Why people say silly things about historical linguistics

I recently realised that a lot of popular misconceptions about language evolution derive from uncritical use of the "family" metaphor. In families, a person has kids and then stays around, alongside the kids, for many years... they may live to see their great-grandchildren. The parent and the child may show a family resemblance, but will certainly be separate individuals. If you're told that languages come in "families", and "descend" from past languages, then it seems perfectly reasonable to imagine those ancestor languages lingering on alongside their descendants, and to imagine that the minor changes occurring daily within the language you speak are completely different from the sharp discontinuities that would have to occur for a new language to emerge.

But languages don't work that way at all: a language's "descendants" are (with rare exceptions) simply the various results of its own changes in the mouths of various communities. It's usually meaningless to talk about one living language being the "ancestor" of another one; in such cases, both are descendants of the same ancestor, even if (as infrequently happens) one has changed significantly less than the other. (Revived languages, like Sanskrit, are arguably an exception.) The same mistake is frequently made in popular understandings of biology, for the same reason; people imagine that chimpanzees (say) are humans' ancestors, when in reality the very fact that chimpanzees exist alongside humans proves that, while both species share a common ancestor, that ancestor was neither of them (or, looking at it another way, has equal right to be described as either of them.)

Songhay materials

Songhay is a close-knit family of languages in West Africa, spread by the medieval Songhay Empire, that happens to be rather relevant to my PhD. It has no close relatives; the best guess is that it's Nilo-Saharan, but if it were spoken in the Americas, it would undoubtedly be classed as having no relatives whatsoever, and the resemblance to other languages is not strong. It has some rather interesting syntactic patterns. Throughout the family, NPs are organised as follows: possessor - head - adjective - determiner - plural marker, eg Kwarandzie adra kedda gh yu (mountain small this pl) "these small mountains", Sidi L`arbi n iz yu n targa (Sidi Larbi 's child pl 's canal) "Sidi Larbi's children's canal". While at least one other West African family, Mande, has this NP order, the only case I am aware of offhand outside Africa is Ulwa in Nicaragua. Even rarer worldwide is a feature found in a number of centrally located Songhay varieties: having two distinct classes of verb, one - the vast majority - requiring SOV word order (ie preverbal objects), and the other (including such verbs as "follow", "marry", "want", "see", "fear", "bring", at least in Gao) requiring SVO order (ie postverbal objects.)

Anyway, for me this has been a great week for finding materials on Songhay. Jeffrey Heath has updated his webpage, adding work in progress on the nearly undocumented dialect of Humburi as well as several others (I will find the Tadaksahak wordlist especially useful; aside from Songhay, readers may also want to check out his Dogon materials.) On a missionary website (though I strongly disapprove of such work, it does have useful byproducts), I found a good hour of fairly comprehensible audio in Tadaksahak, an inadequately documented Northern Songhay language important for my purposes; and SOAS library just informed me that the copy of Ousseina Alidou's unpublished dissertation on Tasawaq, an even more important language for comparisons to Kwarandzie, has at long last arrived from Hamburg. Above all, I got an email from a kind contact from Tabelbala, with some more Kwarandzie audio files.

For other Songhay materials, try Relative Clauses in Tadaksahak, Some Verb Morphology Features of Tadaksahak, Northern Songhay Languages in Mali and Niger, Southern Songhay Speech Varieties in Niger, The Zarma Website, Zarma Dictionary, Notions élémentaires pour apprendre le Zarma, La dénomination en Zarma, Lexique kaado-français...

Prenominal adjective borrowed into Arabic from Persian?

A major interest of mine lately is the way in which lexical borrowings can affect syntax, dragging bits of the source language's word order with them. I came across what looks like a nice example of this in a book on Gulf Arabic. In Kuwaiti dialect, as in all dialects of Arabic, adjectives normally follow the noun. However:

The (Persian) adjective kooš precedes the noun it qualifies. It does not occur in association with defined nouns. It is not inflected for gender or number. Thus:
    kooš walad, bint    a good boy, girl
(T. M. Johnstone, Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, London: Oxford University Press 1967, p. 147.)

Only trouble is, my Persian grammar doesn't say anything about the Persian adjective in question being pre-nominal, and virtually all adjectives in Persian are post-nominal. Does anyone know more about this?

Learn Oneida!

Came across a great new site, the Oneida Language Revitalisation Program, consisting mainly of an extensive audio phrasebook of Oneida, the Iroquoian language native to upstate New York. There's also a teaching grammar and dictionary at Oneida Language Tools, and some video at Tracy Williams' site. It's great to see this much material online for a language with less than two hundred speakers; this should make it a lot easier for would-be speakers to make a good start at learning it.

Translation and propaganda

Horrifying news from Palestine - a Hamas Mickey Mouse is telling Palestinian kids to "annihilate Jews"! Or not. In fact - after running on a wide range of media, few of whom I suspect will bother to correct their story - this story was independently quickly exposed by several sources, such as Angry Arab, Ali Alarabi, and Brian Whitaker; MEMRI (the Israeli secret services-linked outlet that provided it) made the mistake of providing a video allowing any Arabic-speaker to confirm their mistranslations. With just a bit of spin, the kids' show in question was turned from merely propagandistic to verging on Bond-villain-esque:
* nqāwim, "we will resist", is rendered as "we will fight";
* biṭuxxūnā l-yahūd "the Jews shoot us", is rendered as "we will kill the Jews" (!);
* 'astašhid "I will be a martyr" as "I will commit martyrdom" (I don't think that's even an English expression, but never mind);
* 'ustāđiyyat al-`ālam, literally "professorship of the world" (in context, they clearly mean being at the intellectual forefront of the world), is rendered as "masters of the world".

When challenged on the translation of "biṭuxxūna l-yahūd", the ex-colonel in Israeli military intelligence who runs MEMRI, Yigal Carmon, apparently resorted to insisting that because "yahūd" (Jews) comes at the end, it must somehow be the object! ("Even someone who doesn't know Arabic would listen to the tape and would hear the word 'Jews' is at the end, and also it means it is something to be done to the Jews, not by the Jews.") It is rather difficult to imagine someone running an organisation dedicated to translating Arabic being unaware that subjects in Arabic commonly follow the verb (especially when a pronominal object suffix (-nā "us") is present, as here).

The moral in all this for English-language media is clear: when some helpful organisation sends you a free translation of some foreign-language article or program, do look a gift horse in the mouth, and check the translation with an independent source first. As for readers/viewers of the media in any language - caveat lector! But you no doubt already knew that.

Agflation

I'm a bit busy getting my core chapter ready to hand in, so just a quick post on an English word I spotted lately: agflation. The term confirms the ever-increasing productivity of "-flation" as a suffix; the phenomenon is rather alarming.

Who has more than 40 words for camels?

Geoffrey Pullum is annoyed to hear a reporter state that "Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel" - not so much for whether it's true or not as because "they are presented as if profound and significant and clearly supportive of exoticizing claims about far-away nomadic peoples like Arabs and Eskimos, when in fact even if they were true they would be utterly unsurprising." I suppose I should point out that it is true - unsurprisingly. I don't know much more than three (Classical) Arabic words for "camel" ('ibil camels in general, jamal male camel, nāqah female camel); but people I can only describe as camel geeks have taken the trouble to post lists of terms for camels of various ages, sexes, colours, and breeds - and there appear to be 38 more terms for female camels classified by their breeding status alone, and another 14 for different Saudi camel breeds (and I'm ignoring at least another 6 lists of specialised terms for camels just on that site.) If I were a professional camel breeder or something (perish the thought!) I would no doubt know all these terms; but otherwise, who needs them?

But "Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel" is nonetheless misleading. People have a habit of thinking of technical vocabularies as aspects of a language - English has n terms for types of dog, Japanese has x terms for types of seaweed, etc. But that doesn't really work. It's not English speakers that have more than thirty terms for places of articulation; it's linguists working in a certain tradition. If they publish in a different language but studied in the same place, they'll just calque or borrow the words; if they cut their teeth on Panini or Sibawayh - in the original or in English translation - they will use a differently organised vocabulary even if they're writing in English. Likewise, an English camel breeder (if such a thing exists) will most likely just borrow the terminology of whichever region he got his camels from wholesale, as sure as an English sushi restaurant will borrow Japanese sushi terminology. Some Fulani tribes have shifted to Songhay - primarily a language of town-dwellers, with few native words for livestock types - but kept their cattle-herding lifestyle; unsurprisingly, they've also kept Fulani's enormous set of words for different types of cow, and not suddenly forgotten how to tell one cow from another. If practically every speaker of a language knows a given technical terminology, then it might make sense to view it as a property of the language; but that certainly isn't the case here.

Tamghazinut

I'm writing my core chapter at the moment on Kwarandzie (Korandje), the Northern Songhay language of Tabelbala. (Ethnologue and basic historical common sense notwithstanding, it is specifically Northern Songhay in ancestry, sharing common innovations with the language of places like In-Gall rather than the city it used to trade extensively with, Timbuktu.) It is very heavily influenced by Berber, like other Northern Songhay languages, and I found a great example the other day: the word for "old woman" is tamghazinut. Amghar is a Berber word meaning "old man"; zinu is a Songhay word meaning "old"; and ta-...-t is a Berber circumfix forming the feminine, which, even though Kwarandzie doesn't have gender agreement of any kind, seems (judging by this remarkable case) to be marginally productive as a derivational affix. (Postvocalic r is regularly lost in Korandje.)

On the map below (which I put together for my thesis using Google Earth and GIMP), you can see something of the geographic improbability of the situation:

Yexisti!

A query on LINGUIST List the other day asked for examples of other languages which, like English, have a verb "exist" distinct from the general-purpose existential "there is". In Algerian Arabic, such a verb has emerged in recent years through borrowing from French - and has enjoyed the rare distinction of being publicly condemned by the president:

"Ma tinsistish", "ma texistish", the President of the Republic repeated, exclaiming: "What is this language?! It's not French, nor Arabic, nor Tamazight." Looking irritated, he added "I've heard some say that this is a matter of Algerian specificities. If so, I refuse as a citizen to be a part of these specificities."
(L'Expression 9 Mar 2006. The quote can't be found on the official record, which just has a general condemnation of the "repulsive jargon we use in our daily dealings, in which it's sometimes hard to find our national language or even our original unadulterated colloquial dialect.")

Silly as it may sound, this borrowing does have advantages. kayen is the usual way of expressing "there is" in Algerian Arabic, but there are contexts in which it simply won't work - you could not reasonably render "I exist" as *kayen ana, or "Homer existed" as kan kayen Homer (any more than "there's me" or "there used to be Homer" really mean the same thing.) You have to have recourse to loanwords for that, whether you use a Classical Arabic word (mawjuud, say) or a French verb.

Anyway, I did a quick web search for examples of this, not expecting much - but it seems that the online corpus of colloquial Algerian Arabic is bigger than you might have thought, and as full of code-switching as you might expect given who is most likely to have web access. Anyway, presidential proscription or not, a number of examples come up:
* hahahaha mazal yexisti had nou3 taa les femmes? (lol does this kind of women still exist?)
* Antik yerhem waldik, can u send me the link of derja dikssiounaire blenglizia ila yexisti bien sour (Antik please can u send me the link of Darja Dictionary in English if it exists of course)
* Hiphop ma zal yexisti (Hiphop still exists)
* en deux mots : ma yexistich en un mot makachou. (In two words: it doesn't exist. In one word: there isn't any.)
* c un ideal li ma yexistich (It's an ideal that doesn't exist)

Note the -i in this verb. In Algerian Arabic, Classical final-y verbs have mostly merged to end in -a in the past 3rd person and -i everywhere else: bka "he cried", yebki "he cries", bkit "I cried", ebki "cry!"; wella "he returned", ywelli "he returns", wellit "I returned", welli "return!". The rest of the stem remains constant throughout the conjugation; only the final vowel changes in such cases. Some of the commonest forms of French verbs happen to end in [e]: j'existais, il existait, exister, existez... So by an interesting compromise, throughout North Africa most French verbs are borrowed as final-y forms: tilifuna "he called", ytilifuni "he calls", tilifunit "I called", tilifuni "call!" (< telephoner). exister is no exception.

I wonder if other dialects have adopted this word too? I found one example from Tunisia, but that scarcely counts as a different dialect...

The Piraha debate heats up

A recent Language Log post alluded below the fold to two very interesting papers continuing the Piraha debate. Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment (Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues) reexamines Everett 2005's claims in light of Everett 1986, pointing out substantial and inadequately explained discrepancies between the two, and concluding with the rather hard-hitting statement that:

CA asserts, for example, that the embedded clauses amply documented and described in the earlier work are not actually embedded clauses, but offers no account or even acknowledgment of the numerous facts that argue in favor of the old view over the new. Similarly, CA offers as an argument for the new view the absence of long-distance wh-movement, but offers no new account of the data that in earlier work motivated the claim that Pirahã has no overt wh-movement of any kind. Likewise, as we have seen, CA asserts that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, but offers no coherent evidence against the proposal that the words described as quantifiers in the earlier work were described wrongly. In section 5, we have suggested that the situation is little better with respect to CA's discussion of Pirahã culture. CA simply asserts that Pirahã grammar has properties that, if true, would place it outside the pale of grammar and culture as we know it and would demand a special explanation for Pirahã's seeming uniqueness.

Everett replies in "Cultural Constraints on Grammar in PIRAHÃ: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (2007). He protests their efforts to provide comprehensible glosses for his 2005 sentences, objecting that considerations like what "the best free translation, the least exotic translation" is are irrelevant to the final analysis, which should rely solely on the truth conditions for the word's use, and that in any event "armchair linguists who wouldn't be able to pronounce a single Pirahã word" are in no position to give such glosses. Glosses like "cloth arm" are superior to glosses like "hammock" (which is what the compound in question means), because they help inform the reader about the complexity of Pirahã morphology. He also offers some interesting evidence on why he now analyses what he had previously termed a "nominaliser" (and had glossed as such in 2005) as a marker of old information. His core objection seems to be that such efforts as Nevins et al's are bound to fail because not all languages "translate fairly well into one another", and in particular, Piraha cannot be translated well into English; the comprehensible translations they propose don't have the same truth conditions, and the "literal" "translations" (yes, I think that was worth two pairs of scare quotes) that he sometimes gives (eg Everett 2005:624: “Smallness of cans remaining associated was in the gut of the canoe”; what would the truth conditions for something being "in the gut of the canoe" be, I wonder?) don't exoticise the language so much as attempt to render its genuine exoticism into English.

The debate looks like an argument about where the burden of proof lies: for example, does Everett need to provide more than two examples of how the truth conditions of Piraha "ba´aiso" differ from those of English "whole" (supposedly; the anaconda skin example works just fine for me in English, presumably implying that my word "whole" does not in fact mean the same as Everett's word "whole"), or do his critics need to go learn Piraha before they can question his claims about the meaning of "ba´aiso"? Are his critics justified in assuming that, in the absence of contrary published evidence, a given Piraha structure will have a familiar counterpart? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Incidentally, Everett's response provides another interesting example of differing truth conditions for a sentence in English. In his idiolect, apparently, the fact that, when outsiders come,

"They say hello and the Pirahãs say hello back. They ask if there are any fish and the Pirahãs say that there are fish or are not fish. Many Pirahãs can communicate at a rudimentary level in Portuguese. But they lose the gist of conversations very easily and often after someone has left they ask me to interpret... The best speakers of Portuguese among the Pirahãs speak it about as well as I do French. I can say a few things and find a bathroom, but I am not ready for any conversation of any depth at all."

is so perfectly compatible with all Piraha being "monolingual" that he can actually offer it as evidence for the claim.

Of truth and Scotsmen

A few commentators on my previous post invoked the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. This term refers to a rhetorical move whereby one makes a sweeping generalisation about some class (say, Scotsmen), and, when presented with a counterexample to the generalisation, retorts that this counterexample is not a true example of the class ("no true Scotsman"). While not strictly speaking fallacious, this move is of course misleading, in that it suggests that the empirically testable generalisation first proposed still stands, when actually it has been replaced with an unfalsifiable tautology applying to a much narrower class. I didn't in fact use any such argument in my last post, but I smelled something fishy about this "fallacy", and decided to examine it further.

The "true X" construction is semantically productive in a wide variety of contexts (a true friend, a true patriot, a true gentleman, a true villain, a true genius, a true cat...) In each case, it presupposes that some things that would normally be termed members of the class are not true ones (that not all of those who are normally labelled friends are true friends, for example). At least for animate nouns, it seems to distinguish between a broader use of a term based on appearance or convention, and a less inclusive one referring to a sort of ideal that members of the broader class may or may not live up to. Thus a true cat is one that exhibits, in exaggerated form, all the characteristics that we associate (accurately or not) with stereotypical cats; a true friend is one who exhibits the characteristics of friendship in circumstances where others would fail to exhibit them. Anyone can be a Scotsman merely by being born in Scotland, but to be a true Scotsman, you probably have to wear a kilt all the time, love haggis, roll your r's, etc.

Obviously, this feature of English is not inherently fallacious or misleading; using the phrase "true X" simply saves us the trouble of saying "an X that more than satisfies our expectations of Xs". Now that more people actually know foreigners personally rather than by report, it's become painfully obvious how far from reality most national stereotypes are, so this construction sounds rather silly when applied to Scotsmen; but even there it nonetheless conveys a fairly clear meaning to anyone familiar with English culture.

Interestingly, though, the rhetorical move originally criticised is not always misleading either. You can undeniably be a Scotsman (or a cat) without being a true Scotsman (or a true cat), so the suggestion that calling someone not a true Scotsman saves the original sweeping generalisation about Scotsmen is false. But if you're not a true friend (or a true gentleman), you're not really a friend (or a gentleman) at all - just as fool's gold isn't really gold - so calling someone not a true friend, if justifiable, does save your sweeping generalisation about friends, or, more accurately, your statement defining the characteristics of a friend. A poem I studied way back in middle school provides an entertaining example of the non-fallacious use of an (implicit) "No true Scotsman"-type argument:

Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws;
They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws;
With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another,
Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother;
The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air;
Said Francis then, “Faith, gentlemen, we’re better here than there.”

De Lorge’s love o’er heard the King, a beauteous lively dame,
With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same;
She thought, The Count my lover is brave as brave can be;
He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me;
King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine;
I’ll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine.

She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady’s face.
“By Heaven,” said Francis, “rightly done!” and he rose from where he sat;
“No love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that.”

Bloggers who abusively invoke "Islam"

Today, it appears that politics has once more touched the hallowed halls of Language Log Plaza. Unfortunately, while one post was good, the other was devoted to criticising what looks like an eminently sensible - if unlikely to be followed - EU recommendation that, among other things, the term "Islamic terrorism" be replaced in EU discourse by "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam", and the term "jihad" not be used in reference to terrorist acts. This should be an absolute no-brainer. The likes of Al-Qaeda wrongly describe their own terrorist acts as jihad in order to make them appear legitimate to other Muslims; for Western governments to publicly accept this characterisation is about as sensible as it would be for Muslim critics of Bush to start losing no opportunity to call him a true American patriot, or a stalwart defender of democracy and freedom.

Bill Poser seeks to justify the term "Islamic terrorism" by saying that "Dozens of terrorists have explicitly said that they are Muslims and that their motivation was Islam. Moreover, there is clearly widespread support among Muslims for terrorism." He then lists a table of responses across selected Muslim countries to the question of whether "suicide bombings against civilians are sometimes or often justified". Slightly expanding that table might have modified his conclusion. In the US, it turns out, "only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."". The loonier fringes of the blogosphere are rife with the sorts of idiots who would be happy to describe themselves as patriots motivated by patriotism and who support the mass killing of Muslim civilians. So by Bill Poser's reasoning, Americans' killings of Muslim or Muslim-looking civilians ought to be termed "patriotic terrorism" (626 ghits.) Of course, such a term is extremely unlikely to be used, because, given the sensible general view that such crimes are unpatriotic, the term's only function would be either to attack the whole notion of US patriotism by tarring it with the "terrorism" brush, or to promote the idea of terrorism by wrapping it in the flag. Calling the terrorism of groups like al-Qaeda "Islamic" fulfills precisely the same two functions - and no government should be in the business of promoting either of the resulting noxious ideologies.

Update: Bulbul, whose blog is always worth reading, has put up a good response to this issue.

OREL update

A brief work-related note:

The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project has (well, I have) just updated OREL: Online Resources for Endangered Languages. This bilingual library of annotated and categorised links now includes a total of more than 300 resources in English and Arabic, covering language endangerment and revitalisation, technology and techniques, ethical issues, and funding sources.

To access OREL in English, go to http://www.hrelp.org/languages/resources/orel/; to access it in Arabic, go to http://www.hrelp.org/languages/resources/orel-ar/.

Tamazight (Berber) proverbs of Tipasa

The second part of the book I discussed in my previous post is more immediately relevant to linguists: it is a collection of more than 150 Tamazight proverbs from the Tipasa area (specifically the village of Bou-Smail). These are transcribed in Arabic characters and provided with an Arabic translation, along with an interpretation of the proverb's meaning and usage and translations of the meanings of (some) individual words.

The proverbs selected are often slightly mystifying, as so many proverbs are; but a lot of their themes will have a familiar air to any Algerian, even where the form is unique to the region. Accurately reflecting the mood of the first half of his book, he opens with the splendidly chauvinistic:

  يَازِيطْ نَتْسمُورثْ إينُو وَلاَ أسْكورْثْ أَمِدَنْ (Yaziṭ ntsmurṯ inu ula asekkurṯ n medden)
  Better a chicken from my land than a partridge from someone else's.

Another proverb which he brought a strong social spin to was:

  أغْيُولْ وَمَاسْ يَتْغِمَغْ بْلا لَحْلاَسْ (Aγyul umas yetγimeγ bla leḥlas)
  A jointly owned donkey remains saddle-less.

and

  أخَامْ وَمَاسْ يَتَوِدْ لَهْوَاسْ (Axxam umas yettawed lehwas)
  A jointly owned house brings problems.

both reflecting the beylik mentality that remains all too common in Algerians' treatment of public property, and helps explain why socialism could never have worked there.

Given the author's interest in emphasising the Amazigh element of Algerian culture even outside Tamazight-speaking areas, though, he missed a trick by not pointing out how a number of the proverbs are shared across Algeria. A couple of proverbs were familiar to me from Dellys, for example:

  أَعْدِيسْ سْحَالْ دْيَرْوَا، يَقَّارْ إيِخَف غَنَّى (Aɛdis sḥal d yeṛwa, yeqqar i yixef γenni)
  Dellys: كي تشبع الكرْش، تقول للرّاس غنّي (Ki təšbə` əlkərš, tqul ləṛṛaṣ γənni)
  When the stomach gets full, it tells the head to sing.

and:

  أُويْتُسْمغَرْ يَخَفْ، سَالْ أَيْشَابْ يَخَفْ (sic; U yettsumγer yixef, sal a ycab yixef)
  Dellys: ما يكبر راس حتّى يشيب راس (ma yəkbər ṛaṣ ħətta yšib ṛaṣ)
  No head grows up until another's head grows white.

Others are apparently used in Chaouia too:

  وَانِي أتْيَقْنَنْ سِفَسْنِيسْ، أَتْيَرْزَمْ سِغْمَاسِيسْ (wani a-t yeqqnen s ifassn-is, a-t yerzem s iγmasn-is)
  Chaoui: wi -t- ikersen s ufus , at yefdek s teψmas (ويت يكرسن سوفوس، أت يفدك ستغماس)
  Darja: اللي عقدها باليدين ، يحلها بالسنين (əlli `əqqədha bəlyəddin, yħəllha bəssnin)
  He who ties it with his hands will untie it with his teeth.

  يُوسَادْ جَرْ وَكْسُومْ أَذْيِشَرْ   (yusa-d jer weksum ḏ yicer)
  Chaoui: ittedef jer n yicher d w-aksum (يتّادف جر ن ييشر دوكسوم)
  Darja (as heard from Dahmane El Harrachi): داخل بين الضّفر واللّحم (daxəl bin əḍḍfəṛ wəllħəm)
  Coming between the fingernail and the flesh.

In a final appendix which is something of a grab-bag, he puts a table of pronouns (he leaves out "we"), a couple of poems in Latin and Arabic script (only the Latin has been hopelessly messed up by a font problem), a list of names with Tamazight etymologies, a story about the jackal and the hedgehog (to which I've seen parallels as far away as Ghomara in northern Morocco) in translation, and - rather bizarrely - a certificate from the Arabic Language and Literature Academy of Algiers that they've agreed to publish this book.

The one problem with the book is its transcription system (worsened by a number of typos even in the Arabic parts.) Plain Arabic is better suited than plain Latin for the transcription of Tamazight; but, unfortunately, he did not take the minor steps, such as inventing a letter for ẓ or writing all instance of a, i, u as long, that could have allowed a perfectly phonemic Arabic transcription (along the general lines of Mohamed Chafik's.) As a result, it ends up with almost as many ambiguities as the Latin system used by Laoust a century earlier. A curious feature of the transcription is the frequent absence of gemination (tashdid) where it would be expected; since he does transcribe some instances, and presumably would have no difficulty hearing it, this might reflect an actual feature of the dialect. More expected is the frequent weakening of feminine t- to h-, and often its complete disappearance.

A new(ish) book on the Tamazight (Berber) of Tipasa

I've recently finished reading الأمازيغية - آراء وأمثال (تيبازة نموذجا) Tamazight: Views and Proverbs (the Example of Tipasa), by Mohamed Arezki Ferad (Algiers:Dar Huma 2004). It appears to be only about the third or fourth work ever written focusing on this dialect, but is unlikely to come to most English-speakers' attention, so I decided to review it, if only to remind myself what's in it.

The first half of the book is a set of essays on the place of Amazighness in Algeria's national identity, in which he argues that Algeria's Amazigh identity is undeniable, is relevant to the whole country and not just the minority that speak Tamazight, and complements rather than contradicts Algeria's Arab identity. The point is so obvious that it should scarcely need to be made; yet, as he notes, for decades the government used to make life difficult for those who spoke in such terms. He reminisces on his own experience (p. 54):

I remembered being excluded from the university and forbidden to teach in the history faculty in the early 1980s simply because I presented a thesis for my certificate of advanced studies on Amazigh history in Andalus in the period of the petty kings (reyes de taifa), and my viva was not scheduled until after great efforts, only to yield a blow that hit me harder than a thunderbolt: being excluded from the university and not hired by it! For the decision-makers back then thought that the thesis's topic reeked of anti-Arabism and encroachment upon the sanctity of this language which could never accept a rival! How great was my disappointment - I, a Kabyle born in a conservative environment built on Islam as its religion, Arabic for its writing, and Tamazight for its speech! I remembered - from as far back as I can recall - how we would study Arabic in Kabyle - yes, we studied Arabic in Kabyle, by the method of alif u yenqeḍ ara, ba yiwet s wadda, ta snat ufella... (ا alif has no dot, ب ba one underneath, ت ta two on top...) I remembered how we used to venerate the Arabic language and hurry to gather papers with Arabic writing on them when we found them scattered on the ground, for fear that some passer-by might tread on them with his feet... I remember how the name of "Mohamed Larbi" (lit. Muhammad the Arab) was on every tongue, with scarcely a family not using it, and the name of "Fatima" as a blessing for the Prophet (PBUH). For all these personal reasons, I couldn't understand the viciousness of the assault on the Amazigh dimension of the Algerian personality...

It is difficult for the uninformed reader to gauge whether his non-hiring was motivated by political or academic considerations; but in this quote, equally targeted at Arabists seeing Berber identity as a probably treacherous fifth column and Berberists seeing Arab identity as an alien false consciousness, he eloquently expresses the contrast between the absurd ideological concept of Arab and Berber cultures as opposing one another and the reality of traditional (and indeed modern) North African life where they intertwine inextricably. The degree to which things have improved in this regard is emphasised by the certificate he encloses from the Arabic Language and Literature Academy of Algiers stating that they've agreed to publish this book.

To reinforce the point, he devotes more than 20 pages to summarising the views of various leading thinkers of Ben Badis' Islah movement (an effort to reform Islamic practice in Algeria in the early 20th century that played a key role in reinforcing the idea of a shared non-French Algerian identity) on Berber, arguing that virtually all of them took this view (and hence that it must be the patriotic view to take...), along with a couple of Middle Eastern Arab writers whom he repeatedly mentions. He waxes enthusiastic about the constitutional amendment of 2002 that made Tamazight a "national language", and discusses the question of writing systems for Tamazight in its wake, coming out in favor of Arabic while acknowledging that, over the years of government hostility, Latin has taken the lead. While criticising the ideologues who oppose any recognition of Tamazight, he constantly dissociates himself from extremist Berberists who want nothing to do with Arabic or even Islam, warning that if the state doesn't promote Amazigh heritage, unsavoury characters of that ilk will. Here as so often in politics, it seems that extremists can be rather useful to moderates! While his doctrinaire political orthodoxy sometimes left me impatient for a more forthright style, it's probably exactly the right tone for his audience.

The second part, a set of proverbs of the area, will be reviewed in my next post.

How many ways can you write Tamazight?

I noticed an interesting set of articles in Info-Soir the other day on Tamazight (Berber) language teaching in Algeria. It confirms that Algeria has not adopted any one script as official for Tamazight: rather, all three are in use, depending on wilaya. Latin is used where Kabyle is spoken, Arabic in much of the Chaoui-speaking area, and Tifinagh in the far south. M. Touati of the Ministry of Education reports that 119,000 children in Algeria are currently studying Tamazight, 35,000 of them in a new primary school program; however, they complain of a shortage of teachers.

I'm finding it hard to gather exactly where the language is being taught, partly because the Ministry of Education website is among the slowest on earth. But it seems that, in 2001-2, it was being taught in only 5 wilayas, mainly in Kabyle-speaking areas: Bouira, Boumerdes, Tizi-Ouzou, Bejaia, and Biskra. Orders regarding the expansion of Tamazight education from 2000 were issued to a much longer list of wilayas - Oum el-Bouaghi, Batna, Bejaia, Biskra, Bouira, Tamanrasset, Tizi-Ouzou, Setif, Oran, El Bayadh, Illizi, Boumerdes, Khenchela, Tipasa, Ghardaia; but it is reported that four of these, El Bayadh, Oran, Tipasa, and Illizi, have ceased to teach it, and in Biskra and Tamanrasset it is reported that most of the few who have taken it up are Kabyle families.

I've written somewhat on this topic before, incidentally, as Awal nu Shawi recently reminded me. One of these days I need to update that essay.

Back from CamLing

I'm just back from a linguistics conference in Cambridge, CamLing 2007, where I presented a talk on number borrowing in Berber. If you missed it, you can view the slides at my homepage.

The conference was interesting, and I won't go into too much detail on it, but one thing I was surprised and saddened to learn (from Mary Ochoa) was that Yucatec Maya, one of the largest Maya languages, is extremely threatened. It has nearly a million speakers, but, except in the remotest villages, practically all Yucatec children are being spoken to exclusively in Spanish by their parents. Some parents even tell their children not to speak Yucatec or they'll punish them. Like Navajo, another Native American language that was flourishing until lately, it seems to be headed for a massive, rapid decline over the next fifty years.

Return of the Thousand Verses

I decided to inflict upon my readers my attempt to translate the first 15 lines of Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik, a medieval poem summarising Arabic grammar which I described some time ago. The original may have been written more for mnemonic than artistic purposes, but at least it takes fewer liberties with the metre... For best results, I recommend using an alliterative residulator.

Muḥammad, who is the son of Mālik, says:
My Lord God, the best master, I praise,
Praying for the Prophet, the Chosen One,
And his noble relatives every one.
And I seek God's help in a thousand-line
Poem in which grammar's basics are outlined,
Simplifying the hardest, concisely distilled,
And offering gifts, with a promise fulfilled,
Bringing contentment without any misery
Surpassing the thousand-liner of Ibn Mu`ṭī
Which previously took first position,
Deserving my praise and recognition;
And abundant gifts may God decree
In the Afterlife's stages for him and me!
A meaningful utterance is a sentence, like “Stand up, [birds]!”,
And nouns, and verbs, and particles are words
(The singular is word), and speech has general sense -
And “word” may also be used to mean “sentence”.
By genitive, indefinite, vocative, and “the”
And predication the noun is seen clearly;
By the t of fa`al-ta¹ and 'ata-t², and the y of if`al-ī³,
And the n of 'aqbil-anna⁴, known the verb will be;
Apart from them is the particle, like hal⁵ and fī⁶ and lam⁷.
A verb in the imperfect follows lam, like yašam.
Distinguish verbs' perfect by t, and recognise
By n the imperative verb, if imperatives arise.
And if in the imperative n has no place to dwell,
It's a noun, such as for instance ṣah⁹ and ḥayyahal¹⁰.

1. you did
2. she came
3. do! (f.)
4. approach!
5. question marker
6. in
7. not (past)
9. ssh!
10. over here!

Original text:

قال محمد هو ابن مالك * أحمد ربي الله خير مالك
مصليا على الرسول المصطفى * وآله المستكملين الشرفا
وأستعين الله في ألفيه * مقاصد النحو بها محويه
تقرّب الأقصى بلفظ موجز * وتبسط البذل بوعد منجز
وتقتضي رضا بغير سخط * فائقة ألفية ابن معطي
وهو بسبق حائز تفضيلا * مستوجب ثنائي الجميلا
والله يقضي بهبات وافره * لي وله في درجات الآخره
كلامنا لفظ مفيد كاستقم * واسم وفعل ثم حرف الكلم
واحده كلمة والقول عم * وكلمة بها كلام قد يؤم
بالجر والتنوين والندا وأل * ومسند للاسم تمييز حصل
بتا فعلت وأنت ويا افعلي * ونون أقبلنّ فعل ينجلي
سواهما الحرف كهل وفي ولم * فعل مضارع يلي لم كيشم
وماضي الأفعال بالتا مز، وسم * بالنون فعل أمر إن أمر فُهم
والأمر إن لم يك للنون محل * فيه هو اسم نحو صه وحيّهل

Slovak diglossia and Papuan Austronesian

If you're interested in diglossia, or sociolinguistics, or prescriptivism - and who isn't? :) - check out Bulbul's latest post on Standard Slovak. Also, a rare linguistics post on Far Outliers discusses the development of the Austronesian languages of the Huon Gulf.

Zenaga and Mauritania

Mauritania deserves some attention this week. On the rare occasions when it makes Western headlines, it's generally for slavery or famine, but this week it's distinguishing itself in a rather nobler fashion: holding its first free presidential elections. This is all the more remarkable because it comes some months after a military coup deposing the dictator who ruled Mauritania for 21 years, Maaouya Ould Taya; is it possible that a coup leader actually wants to step down in favour of an elected government? One can but hope that the appearance corresponds to the reality...

Anyway, in commemmoration of this event, I will talk a little about Zenaga this week. Zenaga is the nearly-extinct Berber language of Mauritania. Until about five hundred years ago it was spoken throughout most of the country; its ancestor would have been the language of the Almoravids. However, after the main Berber tribe, the Lamtuna, was defeated by the Arab Beni Ma`qil, most tribes gradually shifted to Hassaniya Arabic, which itself came to contain numerous Zenaga loanwords. The "marabout" tribes, those specialising in Islamic religious learning, retained Zenaga longest, and to this day it continues to be used, at least by the elderly, in a few areas near the southern Atlantic coast. It is remarkably divergent from other Berber varieties, due partly to a number of sound shifts (x > k, l > dj) and partly to a rather different vocabulary, incorporating words rare elsewhere in Berber along with Wolof and Pulaar loanwords. In addition to influencing Hassaniya Arabic, it has also contributed a number of loanwords to the Azer dialect of Soninke, and several words - notably the words for three of the five prayer times, and some religious holidays - to Wolof. Catherine Taine-Cheikh has been doing some documentation of it.

At least one of the few books on this language is available online: Le Zénaga des tribus sénégalaises, by General Faidherbe - although, chillingly, the author dedicates it to the genocidal mass murderer King Leopold II.

Saudi Dialect Map

An item of passing interest that caught my eye, and seems quite hard to find online: a Saudi Dialect Map. Unfortunately, there is little information on what (if any?) data this is based on, but there are other interesting materials on the author's website. Of the dialects pictured, the Najdi dialect is rather remarkable for its conservatism; it retains both the classical passive and tanwin.

Tamazight near Blida (Algeria)

A friend of mine alerted me to an interesting article in Ech Chorouk (3/3/2007): Beni Mesra - the forgotten people of the Blida Atlas. It describes a rural area near Blida where a Berber language was spoken within living memory, and is still spoken by the older generation. Dispersed first by the French counterinsurgency policy of forcing the inhabitants of many rural areas off their land during the War of Independence, and again by the violence of the civil war of the 1990s - to say nothing of the economic incentives to leave the area - their problems are tragically typical of much of rural Algeria. However, it is their nearly-vanished language which is of particular interest here; they represent a last survival of Tamazight in the otherwise entirely Arabic-speaking region south of Algiers. The author, Mohamed Arezki Ferad (who has written a book on the Tamazight of Tipasa), states:

‬ ومما لا شك فيه، أن مأساة بني مصرا لم تنحصر في الجانب الاجتماعي فقط بل امتدت إلى موروثهم الثقافي الأمازيغي الذي ضاع منهم لهجرتهم وتشتتهم في شتى التجمعات السكانية في سهل متيجة بفعل جرائم الاستعمار الفرنسي خاصة خلال ثورة نوفمبر، ثم جاءت أحداث الإرهاب الأعمى لتفرغ‮ ‬عرش‮ ‬بني‮ ‬مصرا‮ ‬نهائيا‮ ‬من‮ ‬سكانه‮ ‬بنزوح‮ ‬سكان‮ ‬قرية‮ »‬يما‮ ‬حليمة‮« ‬المقدر‮ ‬عددهم‮ ‬حوالي‮ ‬200‮ ‬عائلة‮ ‬سنة‮ ‬1996م‮.

وإذا كانت الأمازيغية قد ضمرت إلى درجة أنها لم تعد لغة التواصل لدى جيل الاستقلال، فإنها مازالت حية ترزق على صعيد أسماء الأماكن المتداولة حتى في أوساط الشباب يحمل معظمها معاني الحقل (إقر) العين (ثلا) والثنية (تيزي) والسهل (الوضا) أو (أقني) نذكر منها: ثالة أقنتور/ ثيزي علي/ ثامده أوقني/ ذفير لوضا/ لعزيب/ أحلوق/ ثاحامولت/ آيث غرورة/ يما حليمة/ ثلايلف/ إسبغان/ ثاقاديرث/ آيت أعمرولحاج/ أبريذ إخوان/ ثيزي وزال/ إقر أوزار/ إخف إقر/ إكر تازارت/ إغزر أوشاش/ إغيل أحروش/ ثيقرت وذغاغ/ ثلا أو مكراز/ إغيل أشكير/ ثاوريرث/ ثامرزوقث/ ثيزي أتسيثان. وحسب الحوار الذي جرى بيني وبين أهل بني مصرا، فإن لهجتهم الأمازيغية قريبة جدا من لسان القبائل الكبرى ولا تختلف عنها إلا في بعض الكلمات القليلة أذكر منها: أذر (البلوط) أحزاو (الطفل).

There is no doubt that the Beni Mesra's plight was not limited to the social side alone, but extended to their Amazigh cultural heritage, which was lost to them due to their migration and dispersal in various settlement centres on the Mitidja plain through the crimes of the French colonisation, particularly during the November Revolution; then blind terrorism came to finally empty the Beni Misra's land of its inhabitants, with the emigration of the inhabitants of Yemma Halima, who numbered 200 families in 1996.

And even if Tamazight has declined to the point that it has not remained the language of communication for the Independence generation, it is still alive and well on the level of placenames used even among the youth, most meaning field (iger), spring (tala), pass (tizi), plain (luḍa, ag°ni), of which we name: Tala Ugentur, Tizi Ɛli, Tamda Ugni, Deffir Luḍa, Laɛzib, Aḥluq, Taḥamult, Ayt Гrura, Yemma Ḥlima, Tala Ilef, Isebγan, Tagadirt, Ayt A`mer Elḥaj, Abrid Ixwan, Tizi Uzzal, Iger Uzar, Ixf Iger, Iger Tazart, Iγzer Ucac, Iγil Aḥruc, Tigert Udγaγ, Tala Umekraz, Iγil Ackir, Tawrirt, Tamerzugt, Tizi Atsitan. And according to discussion between me and the people of Beni Mesra, their Tamazight dialect is very close to the language of Grande Kabylie, and differs from it only in a few words, including: ader (acorn), aḥzaw (child).

Earlier he gives an example of the dialect:

وقد علق أحد المواطنين الذي بدت عليه مسحة الحزن والمرارة على وضع المصراويين المأساوي، باللسان الأمازيغي ما معناه: إن الكثير من الجزائريين الذين تبوّأوا مراتب عليا في دواليب الدولة قد أنستهم تخمة المناصب ما للشهداء من فضل وما لأفراد الشعب المنسي من دور في وصولهم إلى مراتب المسؤولية، لذلك أداروا ظهورهم لمن صنع ملحمة النصر (يتشور أوعبوظيس، يتسو ذفيريس).

One of the locals, upon whom the signs of sadness and bitterness over the terrible plight of the Mesraouis were apparent, commented in the Tamazight language that many Algerians who have reached high state positions, satisfied with rank, forget the preference due to the martyrs (of the revolution) and the role of the forgotten members of the people in their reaching positions of responsibility, so they turned their backs on those who made the battlefield of victory (yeččur uɛebbuḍ-is, yettsu deffir-is.)

Destroying Harsusi

I just came across some incredibly unenlightened reporting from Al Watan on one of the more endangered South Arabian languages (not, pace the article, a dialect of Arabic - in fact, it's less closely related to Arabic than Syriac or Hebrew are):

وتحدثنا المعلمة شيخة بنت راشد الهنائي إحدى المشرفات على الفصل التمهيدي ومعلمة مادة التربية الإسلامية بالمدرسة قائلة : الفصول التمهيدية التي سعت إدارة التربية والتعليم بالمنطقة بتنفيذه في مدارسها وللعام الثاني على التوالي يأتي بالعديد من الأهداف والتي تتمحور في الأساس لتشمل فئة من الأطفال الذين يتوقع التحاقهم بالصف الأول الأساسي في العام الدراسي القادم حيث تأتي في مقدمة هذه الأهداف تعويد الطالب على الجو المدرسي من خلال طابور الصباح والانخراط مع الطلبة في المدرسة والفصل الدراسي وتأقلمهم مع المعلمة داخل القاعة الدراسية وغرس التعاون والجو الاجتماعي في نفس الطالب قبل دخوله المدرسة وإكساب الطلبة العديد من المهارات في القراءة والكتابة والعمليات الحسابية وكذلك العمل على القضاء على اللهجة السائدة والطاغية على أهالي هيماء وهي اللهجة الحرسوسية من خلال الحروف والكلمات العربية الصحيحة لأنه في الحقيقة تواجه إدارة المدرسة عند التحاق الطلبة في الصف الأول مشكلة فتجد المعلمة الصعوبة في تفهم هؤلاء الطلبة من خلال هذه اللهجة الحرسوسية

"The teacher of Islamic Upbringing at the school, Sheikha bint Rashid al-Hana'i [s]aid: "The preschools that the Ministry of Education in the area has undertaken to implement in its schools for the second year running will bring about a variety of goals [...] the children will gain many skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and we will work on destroying the dialect which is prevalent and rife among the inhabitants of Hayma, the Harsusi dialect, through correct Arabic letters and words, because it truly presents the school administration with a problem when the students enter first grade, because the teacher finds it difficult to understand these students in this Harsusi dialect." (Al Watan, 15 Apr 2005)

I wonder if her echo of the language policies that half-destroyed Welsh or Native American languages is conscious. Somebody get over there and make some recordings of Harsusi before people like this manage to implement these goals!

Arabic threatened in Qatar?

In a development that doesn't surprise me but will probably surprise anyone who hasn't been following developments in the Gulf, an educationalist is warning that Arabic is threatened in Qatar, and some Arab children are growing up not speaking it. Recall that Qataris are a rather small minority in Qatar, outnumbered by guest workers from all over the world, mainly from South Asia (especially Kerala), the Arab world, and the Philippines. English has become very much a lingua franca there, and much of the population speaks it far better than Arabic, if they speak Arabic at all.

Qatari children's exposure to English often begins soon after birth, with the hiring of a nanny who is unlikely to speak much if any Arabic, and certain not to speak the Gulf dialect - or as Ms. Al Misnad put it, "the education of the children is left to foreign housemaids, who teach their own language and customs." It continues at school, where about two-thirds of their fellow students are non-Qatari (in practice probably less, due to many expat kids attending expat schools); English is a mandatory subject from first grade up, and the many American universities opening campuses in Qatar are commonly English-medium (for instance, CMU.) In short, it's easy to lead a fairly full life in Qatar with little Arabic, and easy to envision Qatari kids of this generation acquiring English natively.

However, apart from other issues like not giving any statistics or details, the article suffers from the common conflation of classical and colloquial Arabic. "In addition, parents would rather talk to their children in the dialect of their country of origin rather than in classical Arabic, a factor which is also contributing to a general decline in the understanding of the classical language" - as if parents have ever talked to their children in classical Arabic for the past millennium, or as if it were desirable that the children should grow up not speaking their own dialects!

Frananglais in Cameroon - but what exactly is it?

The BBC has recently reported that "Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais - a mixture of French, English and Creole - is affecting the way students speak and write the country's two official languages." An interesting language contact story, in a remarkably multilingual country none of whose own languages are used for official purposes; shame you can read straight through the article without being any the clearer on whether Frananglais is a system in its own right or just what they choose to call the local brand of code-switching between the two. Many of their examples suggest a French syntactic frame with English vocabulary inserted ("Tu as go au school", "Tu play le damba tous les jours?") - raising the possibility that certain English words consistently replace their French counterparts, while others remain in French - but other examples suggest plain old code-switching, ie shifting from one language to another in mid-sentence ("Tout le monde hate me, wey I no know", "je ne suis pas sure about this"). The one other example of frananglais I could find online is very much in line with it having a French frame with English words (and at least one Italian one) inserted, but there simply isn't enough data to see whether the replacement is systematic or ad hoc. I wonder if anyone can tell me :)

Quand je tellais aux djo de came put leur hand dans la marmite ici ,les djo me tellait que je ne suis pas reglo,que sam est un reglo,l'autre que france foot ne prenait pas en consideration de tels votes,et l'autre que je devais plutot appuyer ma petite au lieu de stay ici un saturday afternoon a game come les muna.(au fait moi je l'ai appuyé hier).Je remercie tous les toileurs qui ont sensibilisé le peuple et qui continue a do leur work reglo.Un seul mot....................jusqu'à ce que notre muna soit en haut sur tous les yahoo de ce web.Je vous en prie camez ici sur yahoo italie,la situation se fait inquietante,que les djo des state là quando tout le monde ici en europe nang deja began a do ce qu'ils Know.C'est notre arme segrete,la force du muna c'est le jour,et nous les grands continuons a work meme la nuit grace aux djo des state.J'ai began a speach avec notre frananglais parceque les djo tell qu'ils y'a des Mazembe ici qui boblé nos tactiques et vont les appliquer pour eux memes.Alors il faut qu'on leur show qu'on peut speach sans qu'il ne yah rien..... - Saittout, le 26/10/2006 à 15:33, Lions Indomptables

UPDATE: Language Log has a helpful post on this, citing some literature. See comments also - apparently it is very much a system rather than code-switching.

Semitic snake spells pop up in Pyramids

Prof. Richard Steiner claims to have deciphered a previously incomprehensible section of an ancient Egyptian inscription as a spell against snakes written in a Semitic language. Dating from 2400 BC, this spell, engraved on the pyramid of King Unas, would be the oldest attested West Semitic inscriptions (apparently in the dialect of Byblos), and nearly as old as the oldest Akkadian inscriptions. The idea of Semitic speakers being seen in ancient Egypt as specialists in snake magic is strangely reminiscent of the story of Moses.

Unfortunately, the talk in which he announced this is only available in Hebrew ("Proto-Semitic Spells in the Pyramid Texts") - he is apparently writing up a publishable work on the subject in English - but the link contains the texts themselves (p. 7) and their transcriptions (pp. 3-4) - the bold bits are those claimed to be Semitic, while the rest is regular Egyptian. He also has up a response in English to criticisms of his claim, which apparently were not long in coming. My Hebrew is not nearly good enough to understand most of the translations he gives, but here's a couple of bits I think I got:

236: ''kbbh iti itii bitii'' = Chant: Come, come, to my house!
281: ''mmin inw 333 twb ś if w-inw hnw'' = Who am I? Rir-Rir - sweet of smell in my nose - I am they. (there just has to be a translation error in this one - probably made by me)

From these, you can see a number of recognisable Semitic words - ''iti'' for "come" (Arabic أتى 'atā, Syriac 'atā), ''bit'' for "house" (Arabic بيت bayt, Hebrew bayit, Syriac bayt-ā), ''mmin'' for "who?" (Arabic من man, Hebrew mîn, Syriac man), ''twb'' for "good" (Arabic طيب ṭayyib, Hebrew ṭôb, Syriac ṭāb)... Specifically Canaanite features, if any, are less conspicuous; the assimilation of Proto-Semitic ''n'' to a following consonant presumably found in ''if'' "nose" (Arabic أنف 'anf, Hebrew 'āp) is found in Canaanite, but also in Akkadian.

Manly numbers in Tashelhiyt Berber

I've been looking at how and why Arabic numbers have been so widely borrowed into Berber, and came across a rather illuminating quote:

"Also, for the numbers 3-29 one frequently chooses the Arabic terms (ie. those in §171.) The women and small children of the Tazĕrwalt-Shlûḥ by preference count (as far as possible) with the Berber numbers, the men by preference (from 10 up) with the Arabic ones. Therefore the Shlûḥ call the Berber numbers laḥsâb (الحساب) ntimġârin, and the Arabic ones laḥsâb niirgâzĕn - ie women's counting* vs. men's counting."

("Auch für die Zahlen von 3-29 wählt man häufig die arabischen Bezeichnungen (s. diese in §171). Die Frauen und kleinen Kinder der Tazĕrwalt-Schlûḥ zählen lieber (soweit es angeht) mit den berberischen Zahlen, die Männer lieber (von 10 an) mit den arabischen. Deshalb bezeichnen diese Schlûḥ die berberische Zählweise als laḥsâb (الحساب) ntimġârin, die arabische aber als laḥsâb niirgâzĕn - also als die Frauenzählweise, bezw. Männerzählweise." - Stumme 1899:102)

If you're interested, and in the vicinity of Cambridge in March, I'll be talking about this issue at CamLing.

* Shurely "old women's counting"?

Bibliography:
Stumme, Hans. 1899. Handbuch des Schilhischen von Tazerwalt. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs.

Black = free: a nice case of polysemy in Songhay, and its converse

Looking through Jeffrey Heath's 1998 dictionary of Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language spoken in and around Timbuktu, I was struck by the following entry:

bibi * a) [intr] be black, dark [cf bii 2] [INTENS: tirik! T, fi! N] * be freeborn, noble (not a slave) * LOCUT: bañña nda bibi slave and freeman alike * [final in compounds involving sorcery, => čiini-bibi * b) [adj] black, dark * c. [n] soot, burnt residue.

It contrasts satisfyingly with the sort of polysemy you tend to get for "black" on the other shore of the Sahara, as in this Kabyle entry from Dallet 1982:

akli (wa), aklan (wa) || Negro. || Slave, servant. || Butcher; profession reserved for the inferior class of aklan (slaughterer and wholesale and retail vendor in the market.) || Male first name often given to a Kabyle child as a prophylactic measure (against envious gazes and the evil eye.) Antonym: aḥerri [free].

It would be interesting to examine the connotations of "black" in more languages...

Aboriginal language of the Ahaggar

Tuareg oral tradition records that, when the Tuareg arrived in the Ahaggar (Hoggar) Mountains of southern Algeria sometime in the first millennium AD, they encountered people called the Isăbătăn - a sparse population of hunters and goat herds, stereotyped in popular anecdotes as stupid. Parts of the Dag-Ghali tribe claim descent from them. What language did they speak? We may never have enough data to know for sure, but Tuareg stories provide possible clues, sometimes putting seemingly nonsensical, or at least non-Tuareg, words into the mouths of Isăbătăn characters. I recently came across an example, quoted from Pandolfi 1998:132 in Kossmann 2005:15 (transcription slightly modified):

Ikkəršərmadən tangarən damadən.
The ants come in and go out.

The morphology of the sentence is Tuareg - -ən is the normal Tuareg masculine plural suffix, while i- is a normal Tuareg nominal plural prefix. But the lexical stems - -kkəršərmad- "ant" (?), tangar- "come in", damad- "go out" - have no obvious Tuareg or broader Berber cognates. Unlikely as it is, it would be interesting if one of my readers happened to recognise an obvious source for these...

Bibliography:
Kossmann, Maarten. 2005. Berber Loanwords in Hausa. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
Pandolfi, Paul. 1998. Les Touaregs de l'Ahaggar (Sahara algérien). Parenté et résidence chez les Dag-Ghali. Paris: Karthala.

Maghreb sociolinguistics

I've just come across a couple of interesting posts on the North African sociolinguistic situation. On Aqoul, Shaheen discusses a topic close to my heart - how the dominance of French hurts the Maghreb's economy and makes new ideas take longer to reach it:

The ubiquity of French not only aggravates the dependence of the Maghreb to France, it impedes the region's ability to develop beyond its traditional (colonial) ties. Worse, it not only serves as an economic chain, it culturally acts like an albatross around their necks: everything, from law to social models is borrowed from France. Considering how inefficient and sterile French models and intellectual production can be today in most fields when compared to their anglo-saxon counterparts, the Maghreb is riding a losing horse. It isolates individual Maghrebis from most scientific and economic literature...

Some of the comments are worth reading as well, and the author links to published online papers (bibliography in a blog post - always a trend worth promoting!)

In a more personal post, "Filjazair" describes Algeria's linguistic "schizophrenia", as it appears to a heritage learner:

I hear, a lot, things like: "Don't bother learning darija, it's not worth it"; "You don't need to learn fusha [formal Arabic], nobody speaks it"; "Our language [Arabic, formal Arabic] is being corrupted - we're still in the age of colonisation!" (this from one student who'd heard that another student had to write her university thesis in French); "Everybody speaks French, that's all you need"; "Everybody speaks darija, that's all you need."

Chaos.

So I'm in a French class with Algerians who already know a lot of French but speak it sloppily, and who feel a need - because of work, because of school, because of future prospects - to get better. This week I start formal Arabic lessons with a tutor downtown. And along the way I'm trying to pick up snippets of darija to use in the street, so as not to have to use too much of the French or Arabic I'm learning, because French marks you as a foreigner (or worse, a snob - an Algerian in contempt of her Algerianness) and because nobody actually speaks the formal Arabic.

-n't infixation in English

Consider the following word:

Finally one said "It's astonishing. Frankly astonishing. The man has actually got charisn'tma."
"Your meaning?"
"I mean he's so dreadful he fascinates people. Like those stories he was telling... Did you notice how people kept encouraging him because they couldn't actually believe anyone would tell jokes like that in mixed company?" - Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay, 1996, p. 289

This word may not be original to Terry Pratchett, incidentally - this document suggests it appeared in a show called My Word! back in 1976. It gets 90 ghits, (including one in Polish), concentrated disproportionately in reviews:
* "...cardboardy Paul Walker, whose lack of presence ('charisn'tma'?) sucked much of the life out of..."
* "Collectively, they exude charisn'tma, and one or two even possess what Ken Campbell once described as "the legendary Minus Quality" whereby when they exit, the stage somehow seems fuller."
* "Hard-edged r&b from the band with a front man who exudes charisma. Me? I exude charisn'tma."

In this structure, a common word's meaning is "inverted" for comic effect by adding -n't to a portion of it which resembles a common auxiliary verb. I can think of at least one other such case:

"I even attempted a beehive do, but I ran out of hairspray. So it kind of turned into a don't." - Douglas Coupland, Generation X, p. 82

Believe it or not, this one gets some ghits as well, though it's obviously hard to determine how many:
* "Scarlett's Hair-Don't"
* "Hair-Bow is a Hair-Don't"
* "Is it a hair DO or hair DON'T???"
and an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

And at the even less lexicalised end of the spectrum, we find stuff like this:
* "Another Republican’t paragon of virtue"
* "As it happens, my friend Tom Schaller noticed that many of you liked “Republican’ts” — and he suggests that we all start using it, at least as often as the GOP throws around “Democrat Party.”"
* "You’ve seen me in action. You know I’ll get you out. I’m a Mexican, not a Mexican’t!”"
* "did you hear about the lazy, unambitious bird? It was a whippoorwon't. (Yuck, I hate puns.)"

Your question for 10 points: do portmanteau words like this need to be accounted for by a full theory of morphology, or are they monstrosities that should be swept under the rug into psychologists' labs? These words' two components seem to both contribute to their meaning, but not exhaustively, in much the same way as the meaning of "catty" is partly but not completely predictable from "cat" and "-y"; how should that relation be characterised?

The plural-breaking mountains of Oman

Arabic is well-known in phonological circles for the diversity and complexity of its broken plurals (jam` at-taksiir جمع التكسير) - that is, plurals formed at least partly by internal modification of the word. The commonest type for four-consonant roots is mainly characterised by an -aa- after the second consonant. For example:

daftar-un > dafaatir-u "notebook"
kawkab-un > kawaakib-u "planet"

Certain rather regular complexities emerge when a long vowel is present in the singular; depending on position, it is either treated as an extra consonant or affects the length of an output vowel:

xaatam-un > xawaatim-u "ring"
risaal-at-un > rasaa'il-u "letter"
qaanuun-un > qawaaniin-u "law"

If the stem has more than four consonants and takes this plural types, the later ones get dropped off the edge, so to speak:

`ankaabuut-un > `anaakib-u "spider"

Now this has been the subject of some interesting work, notably in autosegmental phonology, where such phenomena have been taken as a strong argument for separating consonants and vowels into separate tiers. For Arabic, the plural morphology itself - in this case, the skeleton -a-aa-i[i]-, but there are many others - never seems to involve infixing a true consonant; diminutives in -u-ay-i- can be explained away by treating -y- as a semivowel. But that changes if we look beyond Arabic...

Jibbali/Sheri is a Semitic language spoken on the southern coast of Oman, and (despite its location) is neither descended from nor mutually intelligible with Arabic. Among other changes, it no longer has distinctive vowel length. Its commonest equivalent of the Arabic plural form described above involves the insertion of -ab-/-ɛb- instead of -aa-:

dəftɔr > defɛbtər "notebook"
kənsed > kenabsəd "shoulder"
mɛrkɛb > mirɛbkəb "boat"
muṣħar > muṣɛbħar "branding iron"

although it does have a more Arabic-like form with -o-/-ɔ- in some (mainly feminine) cases:

maħfer > moħofur "basket"
ħalḳũ-t > ħɔloḳum "Adam's apple"

Note that the -ab- plural is productive enough to apply to Arabic borrowings like dəftɔr. I would love to know how this form emerged; as far as I know, no other Semitic language has a b-infix plural.


Bibliography:
Ratcliffe, Robert R. The 'Broken' Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic. John Benjamins: Amsterdam 1998.

Executable articles

Mark Liberman recently made an excellent suggestion on Language Log: scientific and technical papers should include an explicit, executable recipe for generating their numbers, tables and graphs from published data. However, I think if anything he undersells the possibilities. Where executable algorithms could make a big difference to linguistics papers is in testing proposed rules - phonological principles; historical sound shifts; morphological rules...

If someone proposes a vocabulary of protoforms and a set of regular sound shifts, they are writing an explicit algorithm already. With an accompanying executable version of it, taking protoforms as input and outputting descendant forms (and programs to do some of this have already been written, eg Geoff's Sound Change Applier, Phono), you would be able to know exactly what the predicted forms in each descendant language would be, and be able to spot irregularities (in other words, prediction failures) with ease.

Likewise, if someone proposes a phonological principle (whether conceived of as a rule, as a constraint, or otherwise), you could test its effect on arbitrary data and see if it makes the right predictions. Gaps in the theory (for example, the representation of clicks in Government Phonology) or non-computable theories (an accusation sometimes made against Optimality Theory) would be conspicuous: the input would rejected, or the program would simply be unwritable. The phonology of a language would be accompanied as a matter of course by a program generating phonetic representations from phonemic inputs. In fact, a widespread and welcome trend in modern phonology is to regard individual language's phonologies as specific instantiations of universal constraints or structures; so let each theory be fully specified as a programming language, and each individual language's phonology be represented in it (as an ordered list of constraints, or a set of parameter settings, or whatever your favorite theory does). Inconsistencies or ambiguities would stand out like sore thumbs as you played around with the program. In short, executable articles would make linguistic theories more accountable, and make it easier to spot gaps and places where further work is called for.

Incidentally, I have occasionally been known to practice what I'm preaching here: way back when I was studying mathematics, I wrote a program to generate Algerian Arabic broken plurals from singulars, and found the experience very informative. (It worked, too.) Unfortunately, this program was written in Visual Basic 3.0, not a programming language that has aged very well... which is, of course, another issue that would have to be considered.

<g> in Arabic

A belated Eid Mubarak and Happy New Year to all my readers!

This post is brought to you by the letter G - a sound all too common in many languages, including many dialects of Arabic, yet absent from Classical Arabic, leading to a minor quandary for transcribers, and to substantial regional variation. In Morocco, [g] in names is typically written using a kaf ك with three dots (ڭ), as in this sign. In Algeria and Tunisia, it's typically a qaf ق with three dots (ڨ), a choice reflecting the sound shift q > g common in Bedouin dialects, but unfortunately easily confused with the fa with three dots (ڤ) often used elsewhere in the Arab world for [v]. In Egypt, a jim ج is generally used, since classical j is pronounced g in Egyptian dialect. Elsewhere in the Arab world, a kaf with a line on top (گ), as in Persian or Kurdish, is sometimes used. In adapting foreign loanwords, ghayn (eg بلغاريا Bulgaria) or jiim (eg إنجيليزية English) are usual. In a Qatari mall recently, however, I saw yet another system: Osh Kosh B'Gosh was transcribed as أوش كوش بيڠوش, with a ghayn with three dots (Malay ng). I have no idea what country this may be characteristic of - even here it appears rather unusual. Any thoughts?

The earliest recorded pidgin - Maridi Arabic?

Some years ago, browsing in a bookstore, I came across a mention of a Mauritanian Arabic-based pidgin recorded by the medieval geographer Al-Bakri. For years since, I have been regretting not having written down the details; even reading through a copy of Al Bakri's description of North Africa brought no joy. Today, I finally found the mention again, and managed to track down the original reference - and understand why I didn't find it before...

Al-Bakri (1014-1097) was a noted geographer and less noted writer from Huelva in modern-day Spain. His description of North Africa was the most detailed since Roman times, and his descriptions of West Africa are among the earliest surviving - despite the fact that he himself never seems to have left Spain, relying instead on travellers' descriptions. Only some twelve manuscripts of his greatest work, al-Masālik wal-Mamālik, survive, none complete. The passage containing the pidgin text, unfortunately, is absent from most printed editions of al-Bakri, including every edition that I could find at SOAS: according to Thomason and Elgibali, "we have found our text only in a printed copy of al-Bakrī located in the national library of Egypt in Cairo; this copy is dated 1943, but we do not know who compiled it or - more importantly - what its manuscript source was."

Without further ado, here is the text, as given by Thomason and Elgibali, who apparently found it somewhere in a section describing Aswan and other Egyptian towns:

Someone told me that a dignitary from the people of Aswan used to travel a lot. One day he reached a small town called Maridi. Upon his return, he said to the prince of the believers: 'Sir, may God give you plenty of good and honour your face, here is my case! Its goal is to preserve and spread the word of God. The Blacks have mutilated our beautiful language and spoiled its eloquency [sic] with their twisted tongues. During my visit, Sir - may God protect you - only God's guidance helped me escape the dangers and understand their miserable Arabic. Sometimes, and may God forgive me if I did wrong, I could only laugh at what they called Arabic; and may God forgive me if I call what they uttered Arabic. Listen, Sir:

[and here I add my entirely conjectural vocalisation; for the original, see below] bī waħid yūm rādūl, Dūmā lū 'isim. damal lū 'ū wa bin lū 'ū. 'umnī dī rūħ 'a`adnī bī maħall. kīk lū 'ūl "ħaram, 'inta barbar, bin mū rūħ, 'inta barbar; 'a`adū!" 'umnī damal fū' 'ū, kīk lū 'ūl "ħaram, 'inta barbar, bin 'a`ad, dūmā rūħ." kīk lū 'ūl ħaram 'inta barbar. Dūmā 'ūl: "kīk mū diyyid mū muhī."

One day there was a man whose name was Jumu`a. He had a camel and a son. They were going to stay in a place. People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian! Your son should not walk, you barbarian; seat him!" They were on the camel. People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian!" The son sat and Jumu`a walked. ̂People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian!" Jumu`a said "People(?) are neither good nor important."

The prince of the believers ordered that his need be met.

The chances of copyists having mangled this bizarre passage are high; the chances that the printers mangled it (or left out whatever vocalisation might have been present) makes the situation even worse. (Certainly De Slane's edition shows instances of both; thus his īħan Yākūš, given as Berber for "God is one", is almost certainly a mistake for ījan Yākūš, by the omission of a dot.) However, it shows some striking features.

The near-absence of morphology, the apparent presence of tense particles, and the simplification of the phonology are all suggestive of a pidgin, and a pidgin is exactly what one would expect given the nature of the trans-Sahara trade. Phonetically, the substitution of ' for qāf is characteristic of lower Egypt and the Levant, but also of several city dialects in the Maghreb and of Maltese; the substitution of d for j is widespread in upper Egypt, but I know of no modern dialect that has both features. The word kīk scarcely looks like Arabic; Thomason & Elgibali suggest a possible interpretation, based on two etymons reportedly widespread in Nilo-Saharan (koi "person", -k "plural"), as "people".

Where was this pidgin spoken? Unfortunately, the text is thoroughly vague on this point, and Maradi's location is unknown. The paragraph after it is a condensed version of a passage elsewhere in al-Bakri describing the Lamtūna tribe of Mauritania, so Thomason and Elgibali suggest that it was spoken in Mauritania; however, Owens notes that both the phonetics of the text and the attribution to a person from Aswan (not to mention the possible presence of a Nilo-Saharan word) suggest a location somewhere in modern-day Sudan.

Of course, until someone finds the manuscript containing this passage, I will be unable to banish a slight suspicion that this whole passage might be an obscure joke by the printers (whoever they might be - the book in Cairo in question does not appear in Thomason and Elgibali's bibliography) on linguists worldwide... However, if authentic (and it scarcely seems likely that the printers would have made it up), this may well be the earliest attested passage in a pidgin, and certainly the earliest Arabic-based pidgin reported. It also provides an illustration of several rather common responses to pidgins and creoles: the half-shocked half-amused contempt for its differences from the lexifier language, the idea that the pidgin itself constitutes an obstacle to learning that needs to be overcome by education in the lexifier language, and the idea that this latter task is the state's responsibility.

PS (23 Dec): In Arabic, this story is more usually told of Juha; it occurs to me that دوما (Dūmā) may well be a misreading/miscopying of دوها (Dūhā), which would be a plausible rendition of Juha, rather than of the rather unusual name Jumu`a.

Arabic: (unfortunately, the portion given starts at "Sir, may God give you plenty of good"; the typeface is also extraordinarily blurry. I have taken the liberty of adding some punctuation.)

مولاي الخليفة جزاك الله خيرا وأكرم وجهك، إليك قضيتي ومحتواها حفظ كلمة الله ونشرها... فإن السود قد قطعوا اوصال لغتنا الجميلة تقطيعا وأفسدوا بيانها بشرير ألسنتهم المعوجة، فأثناء زيارتي (حفظك الله) كان إلهام الله ووحيه المعينين الوحيدين للنجاة من الأخطار وفهم ما أرادوا قوله لي بعربيتهم المزرية، فأحيانا يا مولاي (وسامحني الله إن أخطئت) كنت لا أملك الضحك على عربيتهم - وليسامحني: الله إن أطلقت على ما نطقوا بها اسم العربية، فاسمع يا سيدي:

بي وحد يوم رادول دوما لو اسم دمل لو او وبن لو او امني دي روح اعدي بي محل كيك لو لوب حرم انت بربر بن مو روح انت بربر لو اعدو امني دمل فوء او كيك لو اول حرم انت بربر بن اعد دوما روح كيك لو اول حرم انت بربر دوما اول كيك مو ديد مو مهي

Bibliography:

• Al-Bakri, Description de l'Afrique septentrionale, M. G. De Slane, trans. (Alger, 1913).
  
• Jonathan Owens. "Arabic-based Pidgins and Creoles", in Contact languages: a wider perspective, ed. Sarah G. Thomason. Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1996.
  
• Sarah G. Thomason and Alaa Elgibali. "Before the Lingua Franca: Pidginized Arabic in the Eleventh Century A.D.". Lingua 68 (1986) 317-349.

No Arabic please, we're American

If you haven't already seen it, the Baker report brought to light a piece of epic stupidity in Iraq:

All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handi-
capped by Americans’ lack of language and cultural understanding. Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency. In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communication with Iraqis, we are often at a disadvantage. There are still far too few Arab language–proficient military and civilian officers in Iraq, to the detriment of the U.S. mission.

Why make such an easily fixable mistake? I suspect because they view most of America's large population of fluent Arabic speakers as security risks - although apparently other factors play a role too...

(Hat tip: Aqoul.)

The grammar of talking to yourself

In the Dark Ages, too, linguists sometimes got a little worked up over theoretical differences (if a work of fiction is to be believed):

"Those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of 'ego' [I], and in the end they attacked each other, with edged weapons." - Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

In a sense, one would expect that "I" should really have a vocative - certainly people talk to themselves sometimes - yet Latin's lack of a vocative "I" is paralleled in English. If John (that old linguists' standby) tells himself "John, get up and do some work", the sentence is not grammatically odd; if he tells himself "*I, get up and do some work" or "*Me, get up and do some work", neither sentence is grammatically possible. Note that no such restriction applies to non-vocative uses; it would be equally grammatical for John to tell himself "I'm in luck!" or "You're in luck!" Even resorting in desperation to the archaic English vocative "O" yields nothing: "O I!" is ridiculous, and "Oh me!" is already in use as a rather silly exclamation. So why should the vocative of "I" be so hard to form?

Update: Thanks to Language Hat, I have learned of an interesting post on the very grammarian of whom Eco is writing.

Speaking Arabic in public; or: don't say Yallah

You may have heard about the imams who got taken off a plane in the US (Minneapolis) because some passenger thought they were suspicious. Apparently:

Before passengers boarded, one became alarmed by an overheard discussion. "They seemed angry," he wrote in a police statement. "Mentioned 'U.S.' and 'killing Saddam.' Two men then swore slightly under their breath/mumbled. They spoke Arabic again. The gate called boarding for the flight. The men then chanted 'Allah, Allah, Allah.'"

It's bizarre the way that "They spoke Arabic again" seems to be characterised as somehow suspicious in itself - but the part that really makes me think "duhhhh!" is "The gate called boarding for the flight. The men then chanted 'Allah, Allah, Allah.'" It's obvious what they must really have been saying (although I haven't seen any paper point this out): Yallah, yallah, meaning "come on! let's go!". If even the use of the word "Allah" alarms some paranoid passengers, then Arabs will be hard-pressed to speak at all - between inshallah, hamdulillah, and bismillah alone (let alone yallah or wallah) you could easily reach at least one mention of "Allah" every couple of sentences in a completely mundane conversation! I hope this is an isolated instance rather than a trend.

In related news, speaking Yan-Nhangu is apparently suspicious as well...

In unrelated news, I thought Tulugaq's Google Map of Inupiaq was pretty cool, as is Sydney Place Names - I hope this is a trend.

"An elaborate series of grunts and gestures"

More in the weird colonial-era language books series - this time "The Siwi Language", by W. Seymour Walker, F.R.G.S (Late Royal Artillery), with a foreword by His Excellency Wilson Pasha (Governor, Western Desert Province of Egypt), 1921:

There are no interjections in Siwi which are sufficiently constant to be worth committing to paper.
Their meaning is expressed by an elaborate series of grunts and gestures which can only be acquired by practice.

And:

There is only one noun-adj. in Siwi in which the masc. and fem. forms are identical:
zlèta, naked, bare
Note 30. This exception is a good example of the construction of the Siwi vocabulary, and illustrates one of the reasons for its paucity. Amongst the women a naked female is quite a possibility, but to the general Siwani mind, it is so inconceivable, and so contrary to all established customs, that no special word-form has been evolved to cope with such an obvious phenomenon.

If you want to hear what Siwi is really like, the indefatigable Madi has put a Siwi audio file up on Tawalt: the Story of Prince Sayf. With a bit of help from books like Walker's (and more usefully Laoust's), I can make out a fair bit of it. Remarkably, Siwi has borrowed Arabic's comparative form, as you can hear in the second sentence.

Gulf Arabic (and Hindi?) Pidgin

It should be unsurprising that a pidgin trade-Arabic has evolved in the Gulf, given the incredibly large proportion of the population from non-Arabic-speaking countries. But this is the first info I've seen on it online. Not much actual detail (I would add the word siida "straight ahead"), but it also mentions a pidgin Hindi, which is more surprising. Sounds worth investigating...