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?