Miscellaneous Darja notes

With Twitter apparently determined to become an eX-network, the moment seems right for turning back towards blogging. I might change platforms (Substack sounds promising – any good ideas?), but in the meantime, let’s see if this is still working and post some miscellaneous notes on Dellys Arabic from my holiday.

Today, when a watch started randomly beeping, I heard a cousin say ʕəbbẓi næ̃mpoṛt waħda təħbəs “press any one, it’ll stop”. This is obviously the same construction as næ̃mpoṛt ħaja, and was indeed produced by the same person. So it seems that næ̃mpoṛt is indeed a fixed part of his grammar; but note that it is followed by an indefinite noun (ħaja ‘thing’, waħda ‘one’) rather than an interrogative pronoun as it would be in French (quoi ‘what’, qui ‘who’).

When I heard the verb ykạmiri ‘he’s filming’, I initially thought this was proof positive that the loanverb ending -i had become a productive denominal verbaliser (cp. kạmira ‘videocamera’); after all, there is no French verb camérer. But it turns out that camérer is attested in Algerian French, so the case remains ambiguous.

An old woman to a little girl: ya ṛṛwiħa ttaʕi! “oh my little soul!” The diminutive brings to mind Hadrian’s animula.

The mediopassive verbs ntkəl ‘be eaten’ and ntfəxswell up are old news to me, but somehow I had missed the corresponding participles mətkul ‘eaten’, mətfux ‘swollen’, which show that both verbs are to be analysed synchronically as n-passives (“Form 7”) with t-initial roots, though in both cases the t originally derives from a passive prefix or infix (“Form 8”).

On a trip up the mountain, I heard tuzzalt, which does indeed refer to ‘rockrose’, whatever the correct translation of tazalt might be. But the speaker was bilingual in Kabyle, so the pronunciation might not be representative of Dellys Arabic.

A colonial-era rhyming proverb that was new to me: ləmʕawna f-ənnṣaṛa wala lqʷʕad f-əlxṣaṛa ‘[even] helping the Christians is better than sitting around unprofitably.”

Onomatopeia for the sound of milking: čəqq čəqq čəqq. May help explain the Siwi verb…

As discussed on Twitter, skərfəj ‘grate (v.)’ seems to come from Italian scalfeggiare or something very similar. Along with spərpəħ ‘sprawl about’ it provides a rare example of what looks like a five-consonant root, but should perhaps better be interpreted as four-consonant with an otherwise poorly evidenced prefix s-; cf. sħaj ‘need (v.)’