Update from Tabelbala

I've gotten a clearer idea of the linguistic situation here. Apart from Kwarandjie, which, as I've said, is the main language of three of the four villages (and used to be the lingua franca of the oasis), and of course Arabic, there are a few families here (in Ifrenyu and el-Karti) speaking Tamazight - specifically, the dialects of the Ayt Khebbach and Ayt Atta tribes of southern Morocco. They seem to have traditionally been nomads in the general vicinity who settled down here in the seventies or so, although much outnumbered by the (Hassaniya Arabic speaking) Rgaybat who constitute what little population there is in the desert surrounding Tabelbala. I've been doing a little fieldwork with them, focusing on vocabulary that might be relevant to Kwarandjie etymologies, and have been struck by how rarely they seem to provide the source for Kwarandjie's Berber vocabulary - even when the word is quite common in Berber (as it often is not), like adra for "mountain", they seem to use a different one (in this case, tawrirt). The speakers I've spoken to have a rather impressively large vocabulary, but often seem quite embarrassed to speak the language at all - one at first quoted me a local proverb "Esshelha ma hi klam, weddhen ma hu lidam" - Shelha isn't language like ghee isn't (some sort of highly valued medicinal fat product.)"

The list of tense/aspect/mood particles continue to grow - a particularly impressive example I encountered yesterday was `a-s-a`a-m-k-dri (1S-neg-prox.fut.-subj.-yet-go), meaning something like "I've totally stopped going." (ma tlitsh nruh kamel). Actually, -s-a`a-m is a contraction that probably deserves a single lexical entry, but never mind. Note the `ayns in historic Songhay vocabulary here, deriving from original gh.

The phonological issues I mentioned last turn out to derive historically from deletion of an emphatic r, not from any significant difference in the consonants themselves. Not sure yet how to deal with them synchronically, though...

Brief update

Today I'm in Bechar, with a somewhat more effective net connection; I apologise for the poor appearance of the previous one, which I sent by email. I am currently sitting with Omar Yahiaoui (who asked me to mention this); I've been hanging out mainly with the Yahiaoui extended family of Kwara, one of the three villages that speak the language, although I'll have to balance this soon with some extended staying in Ifrenyu, the other main village with which there is a certain amount of mostly but not totally friendly rivalry. The phonology keeps getting bigger and richer - never mind all the emphatics and labiovelarised consonants and affricates, there are a few contrasts involving h and gw that have clear effects on surrounding vowels but that I simply can't seem to hear. I've made a few more recordings, and done a bit more sightseeing, going into the erg a little - sand dunes and not much else from Tabelbala all the way to Ougarta.

PS: should have written Shelha, not "Shelhiyya", in my previous Bechar post.

Fieldwork post I

Hello everybody! I am alive and well in Tabelbala, speaking "Korandje" ([kwɑ́:ṛɑ-n-dʒji], probably /kwaṛa-n-dzyəy/) on a regular basis and writing down vast numbers of obscure words enthusiastically volunteered by the more fluent older generation of speakers, while trying to figure out grammatical issues from natural speech overheard or addressed to me and from occasional elicitation when I can find someone who will put up with it. I've filled a notebook of more than two hundred pages with notes already, but I've done only a very small amount of recording, which has so far proven harder to negotiate.

The people here are incredibly hospitable, and the area remarkable for its beauty - an oasis of gardens (ləmbyu) and irrigation canals (tsirgyanən) between the mountain (aḍṛa) and the erg (amrər). However, it is remarkably isolated, connected to the outside world (and the nearest towns are a very long way away) by only a single road and a single telephone line, which has not been conducive to job creation; there is talk of a second road to Adrar, which might help. Its inherent touristic potential, which some here are keen on expanding, is difficult to realise in the absence of any hotels.

The language is clearly endangered. People from about 30 and up speak it routinely (though all speakers appear to speak dialectal Arabic to native standard), but most younger speakers seem to have a primarily passive knowledge of the language, always answering in Arabic or struggling to find even basic vocabulary, though this is more true of some families than others. Most people I've spent time talking with have been keen on the idea of reviving its fortunes, or even teaching it in school "like Kabyle", but some have been rather more negative, dismissing it as not a proper language and of no use.

There's some very interesting stuff going on in the language, including what I take to be a sound shift in progress of affricated [kç] (the sound that Cancel wrote as <χ>) to affricated [ts] (of which speakers are well aware.) Cancel's <th>, incidentally, is itself [ts]. The tense/aspect/mood system has been reworked much more radically than existing materials indicated, with a past copula (also used for what I so far interpret as a past progressive) ga showing up before personal agreement rather than, like aspect and mood markers, after. The phonology is complex: tone and most vowel contrasts have definitely been lost, but a lot of emphatics have been gained, including such unusual sounds as affricated [ṭṣ]. Vowels reduced to schwa, and lost coda r's, reappear in verbs when you add a 3rd person direct object pronoun "clitic" (but not when you add a 3rd person indirect object one.) The language has a specialised focus marker, which interacts interestingly with subject person/number markers. The vocabulary is of major interest in its own right for what it has to say about the history of this part of the Sahara. It defies any simple effort to pin down the immediate source of the agricultural technologies that have allowed the Belbalis to survive and flourish here: "palm" is Songhay kungu, but "date" Berber tsini; a foggara is Songhay bəng-bini as long as it stays underground, but Berber tsargya once it emerges.

Bechar

I am currently in Bechar, the local capital, and plan to take the four-hour coach trip to Tabelbala tomorrow inshallah. After corresponding with a computing student here whose family is from Tabelbala for some time, I've finally met him in person; he seems a nice guy. Interestingly, when speaking Arabic, he calls Korandje "shelHiyya" - the name usually applied to the Berber dialects of the region and of southern Morocco. This suggests to me that this word may have become a generic term for non-Arabic local languages, in which case all statements about a given oasis around here speaking "Tachelhit" or "Shelha" need to be checked carefully.

Naturally, I've combed the local bookstores (there aren't too many, but there is a university here after all); I only found one book relating to the linguistics of this rough area, a work by Mohamed Bouali (2004) on the attitudes of people in the Berber-speaking oasis of Boussemghoun in western Algeria to a number of issues, including their own and other Algerian languages. Not very surprisingly, these seem closely aligned with moderate conservative opinion in Algeria generally, rather than showing any particularly strong similarity to the spectrum of attitudes common in Kabylie; his interviewees displayed pride in their language, but also identified fairly strongly with Arabic, and were more often than not hostile to the idea of teaching Berber ("Tachelhit") in school. The author reports that, unlike in some nearby oases, the Semghounis have consistently retained Berber and show no signs of shifting to Arabic as a home language. In Bechar itself, all talk I've heard has been in Arabic; the local accent is distinguished a lot of affricated t's (ts) and frequent use of "wah" for "yes", but is overall even closer to my own dialect then I was expecting.

Fieldwork begins

First of all: a belated Eid Mubarak everybody!

Second: Tomorrow I'm flying to Algeria, and heading to Tabelbala soon after to document Korandje (Kwarandji), a northern Songhay language spoken only there. I don't yet know how accessible the Internet is in Tabelbala, so blogging may be even more irregular than so far, or even impossible. If it is reasonably accessible, I plan to recount my experiences doing research out there - so stay tuned...

Language learning link

I recently found out just how much downloadable language material - mainly Peace Corps manuals, grammars, and dictionaries - there was on a site called ERIC, including but not limited to Hassaniya, Fulfulde, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Malagasy, Tashelhiyt ("Tashelheet"), Hausa, Ilocano, Sinhala... It seems only fair to spread the word.

Child triglossia: an anecdote

While I was in Algeria, I was watching a cousin's toddler play with one of those toy computers that play a word when you press on a letter. The words, in this case, were in Arabic - Fusha (Classical), of course. Several times she repeated after the machine and then, with a very emphatic tone, added the Darja (Algerian dialect) translation - for example:

Machine: qird (monkey)
Toddler: qird! šadi!

Then she got to "bird" (Arabic ṭā'ir) and came out with the memorable line:

ṭā'ir! u b-əṛ-ṛumiyaa nqulu-lu ḷa ṭa'ir.
(ṭā'ir! And in French we call it ḷa ṭa'ir.)

Gets you wondering, really... how do kids acquire di/triglossia? It's certainly not just a matter of what they learn in school, as this case illustrates.

Berber Qur'an translations

Thanks to the efforts of various press agencies, there has been a story floating around the Internet this year about the "first Tamazight Quran". In reality, it's more like the last first Tamazight Quran. I'll try to describe the situation to date as best I can; if any readers know of relevant material I have omitted, please tell me!

You will find occasional reports online that the medieval Berghouata kingdom put together a Berber Qur'an translation; these are misunderstandings. If you look at what al-Bakri (the oldest source I can think of offhand for this) actually says about the Berghouata, he says their second king Salih ibn Tarif claimed to have received a revelation in Berber in 80 chapters which he called a Qur'an, but whose contents (some of which al-Bakri gives translated into Arabic) had nothing to do with the Qur'an. In fact, a later Berghouata king massacred thousands of Muslims in his kingdom for refusing to convert from Islam to the Berghouata religion. It would not surprise me at all to learn of a medieval Berber translation of the Qur'an; I know of such works for Turkish, Spanish, Persian, and Kanuri. However, discounting occasional ill-sourced reports of a no longer extant Almohad one, the earliest reference to such translation that I have come across is a fatwa by the Moroccan shaykh Al-Ḥasan bin Mas`ūd al-Yūsī in 1102 AH (1691 AD) judging translation of the Qur'ān into Tamazight to be permissible, mentioned in Jouhadi Hocine's translation's foreword; such a fatwa implies sporadic translation, but, as far as I am aware, no full written translation from the period has turned up.

Oral translations may be another matter. In Mali, there is reportedly a longstanding tradition of oral translation of the Qur'an into Tamasheq, the Berber language of the Tuareg; this was recorded in a series of 44 cassettes in 1989 by the Ahmed Baba Historical Documentation and Research Centre. Similar cases may well have existed elsewhere.

Serious published efforts at Qur'an translation seem to begin in the 1990s. The earliest partial translation to be printed seems to be Kamal Nait Zerrad's 1998 Lexique religieux berbère et néologie : un essai de traduction partielle du Coran. This work is primarily an effort to design a "purist" Berber religious vocabulary, one drawing on native lexical resources rather than Arabic borrowings, with a translation of a selection of suras added essentially as a proof of feasibility (the book's author, a well-known Berber linguist, does not in fact appear to be particularly strongly committed to Islam.) While the translation is basically into the author's native Kabyle, neologisms and words from other Berber varieties are so frequent as to make the translation rather difficult for native speakers of Kabyle to follow. This work uses the Latin orthography that has become more or less standard in Kabyle usage.

In 2003, with the Moroccan government's decision to raise the position of Tamazight and bring it into the school system, the first complete Berber Qur'an translation (strictly speaking, translation of the meanings of the Qur'an), Jouhadi Lhocine Baamrani's Tarjamat ma`ānī lqur'ān billuġati l'amāzīġiyyah: nūrun `alā nūr / tifawt f tifawt, many years in the making, finally appeared. This complete Moroccan translation (described years earlier, along with the political controversy surrounding it, by The Economist) has priorities more in accordance with one's expectations of such a work: the author's preface concerns itself primarily with reassuring the reader of the work's interpretative accuracy (the author uses the Warsh reading, and, in cases of difficulty, relies on examination of relevant hadith and well-known commentaries), and of the work's religious justification. However, conservative readers have expressed unease at his relative lack of religious training. The work is written in the Tashelhiyt of southern Morocco, a considerably less Arabic-influenced dialect than Kabyle; nonetheless, like Nait-Zerrad although not to the same extent, the author often chooses to use pure Berber vocabulary even when obscure in preference to Arabic loanwords, explicitly drawing an analogy to Fusha Arabic. "Some may say: I do not understand much of the Tamazight in which he has written, and I am Amazigh! I reply that not everyone who speaks Arabic, for example, understands the Qur'an which came down in faultless Arabic. Do not forget, dear reader, that a child spends much effort in gradually learning his native language, so why should you expect to know literary/pure (faṣīħ) Tamazight in a single go?" Apart from some Tifinagh on the cover, the author uses Arabic characters, regularly used by Tashelhiyt authors to write in their native language since the sixteenth century, although he substitutes a variant of Chafik's new orthography (writing all vowels as long instead of short, and using zay with three dots for the emphatic ẓ) which has grown in popularity. He has also published a translation of an-Nawawi's Forty Hadith, as well as some poetry.

Also in 2003, correlating to the Algerian government's gradual expansion of the role of Berber in efforts to conciliate opposition in Kabylie, a Kabyle translation of six hizbs, by Si Muḥend Muḥend Ṭayeb of the Ministry for Religious Affairs (with help from Said Bouziri, Djafar Oulefki, and Mohamed Tahar Ait Aldjet), was published by the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an. This translation uses Arabic characters, but not in the systematic way of Jouhadi Lhocine's translation; rather than establishing a fixed phonemic orthography, it gives the impression of trying to fit Kabyle into Arabic characters in much the way that many people try to fit it into French ones, without any consideration for the phonemic rules of the language. For example, strictly phonetic assimilations across word boundaries, like n+r > rr, are written with shadda, and phonetically short a and ə are both written in the same way, with fatha. It was criticised by activists for its extensive use of Arabic vocabulary - although I rather suspect this makes it more readable to the average Kabyle speaker than the strict purism of other editions. A complete translation by the same people is to appear shortly; it is this which has been being carelessly reported as "the first Tamazight Qur'an".

However, when it does appear, it's not even going to be the first complete Kabyle translation. In late 2006, the poet and chemist Remḍan At Menṣur beat the Ministry to it; I saw copies of his complete translation in shop windows in Algiers and Paris, but have not yet got one. This work uses the Latin and Neo-Tifinagh orthographies on facing pages, and comes with an audio CD. The more extreme anti-Islamic wings of the Kabyle autonomy movement criticised the very fact of his translating this as promoting "Arabisation and Islamisation" (huh, who would have thought that translating the Qur'an might be construed as promoting Islam?) A more conservative reader, while praising the work, suggested that it would have been better off using Arabic script, and that the difficult task of translating with an eye to the correct interpretation required the efforts of a whole committee rather than a single man.

More translations are no doubt to be expected, and their quality - both interpretative and linguistic - will hopefully improve. But this cannot take place in isolation; the form Berber translations of the Qur'an end up taking will inevitably be heavily influenced by the form of the language that ends up being taught in the schools and used in other publications, and politics will continue to affect both whether and how the text is translated. It will be interesting to see how the situation develops.

(Non-)universal quantifiers

Many readers will recall Everett's argument that Pirahã had no universal quantifier because statements featuring what he had originally translated as "all" would generally be considered true even if a small part of the original had to be excepted. I'm not sure the conclusion follows (universal quantification could still be its prototypical meaning, for example), but if it does, then it could equally well be argued to be true of Darja; a lot of statements about "all" that I hear made here are ones which the speaker is perfectly aware (and accepting) of the existence of exceptions to, and it took me a while to go against my mathematical training and realise that when they said "all", they didn't mean it in the logicians' sense. Actually, I suspect the same is true of many idiolects of English. This was brought to mind by a little example I heard yesterday: hađa ybi` kŭll ħaja, bəṣṣəħħ əlfṭayəs ma ybi`š هذا يبيع كُلّ حاجة، بصّح الفطايس ما يبيعش "This guy sells everything, but hammers he doesn't sell."

Neo-Neo-Neo-Tifinagh

I went to Tizi-Ouzou today, where I bought a few Kabyle-related books. The smallest, a tiny little handbook entitled Cahier d'écriture de l'alphabet tifinagh, or Attafttar, from Editions Baghdadi, Algiers (no date of publication or author given), provided a bit of a surprise. I thought I had seen every variation of Neo-Tifinagh there was to see, but I was wrong; this illustrated children's book presents yet another one. It's essentially Chaker's Neo-Neo-Tifinagh, but with one or two forms from the Academie Berbere alphabet (b, s) plus at least one sign, Arabic ع with the curves straightened out into right angles, that I've never seen anywhere else. You know, I'm not enormously in favour of Neo-Tifinagh to begin with, but the proliferation of variant forms that you find is just ridiculous; in a sufficiently Algerian mood, I could easily believe many of them are put together by anonymous opponents of Tifinagh seeking to weaken it by spreading confusion.

Impersonal vs. personal "you"

In English, "you" is equally used in a literal sense (referring to the addressee) or in an impersonal sense (referring to an arbitrary imagined experiencer.) In Darja, at first sight, it looks the same way - and for speakers of any one gender, this is true. However, looking at speakers of both genders allows you to realise that the distinction is grammaticalised. Addressee "you" agrees in gender with the addressee; impersonal "you" does not agree in gender with the addressee, but with the speaker. Thus a woman speaking to a man will say tṛuħ "you go" when "you" refers to the man addressed, but tṛuħi when it refers to an arbitrary person, like "When you go by bus, it takes a while."

Bits of Darja morphology

I heard a great word today: tməhbəl تمهبل "behave like a crazy person", a verb derived by consonant extraction from the noun/adjective məhbul مهبول "crazy", itself a passive participle (of a form familiar from Fusha, with a prefix m- plus an infix) from the verb hbəl هبل "go crazy". A similar process, whose intermediate stages do not however survive in Darja, brought about tməsxər تمسخر "kid, joke"; cf. Fusha saxira سخر "mock, laugh at".

Regular diminutives are formed with an infixed i, optionally with a feminine ending added. In Dellys, nouns normally form them either by simple infixation or (for three-letter roots) infixation with an added y after the infix, but adjectives add an extra consonant after the i - either a copy of the second root consonant (eg kħiħəl كحيحل "a little black", from kħəl كحل "black"), or a w (ṣġiwəṛ صغيور "tiny" from ṣġiṛ صغير "small"). "One", unlike other numbers, agrees in gender with its referent, a property of adjectives; thus it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that it can take the adjective-style diminutive wħiħda "a little one."

The English "substrate" in my Darja shows through most clearly, I suspect, in noun agreement. Gender for inanimate objects has always given me trouble; the gender of a noun is almost always obvious from its form, yet if I don't concentrate I still tend to revert to some kind of default gender when the noun in question is unmentioned or is in a different sentence. Number is a lot easier; but even there there are a few points I need to focus on. For one thing, I tend to give words like səṛwal سروال "trousers", which take plural agreement in English, plural agreement when they should be singular. (I am not alone in this kind of error; talking to a friend born and raised in a largely Kabyle area of the Casbah in Algiers, I heard that in his neighbourhood they consistently say things like əlma bardin الما باردين "The water is cold (pl.)", because "water", aman, happens to take plural agreement in Kabyle.) But there is a large class of nouns in Arabic in general where the unmarked form is essentially a mass noun but is used in most contexts where English speakers use plurals, and the singular (or rather the singulative) is formed from it by adding a feminine marker. For example, if you want to say "I bought some figs today", or "I made some fig jelly", or "I see a fig tree", for any of these you would use the unmarked bəxsis بخسيس "figs"; for "I ate a fig" or "This fig is tasty", you would add the feminine ending to get bəxsisa بخسيسة; if you said something like "There are three figs on the table", where the figs are individuated but there's more than one of them, you would pluralise the singulative (feminine) form and say bəxsisat بخسيسات. So in most contexts, the English plural "figs" gets rendered by the mass noun bəxsis. The difficulty that arises is that, as a result, I tend to think of words like bəxsis as plural, and give them plural agreement, when in fact I should be giving them singular agreement like any other mass noun.

Dellys news

Under the circumstances, a little non-linguistic posting seems to be called for. Some criminal exploded a bomb here in Dellys yesterday, down by the port just east of the centre. Neither I nor anybody I know was hurt, but the hospital was kept very busy. I haven't heard much clear news yet, but I understand there have been some 30 deaths, mostly young Army conscripts along with a couple of port workers standing nearby. Everyone here is shocked (of course) and angry - an attack on such a scale around here is unprecedented - but continuing with business as usual (apart from the port of course, which is closed last I checked.)

That story you can follow in the news easily, and, here on the scene though I am, I am probably worse informed about it than someone reading all the press releases; I haven't been down to the port since I got here. So I'll talk a bit about the environmental situation instead. On the part of the beach just east of sid-əl-məjni سيدي المجني, things get a bit depressing. After a couple of years of being free or sewage (zigu, from French (le)s égouts), the nearby stream (wad-əl-gəṭṭaṛ) is once again flowing a nice greyish-black colour. Only now, since the 2003 earthquake (əz-zənzla), the sea it used to flow into is a good deal lower (technically, the land is higher), so the black stuff just accumulates along the shallows to its west, and the stream's delta, coated with nitrate-loving vegetation, is poking out a good ten metres into what used to be the sea. The ecological effects are interesting; little river trees and bushes are appearing all along the shoreline of the black spot in what used to be sand, and swifts (xŭṭṭayəf) are swooping all over the area eating up the bugs it nourishes. At this rate, the whole bit between the stream and Sid-el-Medjni will probably not be a beach at all for much longer; it'll turn into some kind of swamp. I'm told the effects are visible further out to sea as well; off that part you only see one species of seaweed, and practically no sea urchins (lŭggi). A recent week-long heat wave got forest fires breaking out all over the country, to the point that the sea water was coloured with ashes. And don't get me started on the problem of sand theft (sand is needed for building, and nonstop, if slow, building is happening everywhere all the time), which has turned what used to be the widest sand beaches in the area, at Takdempt and Sahel, into thin strips disappearing into the sea, and led to the collapse of at least one house that I'm told had once been a good hundred metres from the beach, at whose windows seawater now laps. People say environmental issues aren't relevant in Algeria; personally, I find they tend to be a lot more conspicuous here than in the UK.

Speech errors and phonology; borrowing basic vocabulary; and a correction

A child's speech error I heard reported the other day provides a great illustration of the psychological reality both of allophones and of the skeletal tier in phonology: /twəħħəš-t توحّشْت / [twæħ'ħɛʃt] "I missed" (in the emotional sense), became /twəššəħ-t / [twɪʃ'ʃæħt]. The ħ and š are permuted without affecting the (in this case grammatically determined) position of the length; and the phonemic realisations of the schwas between them change to match their new neighbours. (ħ makes an adjacent schwa more a-like; š and w both do not affect the value of neighbouring schwas, and in the absence of any external influence, the default phonetic value of a schwa is roughly [ɪ].)

While counterexamples to the naive idea that basic family terms like "father" and "mother" are unborrowable are easy to come by, Algeria presents a particularly striking case; so many of the people who addressed their own fathers as baba are raising their own children to address them by the Fusha term 'abi, or even the French papa. (And baba itself may be a Berber borrowing, though the evidence is far from compelling.)

Contrary to what I wrote in my MA thesis, and to the intuitions of the native speakers I asked, negated nouns can certainly occur without ħətta, "any"; I heard a good four or five examples today, including waħda ma yxəlli (he won't leave a single one), ma ysərbi lħaja đ̣ukka "it serves no purpose now", xəlq ma kayən "there's not a soul". Something for me to investigate when I get back to that.

The Straw Road

Every time I come to Dellys, in between all the visiting and swimming, I find myself marvelling at the full linguistic resources of colloquial Algerian Arabic, and learning new words and constructions; this time is no exception. I've been typing some of these up, and plan to post them on my sporadic Internet visits.

One of my aunts taught me a new Darja term the other night - triq əttbən طريق التبن, the Milky Way, literally the Road of Straw. In the old days before there were clocks, people used to tell a prayer time by it: when it first became visible in the sky, they would go pray `Isha. That test may not work so well in modern city environments, but Dellys is still dark enough at night that you would probably get it about right. She also mentioned nəjmət əl`iša نجمة العشاء and nəjmət əlməġrib مجمة المغرب (the `Isha and Maghrib stars), which would presumably be Venus and Mercury respectively. I'll have to look into the rest of the astronomical terminology sometime, if I can find anyone who knows it.

Leiden conference on African languages and linguistics

I'm just back from a conference at Leiden, and heading off to take a holiday in Algeria very soon; here's my interim report to tide my readers (to whom I apologise for the interruption in service:) over.

Leiden turns out to be a very nice little town, clean, quiet, full of canals, and practically empty. I imagine all that changes when the students get there! The conference was good - I got to talk to several other people working on Berber and Songhay, and heard some interesting talks. To name a few, Jeffrey Heath discussed the remarkable ways in which syntax affects tone in Jamsay Dogon; Maarten Kossmann argued (and I am inclined to agree) that the Mande influence discernible in southern but not northern Songhay, and especially strong in "Inner", or Eastern, Songhay, is particularly to be linked to Soninke, and is not a feature of proto-Songhay; Alain Bassene presented a paper on topicalisation and focus in a Jola variety where both proved to behave in a manner almost completely identical to their behaviour in Algerian Arabic; and Mary Pearce presented in impressive detail what turned out to be a clear ongoing sound change (a shift from phonemic tone to phonemic voicing) in the Chadic language Kera. My own paper was perhaps a little too esoteric even for a conference like this - I'm not sure that more than two or three people in the audience actually cared about sound shifts in Songhay - but I heard corroborating evidence for one of my statements immediately afterwards, which was satisfying.

I also picked up a pleasing number of free language/linguistics books, including review copies (look for them on Afrikanistik sometime in the indefinite future) of a new dialectological atlas of the Moroccan Rif and of a book by Pichler on the history of Tifinagh which (I'm not sure whether to be amused or annoyed) briefly quotes me verbatim regarding Neo-Tifinagh without attribution or even quotation marks.

Phrasebook fiction

The bewilderingly odd and sometimes strangely evocative phrases that some phrasebook compilers apparently expect to be useful have caught the attention of many people besides me, although I do think the Andamanese one I found a year or two back takes the cake. However, until a few days ago, I had not come across phrasebook-based fiction. I can now report that there is at least one example of such a genre: Gene Wolfe's "Useful Phrases" (a short story in Strange Travellers):

Even so, many of the phrases thus translated struck me as peculiar. Who would wish to say "You no longer recognize her," "Mine is a similar address," or "I will tell the trees to be quiet"? I studied all these phrases diligently, however, so much so that I sometimes found myself murmuring in my bath, Pava pacch, tîsh ùtra. Neéve sort dufji. "How like a ghost are the fountain's waters! The flood carries away my riches." The paper is marvelously thin, and yet completely opaque; the print sharp-edged even when viewed through my best magnifying glass...

I addressed to him the phrase I had so often rehearsed: Semphonississima techsodeliphindera lafiondalindu tuk yiscav kriishhalôné! "How delightful to discover in the shrinking sea a crystal blossom of home!"

He dropped my advertisement and ran from the shop.

There would be no point in summarising the story - it's not about plot so much as mood. If it has a moral, it must be that you should keep phrase books of unknown origin for unidentifiable languages only if you want your life to become more exciting and dangerous.

A coming reanalysis in Arabic and Berber

In historical linguistics, when a word or string of words is reinterpreted as consisting of a different set of words (for example, when "an ewte", which is what people used to say in Middle English, becomes "a newt"), they call it reanalysis. Here are two somewhat parallel examples.

In classical Arabic, one word for "he came" is jā'a. "With" is bi-. "He came with X" is jā'a bi-X, and can usually be translated as "he brought X". In some parts of the paradigm, the two words remain more or less adjacent* - eg ya-jī'u bi- "he comes with"; in others, they are separated by an agreement morpheme - eg jā'-at bi- "she came with", ji'-nā bi- "we came with". In all modern dialects, the glottal stop is lost, and so are the final short vowels, which would regularly yield jā b(i)-, yijī b(i)-, jā-t b(i)-, etc. But in fact, this common construction was reanalysed as a single word, so you get forms along the lines of jāb, yijīb, jāb-it, jib-nā...

In Proto-Berber, as across most Berber languages, the word for "come" was something like as (perfect form y-usa, habitual yə-ttas, etc.) However, Proto-Berber also had a very productive system of "extensions", particles near the verb marking the direction in which the verb's action took place: towards (d) or away from (n) the speaker. Naturally, "come" normally featured the d extension. In many common forms, it was adjacent to the stem (eg y-usa d "he came", nə-ttas d "we come", etc.); in others, it was not (eg ad-d as-əγ "I will come", usa-n d "they came", etc.) In at least one variety - the dialect of the Beni Snous near Tlemcen, in western Algeria - this d was reinterpreted as part of the word "come"; so there (with voicing assimilation of s to z when next to d) you get forms like yusəd, nəttasəd, ad azd-əγ, uzd-ən.

* Strictly speaking, even in this one they're separated by a short vowel marking mood.

"The inadequacy of traditional Islamic languages"

A Pakistani physicist weighs in on the state of science in the Islamic world in Physics Today, a magazine I used to subscribe to during the very brief period when I was doing physics at university. The article's quality is variable; he makes some good points (like the alarming publication and patent statistics, and the way that authoritarian attitudes inhibit hypothesis forming), but also some poor ones (his Bourguiba-esque suggestion that fasting and prayer are incompatible with hard work, for example, is laughable.) Anyway, he throws in an observation on language worth discussing:

Second, the inadequacy of traditional Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, Urdu—is an important contributory reason. About 80% of the world's scientific literature appears first in English, and few traditional languages in the developing world have adequately adapted to new linguistic demands.

In what sense can a language be inadequate for a purpose? What I take him to be referring to is the inadequacy of technical terminology. Specialists in any field have to learn a set of fairly complicated ideas to which they can refer concisely and unambiguously (phoneme, wh-movement, coronal, theta-role; integration, isomorphism, standard deviation...) Such terms often do not refer to anything normally noticed by people, and therefore have no equivalent in any language until one is created or borrowed. Various specialists or committees have undertaken to create such terms (in Arabic, at least, they generally eschew the idea of borrowing them.) But in many cases a chaos of alternative terms is spread. For "linguistics" alone, different Arabic dictionaries will suggest اللسانيات، الألسنيات، اللغويات، علم اللغة, and even other terms. I have three dictionaries of linguistic terminology in Arabic sitting on my shelf; randomly looking up "retroflex", for example, I find ارتدادي، التوائي، انقلابي all given as translations.

One might expect that the efforts of specialists to communicate with each other would end this problem, with the community of linguists (say) rapidly converging on a single term and abandoning the rest, just as such synonyms for "retroflex" as "cerebral" or "cacuminal" have largely disappeared in English. But there we have a vicious circle. At present, to be a good specialist in many fields, you need to have studied them in some Western language, and to be following a literature on them that's largely in a Western language, and to be communicating with colleagues who mostly speak that same language. In fact, given how little on average is spent on research in the Islamic world, in many such fields the odds are high that you won't even be able to find employment without going to or staying in the West, further reducing your opportunities to talk about, or teach, the subject in your own language - and if you do stay in your own country, you may find that specialist terminology dictionaries, especially those printed in other countries, are hard to find. So if ambiguities or misunderstandings come up, the easy thing to do is to switch to English or French or the like; the ideological incentive to use your own language is not supplemented by any significant material or practical incentive. And thus the language gets slowly pressured out of another domain. It's not inevitable, but to change it you'd have to create more incentives and more opportunities for people to stay and to teach in their own countries.

Of course, for Arabic in particular but to a lesser extent for Urdu and Persian, there is a second factor to be considered: diglossia, the wide gap between the language spoken in everyday conversation and the one considered suitable for writing or teaching in. This in itself has some negative implications for teaching science, although the obstacles it sets up to participation by the masses are far less than those that use of an unrelated foreign language like English or French does. But that is another topic for another time.

Miscellaneous linguistics news

I've been keeping busy lately, looking at some rather interesting grammatical facts about the Berber dialect of Ngousa (Ingusa) which I plan to talk about (among other things) at Paris in September. The vocabulary is also interesting; tiḥemẓin "couscous", for example, presumably somehow from timẓin "barley". However, a casual trawl of the news today revealed a surprising number of linguistics-related stories, which I thought I'd share:


Orangutans Play Charades When Misunderstood: For extra points, outline a scenario for the development of a fixed learned vocabulary from sufficiently frequent efforts in a small population to play this sort of charades.

Brain Responses in 4-Month-Old Infants Are Already Language Specific: 4-month-old German and French babies deal better with words stressed in accordance with the the laws of their soon-to-be-native language.

Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation: "Do fast readers rely most on letter-by-letter decoding (i.e., recognition by parts), whole word shape, or sentence context? We manipulated the text to selectively knock out each source of information while sparing the others. Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating." I wonder whether this applies in other written languages or is a peculiarity of English.

And a little multimedia on an English regional dialect from the BBC: Pitmatic.