Darja miscellaneous notes 2025

Every time I go to Algeria, I come back with some linguistic observations that are new to me (if not necessarily to anyone else.) Here are this year's.

Many collective nouns take plural agreement: sqit əššjəṛ əttəħtaniyyin “I irrigated the lower trees”, kanu sjəṛ “there were trees”, ənnməl haðu “these ants”. Not all do, though, or at least not all the time: nnamus bəkri kʊnna nšufuh nəqqʊtluh “mosquitoes, in the old days, if we saw them (lit. it) we’d kill them (lit. it).” A topic worth looking at in more detail.

“Have”-based expressions for “ago” are familiar from Romance languages; in Darja, however, they agree with the notional possessor, e.g. dərtu ma-ʕəndi-š bəzzaf ‘I did it not long ago’ (lit. “I did it I don’t have much”). Along similar lines, the subject of ʕla bal-i “I know” (originally “on my awareness”) was originally the theme, the fact known. Synchronically, however, utterances like ma-kʊnt-š ʕlabal-i “I didn’t know” (lit. “I was not I know”) suggest this is no longer the case.

Another example of næ̃mpoṛt (discussed here previously): u xəllih yakʊl næ̃mpoṛt ħaja ‘and let him eat anything’.

The construct state has undergone some interesting developments. Most masculine nouns have no distinct construct state, and most feminine nouns form a construct state by replacing -a with -ət. If we factor out, for the present, the stem-internal effects of schwa-zero alternations and compensatory gemination, then, for most nouns, we can speak of a single construct state used for head nouns followed by possessor NPs or by suffixed possessor pronouns alike. However, a few nouns show a different distribution. Several kinship terms in -a take the suffixes directly: yəmma-k ‘your mother’, baba-k ‘your father’, jədda-k ‘your grandmother’, even ṭaṭa-k ‘your auntie’. (These nouns have zero-marked 1Sg possession: yəmma u yəmma-k “my and your mother”.) Such nouns usually take clitic doubled possessives (yəmma-ha ntaʕ Baya ‘Baya’s mother’, lit. ‘her mother of Baya’); however, if used in the regular synthetic possessive (“iḍāfah”) construction, they take a suffix t, e.g. yəmma-t yəmma-k “your mother’s mother”. For these nouns, it seems tempting to postulate two construct states rather than one.

The noun pattern CəCCayC is not particularly productive, but I heard a new example: tərtayqat “firecrackers” (cf. tərtəq “pop”). Other examples include ħərrayqa “jellyfish” (ħrəq “burn”), xʊṭṭayəf “swallow (bird)” (xṭəf “snatch”), bu-zəllayəq “blenny (fish)” (zləq “slip”).

Feminine nouns without overt feminine marking form diminutives with overt feminine marking: yədd ‘hand’ > ydida ‘little hand’. Very few masculine nouns have apparent feminine marking, but x(a)lifa ‘caliph’ is one such; məskin əlxliyyəf haðak “poor little caliph!” shows that the converse is also true, i.e. that masculine nouns with apparent feminine marking form diminutives without it.

The verbal template CəCCəC is in generally semantically and syntactically distinct ftom its corresponding passive/middle tCəCCəC. However, the distinction is neutralised in the participles: mwəð̣ð̣i “washed for prayer” from twəð̣ð̣a, mkəṛməṣ “dried (of figs)” from tkəṛməṣ “dry (of figs, intr.)”. Some speakers, however, do say mətwəð̣ð̣i.

Passives in n usually involve a simple coda n, but I heard clear gemination in li baš yənnəqsəm ‘for it to be divided’. The question of gemination in triliteral passives would deserve a closer look.

Weak-final triliteral verbs tend to add -an- in verbal nouns: tənħaniyya “removal” from nəħħi “remove”.’

A few emotional idioms: bərrəd qəlb-u “he cooled his heart”, i.e. he satisfied his heart’s desire; ṭəyyəṛhali “he made it fly for me”, i.e. he made me lose my temper; ṭəḷḷəʕlu lgaz “he raised the gas for him”, i.e. he made him angry. A proverb: triq əlʕafya tənẓaṛ yalukan tkun bʕida “the road of safety gets visited even if it’s far away.”

The usual ‘whatchamacallit’-word in Dellys and elsewhere in Algeria is laxʊṛ, originally “the other one”, used to substitute for verbs as well as nouns. However, from a relative about 90 years old, I heard a different construction based on haðak “that”: ma-yhaðak-š “he doesn’t whatsit”. This is paralleled in Malta and Morocco, so presumably it used to be more widely used.

The usual word for “knife” in Dellys is mus, but xʊdmi (usual in Bechar) is also in use. However, I hadn’t previously heard xʊdmiša. The curious final š can perhaps be explained as a borrowing from Berber, in some varieties of which ṯaxʷəḏmiyṯ would regularly yield ṯaxʷəḏmišṯ.

French cinquante is often heard as sikõnt “fifty”. The vowel is difficult to explain – influence from another Romance language?

Some words new to me: gərziz “empty gum, empty tooth socket”; ma-ksan-š “he’d rather not”; ṣfiħa “horseshoe”.

The ʕ in the verb ‘give’ is often elided: aṭini “give me” for regular aʕṭini.

I don’t think triliteral verbs ever end in w, but quadriliterals may: yqəwqəw ‘(a chicken) cackles’ (usually yqaqi in Dellys), yčəwčwu ‘they chatter’.

HEAD = GOURD in Algeria

The metaphorical identification of heads with gourds is probably obvious enough to arise spontaneously anywhere that gourds are in regular use (even English has expressions like "stoned out of his gourd".) In Algeria, it is historically reflected in some varieties' lexicon. Kabyle has in most contexts replaced pan-Berber ixf with novel a-qəṛṛu, whose ṛ betrays its loanword origin. The immediate source seems to be dialectal Arabic qəṛṛuʕ, attested in the meaning "head" around Jijel, but originally "big gourd", imposing the augmentative template CaCCūC on the noun qarʕ (dialectal qəṛʕa) "gourd, squash". (One might also consider a role for Classical ʔaqraʕ "mangy, bald", dialectal gəṛʕa "bald".

The thing about metaphors, though, is that they appear across multiple domains, not just in language. I recently learned of a traditional Algerian treatment for migraines (reported to be very effective) that involves cutting a fragment of gourd, writing various symbols on it, and pressing it against the appropriate place on the head of the affected person. The same metaphor that produced lexical change in Kabyle has evidently inspired curative practices next door. Perhaps a wider cultural survey would yield examples in other domains as well?

"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

Ngər "die out"

In Algerian Arabic, ngər نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; nəgru نڨرو "they died out" typically means they died leaving no descendants bearing the family name. I've usually heard it in reference to small families that had no sons, but it can also be caused by mass killing, as recent events horribly remind us; expressions used in the news, alongside "wiped out", include the oddly bureaucratic formulation "erased from the civil registry".

This verb has no connection to Arabic نقر naqara "peck, hollow out, etc.", as its non-emphatic r betrays. It is a denominal verb formed within Arabic from the Amazigh (Berber) noun anəggaru "end, latter", derived from the verb gʷri "remain behind" (originally *ăgrəβ; forms cited are from Kabyle). Nevertheless, it has been been reborrowed from Arabic into a wide range of Amazigh languages, e.g. Kabyle ngər, glossed by Dallet as "die leaving behind neither descendants nor relatives; die out (family); be exterminated".

This concept, unambiguously expressed by a single word in most North African languages, doesn't seem to be lexicalised in English. Is it lexicalised elsewhere?

"The Sound of Music" across three languages

You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music, an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family's memoirs. It features a neat little song for teaching musical notes, "Do, a Deer", which has been translated into a number of languages. Let's contrast three versions - English, Japanese, and Arabic - and see what they suggest.

English	Japanese	Arabic
Do, a deer, a female deer,	ドはドーナツのド Do is for "donut" (dōnatsu),	دو دروب ومعاني Do is "paths" (durūb) and meanings,
Re, a drop of golden sun;	レはレモンのレ Re is for "lemon" (remon);	ري ربيع الأغنيات Re is a "spring" (rabīʕ) of songs;
Mi, a name I call myself,	ミはみんなのミ Mi is for "everyone" (minna);	مي مـوسيقى وأغاني Mi, "music" (mūsīqā) and songs;
Fa, a long long way to run;	ファはファイトのファ Fa is for "fight" (faito);	فا فـجر الذكريات Fa, a "dawn" (fajr) of memories;
So, a needle pulling thread;	ソは青い空 So is blue "sky" (sora);	صوتنا ملء الفضاء Our "sound" (ṣawt) is a filling up of space;
La, a note to follow So;	ラはラッパのラ Ra is for "trumpet" (rappa);	لم يزل فينا الوفاء In us is "still" (lam tazal) loyalty;
Ti, a drink with jam and bread;	シは幸せよ Si is "happiness" (shiawase)	سوف تبقى يا غناء You, O song, "shall" (sawfa) remain;
That will bring us back to Do!	さぁ歌いましょう So let us sing!	لنغنّي نغنّي.. لحن الحياة Let us sing, sing... the tune of life!

As should be obvious, the Arabic version is derived from the Japanese one (via a popular anime of the 1990s) rather than directly from the English one. However, it contrasts sharply with both in the choice of note-mnemonics. In English, each note name (well, except "la") is mapped directly to a near-homophonous monosyllabic word, taking advantage of English's relatively short minimal word length; most of these are widely familiar, high-frequency items. In Japanese, the word choices are necessarily longer and perhaps more obscure (the syllable fa is found only in relatively recent loanwords anyway), but in each case the note is mapped perfectly to the first syllable of a single word, usually referring to something readily visualisable. In Arabic, the note is again mapped (increasingly approximatively) to the first syllable, not of a word, but of a 2-4 word phrase; not a single one of these phrases refers to anything concrete enough to visualise. High-flown slogans replace the original's homely whimsy.

I have no way of proving it, but I believe this is symptomatic - certainly of the Arabic dubbing in the cartoons I used to watch in the early 1990s, and plausibly of Modern Standard Arabic discourse in general: an imagination based on recitation rather than visualization, preferring stirring abstractions to concrete details. After all, concrete details travel poorly in this diglossic context.

Being "upon the truth"

It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - salat, namaz, wudu, shahada, masjid... There are even a few such words that aren't borrowings from Arabic or Urdu: circumambulation comes to mind. It is much more difficult, at least for me, to think of characteristics of "Islamic English" that go beyond the lexicon.

I was recently struck, however, by the expression "upon the truth". Searching for "upon the truth" yields plenty of mainstream English examples like "hit upon the truth", "lay hold upon the truth", "an essay upon the truth of the Christian religion"... However, searching for "be upon the truth", "are upon the truth", "is upon the truth", etc. yields a very different picture. Suddenly almost every single search result is specifically Islamic:

• "a) Hindering from the path of Allah, b) and confusing the person into believing that he is upon the truth" (Anonymous, Mission Islam
• "Either all of them are upon the truth which is impossible since truth is not open to contradictory differences or one of them is upon the truth" (Shaykh Haytham Al-Haddad in Muslim Matters)
• "This is because ibn 'Arabee held that all pagans and idol-worshippers were upon the truth since Allah is in his view everything" (translated from Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Rabee Ibn Haadee Al-Madkhalee's The Reality of Sufism in Light of the Qur’aan and Sunnah)
• "who do I follow among all those who claim to be upon the truth?" (Zahra Anjum in the International Islamic Publishing House blog)

You get the idea. The rare exceptions, like "their ultimate dependence is upon the truth", reflect quite a different construction, as the inanimate subject shows. In English, referring to people or groups being "upon the truth" appears to be unique to Islamic discourse (perhaps even to some genres thereof; most of the hits seem to have a vaguely Salafi vibe).

While this construction uses only well-known English vocabulary, it literally translates the Arabic expression على الحق ʕalā l-ḥaqq "on the truth/right". Within Arabic, this expression has a bit of an archaic ring to it, but is familiar from a number of hadith, e.g:

فَجَاءَ عُمَرُ فَقَالَ أَلَسْنَا عَلَى الْحَقِّ وَهُمْ عَلَى الْبَاطِلِ
At that time `Umar came (to the Prophet) and said, "Aren't we on the right (path) and they (pagans) in the wrong?" (Bukhari 65.365)

Being "upon the truth" is thus a calque into Islamic English from Arabic. No doubt a wider investigation would reveal other such cases.

Two Bambara words in Gnawa songs of Meknes

Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and medical functions, usually called Gnawa in Morocco, Diwan in Algeria, and Stambeli in Tunisia. Aguadé's Die Lieder der Gnawa aus Meknes provides the lyrics of an extensive corpus of Gnawa songs from Meknes in northern Morocco. These songs are primarily in Arabic, but characteristically include a number of words with no plausible Arabic or Berber source, presumed to derive from languages of the Sahel. Their identification, however, is generally difficult, although Aguadé ventures a few suggestions drawn from Hausa. Anyone can comb dictionaries for sound-alikes, but similar forms may be found across unrelated languages of the Sahel with very different meanings. It would be much easier if the meanings were certain, but the singers do not necessarily know the meaning of such words, and the context often hardly narrows it down. Nevertheless, some cases can be identified more confidently than others.

Aguadé's song number 88, Lalla l-Batul "Lady Virgin" (pp. 128-129), is dedicated to a female genie whose song cycle corresponds to the colour yellow. Its refrain (accounting for 5 out of its 8 lines) is a lalla l-batul, saysay "Oh Lady Virgin, saysay". The word saysay has no meaning in Arabic or in Berber. In Bambara, however, sáyi means "yellow"; the refrain would then be "Oh Lady Virgin, yellow, yellow".

In his song number 90 (pp. 130-132), the refrain is fufu dənba ya sidi "fufu dənba, oh master" (repeated 14 times, including the opening line of the song). Bambara dénba means "mother". The first verse after the initial refrain is ma bɣatək kda ya sidi "she didn't want you like that, oh master"; no feminine singular subject to which this could refer appears anywhere in the Arabic text of the song, but the Bambara interpretation allows this line to be better understood. I'd like to relate the preceding fufu to Bambara fò "greet" and/or fɔ́ "say, speak" - "greet Mother" would seem contextually appropriate - but I can't quite see how the grammar would hang together.

Addendum: In song 5, Sidi Gangafu "Mr. Gangafu", almost every couplet ends in Bambaṛa or shortened ya Mbaṛa, so a Bambara etymology seems worth considering (although an allusion to Hausa is also found). As Aguadé notes, Ganga is simply a kind of drum used by the Gnawa, whose name is shared across most of the Sahel, so one would expect this name to mean something like "drum-player" or "drum-maker". In fact, Gangafu can readily be interpreted as Bambara gàngan-fɔ̀ "play the ganga-drum". "Drum-player" should properly be something like gàngan-fɔ̀-la, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to suppose that the Bambara used by slaves among themselves would have had some non-standard features, given that for many of them it would have been a second language to begin with.

Some Dellys manuscripts

(Not linguistics, just history - possibly self-indulgent at that.)

Quite a few years ago in Dellys, I was allowed to photograph a bundle of pages from different manuscripts grouped together in a single detached cover, labelled as belonging to my great-uncle (رحمه الله). (I wasn't very good with metadata at the time, so I apologise in case anything ended up in the resulting folder from a different source.) Both the internet and my ability to read premodern Arabic handwriting have advanced a lot since then, and I can now identify (more or less) six of the works which these were taken from:

• A commentary on al-Nawawī's Forty Ḥadīth - a selection of key sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)
• Muhammad Mayyāra's commentary on Ibn ʕĀshir's Guiding Helper - a condensed summary in verse of essential Mālikī fiqh (religious jurisprudence)
• Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī's Warning to the Neglectful, a book of religious exhortation
• Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī's Decipherment of the Symbols and Keys of the Treasures, explaining Sufi concepts and terms
• A linguistically focused commentary on al-Būṣīrī's Mantle - a poem in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)
• Ibn Mālik's Thousand-Liner - a condensed presentation of Arabic grammar in verse to facilitate memorisation
• A commentary on al-Abharī's Isagoge - an introduction to Aristotelian logic

Apart from these, there were a few pages of rhymed dua (supplication to God), which I can't find a source for online.

I still can't identify most of the commentators; it seems that plenty of commentaries have yet to be properly digitised. But the geographic spread of the authors is noteworthy, covering almost the whole span of the former territories of the Umayyad Caliphate: al-Samarqandī from Uzbekistan, al-Abharī from Iraq or Iran, al-Nawawī from Syria, Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī from Palestine, al-Būṣīrī from Egypt, Mayyāra and Ibn ʕĀshir from Morocco, Ibn Mālik from Spain. The chronological spread, on the other hand, is notably more concentrated: 10th c. (al-Samarqandī), 13th c. (al-Abharī, al-Nawawī, al-Būṣīrī, Ibn Mālik), 16th/17th c. (Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī, Ibn ʕĀshir). The 13th century doesn't necessarily spring to mind as a golden age of Islamic thought, but for the early 20th century curriculum this notebook presumably reflects, it was at least a golden age of school texts. (On the other side of the Mediterranean, it was also the age of Thomas Aquinas and Dante.) The absence of 19th century texts here might be accounted for by the rise of printing, but that cannot explain the paucity of texts from other recent centuries; even the 16th/17th century texts seem to be intended to open the door to understanding older works. The common purpose of these works should also be clear: all of them either relate directly to religion or are ancillary to the religious sciences.

The texts themselves accordingly therefore cast only a very indirect light on the context where they were being studied. A note carefully added in pencil on the inside cover sometime in the early/mid-20th century, however, is much more eloquent:

WARNING: The earth is a dark planet, lit by the moon at night and by the sun in the day. The earth is suspended in space by the power of Allah SWT; He made a gravitational power in the stars that attracts the earth towards them just as a magnet attracts iron. The earth is not carried on the horn of a bull, as claimed on p. 36 of this book in a ḥadīth of `Abd Allāh ibn Sallām when he asked the Messenger of Allāh SAWS about the earth "What was it created from?" and so on until he asked him "And what do these seven earths rest upon?" He replied "On a bull." He asked "And what is the bull like?" He said "A bull with 40,000 heads", etc. This ḥadīth has no basis, and has been deemed fabricated, and none of the learned have confirmed this ḥadīth - and Allah knows best.

This short comment feels like the entire modernist era in a nutshell - that late 19th/early 20th century moment of collision with the West, when this vast storehouse of traditional knowledge, stabilised over centuries by mnemonic verses and long insulated from external criticism, is suddenly confronted with an urgent need to sift out the grain from the chaff and go back to first principles, or risk losing intellectual as well as physical battles. We're still living through the aftermath; one result is a widespread suspicion of works formerly treated as unimpeachable, including some of those above.

Instrument nouns between Dholuo and Arabic

In Dholuo (a West Nilotic language of Kenya), instrument nouns are formed using ra-...-i (the final -i is dropped after sonorants and semivowels), as in the table below (Tucker 1993:111-112, retranscribed). Both English and Arabic have comparable formations. In English, instrument nouns are occasionally formed with the -er suffix, like agent nouns. In Arabic, instrument nouns are more systematically formed, but with a variety of different patterns, starting with mi-..., or in modern colloquials with a feminine agent noun CaCCaaC-a.

However, taking a look at the cases listed by Tucker, we may note a striking cross-linguistic difference in distribution. In Arabic, all but three of the translated nouns use an instrument noun pattern of some sort, and two of the others use a more general verbal noun pattern; only "ladder" appears completely underived. In English, "peg", "billhook", "pestle", "tongs", "lid" all seem to be underived and simplex, and for several cases with zero-derivation (notably "hoe", "rake", "drill", "sign"), intuition suggests that the verb derives from the noun, the opposite of what we see in Arabic or Dholuo.

This suggests a typological difference in the structure of the lexicon: perhaps some languages "prefer" to mark instrument nouns as such and to form them from corresponding actions, while some prefer simple instrument nouns from which verbs may be formed indicating the corresponding actions. I wonder whether that holds up on a larger sample? What does your language tend to do, dear reader?

cut	toŋ-o	قطع	|	billhook, cutter	ra-tóŋ̂	منجل
slash	bẹt-ọ	مزّق	|	slasher	rạ-bẹ́t-ị̂	منجل طويل
hoe	pur-o	عزق	|	hoe	ra-púr̂	معزق
scratch	gwạr-ọ	خدش	|	forked rake	rạ-gwạ́r̂	مدمّة
see	ŋịy-ọ	رأى	|	mirror	rạ-ŋị́ị̂	مرآة
strain	dhịŋ-ọ	صفّى	|	strainer	rạ-dhị́ŋ̂	مصفاة
pound	yọk-ọ	دق	|	pestle	rạ-yọ́k-ị̂	مدقة
pierce	cwọw-ọ	ثقب	|	piercing instrument	ra-cwọ́p-î	مثقاب
hold	mạk-o	مسك	|	tongs	rạ-mạ́k-ị̂	ممساك
plug up	din-o	سد	|	stopper	ra-dín̂	سدّادة
hang	ŋạw-ọ	علّق	|	peg for hanging	ra-ŋạ́ŵ	علاّقة
cover	um-o	غطّى	|	lid, cover	ra-úm̂	غطاء
show	nyis-o	أظهر	|	sign	ra-nyís-î	علامة
climb	ịdh-ọ	صعد	|	ladder	rạ-ị́dh-ị̂	سلّم

Had Gadya in the Arabic dialect of Constantine Jews

Seeing as you can't turn on the news in France these days without hearing a certain more-French-than-thou provocateur fulminating against Arabs, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the Arabic dialect his parents or grandparents must have grown up speaking. There are a couple of recordings of the "Judeo-Arabic" of Constantine; a nice easy one to transcribe is Michael Charvit's recording of the originally Aramaic children's song Had Gadya, as traditionally sung at the Passover (Pesah) festival (translation here):

حاد ڨاديا، حاد ڨاديا، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجات القطّوس، وكلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجات الكلبة، وڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجات العصا، وضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا النار، وحرق العصا، والدي لي ضربت الكلبة، والدي ڨدمت القطّوس، والدي لي كلات الجدي، لي الدي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا الما، وطفّى النار، الدي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، الدي لي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا التور، وشرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، الدي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، الدي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا الدبّاح، دبّح التور، اللي شرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا ميلخ همّاڥات، ودبح الدبّاح، اللي دبح التور، اللي شرب الما، اللي طفّى النار، اللي حرق العصا، اللي ضربت الكلبة، اللي ڨدمت القطّوس، اللي كلات الجدي، اللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس
وجا اقّادوش باروخ هو، ودبح ميلخ همّاڥات، اللي دبح الدبّاح، واللي دبح التور، واللي شرب الما، واللي طفّى النار، واللي حرق العصا، واللي ضربت الكلبة، واللي ڨدمت القطّوس، واللي كلات الجدي، واللي شرالي بابا بزوج افلوس، زوج افلوس

ħ̣ad gadya, ħ̣ad gadya, li šrali baba bzuz əflus, zuz əflus
u ğat əlqəṭṭus, u klat əlždi, lli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğat əlkəlba, u gədmət əlqəṭṭus, lli klat əlždi, lli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğat əlʕṣa, u dŭṛbət əlkəlba, lli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əldi klat əlždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus
u ğa ʔənnaṛ, u ħṛəq əlləʕṣa, u ddi li ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, u əldi gədmət əlqəṭṭus, u ldi li klat əžždi, li ldi šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğa ʔəlma, u ṭəffa ʔənnaṛ, əldi ħrəq əlləʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əlždi, əldi li šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğa əṭṭuṛ, u šṛŭb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əlləʕṣa, əldi š ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əlždi, əldi šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əflus
u ğa ʔəddəbbaħ, dəbbəħ əlṭuṛ, əlli šṛŭb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əlʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əžždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, bzuğ əflus
u ğa milax həmmạvat, u dbaħ əddəbbaħ, əlli dbaħ əttuṛ, əlli šṛəb əlma, əlli ṭəffa nnaṛ, əlli ħrəq əllʕṣa, əlli ḍəṛbət əlkəlba, əlli gədmət əlqəṭṭus, əlli klat əžždi, əlli šrali baba bzuğ əflus
u ğaaaaaaaaa qqaduš baṛux huuuuuuuu u dbaħ milax əmmạvat əlli dbaħ əldəbbaħ ulli dbaħ əttuuṛ ulli šṛəb əlmaaaa ulli ṭəffa nnaaaaaaaaṛ ulli ħrəq əlʕṣaaaaa ulli ḍəṛbət əlkəlbaaa ulli gədmət əlqəṭṭuuuuuus ulli klat əžždiiiii ulli šrali baba bzuğ əflus, zuğ əfluuuuuuuuuus

This recording should in itself be sufficient to dispel any misguided notion that "Judeo-Arabic" was a different language. All of it should be perfectly transparent to any Algerian Arabic speaker except a couple of phrases specific to Jewish culture: ħ̣ad gadya is Aramaic for "one kid goat" (the name of the song), milax həmmạvat is Hebrew for "the Angel of Death" (ملك الموت‍), and qqaduš baṛux hu is Hebrew for "the Holy One, Blessed be He" (referring to God). The word dəbbaħ ("slaughterer"), while obviously Arabic, might also be a religiously specific term for "shohet" (a kosher butcher) rather than the generic term for "butcher" - I'm not sure. Otherwise, every word in the rhyme is etymologically Arabic, although qəṭṭus "cat", zuğ "two", and flus "small coins" are ultimately from Latin or Greek. (Note the complete absence of Berber vocabulary.)

Nevertheless, we do see a few slightly unusual dialectal features. The most striking is the variation between different forms of the relative pronoun: normal əlli coexists with əldi, əddi, hesitant combinations of the two with li, and, oddly enough, ulli, as if this were coordination rather than subordination. The use of əldi, in particular, is reportedly characteristic of Jewish religious registers of Arabic; it looks as though the speaker was in the habit of using əlli in his normal speech, but aimed for əldi in this religious and formulaic context. We also find variation between (eastern) zuz and (central/conservative) zuğ for "two", and assimilation or non-assimilation of the article in əlždi or əžždi "the kid goat", probably a result of the deaffrication of ğīm before d. The loss of interdentals is fairly normal for old urban dialects.

Lemurian Arabic

In the western ports of the continent of Lemuria, on the old trade route to Uqbar and thence to Atlantis, a dialect of Arabic has been spoken since probably the 6th century AD or so. Its longstanding isolation from other Arabic dialects, and its speakers' bilingualism in neighbouring Lemurian languages, has allowed it to develop some rather unusual features. Like all Arabic dialects, it has lost the final short vowels preserved in Classical Arabic; but, unlike any other surviving dialect, it has largely preserved case and mood marking, thanks to extensive final-syllable ablaut.

For example, the noun "book" is conjugated as follows:

	SG	PL
NOM	kitoob	kitaaboot
ACC	kitaab	kitaabeet
GEN	kiteeb	kitaabeet

One thus says royt ilkitaab "I saw the book", sagatʼ ilkitoob "the book fell", deexil ilkiteeb "inside the book". The resulting system is rather reminiscent of Old Irish, among other languages of our own timeline.

Sadly, a full documentation of this fascinating dialect will forever be wanting, due to the difficulty of travelling to fictional destinations and of getting recording equipment to work properly in fantasy universes. However, I trust that the available data is sufficient to establish that phonetic changes such as the loss of final short vowels need not automatically imply the loss of morphological information that the lost phonemes had encoded.

Clitic doubling in Arabia: An update

Back in 2017, I published an article on "Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic" (ZAL 66, pp. 45-70), arguing that the various cases of clitic doubling reported across Arabic dialects in different regions - NW Africa, Malta, the Levant, Cyprus, Central Asia, Dhofar - differ in their behaviour, do not share a common origin, and in each case reflect substratum influence. The case of Dhofar turned out to be particularly tricky in that the only available evidence for clitic doubling in local Arabic and in its Modern South Arabian substratum came from the same speaker in each case - Mhammed bin Selim El-Kathiri, a bilingual speaker of Jibbali and Dhofari Arabic who worked with a team of Austrian linguists about a century ago. He used the same clitic doubling construction across both his languages (definite DO/IO/PrepO, no marker); but no such construction appears in more recent work on either language. I tentatively concluded that:

Only further data can determine whether this is a general feature of some particular Dhofari dialect (perhaps the second language dialect of Arabic spoken by Shihri speakers?) or just an unusual feature of El-Kathiri's idiolect. However, if this construction was not simply idiolectal, its origins seem more likely to lie in Jibbali than in Dhofari Arabic, since no parallels have been found in any Arabic dialect of the Arabian Peninsula.

A forthcoming article I recently came across, Pronominalization and Clitic Doubling in Syrian and Omani Arabic, changes the picture for this region. In a paper primarily focused on the generative syntax of clitic doubling rather than on its history, Peter Hallman and Rashid Al-Balushi demonstrate for the first time that the Arabic variety of al-Batinah in the north of Oman has productive clitic doubling, and that its distribution (definite/specific DO/IO/PrepO/Poss, no marker) largely matches El-Kathiri's usage a century earlier. Clitic doubling of this type thus a widespread Omani feature, not a Dhofar-specific one, and certainly not a merely idiolectal one.

Note that the dialect of Al-Batinah, like that of Dhofar, is a dialect with q for historic qāf, representing the earliest stratum of Arabic to reach the region. One hypothesis could be that clitic doubling of this type is a Modern South Arabian (MSA) substratum feature, calqued into the first Arabic varieties to reach Oman but never reaching the g-dialects that first come to mind when one thinks of Arabian dialects. On the other hand, no further evidence has yet come to light for clitic doubling in MSA; based purely on the available data, it seems equally or more plausible that this type of clitic doubling arose spontaneously in Omani Arabic and was calqued into Jibbali by bilinguals such as El-Kathiri. Much more dialectological data is needed to decide the question; available descriptions are evidently far from complete. In either case, independent origin appears far likelier than any kind of historic connection with the rather different types of clitic doubling observed in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world.

W-deletion in Arabic

In Arabic, triliteral verbs starting with w- often drop the w- in the imperfect ("present"), and in a few related forms like the verbal noun: وجد wajada "he found" vs. يجد yajidu "he finds", وزن wazana "he weighed" vs. يزن yazinu "he weighs"... But not always: contrast وسن wasina "he fell asleep" vs. يوسن yawsanu "he falls asleep", وجز wajuza "it was brief" vs. يوجز yawjuzu "it becomes brief". Going through a dictionary, it becomes obvious that the primary determining factor is the vowel: verbs with an imperfect in -i- drop the w, while others keep it. (Proviso: verbs which originally had -i- turn it into -a- if the third consonant is "guttural", ie pharyngeal or glottal: thus وقع waqa3a "it happened" vs. يقع yaqa3u "it happens" from *yaqi3u, contrasting with وجع waja3a "it hurt" vs. يوجع yawja3u "it hurts" with original -a-.)

Empirically, this seems to work fine. But it doesn't make sense to me historically. Why should an i in the second syllable correlate with the absence of a w in the first syllable? Any ideas how such a sound change could plausibly have taken place?

Animal speech in the Songhay world: from orality to manuscript

Whether animals can talk is, above all, a question of definition. There are obviously important differences between human language and animal vocalizations; modern linguists and biologists find it useful to emphasise these by reserving words like "talk" for humans. There are, however, also important similarities which can be used to justify a common term for both - above all the fact that both often seem to be used for communication.

In traditional Songhay discourse, as in many other places, it's perfectly reasonable to say that animals talk. A "Kaado" text by Adama Seydou, recorded at the heart of the Songhay world in northwestern Niger near Dolbel by Ducroz and Charles (1982:55), expresses this attitude concisely:

Dábbèy, ì gó ǹd ŋ̀gêy wón héenó kâŋ ì ǵ té, kâŋ sénní nô, sénníyóŋ mó nô kâŋ, mán t́ bórà kúl nàŋ ǵ má r à. Amá bòryóŋ gò nô kâŋ ǵ nê, ŋ̀gêy ǵ má, wó kâŋ círôw fìláanà gó k̀ nê, wàl wó kâŋ háw fíláan gó k̀ hẽ́ k̀ nê, wàl wó kâŋ bèrì fìláanà, à gó k̀ hẽ́ k̀ nê.
Animals, they have their own cries that they do, which are speech/language; those too are speech/language, which no one can understand. But some people say they understand, what a certain bird is saying, or what a certain cow is saying with its cry, or what a certain horse is saying with its cry.

Some years ago in Tabelbala, the northernmost (Korandje) Songhay-speaking settlement, I recorded a similar attitude towards animal vocalizations, by Mr. Mohamed Larbi Ayachi (tabelbala2010-1-035). After he explained the idea, implicit in animal tales across North Africa, that long ago all the animals used to talk, I asked him why that stopped; he replied:

Aṛṛə̣yyəd, ala wạlu. Ala əytsa lħəywan ba təndzi abdzyəy. Lħəywan. Mħal išənyu, mħal ə ɣuna. Išənyu ndza nbạṛṛaḅḅạna gạka, uɣudz abnnas nɣayu, gundz ə iššəmm an ərriħəts amgẉa anna tsiwktsyu, maʕ maʕ. Itsa abdzyəy.
Did it stop? No, no way. No; look, animals still talk. Animals. Like goats, like uh whatsit. Goats, if you've raised them in the house, the one who gives them food, when they smell his smell they start crying out, maa! maa! So they talk!

How did the precolonial spread of literacy combine with these attitudes? An unpublished Arabic manuscript recently posted by Endangered Libraries In Timbuktu - Kitāb fīhi Kalām al-Bahā’im wa al-Ṭuyūr [A Book Containing the Speech of the Animals and the Birds] (from the Essayouti Library, early 19th c.) - strikingly mirrors Adama Seydou's discourse above, while integrating a specifically religious spin. This apocryphal text, probably composed locally to judge by the occasional gender agreement errors, portrays ten Jewish religious scholars challenging the Caliph Umar with a bunch of difficult questions, including:

وأخبرنا عن الفرس وما يقول في صهيله وعن الإبل وما يقول في رخائه وعن البقر وما يقول في نهاره وعن الحمار وما يقول في نهاقه وعن الريح وما يقول في هبوبه وعن العصفور ما يقول في صرصرته وعن الشاة وما يقول في صياحها وعن الكلب وما يقول في نباحه وعن الثعلب وما يقول في ترنيه

"Tell us about the horse and what it says in its neighing, and the camel and what it says in its grunting, and the cow and what it says in its mooing, and the donkey and what it says in its braying, and the wind and what it says in in its blowing, and the sparrow and what it says in its chirping, and the sheep and what it says in its bleating, and the dog and what it says in its barking, and the fox and what it says in its crying..."

Umar forwards the questions to (his future successor) Ali ibn Abi Talib, who replies:

وأما كلام البهائم والطيور فإن الفرس يقول في صهيله اللهم اغفر للمؤمنين واحزن الكافرين واما الابل فانه يقول يا رب كيف يستطيع السكوت من يفهم القنوت واما البقر فإنها تقول يا غافل انت في شاغل يا غافل انت عن القريب راحل يا غافل ما حدثت ما انت فاعل واما الشاة فانها تقول يا موت ما افجاك يا موت ما انشاك يا ××× ما اغفلك واما الحمار فانه يقول اللهم لعن المكا××××××××× الكلب فانه يقول اللهم اني محروم وانت الرحمن ××××××××× واما الثعلب فانه يقول يا رب ا...

As for the speech of animals and birds: The horse says in his neighing "O God, forgive the believers (al-muʔminīn) and sadden the disbelievers (al-kāfirīn)". The camel says "Lord, how can one remain silent (sukūt) who understands supplication (qunūt)?". The cow says "Neglectful one (yā ġāfil), you are in distraction (šāġil); neglectful one (yā ġāfil), you are soon to depart (rāħil); neglectful one (yā ġāfil), what have you made new and what are you doing (fāʕil)?" The sheep says "O Death, how surprising you are (mā ʔafjaʔak); O Death, how established you are (mā ʔanšaʔak); [...], how neglectful you are (mā ʔaġfalak)!" The donkey says "O God, curse the [...]". The dog says "O God, I am deprived (maħrūm), and you are the merci[...]". The fox says "Lord, [...]".

In form, these loosely reflect the actual sounds of the animals: each of the phrases attributed to the animals have a rhyme in Arabic that recalls the animal's stereotypical sound (the horse in -īn, the camel in -ūt, the sheep in -aʔak/-alak.) In meaning, on the other hand, they reflect not any actual intentions that the animals might reasonably be seen to have, but rather their species' role within human society: horses used for war, sheep bred to be killed, dogs relegated to a lowly position.

The real purpose of this invention is obviously devotional and mnemonic: it creates a memorable association between an animal's cry and a sort of mini-sermon, ideally making every animal's cry trigger dhikr (remembrance of God) in its human readers.

On the surface, this text not only admits the possibility of animals speaking but gives it a stamp of religious authority. Yet the specific interpretations it gives make it impossible to read such speech as contextually relevant in any specific here and now, or as relating in any way to the animal's desires or circumstances. The animals are not so much being anthropomorphized as being "angelized" - turned into messengers of an abstract cause, like Smokey the Bear. In fact, the pretense of translating the language of animals here, as so often around the world, actually deprives them of the voice that less "sophisticated" approaches like Adama Seydou's acknowledge.

The ideal people to ask about this topic, in some respects, are neither farmers nor scholars, but hunters and herdsmen (not that those categories are mutually exclusive!) Unfortunately, I'm not aware offhand of any work on Songhay-speaking hunters' attitude to animal communication; it would make a very interesting counterpoint to statements like these.

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This little foray into linguistic anthropology was partly inspired by discussions with James Costa. My thanks to him, to Mohamed Larbi Ayachi, and to the ELIT team.

Kabyle-Arabic phraseological convergence

Kabyle Berber and (especially north-central) Algerian Arabic show the marks of massive convergence, often reflected in the use of phraseology that translates literally with identical meaning. A nice example I came across recently (p. 186, Poèmes kabyles anciens, Mammeri 1980/2009) is the following sentence:

Ur as zmireɣ, ur iffiɣ felli.
NEG 3SG.DAT be.able.NEG.PFV-1SG, NEG 3MSG-go.out.NEG.PFV on-1SG
Literally:
I can't handle it, it doesn't suit me.

This translates perfectly into (north-central) Algerian Arabic:

ما قدرتلو، ما خرج عليّا.
Ma qdertlu, ma xrej 3liyya.
NEG be.able.PFV-1SG-3SG.DAT, NEG 3MSG-go.out.PFV on-1SG
Literally: I can't to it, it doesn't go out on me.
I can't handle it, it doesn't suit me.

In languages further removed from the area, however, a literal translation would be comically nonsensical:

• EN: *I can't to it, it doesn't go out on me.
• FR: *Je ne lui peux, il ne sort pas sur moi.

Another case was highlighted on Twitter by Noureddine Chikh: the use in both languages of "where do I know?" for "how would I know?" The latter proved to have some near-parallels elsewhere (with "Whence do I know?"), but no perfect ones were reported. How about this one? Can you think of any other idiomatic phrases that translate literally across the two languages?

Scattered etymological notes

I'm posting these mostly so I don't forget them...

Algerian Arabic jəḥmum جحموم "blackbird", and its Kabyle counterpart ajeḥmum, derive from Classical Arabic yaḥmūm يحموم "soot-black". This otherwise very irregular change y- > j- is perfectly paralleled in another animal name of the form yaCCūC: jəṛbuʕ جربوع "jerboa" from yarbūʕ يربوع. Could this be the regular outcome of this particular template? We need to check if any other yaCCūC animal names have survived.

The Korandje word for "vulva", imən, looks phonologically like an obvious match for Berber iman "soul, self". However, I could never see any sufficiently clear connection between the two semantically. The missing link is provided by Colin's (1918:118) description of the Moroccan Arabic dialect of Taza: there, rōḥ is glossed as a euphemistic term for "vulve de la jument ou de la vache". Is this attested in Berber itself anywhere, I wonder?

Another Korandje word, tasənɣəyt, refers to a type of rock; after Paleolithic discoveries near Tabelbala, paleoarcheologists ended up giving its name to an Acheulian cleaver type, the "Tachenghit" cleaver. This seems to match Jijel Arabic ašənɣud "pierre lisse (pour broyer)" (Marçais 1954:333), although Hassaniya Arabic may offer a more direct point of comparison. I don't remember seeing this in any Berber dictionary so far; is that attested?

Berber-Arabic macaronic verse

I recently came across a poem in praise of the oasis of Awjila in eastern Libya, attributed to its patron saint, the 15th-century Moroccan traveller Abu'l-`Abbas Ahmad ibn `Isa al-Fasi "al-Zarruq". The poem is in Arabic, but its first few verses stand out for including bits of the Berber language of Awjila:

أواجلة قوم يسوقون عيرهم	The Awjilis are a people who drive their caravans
إلى مصر والسودان في طلب التبر	To Egypt and Sudan in search of gold.
كلامهم "سوقات" في كل موطن	Their speech is suq-at (drive!) in every country,
"أكا وكاقني" على أمد الدهر	Akka (here it is!) and mag-nni (where is it?) all the time;
و"ييد وقيم ديلا" ألفاظ كلها	And yid (come) and qim dila (sit here) are the words of all of them
و"أزل فيسا" لغاهم على الأثر	And azzel fisa (run quickly!) is their accustomed utterance.

I can't vouch for the attribution, but it so happens that Morocco did have a tradition of Berber-Arabic macaronic verse, whose best-known exemplar is al-Rasmuki's 17th-century comic poem Qawm `ijāf ("A starved people"); the latter begins:

بسم الإله في الكلام إيزوار	"In the name of the God" in speech izwar (comes first)
وهو على عون العبد إيزضار	For He to help a person iẓḍar (is able),
وهو الذي له توليغتين	And He is the one to whom belong tulɣiwin (praises),
وهو المجير عبده من تومريتين	And He is the protector of his servant from tumritin (trials);
وبعده على النبي تازاليت	And after that, upon the Prophet be taẓallit (prayer),
أعظم بها أجرا ولو تاموليت	Great in reward, even if only tamullit (one time).
سافرت دھرا ووصیفي وینزار	I set off one day with my servant Winzar,
في سنة قد قل فیھا ءانزار	In a year where there was little anẓar (rain).
والقصد في السفر جوب تیمیزار	The purpose of the journey was to reach timizar (lands),
والسیر في خیامھا وإیكیدار	And travel in their tents and igidar (fortresses).
حتى حللت بعد سير أوسان	Until I stayed, after a trip of ussan (days),
في قرية يدعونها بأورفان	In a village that they call Urfan...

Given that the phenomenon is attested from both ends of the Berber world, it would be interesting to explore how widespread such poetry was, and whether it can be considered as constituting a genre in its own right.

Insults slipping through the diglossia filter

I recently came across a video, apparently from the little town of Souani near Tlemcen, of a poet, one Mohamed Tlemceni, performing a public satire of various Algerian establishment figures: كلمة في حق العصابة من إعداد شاعر الحراك تلمساني محمد. The poem itself is in Standard Arabic (Fusha), the normal language for formal public performance, but he intersperses elements from Algerian Arabic (Darja, italicised), as in:

أنتم تعيشون ببركات فخامته
فانحنوا له طاعة وامتثالا
خسئت يا من عرفناك رخيسا
شياتا للفساد طبّالا

"You all live thanks to His Excellency's blessings,
So bow down to him in obedience and compliance" -
Be off with you, you whom we know of old for a cheap bootlicker (lit. shoe-polisher),
a cheerleader (lit. drum-beater) for corruption!

or (in a reference to Ali Haddad):

جمعت ما يفوق الثلاثين مليار دولار بعرق جبيني
ولم أكن يوما محتالا
أول حرّاڨ بعد الحراك المبارك
فبعد أن كان ميليارديرا صار بطّالا

"I amassed more than 30 billion dollars by the sweat of my brow,
and was never once a crook."
The first harrag (illegal emigrant) after the blessed Hirak (protest movement) -
After being a billionaire, he became unemployed!

So what's going on here? The first part of the performance is satirical: for each person mentioned, he gives one or two vainglorious lines sarcastically put in the mouth of the target (often alluding to real quotes), then two or three tearing him down (then he throws the target's picture in the bin). In the second, he praises the Algerian people and urges it to ever greater achievements. Every single Darja element he uses is in the satirical part; various insults (shiyyat "bootlicker", Tebbal "cheerleader", HeRRag "illegal emigrant", HeRki "traitor") and one direct quote (mocked immediately aftewards). The unironic praise is pure Fusha.

This is not a particularly representative sample of the protests, as the small audience and the rural setting should suggest; in its theatrical, rather bombastic style, it harks back to the public speaking of the 1960s or 1970s more than to any contemporary mainstream. The theatricality is obviously to some extent deliberate and even prized; it almost inevitably accompanies the polished use of a language learned at school and never spoken in ordinary conversation. But it also undermines the force of emotional epithets, making them seem a bit recherché. Shifting into Darja for insults helps to restore their immediacy, while adding a bit of comic effect to a moment clearly intended to provoke laughter (at, not with). But it seems the poet is not yet ready to allow that kind of everyday realism into moments of hope; for dreaming of a bright future, only artfully selected, formal words will do. By relegating the Darja words exclusively to the context of mockery, he strengthens the principle of Fusha as the appropriate language for proper speech even as he violates it by letting them into the poem at all. It's a long way from something like Anes Tina's equally contemporary El Cha3be Yourid, where diglossia is hardly even felt as a relevant constraint.

Kabyle-Arabic code-switching

One of the great understudied subjects in North African linguistics is Berber-Arabic codeswitching (unlike French-Arabic and French-Berber codeswitching, which are massively overstudied); among the few references available are Kossmann 2014, for a central Moroccan community, and Hamza 2007, for Tunisia. A video from "Nass Bejaia" that's been circulating on social media might seem to provide a promising data source for this: in an eloquent plea against efforts to divide and conquer by setting ethnic groups against each other, the speaker alternates fluent Darja [Algerian Arabic] and Kabyle [Berber] to convey his message to both groups. What better context for code-switching? But, surprisingly enough, there is almost no insertional code-switching, almost no embedded language islands. About the only example is (Kabyle in bold, Arabic underlined):

makanš la d aqbayli, la d aɛeṛbi, la d amẓabi, la d annayli, la d attargi, ula ma... yji waħəd məlkamrun ysəggəm ldzayər nqululu mərħba bik.

There is no Kabyle, no Arab, no Mozabite, no Naili, no Tuareg, even if... there comes someone from Cameroon who would fix Algeria, we'll tell him welcome!

Even here, the second shift comes after an audible pause, and it's probably no coincidence that all the Kabyle elements of this sentence except ula ma are immediately comprehensible to Arabic speakers; even copular d is widely used in Jijel and Bejaia, though unfamiliar elsewhere (and la is ambiguous, used in both languages, which probably facilitates the first shift). Otherwise, the language shifts are rather consistently at phrase boundaries, as in the sentence that follows the previous:

yji waħəd mənnižir, waħəd məḷḷalmạn, lɛaslama

Someone comes from Niger, someone from Germany, welcome.

or as in this later sentence (French in red):

Anda ara aɣ terrem? Wac, ad ɛawdeɣ? Lukan par exemple - Ya xawti, ya xawti, had əlmisaž muhimm židdan məbjaya, makanš əljihawiyya.

Where are you taking us? What, should I say it again? If for example - Brothers, brothers, this message is extremely important from Bejaia: No regionalism!

Sometimes the same content is repeated in both languages successively, sometimes it's left in only one language, but in general, any one phrase should be perfectly comprehensible to a monolingual. It remains to be studied whether this is typical of Kabyle-Arabic code-switching, or just a fact about this short clip.