisn'tma, and one or two even possess what Ken Campbell once described as "the legendary Minus Quality" whereby when they exit, the stage somehow seems fuller."
* "Hard-edged r&b from the band with a front man who exudes charisma. Me? I exude charisn'tma."

In this structure, a common word's meaning is "inverted" for comic effect by adding -n't to a portion of it which resembles a common auxiliary verb. I can think of at least one other such case:

"I even attempted a beehive do, but I ran out of hairspray. So it kind of turned into a don't." - Douglas Coupland, Generation X, p. 82

Believe it or not, this one gets some ghits as well, though it's obviously hard to determine how many:
* "Scarlett's Hair-Don't"
* "Hair-Bow is a Hair-Don't"
* "Is it a hair DO or hair DON'T???"
and an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

And at the even less lexicalised end of the spectrum, we find stuff like this:
* "Another Republican’t paragon of virtue"
* "As it happens, my friend Tom Schaller noticed that many of you liked “Republican’ts” — and he suggests that we all start using it, at least as often as the GOP throws around “Democrat Party.”"
* "You’ve seen me in action. You know I’ll get you out. I’m a Mexican, not a Mexican’t!”"
* "did you hear about the lazy, unambitious bird? It was a whippoorwon't. (Yuck, I hate puns.)"

Your question for 10 points: do portmanteau words like this need to be accounted for by a full theory of morphology, or are they monstrosities that should be swept under the rug into psychologists' labs? These words' two components seem to both contribute to their meaning, but not exhaustively, in much the same way as the meaning of "catty" is partly but not completely predictable from "cat" and "-y"; how should that relation be characterised?

The plural-breaking mountains of Oman

Arabic is well-known in phonological circles for the diversity and complexity of its broken plurals (jam` at-taksiir جمع التكسير) - that is, plurals formed at least partly by internal modification of the word. The commonest type for four-consonant roots is mainly characterised by an -aa- after the second consonant. For example:

daftar-un > dafaatir-u "notebook"
kawkab-un > kawaakib-u "planet"

Certain rather regular complexities emerge when a long vowel is present in the singular; depending on position, it is either treated as an extra consonant or affects the length of an output vowel:

xaatam-un > xawaatim-u "ring"
risaal-at-un > rasaa'il-u "letter"
qaanuun-un > qawaaniin-u "law"

If the stem has more than four consonants and takes this plural types, the later ones get dropped off the edge, so to speak:

`ankaabuut-un > `anaakib-u "spider"

Now this has been the subject of some interesting work, notably in autosegmental phonology, where such phenomena have been taken as a strong argument for separating consonants and vowels into separate tiers. For Arabic, the plural morphology itself - in this case, the skeleton -a-aa-i[i]-, but there are many others - never seems to involve infixing a true consonant; diminutives in -u-ay-i- can be explained away by treating -y- as a semivowel. But that changes if we look beyond Arabic...

Jibbali/Sheri is a Semitic language spoken on the southern coast of Oman, and (despite its location) is neither descended from nor mutually intelligible with Arabic. Among other changes, it no longer has distinctive vowel length. Its commonest equivalent of the Arabic plural form described above involves the insertion of -ab-/-ɛb- instead of -aa-:

dəftɔr > defɛbtər "notebook"
kənsed > kenabsəd "shoulder"
mɛrkɛb > mirɛbkəb "boat"
muṣħar > muṣɛbħar "branding iron"

although it does have a more Arabic-like form with -o-/-ɔ- in some (mainly feminine) cases:

maħfer > moħofur "basket"
ħalḳũ-t > ħɔloḳum "Adam's apple"

Note that the -ab- plural is productive enough to apply to Arabic borrowings like dəftɔr. I would love to know how this form emerged; as far as I know, no other Semitic language has a b-infix plural.


Bibliography:
Ratcliffe, Robert R. The 'Broken' Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic. John Benjamins: Amsterdam 1998.

Executable articles

Mark Liberman recently made an excellent suggestion on Language Log: scientific and technical papers should include an explicit, executable recipe for generating their numbers, tables and graphs from published data. However, I think if anything he undersells the possibilities. Where executable algorithms could make a big difference to linguistics papers is in testing proposed rules - phonological principles; historical sound shifts; morphological rules...

If someone proposes a vocabulary of protoforms and a set of regular sound shifts, they are writing an explicit algorithm already. With an accompanying executable version of it, taking protoforms as input and outputting descendant forms (and programs to do some of this have already been written, eg Geoff's Sound Change Applier, Phono), you would be able to know exactly what the predicted forms in each descendant language would be, and be able to spot irregularities (in other words, prediction failures) with ease.

Likewise, if someone proposes a phonological principle (whether conceived of as a rule, as a constraint, or otherwise), you could test its effect on arbitrary data and see if it makes the right predictions. Gaps in the theory (for example, the representation of clicks in Government Phonology) or non-computable theories (an accusation sometimes made against Optimality Theory) would be conspicuous: the input would rejected, or the program would simply be unwritable. The phonology of a language would be accompanied as a matter of course by a program generating phonetic representations from phonemic inputs. In fact, a widespread and welcome trend in modern phonology is to regard individual language's phonologies as specific instantiations of universal constraints or structures; so let each theory be fully specified as a programming language, and each individual language's phonology be represented in it (as an ordered list of constraints, or a set of parameter settings, or whatever your favorite theory does). Inconsistencies or ambiguities would stand out like sore thumbs as you played around with the program. In short, executable articles would make linguistic theories more accountable, and make it easier to spot gaps and places where further work is called for.

Incidentally, I have occasionally been known to practice what I'm preaching here: way back when I was studying mathematics, I wrote a program to generate Algerian Arabic broken plurals from singulars, and found the experience very informative. (It worked, too.) Unfortunately, this program was written in Visual Basic 3.0, not a programming language that has aged very well... which is, of course, another issue that would have to be considered.

<g> in Arabic

A belated Eid Mubarak and Happy New Year to all my readers!

This post is brought to you by the letter G - a sound all too common in many languages, including many dialects of Arabic, yet absent from Classical Arabic, leading to a minor quandary for transcribers, and to substantial regional variation. In Morocco, [g] in names is typically written using a kaf ك with three dots (ڭ), as in this sign. In Algeria and Tunisia, it's typically a qaf ق with three dots (ڨ), a choice reflecting the sound shift q > g common in Bedouin dialects, but unfortunately easily confused with the fa with three dots (ڤ) often used elsewhere in the Arab world for [v]. In Egypt, a jim ج is generally used, since classical j is pronounced g in Egyptian dialect. Elsewhere in the Arab world, a kaf with a line on top (گ), as in Persian or Kurdish, is sometimes used. In adapting foreign loanwords, ghayn (eg بلغاريا Bulgaria) or jiim (eg إنجيليزية English) are usual. In a Qatari mall recently, however, I saw yet another system: Osh Kosh B'Gosh was transcribed as أوش كوش بيڠوش, with a ghayn with three dots (Malay ng). I have no idea what country this may be characteristic of - even here it appears rather unusual. Any thoughts?

The earliest recorded pidgin - Maridi Arabic?

Some years ago, browsing in a bookstore, I came across a mention of a Mauritanian Arabic-based pidgin recorded by the medieval geographer Al-Bakri. For years since, I have been regretting not having written down the details; even reading through a copy of Al Bakri's description of North Africa brought no joy. Today, I finally found the mention again, and managed to track down the original reference - and understand why I didn't find it before...

Al-Bakri (1014-1097) was a noted geographer and less noted writer from Huelva in modern-day Spain. His description of North Africa was the most detailed since Roman times, and his descriptions of West Africa are among the earliest surviving - despite the fact that he himself never seems to have left Spain, relying instead on travellers' descriptions. Only some twelve manuscripts of his greatest work, al-Masālik wal-Mamālik, survive, none complete. The passage containing the pidgin text, unfortunately, is absent from most printed editions of al-Bakri, including every edition that I could find at SOAS: according to Thomason and Elgibali, "we have found our text only in a printed copy of al-Bakrī located in the national library of Egypt in Cairo; this copy is dated 1943, but we do not know who compiled it or - more importantly - what its manuscript source was."

Without further ado, here is the text, as given by Thomason and Elgibali, who apparently found it somewhere in a section describing Aswan and other Egyptian towns:

Someone told me that a dignitary from the people of Aswan used to travel a lot. One day he reached a small town called Maridi. Upon his return, he said to the prince of the believers: 'Sir, may God give you plenty of good and honour your face, here is my case! Its goal is to preserve and spread the word of God. The Blacks have mutilated our beautiful language and spoiled its eloquency [sic] with their twisted tongues. During my visit, Sir - may God protect you - only God's guidance helped me escape the dangers and understand their miserable Arabic. Sometimes, and may God forgive me if I did wrong, I could only laugh at what they called Arabic; and may God forgive me if I call what they uttered Arabic. Listen, Sir:

[and here I add my entirely conjectural vocalisation; for the original, see below] bī waħid yūm rādūl, Dūmā lū 'isim. damal lū 'ū wa bin lū 'ū. 'umnī dī rūħ 'a`adnī bī maħall. kīk lū 'ūl "ħaram, 'inta barbar, bin mū rūħ, 'inta barbar; 'a`adū!" 'umnī damal fū' 'ū, kīk lū 'ūl "ħaram, 'inta barbar, bin 'a`ad, dūmā rūħ." kīk lū 'ūl ħaram 'inta barbar. Dūmā 'ūl: "kīk mū diyyid mū muhī."

One day there was a man whose name was Jumu`a. He had a camel and a son. They were going to stay in a place. People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian! Your son should not walk, you barbarian; seat him!" They were on the camel. People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian!" The son sat and Jumu`a walked. ̂People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian!" Jumu`a said "People(?) are neither good nor important."

The prince of the believers ordered that his need be met.

The chances of copyists having mangled this bizarre passage are high; the chances that the printers mangled it (or left out whatever vocalisation might have been present) makes the situation even worse. (Certainly De Slane's edition shows instances of both; thus his īħan Yākūš, given as Berber for "God is one", is almost certainly a mistake for ījan Yākūš, by the omission of a dot.) However, it shows some striking features.

The near-absence of morphology, the apparent presence of tense particles, and the simplification of the phonology are all suggestive of a pidgin, and a pidgin is exactly what one would expect given the nature of the trans-Sahara trade. Phonetically, the substitution of ' for qāf is characteristic of lower Egypt and the Levant, but also of several city dialects in the Maghreb and of Maltese; the substitution of d for j is widespread in upper Egypt, but I know of no modern dialect that has both features. The word kīk scarcely looks like Arabic; Thomason & Elgibali suggest a possible interpretation, based on two etymons reportedly widespread in Nilo-Saharan (koi "person", -k "plural"), as "people".

Where was this pidgin spoken? Unfortunately, the text is thoroughly vague on this point, and Maradi's location is unknown. The paragraph after it is a condensed version of a passage elsewhere in al-Bakri describing the Lamtūna tribe of Mauritania, so Thomason and Elgibali suggest that it was spoken in Mauritania; however, Owens notes that both the phonetics of the text and the attribution to a person from Aswan (not to mention the possible presence of a Nilo-Saharan word) suggest a location somewhere in modern-day Sudan.

Of course, until someone finds the manuscript containing this passage, I will be unable to banish a slight suspicion that this whole passage might be an obscure joke by the printers (whoever they might be - the book in Cairo in question does not appear in Thomason and Elgibali's bibliography) on linguists worldwide... However, if authentic (and it scarcely seems likely that the printers would have made it up), this may well be the earliest attested passage in a pidgin, and certainly the earliest Arabic-based pidgin reported. It also provides an illustration of several rather common responses to pidgins and creoles: the half-shocked half-amused contempt for its differences from the lexifier language, the idea that the pidgin itself constitutes an obstacle to learning that needs to be overcome by education in the lexifier language, and the idea that this latter task is the state's responsibility.

PS (23 Dec): In Arabic, this story is more usually told of Juha; it occurs to me that دوما (Dūmā) may well be a misreading/miscopying of دوها (Dūhā), which would be a plausible rendition of Juha, rather than of the rather unusual name Jumu`a.

Arabic: (unfortunately, the portion given starts at "Sir, may God give you plenty of good"; the typeface is also extraordinarily blurry. I have taken the liberty of adding some punctuation.)

مولاي الخليفة جزاك الله خيرا وأكرم وجهك، إليك قضيتي ومحتواها حفظ كلمة الله ونشرها... فإن السود قد قطعوا اوصال لغتنا الجميلة تقطيعا وأفسدوا بيانها بشرير ألسنتهم المعوجة، فأثناء زيارتي (حفظك الله) كان إلهام الله ووحيه المعينين الوحيدين للنجاة من الأخطار وفهم ما أرادوا قوله لي بعربيتهم المزرية، فأحيانا يا مولاي (وسامحني الله إن أخطئت) كنت لا أملك الضحك على عربيتهم - وليسامحني: الله إن أطلقت على ما نطقوا بها اسم العربية، فاسمع يا سيدي:

بي وحد يوم رادول دوما لو اسم دمل لو او وبن لو او امني دي روح اعدي بي محل كيك لو لوب حرم انت بربر بن مو روح انت بربر لو اعدو امني دمل فوء او كيك لو اول حرم انت بربر بن اعد دوما روح كيك لو اول حرم انت بربر دوما اول كيك مو ديد مو مهي

Bibliography:

• Al-Bakri, Description de l'Afrique septentrionale, M. G. De Slane, trans. (Alger, 1913).
  
• Jonathan Owens. "Arabic-based Pidgins and Creoles", in Contact languages: a wider perspective, ed. Sarah G. Thomason. Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1996.
  
• Sarah G. Thomason and Alaa Elgibali. "Before the Lingua Franca: Pidginized Arabic in the Eleventh Century A.D.". Lingua 68 (1986) 317-349.

No Arabic please, we're American

If you haven't already seen it, the Baker report brought to light a piece of epic stupidity in Iraq:

All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handi-
capped by Americans’ lack of language and cultural understanding. Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency. In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communication with Iraqis, we are often at a disadvantage. There are still far too few Arab language–proficient military and civilian officers in Iraq, to the detriment of the U.S. mission.

Why make such an easily fixable mistake? I suspect because they view most of America's large population of fluent Arabic speakers as security risks - although apparently other factors play a role too...

(Hat tip: Aqoul.)

The grammar of talking to yourself

In the Dark Ages, too, linguists sometimes got a little worked up over theoretical differences (if a work of fiction is to be believed):

"Those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of 'ego' [I], and in the end they attacked each other, with edged weapons." - Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

In a sense, one would expect that "I" should really have a vocative - certainly people talk to themselves sometimes - yet Latin's lack of a vocative "I" is paralleled in English. If John (that old linguists' standby) tells himself "John, get up and do some work", the sentence is not grammatically odd; if he tells himself "*I, get up and do some work" or "*Me, get up and do some work", neither sentence is grammatically possible. Note that no such restriction applies to non-vocative uses; it would be equally grammatical for John to tell himself "I'm in luck!" or "You're in luck!" Even resorting in desperation to the archaic English vocative "O" yields nothing: "O I!" is ridiculous, and "Oh me!" is already in use as a rather silly exclamation. So why should the vocative of "I" be so hard to form?

Update: Thanks to Language Hat, I have learned of an interesting post on the very grammarian of whom Eco is writing.

Speaking Arabic in public; or: don't say Yallah

You may have heard about the imams who got taken off a plane in the US (Minneapolis) because some passenger thought they were suspicious. Apparently:

Before passengers boarded, one became alarmed by an overheard discussion. "They seemed angry," he wrote in a police statement. "Mentioned 'U.S.' and 'killing Saddam.' Two men then swore slightly under their breath/mumbled. They spoke Arabic again. The gate called boarding for the flight. The men then chanted 'Allah, Allah, Allah.'"

It's bizarre the way that "They spoke Arabic again" seems to be characterised as somehow suspicious in itself - but the part that really makes me think "duhhhh!" is "The gate called boarding for the flight. The men then chanted 'Allah, Allah, Allah.'" It's obvious what they must really have been saying (although I haven't seen any paper point this out): Yallah, yallah, meaning "come on! let's go!". If even the use of the word "Allah" alarms some paranoid passengers, then Arabs will be hard-pressed to speak at all - between inshallah, hamdulillah, and bismillah alone (let alone yallah or wallah) you could easily reach at least one mention of "Allah" every couple of sentences in a completely mundane conversation! I hope this is an isolated instance rather than a trend.

In related news, speaking Yan-Nhangu is apparently suspicious as well...

In unrelated news, I thought Tulugaq's Google Map of Inupiaq was pretty cool, as is Sydney Place Names - I hope this is a trend.

"An elaborate series of grunts and gestures"

More in the weird colonial-era language books series - this time "The Siwi Language", by W. Seymour Walker, F.R.G.S (Late Royal Artillery), with a foreword by His Excellency Wilson Pasha (Governor, Western Desert Province of Egypt), 1921:

There are no interjections in Siwi which are sufficiently constant to be worth committing to paper.
Their meaning is expressed by an elaborate series of grunts and gestures which can only be acquired by practice.

And:

There is only one noun-adj. in Siwi in which the masc. and fem. forms are identical:
zlèta, naked, bare
Note 30. This exception is a good example of the construction of the Siwi vocabulary, and illustrates one of the reasons for its paucity. Amongst the women a naked female is quite a possibility, but to the general Siwani mind, it is so inconceivable, and so contrary to all established customs, that no special word-form has been evolved to cope with such an obvious phenomenon.

If you want to hear what Siwi is really like, the indefatigable Madi has put a Siwi audio file up on Tawalt: the Story of Prince Sayf. With a bit of help from books like Walker's (and more usefully Laoust's), I can make out a fair bit of it. Remarkably, Siwi has borrowed Arabic's comparative form, as you can hear in the second sentence.

Gulf Arabic (and Hindi?) Pidgin

It should be unsurprising that a pidgin trade-Arabic has evolved in the Gulf, given the incredibly large proportion of the population from non-Arabic-speaking countries. But this is the first info I've seen on it online. Not much actual detail (I would add the word siida "straight ahead"), but it also mentions a pidgin Hindi, which is more surprising. Sounds worth investigating...

How to give orders in Angass

I'm researching Chadic imperatives at the moment, so I opened Angass Manual - written by H. D. Foulkes, Captain (late R. F. A.), Political Officer, Nigeria in 1915) to the appropriate section, and found it to consist solely of the following advice:

The Imperative is of the same form as the rest of the verbal forms, only uttered with the necessary tone of authority.

I suppose it's too much to expect an Edwardian captain to be able to transcribe tones, but I couldn't read that without bursting out laughing.

The book gets even better, with such cringeworthy gems as this "explanation" for phonological processes:

"The Angass, like most negroes, have a nice ear, and they endeavour to prevent harsh sounds coming together."

I particularly like how he explains that Angass grammar is really simple:

"The language is so simple in construction that I am hoping a study of it may help in elucidating the groundwork of more elaborated Negro languages."

since anything he can't get to grips with must not be part of its grammar:

"The only difficulty - but it is a very real one - in the colloquial is the apparently capricious employment of a large number of particles, the use of which, though immaterial from a grammatical point of view, is, however, necessary in practice, for without them the sentence certainly loses its flavour, and seemingly some of its sense, in that an ordinary man cannot understand a phrase unless it is enunciated exactly in the way he is accustomed to hearing it, and the omission or transposition of a word bothers him considerably."

rka and yya: from Arabic to Berber, or Berber to Arabic?

I had always assumed, with no particular evidence, that the frequent Algerian Arabic word rka ركا ("rot", v.) was of some obscure Arabic origin; it looks like a normal Arabic word, after all, with a triliteral root and a weak 3rd consonant and a regular conjugation (although that non-emphatic r is suspicious, in retrospect.) It even has a corresponding adjective, raki "rotten", and there is a verb ركا in Fusha, though its range of meanings ("dig", "fix", "slander"...) show no obvious similarity to "rot". So I was somewhat surprised to see, looking at Kossmann 1999:176, that it occurs throughout Northern and Southern Berber languages, with k shifting to sh in Zenati ones as expected, and can clearly be reconstructed for proto-Berber. A lot of common Algerian Arabic words of obscure origins that I had thought might be from Berber haven't held up to closer examination, but this one looks pretty solid.

So on that note, consider the irregular imperative of "come" in Algerian Arabic: not the impossible *ji, but ayya أيّا. I understand this word is also present as an irregular imperative of as ("come") in Kabyle, Chenoua, and Tumzabt; so does it come from Arabic or Berber? In Arabic, hayyaa هيّا "hurry!" seems a plausible-looking but not indisputable source for it; dropping the h would be irregular, but there are other examples (نوظ "get up", presumably from نهض). So the question hinges on how widely the word yya is distributed among Berber languages. Is it found in Chaoui, for example? Or Tamasheq, or Tashlhiyt, or even Siwa? I'm hoping some readers will be able to help answer these question... :)

Sahha eidkoum! and Yobe languages

And Eid Mubarak, everybody! I've already posted on the etymology of this term before, so for lack of anything new to say on it, here's a nice site I've come across: Yobe languages, with handy materials on six minor Chadic languages of Nigeria.