Tokenistic Tifinagh #fail 2

The Algerian government recently decided to make the Amazigh New Year (really the Julian New Year) - coming up tomorrow - an official holiday. This holiday is actually traditional in a lot of Arabic-speaking areas too, in Algeria and across North Africa - and its origins are of course Roman - but over the past few decades it has been reinterpreted as an Amazigh holiday rather than a North African one, and the government made it official specifically as a gesture towards Amazigh identity. In non-Amazigh areas, this creates some quandaries, as illustrated by the announcement below by the government of the wilaya (province) of Blida...

The Algerian flag in the middle is flanked on all sides by easily recognizable signs of Amazigh identity - the letter aza, the abzim pins, etc. - none of which are particularly associated with Blida (even though there are still small Berber communities in the mountains above Blida, not to mention Kabyle migrants.)  The main text is in Arabic, but there is one line of Berber in Arabic script - تفاسكا ن يناير tfaska n Yennayer "holiday of Yennayer", using a word for "holiday" that in a Kabyle context amounts to a modern neologism - and two lines written in Tifinagh, whose geometric shapes add yet another easily recognizable symbol of Berber identity.  If you try to read those lines, though, they turn out in each case to be simple transcriptions (not translations) of the line of Arabic above them:

"Celebration of the Amazigh New Year"
احتفالية رأس السنة الأمازيغية iḥtifāliyyat ra's as-sanah al-'amāzīɣiyyah
 ⴰⵃⵜⴼⴰⵍⵉⴰ ⵔⴰⵙ ⴰⵍⵙⵏⴰ ⴰⵍⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵉⴰ aḥtfalia ras alsna alamaziɣia

"Algerian and proud of my Amazigh identity"
جزائري وبأمازيغيتي أفتخر jazā'irī wabi'amāzīɣiyyatī 'aftaxir
ⵊⵣⴰⵉⵔⵉ ⵡⴱⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵉⵜⵉ ⴰⴼⵜⵅⵔ jzairi wbamaziɣiti aftxr

It's arguably not quite as bad as the Oran case we saw last time; at least this transcription doesn't randomly discard letters.  Nevertheless, the message it sends is once again clear: nobody involved in the making of this official, centralized celebration of Amazigh identity speaks Berber, or thought it would be worthwhile to get someone who does speak it to help them out.  If the Algerian government seriously wants to make Tamazight official throughout the country, it's got a long way to go...

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PS (update 19/01/2018): Not worth a whole post, but I just came across yet another example:
العمال يطالبو... | وزارة الفقر والسّعادة has:

ارحل ...ارحل ....ارحل
بالعربية : ارحل
بالامازيغية : ⴷⴹⴳⴰⴳⴹ
بالفرنسية : Dégage
بالانجليزية : Get out

ⴷⴹⴳⴰⴳⴹ is dḍgagḍ, where ḍ happens to look just like an e; explanation is hopefully superfluous...

Taleb unintentionally proves Lebanese comes from Arabic

So Taleb has jumped back on his hobbyhorse with yet another post on Lebanese not being Arabic; see my previous posts Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Zombie hypotheses and the Zeitgeist, On finding the sources of shared items. The funniest thing about this one is that he's been helpful enough to provide a wordlist (for his dialect, I presume) that - despite a number of typos, almost all of which increase the apparent similarity between Levantine and non-Arabic Semitic languages - should be enough all by itself to prove to anyone in doubt that Lebanese is clearly descended primarily from Arabic, with very little Aramaic influence and even less from Canaanite/Phoenician. Unfortunately, he wasn't as helpful on the grammar, not bothering to include equivalents from other Semitic languages for the pronouns and verbal conjugations...
But I don't have all day to spend beating this dead horse, and doing etymology properly takes time. So let's just have a quick look at the first page of his wordlist (well, probably the second one - the real first one seems to be missing), and leave the other pages as an exercise for the reader.

Out of these 39 words, 18 seem to be unambiguously Arabic in origin - either they share specific sound changes with Arabic to the exclusion of the rest of Semitic, or they use a root not used in the appropriate meaning elsewhere in Semitic. Only two look like being Aramaic rather than Arabic in origin (and the evidence in both cases is fairly weak): "hand" and the patently non-basic vocabulary word "image". (Taleb would add a third, zalame "man", but this word has an at least equally plausible Arabic etymology, making it ambiguous at best.) The remaining 19 words are ambiguous, and could in principle derive from any of more than one Semitic languages - but even there, the situation is not symmetrical; all 19 could derive from Arabic, whereas no more than 11 of them could derive from Aramaic. The unambiguous cases give the following ratio: 18 Arabic : 2 Aramaic : 0 everything else. On that basis, we should therefore expect 90% of the ones ambiguous between Arabic and Aramaic (ie all but one) to derive from Arabic, not from Aramaic, and all of the ones ambiguous between Arabic and another Semitic language but not Aramaic to derive from Arabic. For details, see the following table:

1	goat	Arabic	does not share Canaanite+Aramaic+Ugaritic *nC > CC; does not share Akkadian *ʕa > e
2	god	Arabic / Aramaic	shows innovative gemination of the l, attested only in Arabic and some dialects of Syriac
3	good	innovative	the Arabic etymology is obvious, but the root is pan-Semitic so we may generously assume that it could in principle have derived from some other branch
4	grass	Arabic	does not share Aramaic and Phoenician *ś > s ; does share Arabic *ś > š
5	grind	Arabic / Canaanite	does not share Akkadian *aħa > ê ; does not share Aramaic CaCVC > CCVC
6	hair	Arabic / Ugaritic	does not share Aramaic and Phoenician *ś > s ; does share Arabic *ś > š ; does not share Akkadian loss of *ʕ
7	hand	Aramaic	although a change of *yad > *īd is natural enough that it could easily have happened independently in Arabic...
8	hare	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Akkadian	no distinctive innovations
9	he-goat	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic	no distinctive innovations
10	head	Arabic / Ugaritic	does not share Canaanite *aʔ > *ā > ō nor Aramaic *aʔ > ī nor Akkadian *aʔ > ē ; the form rās (with loss of the glottal stop) is well-attested in early Arabic dialects
11	hear	Arabic	does not share Aramaic and Phoenician *s > š (I'm going with Huehnergard's reconstruction of proto-Semitic sibilants here). Note that the correct Syriac form is šmaʕ, not sma3 ; likewise the Hebrew
12	heart	Arabic	The initial glottal stop (still pronounced q in, for example, Alawite dialects) can only be explained from the Arabic form, which is a lexical innovation replacing original *libb
13	honey	Arabic	3asal is clearly Arabic, and – as I've pointed out before – dabs is attested in Classical Arabic as well as in Hebrew and Aramaic
14	horn	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Akkadian / Ugaritic	no distinctive innovations
15	horse	Arabic	Syriac ḥsan 'strong' has s, not ṣ, but even if it were cognate, the Classical Arabic and Levantine form still share a semantic shift unattested in Aramaic
16	house	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Ugaritic	Akkadian can be ruled out, since it shows a shift *ay > ī which never happened in Levantine.
17	hundred	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Akkadian / Ugaritic	The only innovation here, ʔ > y, is not shared with any of the ancient language in question
18	hunger	Arabic	Even assuming jūʕ has cognates elsewhere in Semitic, the change g > j is specific to Arabic
19	hunt	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Akkadian / Ugaritic	The only innovation here, use of the D-stem, is not shared with any of the ancient languages
20	image	Aramaic	Since when is 'image' basic vocabulary? But yes, assuming we can trust the transcription, it shares the aw with Aramaic
21	inside	Arabic / Aramaic	Mixed signal here: the meaning looks like Aramaic, but the sound shift g > j is Arabic not Aramaic. In reality, the word *jaww must originally have meant 'inside' in Arabic too; it lost this meaning in Classical Arabic, but kept it in many of the dialects
22	iron	Arabic
23	kidney	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Akkadian / Ugaritic	The only innovation here, *y > w, is not shared with any of the ancient languages (but _is_ shared with many other modern Arabic dialects...)
24	kill	Arabic / Canaanite	Does not share Aramaic CaCVC > CCVC
25	king	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic / Ugaritic	Since when is 'king' basic vocabulary?
26	knee	Arabic	Shares a unique innovation with Arabic – the metathesis brk > rkb
27	know	Arabic
28	laugh	Arabic	Shares a unique innovation with Arabic – the sound shift *ɬ' > ḍ (which came relatively late in Arabic – later than Sibawayh, even – and never happened in any other Semitic language). I can't speak for Amioun, but in general Levantine has ḍaḥak; if Amioun does have ḍaḥaq, the fact that it didn't become *ḍaḥaʔ suggests that the *k > q happened there only after the regular shift *q > ʔ, and hence has nothing to do with the Canaanite or Ugaritic forms.
29	leg	innovative	The alleged Ugaritic form is nonsense – Ugaritic had no j sound, and the dictionary of Del Olmo Lete and Sanmartin reveals no appropriate Ugaritic form. It is true that the Levantine form seems to be shared with Ethiopic and some Yemeni dialects, but not with any ancient language of the Fertile Crescent.
30	lion	Arabic	A very problematic choice as 'basic vocabulary'.
31	live	Arabic / Canaanite / Aramaic	Except that the Levantine form is clearly 'alive', not 'live', making the whole comparison problematic....
32	love	Arabic	The Arabic is of course mistranscribed - in his terms, it should be 2a7abba, whereas the Hebrew and Aramaic forms really do have a h.
33	make	Arabic
34	man	innovative	'zalame' is etymologically problematic – both Arabic and Aramaic etymologies have been proposed. 'rejjel' is of course from Arabic. dakar is 'male', not 'man'.
35	many	Arabic
36	meat	Arabic	This shares a specific semantic shift with Arabic to the exclusion of the rest of Semitic : « staple food » > « meat »
37	milk	Arabic / Ugaritic	The root is common to several Semitic languages, but the use of the passive pattern fa3īl in this word is unique to Arabic
38	month	Arabic	Pretty sure the normal Levantine form is shahr, not sha7r, not that it makes any difference to the etymology – and for sure Syriac 'moon' below is sahrā, not šahrā.
39	moon	Arabic