Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Berber dictionary online

A link I've been meaning to post for a while: Amawal n Tiddukla Tadelsant Imedyazen. The guy behind it, Omar Mouffok, deserves credit for his efforts to document Kabyle dialects outside of the mainstream, like the one spoken near Blida; many entries indicate which regions the word is used in, though unfortunately a fairly impenetrable system of abbreviations is used. Translations into French, Spanish, and Arabic are given for some words, but many are only given definitions in Kabyle.

Monday, October 03, 2011

Songhay online

The Northern Songhay family is of some general interest, both for the study of language contact - all its members are astonishingly strongly influenced by Berber and/or Arabic, to the point that only a few hundred Songhay words survive and much of the grammar has been replaced - and for understanding the history of the Sahara (they suggest both that the spread of Songhay predates the Songhay Empire and that a Berber language different from Tuareg used to be spoken in much of Mali and Niger.) I've recently put together a sort of homepage for Northern Songhay linguistics: Northern Songhay. It includes a more or less complete bibliography.

Anyone interested in that will also be interested in a site I recently came across: Songhay.org, offering lexicographical data, lessons, software, and some references focused mainly on the Songhay of Gao (Koyraboro Senni.) I particularly appreciated the pictorial dictionaries under "Encyclopédie".