Tlemcen: medieval folk etymologies and their implications

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād, Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān, dialectal Arabic Tləmsān):

تسمى بلغة البربر تلمسنين كلمة مركبة من تلم ومعناه تجمع وسين ومعناه اثنان اي الصحراء والتل فيما ذكر شيخنا العلامة ابو عبد الله الابلي رحمه الله وكان حافظا بلسان القوم ويقال ايضا تلشان وهو ايضا مركب من تل ومعناه لها وشان اي لها شان
In the Berber language it is called "T.l.msīn", a word composed of t.l.m, meaning "she/it gathers", and sīn, meaning "two" - i.e. the Sahara and the Tell - according to our shaykh the most learned Abū ʕAbd Allāh al-Ābilī, may God have mercy on him, who was well-versed in the people's tongue. It is also said "T.l.šān", which is also a compound, of t.l., meaning "she/it has", and šān, i.e. "it has status".

Both etymologies are easy enough to interpret in the light of comparative Berber data. In the nearest (barely) surviving Berber variety - Beni Snous (Aṯ Snus), some 40 km west of the town - "Tlemcen" is indeed Tləmsin, not Tləmsan (cf. Destaing's Etude, pp. 368, 370, 371, etc.) This variety, however, does not use the word sin for "two" - it uses ṯnayən, like the Rif to its west (cf. Destaing, Dictionnaire, p. 98). The closest varieties to preserve a Berber word for "two" - geographically and genetically - use sən, in common with the rest of the Zenati subgroup to which Beni Snous belongs. The nearest varieties using the form sin are Kabyle, far to the east, and Middle Atlas Tamazight and Tashlḥiyt, far to the west. For the verb, one might consider t-əlləm "she/it spun", but the gloss given better matches a widespread dialectal Arabic word that could well have been borrowed into Berber: t-ləmm "she/it gathers". The second is obviously a compound of Arabic ša'n "affair, rank, status" and the Berber verb t-la "she/it has". Today this verb survives in Beni Snous, as in Kabyle, only residually, in the construction wi-h y-il-ən "who does it belong to?" (Destaing, Grammaire, p. 88). But it may have been more productive at that time, as it still is in Middle Atlas Tamazight.

Obviously, the first of these etymologies is implausible, while the second is a self-aggrandising play on words rather than an attempt to explain the name. But the fact that the first one could seriously be suggested is strong evidence that the meaning of Tlemcen was no more transparent to 14th century Berber speakers than it is to 21st century ones - as is not unusual for placenames. A better etymology can be proposed by taking into account comparative data - and allows us to explain the cross-linguistics differences in the final vowel - but I'll leave that for another day.

"Berber" language in early Arabic texts

Searching Shamela, I recently realised that the earliest references to a language of (al-)Barbar in Arabic go back further than I had assumed, to the second century AH. While these are unlikely to shed much light on actual linguistic practices, they are worth a look.

Two occur in the Qur'ānic commentary (tafsīr) of Mujāhid ibn Sulaymān (d. 150 AH = 767 AD); one in his discussion of sūrat al-Isrā':

فقال عبد الله بن الزبعري السهمي: إن الزقوم بلسان بربر التمر والزبد. قال أبو الجهل: يا جارية ابغنا «٣» تمرا فجاءته. فقال لقريش وهم حوله تزقموا من هذا الزقوم الذي يخوفكم به محمد «٤» .
And ʕAbd Allāh ibn al-Zabʕarī al-Sahmī said: Zaqqūm means 'date' and 'butter' in the tongue of Barbar. Abū Jahl said "Slave-girl, find us some dates", and she came to him, and he said to Quraysh as they were about him: "Have some of this zaqqūm that Muhammad is scaring you with".

And one, almost identical, in his discussion of sūrat al-Dukhān:

بلسان بربر وأفريقية الزقوم يعنون التمر والزبد، زعم ذلك عبد الله بن الزبعري السهمي، وذلك أن أبا جهل قال لهم: إن محمدا يزعم أن النار تنهت الشجر وإنما النار تأكل الشجر، فما الزقوم عندكم؟ فقال عبد الله بن الزبعري: التمر والزبد. فقال أبو جهل بن هشام: يا جارية، ابغنا تمرا وزيدا. فقال: تزقموا.
In the tongue of Barbar and Ifrīqiyah, zaqqūm they mean 'date' and 'butter'. So claimed ʕAbd Allāh ibn al-Zabʕarī al-Sahmī, on the basis that Abū Jahl said to them "Muhammad claims that the Fire grows trees, yet fire consumes trees! So what is zaqqūm according to you?" And ʕAbd Allāh ibn al-Zabʕarī said: "Dates and butter". And Abū Jahl ibn Hishām said: "Slave-girl, find us some dates and butter!" And he said: "Have some zaqqūm."

One is vaguely reminded of Siwi a-zəggar "a (single) date"; but if indeed this were a word of "Barbar and Ifrīqiyah", one would hardly expect it to trip from the lips of Abū Jahl, and still less to be familiar to his audience. (For those unfamiliar with the context: Abū Jahl was the foremost enemy of early Islam, and ʕAbd Allāh ibn al-Zabʕarī was an anti-Islamic poet; their assertion that in some foreign language zaqqūm means "dates and butter" was almost certainly intended as mockery of the Qur'ān, not as serious lexicography.) The juxtaposition of "Barbar and Ifrīqiyah", however, seems to corroborate that the intended reference is indeed to the Berbers rather than to any East African groups.

Another is to be found in the earliest Arabic dictionary - the Kitāb al-ʕAyn, by al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad:

والقَيطونُ: المخدع في لغة البربر ومصر.
qayṭūn: chamber, in the language of the Barbar and Egypt.

The ultimate origin of this word, unlike that of zaqqūm, is perfectly clear: it comes from Greek κοιτών, probably via Aramaic. The term is used in Coptic too: ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ. In modern Berber varieties its form (e.g. aqiḍun) has a q, suggesting a more recent borrowing from Arabic, but one may reasonably suspect that Berbers in Cyrenaica and the Western Desert (most of whom have since switched to Arabic) would have been familiar with some version of the Greek term before Arabic influence.

A number of references to the "Barbar" are to be found in the works of Imām Mālik ibn Anas. None of these refer to the language, but one, in al-Mudawwanah, makes a clear reference to skin colour in the context of what counts as a legally punishable insult, confirming (unless this was a later scribe's addition) that the term's reference was indeed to North rather than (as Rouighi's hypothesis might suggest) East Africa:

بَلَغَنِي أَنَّ مَالِكًا قَالَ فِي الْمَوَالِي كُلِّهِمْ: مَنْ قَالَ لِبَرْبَرِيٍّ يَا فَارِسِيُّ أَوْ يَا رُومِيُّ أَوْ يَا نَبَطِيُّ أَوْ دَعَاهُ بِغَيْرِ جِنْسِهِ مِنْ الْبِيضِ كُلِّهِمْ فَلَا حَدَّ عَلَيْهِ فِيهِ، أَوْ قَالَ يَا بَرْبَرِيُّ وَهُوَ حَبَشِيٌّ فَلَا حَدَّ عَلَيْهِ وَهُوَ قَوْلُ مَالِكٍ.
It has reached me that Mālik said of mawlās in general: "Whoever says to a Berber 'Hey, Persian!' or 'Hey Roman!' or 'Hey Nabaṭī!', or calls him by any other nation of the whites - he is not to be punished for it. Or if he says 'Hey Berber!' when he is really Ethiopian, he is not to be punished for it. That is Mālik's statement.

Miscellaneous Darja notes, 2024

When I wrote my paper on the Arabic dialect of Dellys a couple of decades ago, I described it as using the participle "going (to)" - ṛayəħ رايح (m.) / ṛayħa رايحة f. / ṛayħin رايحين pl., depending on the gender/number of the subject - to form the future. In more recent years, I've started to notice women speakers reducing feminine ṛayħa and plural ṛayħin to ħa حا and ħin حين respectively. On this trip, I heard a young woman say waš ħa-yəqṛa? واش حايقرا؟ "what will he study?", with ħa unmistakeably generalised even to the masculine, as in Egyptian.

Another probable innovation in progress is the spread of -ti- as a possessive linker between CCaC nouns and pronominal suffixes. I was already familiar with forms like ṣbaʕ-ti-k صباعتيك "your fingers", but ṛwaħ-ti-na رواحتينا for "ourselves" and even šɣal-ti-hŭm شغالتيهُم "their tasks" (alongside šɣalat شغالات "tasks"!) are harder to motivate.

I alluded in my last post to a sort of possessive perfect construction; the reference was to ʕənd- ma..., meaning "have Xed plenty". It can quantify the event, as in ʕənd-u ma lbəs-hŭm عندهُ ما لبسهُم "he's worn them plenty", or the object, as in ʕənd-u ma lbəs عندهُ نل لبس "he's worn plenty", or ʕənd-u ma šaf عندهُ ما شاف "he's seen a lot".

The usual "whatchamacallit" filler word in this region is laxŭṛ لاخُر "the other (thing)". I heard one example showing that it can follow the passive prefix, and therefore substitute for verb roots as well as full stems: yə-t-laxŭṛ - yə-t-rigla يتلاخُر - يتريڨلا "get whatsited - fixed".

As in Standard Arabic, the past imperfective is regularly formed with kan "be" plus the imperfective. It's worth noting, however, that either of the two verbs can be negated: yəmma kanət ma tŭxrəj-ši يمّا كانت ماتُخرجشي "Mom used to not go out".

Codeswitches always raise the question of complement selection. In siṛaṛ win nərgŭd سيرار وين نرڨُد "rarely do I fall asleep", the loan c'est rare would take the complementiser que "that" in French, but shows up here with win "where" instead, corresponding not to French but to the construction normally used with the corresponding Arabic word, qlil قليل "few".

From an elderly aunt, I heard a double-object form that intuitively seems completely impossible in Darja to me: ila ma tḏəkkəṛnihaš إيلا ما تذكّرنيهاش "if you don't remind me of it". I think it's a religious classicism (unusually, she's literate despite having grown up before the Revolution), but noting it here in case more examples turn up.

There's a lot to be said about feminine -a in plurals. Usually it corresponds to final nisba -i in the singular, but it consistently shows up in the plural of family names (e.g. ṣwawga صواوڨة "Souags"), and I noticed it on a non-nisba profession noun: šifuṛ شيفور "driver", pl. šwafṛa شوافرة, where one might otherwise have expected *šwafəṛ. I don't recall hearing any of these words in the construct state, but for "brothers" (xiwa خيوة or xawa خاوة), forms like xiwətna خيوتنا "our brothers" seem to confirm that this really is morphologically identical to the feminine singular ending, rather than just being a different morpheme with the same vowel.

Conflicting evidence on the phonological representation of the French loanword ṣak صاك "purse, bag": "my bag" is ṣakki, with a geminate, but "bags" is (or can be) ṣikạn صيكان, with no geminate, and with an unexplained emphatic [ɑ] in the second syllable.

Secondary gemination in central Algerian Arabic is too large a topic to cover here - I have a draft paper on it I really ought to publish - but I was amused to hear it applied to the English loanword bəznəs "do business (esp. shady)": 3pl. impf. ibəzzənsu يبزّنسوا "they do business".

A couple of idioms: ma tkəssəṛ-š ṛaṣ-ək ما تكسّرش راصك "don't bother yourself, don't go to the trouble" (lit. "don't break your head"); ma fiha walu ما فيها والو "no problem, it's not an issue" (lit. "there's nothing in it"). "Easier than easy" isn't an idiom as such, but a construction worth attention: əlqur'an sahəl fuq əsshuliyya u waʕər fuq əlwʕuriyya القرآن ساهل فوق السهولية وواعر فوق الوعورية "the Qur'an is easier than easy and harder than hard."

Some proverbs: duga duga təbbəʕ əṭṭṛig əlməgduda دوڨا دوڨا تبّع الطريڨ المڨدودة "little by little, follow the level path"; kŭll ṯqil fəlmizan xfif كُلّ ثقيل في الميزان خفيف "any load is light in the balance"; ərrʷgad ṣəlṭan الرّڨاد صلطان "sleep is a despot". A few Darja words I've learned this summer - etymologically obscure, except the last:

• gŭrgab ڨُرڨاب - fishing-ground, spot in the sea with lots of fish.
• ẓəṛtiṭa زرطيطة - grape stalk (pedicel), subset of ʕənqud عنقود "cluster"; also refers to the last grapes of the season
• mčəʕčək متشعتشك - (of hair) tangled, messy
• ṭəṛṛaħ طرّاح - mattress maker

Spengler and morphology

While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly branches out there into linguistic historical morphology:

Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitân, and again, daz wîp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific ‘‘I’’ is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries ‘‘have’’ and ‘‘be’’ between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the "feci" which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude — a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject ‘‘I’’ becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence. (Atkinson translation, 1926, pp. 262-3)

A linguist - or a scientist - is not particularly well-positioned to judge airy intuitions about "the dawn of a new life-feeling" or the emergence of a "Faustian soul"; how would one even go about testing such claims rigorously? But the emergence of forms like these is rather better studied. On a world scale, there is nothing unusual about fecisti - plenty of languages collapse the subject pronoun, tense/aspect/mood, and the verb into a single word. In fact, a good 70% of languages in Siewierska's WALS survey mark subject agreement on the verb one way or another. Nor is their completely analytic separation all that rare (22% of the same sample). However, Siewierska's work reveals that there really is something unusual about a form like ich bin, where the independent pronoun is obligatory yet the verb still agrees with it:

My cross-linguistic investigations of verbal person markers reveal that person markers which require the presence of accompanying independent nominals or pronominals are very rare. In a sample of 272 languages I found only two such markers, in Dutch and Vanimo, a New Guinea language of the Sko family. The only other languages that I have come across which display such markers are: English, German, Icelandic, Faroese, some Rhaeto-Romance dialects, Standard French and perhaps Labu, an Austronesian language of New Guinea, and Anejom a language of Vanatu. (Siewierska 2001:219

Perfect marking based on "have" also turns out to be a European feature with almost no parallels elsewhere, as shown by Dahl and Velupillai's WALS chapter on the perfect; they emerged and spread there only in the Middle Ages as an areal innovation. (Bridget Drinka has worked on this question in more detail.)

For Spenglerians, then, these two would at first sight seem to be very promising features to focus on - two globally very rare features, known to have emerged in Europe only after the fall of the Roman Empire, equally innovative in Romance and Germanic and prominent in both. However, there are naturally a couple of hitches.

Person marking requiring independent pronominals is essentially a North Sea feature; though found in French, it never made it far enough south to be shared by Italian and Spanish. Given the prominent role of Italy in Spengler's account of the emergence of Faustian culture, a Spenglerian would presumably be forced to dismiss this feature or to find some workaround. If he retained it, the obvious next task would be interesting: to examine the scattering of South Pacific languages which share this feature and see if their speakers' attitudes to the ego (?) show any relevant parallels to Western European ones.

Perfect marking with "have" shows a better match with the hypothesised Faustian culture-area - but extends a little beyond it, to Albania and to some extent Greece. (Indeed, even Algerian Arabic shows a rather marginal possessive perfect construction.) This presumably reflects Romance influence on these languages in the context of Western Europe's rise to power in the Mediterranean, though one wonders why nothing similar happened outside the Mediterranean. Not a problem for a historical linguist; but would a Spenglerian be forced to take this as evidence for a change in ego-conceptions in those regions, and seek corroboration for it in literature and painting?

Three Mubi proverbs via YouTube

In an episode of "Chadian Wisdom and Proverbs", Yaqub Muhammad Musa discusses three Mubi proverbs, providing the Mubi versions along with translation and extensive commentary in Arabic. Mubi is comparatively well-documented as East Chadic languages go, thanks primarily to Jungraithmayr's excellent 2013 monograph; but even this miniscule corpus reveals some aspects of the language that I was unable to find there.

Proverb 1:

njó	mà	lĭí-lò	gùbá,	ùfáad	à	mìlá
person	if	have.PFV-NEG	big.M,	fall.IMPF	in	well
"If a person has no elder, s/he will fall into a well."
الما عنده كبير، يقع في البير

Every element of this proverb is attested in Jungraithmayr, but the phonology contains some surprises: I hear a secondary gemination after the preposition à which is not discussed, and in ùfáad we observe that regular final devoicing fails to hold, presumably due to the following vowel. Moreover, mà is glossed there as "et, puis" (and, then), which is clearly not the intended sense here.

Proverb 2:

sín-dá	mà	báagì	ɗíil-ít,	ísì	wèelít-ɗò	àagŏ
brother-2M	if	[remaining]	sweet-ADJ,	refuse(?)	lick.PFV-NEG	a.lot
"If your brother is sweet, don't lick him a lot"
أخوك كان بقي عسل، ما تلحسه زيادة

Based on the Arabic version of the proverb, I assume báagì is a loan from Arabic, corresponding to classical bāqī "remaining", and functioning as a sort of copula; it's not in Jungraithmayr. ísì is not there either; in fact, J doesn't discuss the formation of negative imperatives at all that I can see. But it matches well with the attested verb íisí "to refuse", and presumably reflects grammaticalisation from that (cf. Latin noli). So this gives us a new construction.

Proverb 3:

írín-dà	máar	kà	sùsúm-gī	ísì	héegín-nò
eye-2M	even.if(?)	2M	itch-3F	refuse(?)	scratch.PFV-NEG
"Even if your eye itches you, don't scratch it"
عينك دي كان قاعدة تاكلك دا ما تحكّه

Here, máar is just a guess informed by context; no such form is found in J. But we find a second instance of the prohibitive construction, as well as an otherwise unattested verb sùsúm "itch". Note the OV-S construction, which alternates with SV-O under circumstances which seem to remain a mystery.

The fact that new things can be discovered about Mubi from a recording this short illustrates just how much remains to be done in terms of describing this morphologically fascinatingly complex language. At the same time, it tends to confirm the high accuracy of J's transcriptions. I hope further study will be possible.

Loanwords examined via Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer, freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have little experience of Atlantic languages as such, and therefore not much useful to say about most of the book (though it made me want to also read Merrill's work, with which much of it is in dialogue.) However, while proto-Fula-Sereer is dated by the author to 2000 years ago or more, some of the comparisons are relevant for studying contact with other regional families. Two forms are particularly interesting to me for exploring contact with Berber:

• *xiris "slay (vb)": Sereer xiris 'couper le cou, décapiter, égorger' (Merrill: 'slit the throat') ~ Fula hirsa 'égorger; sacrifier (un animal, pour en rendre licite la consommation)' [p. 63]
  Sereer x- : Fula h- is a very well represented regular correspondence; however, Fula -r- in -rC- would normally be lost in Sereer (p. 173), and no regular pattern of vowel elision is given in the book. The word also looks like Soninke xùrùsi "to kill by cutting the jugular vein", yet the vowel correspondence is difficult there as well. The explanation is to be found in their common source as a loanword from widespread (non-Zenaga!) Berber əɣrəs, with the same meaning. The religious importance of slaughtering an animal for meat in this precise manner is sufficient to motivate the borrowing, which would thus have spread with Islam - presumably through northern Saharan travellers rather than Zenaga scholars, given the form.
• *Guf "foam": Sereer kuf 'gonfler, écumer en bouillant', kuf a...al / kuf a... ak 'écume de la mer, à la marée montante' ~ Fula ngufo / (n)gufooji 'mousse, écume' (cf. Fula ƴufa 'mousser, écumer (trans.)', ƴufo 'mousse, écume) (Laala kuuɓ 'mousse', Nyun Gubaher gʊ-gʊfʊri 'mousse', Nyun Guñamolo tɪ-gʊf / tɪ-gʊf-ɔŋ 'écume, mousse', Joola Fonyi ka-gʊf 'bave, écume de mer, mousse du savon'). [p. 102]
  The correspondence of Sereer k to Fula ŋg (let alone ƴ) is completely irregular, with no other examples cited. A comparison to Berber forms such as Tamasheq tə-kuffe, Tamazight a-kuffi, Zenaga tu-ʔffukkaʔ-n "froth" is thus not ruled out, although the other Atlantic forms make it more likely that the resemblance is coincidental. Cp. also Zarma kùfú "écumer" and related forms in Songhay, which probably do derive from Berber.

Other forms are interesting to examine in the context of Songhay and Mande:

• *bon "bad (svb)": Sereer bon 'être mauvais, être méchant, être maigre', ponu l / ponu k "le mal [la chose mauvaise]' ~ Fula bona 'être mauvais, être mal; être méchant', mbonki / bonkiji 'méchanceté ; malfaisance ; perversité' (widespread root in Atlantic and Mel) [p. 86]
  Also widespread well beyond; looks originally Atlantic, but the suffixed vowel in Bambara bɔ̀nɛ and Zarma bòné betrays a borrowing path via Soninke rather than directly from Fula.
• *bul "blue (svb)": Sereer bule 'bleu' ~ Fula bula 'rincer au bleu (du linge blanc); passer au bleu de lessive; colorer en bleu pâle' (The root *bulu is common for Atlantic and Mel languages. It is not a European borrowing). [p. 86]
  If so, then this is also the source for Bambara búla and Zarma búlà "blue", and other forms across the region. But this is a widespread Wanderwort, and one wonders how a European source was ruled out.
• *mbedd "road, path": Sereer mbed o...ong/ped k 'petit chemin laissé entre deux champs à l'hivernage, ruelle, rue, allée" ~ Fula mbedda / mbeddaaji 'grand route' (Wolof mbedd 'rue', Jaad mbɛdɛ 'grand route'; Manjaku umbɛra 'chemin carrossable, route'). May be an ancient Soninke borrowing: < béddè 'rue principale, route'. [p. 87]
  Gao Songhay has albedda / mbedda, with an interesting prefix alternation; Heath very tentatively suggests a link to Arabic blṭ, but that probably doesn't work.
• *Birq (mb-/w-) "manure": Sereer mbiqi n 'fumier, tas de fumier' ~ Fula wirga 'labourer le sol en éparpillant la terre (en luttant au sol ou pour la mélanger ou encore pour brouiller des traces...); disperser du fumier (sur un champ)' [p. 88]
  The correspondence mb:w is not regular, arguably reflecting differences in consonant mutation; only four examples are found, although they look like plausible retentions. The loss of r in Sereer would be regular (p. 173). The correspondence of q to g does not appear regular either (p. 192), unless this is related to the preceding r; one would expect q:kk. It's just as well that the correspondence is irregular, since the Fula term is clearly at least in part a borrowing from Songhay, not vice versa: it reflects a merger of two tonally distinct verbs, found in Zarma as bírjí "fumer le sol; fumier" and bìrjí "mélanger, embrouiller", used in the expression laabu birji "mélanger la terre". Conceivably the "spread manure" sense could be original to Fula, with only the "mix" sense being borrowed; but it strains credulity to imagine Zarma borrowing the same verb but giving it two different tonal patterns depending on the intended meaning. Soninke boroko "manure" is suspiciously similar, but the vowels rule it out as an intermediary.
• *gaw "hunt (vb); throw (vb)": Sereer xaƴ 'lancer, envoyer un projectile, tirer une arme à feu; lancer un dard, pêcher au harpon', nGawlax n / qawlax k ~ nGaƴlax n / qaƴlax k 'la chasse [gibier]' ~ Fula gawoo 'chasser, être chasseur (professionel)'. [p. 111; poorly justified correspondences - 5 words for x:g]
  The Fula term is certainly the same root as (Songhay) Zarma găw "hunter", gáwáy "hunt (v.)". The term doesn't seem to be used in Mande, from a quick look. If the Sereer form is related to the Fula one, then the direction of borrowing must be Fula to Songhay. However, the correspondence looks rather poorly justified. For x-:g-, only 5 correspondances are given, including such eminently borrowable words as "indigo" and "okra". For -ƴ:-w, the expected regular correspondence is rather ƴ:ƴ (p. 192), cf. "limp" (p. 180), "lick" (p. 174). The question of borrowing direction thus remains open.

The following cases may be only coincidentally similar, but perhaps they reflect contact at a much earlier period in prehistory, related to the spread of the practice of milking:

• *Gang "chest": Sereer ngang n / kang k ~ Fula gannde / ganndeeje (Fula < gang-nde?) [p. 103; irregular initial correspondence with only two other examples found)
  Cp. Zarma gàndè "chest".
• *gand "nipple": Sereer hand 'être pleine (femelle), être en gestation, porter [femelle]', hand l / qand a...ak 'mamelle (des animaux), pis', and l / and a...ak 'mamelle (des animaux), pis, téton, tétine' (to note a variety of Sereer forms: h-,q-,Ø-) ~ Fula ʔenndu ~ ʔenɗi 'sein, mamelle; pis, trayon'
  Cp. Zarma gánì "udder".

The Fulani abstract noun formative -(aa)ku is analysed (p. 231) as an "extension suffix" -aa- plus a class suffix -ku explained as a taboo-motivated allomorph of -ngu, citing Koval 2000:230 (a source in Russian). This requires further investigation; it certainly cannot be unrelated to Soninke -aaxu with the same function, but what was the direction of borrowing?

Efforts to exclude Arabic loanwords were largely successful, but even so, one crept in: Fula waabiliire "pluie d'orage" is from Arabic waabil rather than proto-Fula-Sereer *(b)waam/b (p. 79). On the other hand, Sereer tuɓaaɓ and Fula tuubako "European, white man" are derived from nonexistent Arabic *tubaab (pp. 115-116), following a long if poorly evidenced tradition connecting this to the real Arabic word ṭabiib "doctor".

"Punching up/down" in comedy: dating a lexical innovation in English

Any educated English speaker nowadays is likely to be familiar with the idea that comedy should punch up, not punch down: i.e., that it's okay to make fun of people more powerful than yourself, but not of people less powerful. But I remember being struck by the novelty of this expression when I first encountered it, well into adulthood. Notwithstanding the recency illusion, a bit of research suggests that my impression was correct. The earliest attestations I've been able to track down online go back to July 2012, in connection with a controversy about rape jokes made by some comedian named Daniel Tosh:

"Kilstein trots out the old trope that all comics are victims who have been bullied and that’s why we’re doing standup. Total bullshit, of course, but he uses the tired cliche to glorify himself and others– who are “punching up”– and characterizes Tosh and others as tyrants or bully comics who are now punching down." (Brian McKim & Traci Skene, Tosh.Opus, 16 July 2012)

"The answer is that in both cases, the comedians were “punching down.”
Punching down is a concept in which you’re assumed to have a measurable level of power and you’re looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you’ve picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying." (the pseudonymous "Kaoru Negisa", Punching Up, 19 July 2012)

All three writers are, naturally, American, and at least two of them are standup comedians themselves. Presumably the expression would already have been in use in some circles - perhaps backstage in standup comedy - for some years before that. But internal evidence suggests that it was still not assumed to be familiar to a general audience; both sources feel the need to put it between quotation marks on first use, and one even provides a definition, treating it as a metaphorical extension of a meaning used in the context of fights rather than as a familiar term in the context of comedy. (As further evidence, one may point to its complete absence from this 2012 Jezebel article about the same controversy; had it been written a few years later, it would seem unthinkable not to use the term "punching down" in expressing these ideas.) The term's use on MSNBC (as mentioned in the first source) would have been a good first step towards making the term familiar to a wider audience. By 2014, it was already appearing in The Atlantic (""We like standing up for the little guy, we like punching up," Bolton said."). On Google Books, however, the earliest hits in the relevant sense show up only in 2016, at which time the "'punching up' vs. 'punching down' dichotomy" could still be described as a way in which this tension has "recently been encoded" (Taboo Comedy.) Before that date, the object of "punching down" mostly seems to have been bread dough.

Can anyone find an attestation predating July 2012? And does this new terminology represent a new concept of comedians' moral duties, or just relabel an older one? If the latter, what did earlier American comedians call it?

---

Via @sanddorn on Twitter and Matt Farthing, a 2011 attestation - once again by a stand-up comedian, but from England this time.

"And a lot of comedians do jokes that I think aren’t funny enough to justify what they are about, and there’s plenty of ways you can be offensive without ‘punching downwards’. When FB does jokes about Palestine or black people there’s much more of a point behind it really. But it’s difficult because that’s his job, that’s how he sees himself – as this comedian who’ll say anything and make jokes about anything." (Richard Herring, 18 January 2011, )

And using this, I find that Ben Zimmer managed to discover an even earlier attestation, in a good discussion of this term's origins: a blogpost, also by Richard Herring, in December 2010. Note that, in these earliest attestations, it appears as part of a broader metaphor of likening satire to punching rather than as a preset cliché: "the weak punching the strong, rather than the strong bullying the weak", "Though there are no rules, comedy, I feel, should be siding with the weak and the oppressed and punching either inwards (at the comedian him or herself) or upwards (at the powerful or the oppressors)."

The metaphor derives, as Zimmer notes, from the world of boxing: "If you’re punching up, you’re taking on an opponent who might be taller or perhaps in a higher weight class, while punching down would be for an opponent who’s shorter or in a lower weight class." But its transfer to comedy doesn't appear to have been direct: the earliest relevant metaphorical uses found by Zimmer reflect power differentials in the contexts of British football (2002), then American politics (2006).

Abu'l-Atahiya in Korandje

A friend in Tabelbala just posted a translation of some lines from Abu'l-Atahiya into Korandje. Given the general unreliability of Facebook, I think this deserves to be recorded elsewhere, and re-translated into English:

آغَمْفْ بَا قُوُخْ * نَمْڨَآنَا لَكْوَانْكَا
الْكَاسْفْ نِيرْ بَا يَّا نَوْ * نَمْنِينَانَا اَيْصْفَا
مَسْفْكَا اَيْضِيقْ * مْبَاڨُّوكَا نَنْفُونِي
وَلاَّ تَمْزْڨِيدَافْ بَايَعْزَرْ * آطَّرَّف بَيْكاَ
نَمْتْيُوَ آكَا الْقُرْءَانْ * اْمْبَا سَّنَّدْ السَّراْيَتْكَا
نَمْفَكَّرْ أُغُوڎِي اَدْرِى * نْڎَا الْقُرُونْڎِي اَيفُوتْ
أَبَّغْ السَّاعَاتڎِي اِيفُوتْ نِيكَا * اْمْبَا يْعِيشْ ڨَآ بَيَيْكَا
إِڎْ بَكَّا لَخْبَآڎْ امْبَنْضَا * نَمْطَوْ نْڎَانَا أُورْكُورْكَا
أَيْتَا عَلاَّوْصَايَتَ اَغُوڎِي * آبْتْبَآ نْڎِيسْ عَلْحَالَتْ
ءَاسَعْدْ أُغْ مَّاوَانَا * غَارْ إِڎَ اَمَّوْ أَمْطَاسِي
وَامَّوْ أُغْسْ ءآيْشْفَقْ اْنْڎِيكَا * ءآمَّآ أَبُو الْعَتَاهِيَةْ

aɣəm=fʷ ba-qqux * nə-m-ɣ-ana ləkwan=ka
əlkas=fʷ n-ir ba-yyanəw * nə-m-nin-ana a-yəṣfa
mməs=fʷ=ka a-yḍiq * n-ba-ggʷạ=a-ka nə-n=funi
wəlla taməzgida-fʷ ba-yəʕzər * a-ṭṭəṛṛəf bạ=y=ka
nə-m-tyuw=a-ka lqurʔan * ən-ba-ssənnəd əssaryət=ka
nə-m-fəkkəṛ uɣudzi a-dri * ndza lqṛun=dzi a-yfut
a-bbəɣ əssaʕat-dzi i-yfut=nika * ən-ba-yʕiš gạ bya=y=ka
idz ba-kka ləxbạ=dz ən=bənḍạ * nə-m-ṭəw ndz-ana ur=kʷər=ka
əyta ʕə-n=ləwṣayət a-ɣudzi * a-b-tbạ=ndzi-s ʕə-n=lħalət
a saʕd uɣ mmạw-ana * ɣar idz a-mmə̣w a-m-ṭ=a-si
wə-mmə̣w uɣ=s a-yəšfəq əndzi-ka * a-n=ma abu lʕatahiya

"A dry piece of bread * you eat in a corner,
A glass of cool water * you drink pure,
In a room that's narrow, * in which you sit alone;
Or an isolated mosque, * remote from people,
In which you read the Quran, * leaning on a column
As you remember what is gone * and centuries that have passed -
It's better than those hours that passed for you * living in great houses.
What came after that stuff, * you'd burn for it in a hot fire.
Look, this is my advice, * which shows you your situation;
Happy is he that hears it * what he hears will be enough for him.
Listen to one who pities you, * whose name is Abu'l-Atahiya."