Among the many shared characteristics that make the Maghreb proper (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco north of the Atlas Mountains) a linguistic area, in my view (albeit a somewhat trivial one, given that only two fully separate languages are involved) is that of double negation: like French, most languages of the area have a negative particle both before and after the verb.
In Algerian Arabic, this is
ma ... sh(i), which derives transparently from Arabic
ma:, "not (past)" and
shay', "thing" (as in constructions like
ma: ra'aytu shay'an, "I didn't see a thing".) In
Kabyle, the corresponding construction is
ur ... ara, which is purely Berber but exactly parallel;
ur or
ul meaning "not" is found throughout the family, and
ara comes from a root meaning "thing" or, as in Tuareg, "child". By contrast, Tuareg and Tachelhit, south of the Maghreb proper, both use negations based on cognates of
ul alone, without any postverbal element. So when I came across the
Chenoua negative -
u ... sh - I naturally assumed this must be a rather interesting Arabic-Berber hybrid, with the Berber preposed negative and the Arabic postposed one. The
Tamezret negative is similar,
ul ... sh, and seems to fit the idea nicely.
However, it turns out that, despite appearances, this may not be the best explanation.
Tarifit uses
war ... sha, and Middle Atlas Tamazight optionally uses
ur ... (sha). At first sight these seem to work, but the vowel seems odd if they derive from Maghreb Arabic
shi. However,
kra happens to be a well-attested Berber word meaning "thing", found also in Kabyle, and its expected form in Zenati dialects like Tarifit, Tamezret, and Chenoua would be *
shra (this may be a real form, though I haven't come across it.) And what more natural environment to simplify a consonant cluster than in an unstressed grammaticalized particle?
The issue is examined from a rather different, syntactic, perspective in a paper by
Ouali online, which ironically reveals an alternative construction in Tarifit which
does seem to be half-borrowed from Arabic:
ur ... shi. However, its data seem somewhat at odds with those I've found in other sources; there is substantial dialectal diversity within Tarifit, which may explain this.
