The language of academia: Algeria and France

I work in France now. When I give an internal lecture, I normally do it in French - poor French, to be sure, but French. If I attend a local conference, I can usually assume that at least some of the presentations will be in French. The handful of classes I've taught here, I taught in French. Needless to say, all the internal paperwork (of which, thankfully, there isn't that much) is written in French, and I am expected to fill it out in the same language. This is not particularly convenient for me, but I expect it and approve of it. Most French academics have to speak English to be able to do their jobs well, of course. But if they shifted to using English in all contexts and relegated French to informal conversation in coffee breaks, then French academia, while it would be more hospitable to Anglo-Saxon academics, would become far less hospitable to its own citizens, who after all are the ones paying for it!

This experience is one reason why I feel very little sympathy towards complaints of the following type about Algerian academia:

"[W]e have come to a point where Arabisation is used as a means to exclude Francophones from the management of the country's affairs, with an eye towards expelling them from their posts, as seems to be the case at the university level. [T]he requirement for occupying a position of responsibility is no longer ability, but mastery of the literary language. Events such as the following confirm this state of affairs: during the strike that affected the University of Constantine in December 1988, among the demands made was a demand to replace the Chancellor and his team, bilingual, with Arabophones. [A]. Debbih [r]ecalls that already in 1975 'a movement brandished the slogan "Arabisation + Bread"... In this strategy there appear the signs of a real takeover: posts would go not to those who merit them, but to those who use Arabic, the "language of authenticity", the "language of the people".'" (Benmayouf 2009:67; my translation)

Let's shift perspectives for a second. Since 1988, the large majority of every new year's crop of university students has gone through their whole prior education being taught in Arabic, whether you approve of that or not. This was expected since well before 1988, so there was plenty of time to prepare for it; in fact, the policy of Arabising education had been consistently proclaimed since before independence, and has enjoyed widespread popular support in most parts of the country. A primary job of a university professor is to teach these students. Under the circumstances, is it really plausible to suggest that knowledge of Arabic is just an irrelevant distraction from academic ability? Yet, not just in 1988 but now, 25 years later, at least half the subjects on offer are still being taught in French. How would an ordinary English-speaking freshman - even one who had studied German in high school - react if he heard that all national universities' courses in medicine were henceforth to be taught in German?

References Benmayouf, Chafia Yamina. 2009. La question linguistique en Algérie : enjeux et perspectives. Biarritz: Séguier.

Learn Tamezret Berber with cartoons

For such a small place, the Berber-speaking village of Tamezret in southern Tunisia has some talented amateur linguists. For years now Ben Mammou's site has been the best existing reference for the town's Berber language, revealing some interesting features not documented elsewhere. I now learn that two sites can be added to the list: the blog Ekhsa Tamourthiw (I love my land), including some audio and some cute (if impressionistically transcribed) cartoons for learners; and the online Cours de Tmazighth, featuring lessons by Alia Labbouz, Nizar Ben Romdhane, and Larbi Ben Mammou. If you happen to be in Tunis, you can even physically attend the course. Good to see people taking advantage of Tunisia's new freedoms to do something productive! As far as I know, nothing similar exists for other Tunisian Berber villages, although for Douiret, there is a small vocabulary on Douiret.net (not to mention Gabsi's thesis).

"Ya-chü-lo" (Kufa) and other confusing transcriptions

Translators of Chinese histories generally have a very inconvenient habit of transcribing foreign names according to the modern Mandarin pronunciation of the characters used. Mandarin is almost the least suitable of all the modern Chinese topolects for this purpose, since it's lost all the final stops, turned final m to n, and palatalised initial velars. Cantonese or Hakka forms would at least be more helpful; but reconstructions exist now, and those could be given directly.

A brief passage in Tongdian, a Tang dynasty encyclopedia, reports a Chinese soldier's impressions of life in early Abbasid Iraq (where he found himself captive after the Battle of Talas): Tongdian, chapter 193. A translation, taken from Hoyland (1997), is available online: T'ung tien. Unlike many of the other foreign accounts of early Islamic history that Hoyland gathers, which tend towards the bitter, this text is in parts rather charming, particularly where based on first-hand observation. However, the transliterations are as unhelpful as usual. Here are the appropriate Middle Chinese forms, based for convenience on Starostin's database, with y substituted for j:

T'a-shih: 大食 thầyźik, a reasonable transcription of Persian Tājīk, itself originally from Arabic Ṭā'ī (member of the tribe of Ṭayy) - see Language Hat)

mo-shou: 摩首 mwâśǝ́w – no idea what this alleged title of the caliphs might be; probably not Arabic, so maybe Persian? Any ideas?

Po-ssu: 波斯 pwâsye "Persia", presumably from Pārs.

Fulin: 拂菻 phütlim "Byzantium", apparently somehow from Armenian Rhôm (ie "Rome").

Ya chü-lo: 亞俱羅 ʔạ̀külâ "Kūfah", a pretty good transcription of the town's Syriac name, ʕAqūlā.

mumen: 暮門 mòmon (given as a title of the caliph), ie Arabic mu'min "believer"; the vowel choice in the second syllable is interesting, suggesting that the short i was already pronounced in a rather schwa-like way.

Shan: 苫, ie Arabic šām "Syria, the Levant, Damascus". This character isn't in Starostin's list, but its Korean and Vietnamese readings make it clear that the final letter was m, not n (CJKV-English dictionary).

Explaining Korandjé; Darja etymologies

Some readers may be interested in a paper of mine that should be coming sometime soon in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics: Explaining Korandjé: Language contact, plantations, and the trans-Saharan trade. It's an attempt to explain how a Songhay language ended up being spoken so far north, in a location so isolated from all its relatives, and when it got there. This is a pre-review version; the one that will actually be published contains a number of improvements. However, your comments are welcome!

French-speaking readers may also be interested in a post I recently made on my other blog, responding to an unusually error-ridden article about the Berber elements of Darja: Les Algériens qui ont oublié les dictionnaires de leurs ancêtres. My initial response was somewhat irritated, as you see, but on reflection there's something fascinating about it as well: how is it that there are dozens of words in daily use in Algerian Arabic that can easily be found in any sufficiently big Classical dictionary, but that are so rare in the Modern Standard Arabic of Algeria that literate people are capable of assuming they must be from some other language? If Modern Standard and Classical are both Fusha - which is how Algerians tend to think of them - then why are these words so systematically avoided by Algerians when they try to write Fusha?

Kabyle vocab 1: Verbs of motion

I've been taking advantage of being in Paris to attend some Kabyle classes. However, the classes are in French - as are all the textbooks - and I find that I memorise vocabulary more easily when English equivalents are presented. So I'm going to experiment with writing up vocabulary lists and posting them online periodically, on the theory that these might be useful to Anglophone learners other than myself, and that putting them together will be good for my memory. For today, the theme will be verbs of motion. I find that knowing facts about a word's wider connections makes me more likely to remember it, but that may just be me, so if you don't, feel free to ignore them...

Go: ṛuḥ "go!", yeţṛuḥ(u) "he goes", iṛuḥ "he went". This verb, obviously, is borrowed from colloquial Arabic ṛuḥ (like its Siwi counterpart ṛuḥ, iteṛṛaḥ, iṛaḥ); it is quite commonly used, but there is a more purist alternative:

Go: ddu "go!", iṯeddu "he goes", yedda "he went". This verb is also used with the same meaning in Tashelhiyt; it's probably related to Tamasheq idaw, itidaw, ǎddew "accompany, go with". Example: Tom yebɣa ad yeddu ɣer Japun.

Come: as "come!", yeţţas "he comes", yusa "he came". This nearly pan-Berber verb is usually combined with the particle -d "hither (towards here)"; in Siwi, that particle has fused with the stem, yielding héd, itased, yused. Example: Yusa-d ɣer Japun asmi ay yella d agrud.

Pass: ɛeddi "pass!", yeţɛeddi / yeţɛedday "he passes", iɛedda "he passed". This verb, widespread in both Berber and dialectal Arabic, is from Arabic عدا "he passed", as the generally un-Berber ɛ betrays. Siwi retains fel, iteffal, yefla "pass / depart"; the rarer cognate verb (fel, yeffal, ifel) in Kabyle means "go over". Example: ɛeddaɣ fell-as deg wezniq.

Arrive: aweḍ "arrive!", yeţţaweḍ "he arrives", yebbʷeḍ (yuweḍ) "he arrived". Siwi instead uses an Arabic loan mraq, imerraq, yemraq; but it retains a causative of the original root, siweṭ. Example: aql-ik tuwḍeḍ-d zik.

Go up: ali "go up!", yeţţali "he goes up", yuli "he went up". The similarity to Arabic على is probably just a coincidence, since the Tashelhiyt equivalent is eɣli. Siwi uses an equally Berber but unrelated form wen, itewwan, yuna, also found in Tashelhiyt (awen); Kabyle retains a causative of this root, ssiwen "go up (eg road)", and a commoner noun, asawen "(up) a rising slope". Example: La ttalyeɣ isunan.

Go down: aḏer "go down!", yeţţaḏer "he goes down", yuḏer "he went down". Siwi again uses an equally Berber but unrelated form ggez, iteggez, yeggez, also found in Tashelhiyt (ggʷez). Example: La ttadreɣ isunan.

Go in: ḵcem "go in!", iḵeččem "he goes in", yeḵcem "he went in". The same verb is used in Tashelhiyt; Siwi uses a cognate form kim, itekkam, ikim. Example: Ttxil-k, kcem-d.

Go out: ffeɣ "go out!", iṯeffeɣ "he goes out", yeffeɣ "he went out". The same verb is used in Tashelhiyt. and (with a trivial regular vowel change) in Siwi f̣f̣eɣ, itef̣f̣aɣ, yef̣f̣aɣ. Example: Zemreɣ ad ffɣeɣ ad urareɣ?

Or, in a form more suitable for quick self-testing:

go	ṛuḥ
go	ddu
come	as
pass	ɛeddi
arrive	aweḍ
go up	ali
go down	aḏer
go in	ḵcem
go out	ffeɣ

Comments and suggestions welcome, especially if you speak Kabyle!

The wider context of “Teach Yourself Songhay” in Timbuktu

We’ve seen the “Teach Yourself Songhay” poem. What does it tell us, besides the meanings of a few words in Koyra Chiini?

The writer didn’t tell us anything about himself, but we can deduce some points anyway. The shift of *b > m in Kimsi “Id al-Adha” < *kibsi (< Arabic kabš “ram”) is recorded by Heath as a dialect feature specific to the town of Niafounké, 150 km upstream from Timbuktu at the opposite end of the Koyra Chiini-speaking region; the Timbuktu form is cipsi / ciwsi. The same irregular shift is found in Dedem “Muharram” < *dedeb, for which no Niafounké form is recorded by Heath, contrasting with Timbuktu dedew, Goundam dedeb; Hacquard and Dupuis (1897) already record dédo, so the Timbuktu form is at least a century old. (Why “rest of the holidays”? Because feer-mee, which he’s already given, also means “Id al-Fitr”.)

Now, whereas the rural population surrounding Timbuktu is mainly Tuareg, that around Niafounké is mainly Fulani. When the author lists ethnic groups, he starts with the Fulani, and he consistently uses a third person plural “they” to refer to Songhay speakers. This suggests that he himself is probably a Fulani from around Niafounké, rather than a native citizen of Timbuktu. Fulani speakers have an unusually strong tradition of writing their own language in Arabic script, as illustrated by the other two manuscripts mentioned, so this might make sense.

But what was he doing writing this anyway? Obviously he didn’t need it... but others did. In fact, we can safely say that this poem was actually used by at least one student - the version seen is clearly not the original, since it contains a copying error. Surgu "Tuareg" is written شرع, with the wrong dots, as if the copyist mistook it for the Arabic word "he began". This is explained by the circumstances in which it was written.

At the advanced level, the schools of Timbuktu attracted students from as far away as Algeria or southern Mali. For it to be worthwhile to go there at all, they would have to have already spent years studying Classical Arabic – and much of their study would have taken the form of memorising didactic poems, such as the Ājurrūmiyyah or Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik for grammar. But if their studies took place outside the Songhay region, they would arrive not knowing the dominant language of the town. This poem is tailored for such students. I’ve heard reports of similar poems at Kabyle zaouias intended to help Arabic-speaking students attracted by the zaouia’s reputation to learn Kabyle, though I can’t track the reference down at the moment; so, in a sense, this can be considered part of a much wider genre. At the least, it represents an obvious solution to a problem recurring in higher-level schools all over North and West Africa.

The organisation of the poem reflects that environment. Schools were, first and foremost, Islamic schools; thus the author opens not with the commonest vocabulary but with the basic concepts of religion, starting in the order of the Five Pillars of Islam – shahada, prayer, and fasting (but not zakat or pilgrimage, which would both be financially out of the reach of many students.) He continues with that theme, going through the motions of the prayer ritual in the appropriate order (ablution, saying “Allāhu akbar”, reading from the Qur’an, and finally greeting the angels and asking favours of God), and then starting with the meals associated with fasting before moving on to the meals of non-fasting times. Having covered the basic Islamic rituals that structured their day and their year, he only then moves on to other topics – specifically, ethnicity. For a new student from outside the area, travelling so far perhaps for the first time, the variety of ethnic groups represented in Timbuktu, a crossroads between the Sahel and the Sahara, must have been striking, and being foreign would have heightened his awareness of his own ethnic identity.

Note that the author nowhere uses the term “Songhay”. This is not at all surprising. In Timbuktu, Songhay (Soŋoy) traditionally refers primarily to the noble families of the Songhay Empire, in particular the Maïga family. These families had a reputation for sorcery which did not match well with the ethos of the schools, and were in any case only a small minority of the population speaking what is now called Songhay. The term he uses, Gaa-bibi, has a broader sense, being used for the ordinary Songhay-speaking farmers of the area; it literally means “black body” and thus corresponds almost exactly to the Arabic term “Sūdān” that he also uses. “Koyra Chiini” means “town language”, and as such does not correspond in particular to any one ethnic group.

Other points of linguistic interest: Laarab “Arab” is a conservative form compared to what Heath records – laarow (Timbuktu) / laaram (Niafunké, Goundam) – but this is perhaps natural, given than the author is a student of Arabic. Sete, glossed here as "guest", is rendered by Heath as "caravan"; visiting caravan members would stay as guests of particular families. Cirkose and cirkaarey are treated as synonyms for “lunch”; this is confirmed by the earliest dictionary of Koyra Chiini, Hacquard and Dupuis (1897), but at present they have distinct meanings, cirkaarey being “breakfast”. The forms jiŋgar “pray” < *gingar and jur “run” < *zuru illustrate the characteristic innovation of Koyra Chiini, *z and *g / _[+front] merging to j.

Teach Yourself Songhay: A Timbuktu manuscript poem

Of the non-Arabic content I mentioned earlier, a few images are online. One work partly in Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language of Timbuktu, is available on Aluka (subscribers only): A poem explaining several Songhay language phrases. The portion of the poem available online reads as follows:

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم والصلاة والسلام على النبي الحبيب
يا سائلا عن لغة السودان * اسمع جوابا عند ذي التبيان
الله يركي ان غادي الرسول * صلاة جنقر صوم حومي
قالوا تيمم تيمما وضؤ الولا * بكيرة كبر على من صلا
قراءة ايسو كذا النداء * تسليم سلم غاراي دعاء
فطرة فرمي هكذا السحور * ايسحري عشاء قالوا هوري
ثم الغذاء عندهم ايسركسي * مع ايسركاري عند بعض جنس
قالوا فلن لجملة الفلان * اسماءهم غابب لاتوان
العرب لارب عندهم توارق * شرع كذا سيت كل ضيف
الرجل هر كذلك قلت ايحر * وامراة وي كذا جرى اجر
الوشطير جملة الصبيان * كمس ددم باقية العيدين

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,
and blessings and praise be on the beloved Prophet.
O asker about the language of the Sudan [Songhay],
Hear the answer from one who will explain.
God is Yerkoy, ŋga diya the Messenger;
Prayer is jiŋgar, fasting is haw-mee.
They say teymam for tayammum; wudu is alwalaa;
Takbir is kabbar for whoever prays;
Reading is ay cow and likewise calling;
Greeting is sallam, gaara yo is dua.
Breaking fast is feer-mee; likewise, suhoor
is sohore; dinner they say hawre;
then lunch for them is ay cirkose,
along with ay cirkaare for some people.
They say fulan for all the Fulanis;
Their names are gaabibi, and none other;
Arabs are laarab among them, and Tuareg
surgu, likewise sete is every guest.
A man is har, likewise I say is ay har;
A woman is woy, likewise he ran is a jur;
Alwaši-terey is all the youth;
Kimsi, dedem are the rest of the holidays.

The transcriptions are based on Heath's dictionary of Koyra Chiini, except where incompatible. The manuscript is undated, but the language is so close to present-day standards that it can hardly be more than a couple of centuries old at most (although, oddly, the author renders c as س). The poem is anonymous; it seems to be followed by the start of another work, by the Imam Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-Mahdi, in a different (and much more elegant) hand.

The Fulani materials scanned are a little more extensive: there's a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad and another by Uthman dan Fodio, if you care to give them a try.

Languages of Timbuktu

A lot of people seem to have rather limited ideas about Timbuktu's ethnic and linguistic identity. Pan-Africanists think of it as a "black" centre of learning; Berber activists cite it as a Tuareg city; and Arab channels emphasise its Arab heritage. They're all correct, up to a point.

According to its chroniclers, such as Al-Sa`di, Timbuktu was founded by a nomadic Berber tribe, the otherwise unknown Maghsharan; they established it by settling some slaves there to take care of their property while they were away. These slaves probably spoke a Songhay language ancestral to the dominant language of modern Timbuktu, Koyra Chiini. When Ibn Battuta passed by it around 1352, he commented that "most of its inhabitants are of the Massufa [Inusufa] tribe, wearers of the face-veil". Contrary to initial appearances, this actually highlights its multiethnic history: there are still Inusufa in northern Niger, and many of them speak a language of their own mixing Songhay and Tuareg elements, Tasawaq.

During its heyday before Morocco conquered it, the world of Timbuktu scholarship was even more multiethnic than the town itself. The most famous of the Timbuktu scholars, Ahmad Baba, belonged to the Massufa, but studied under the Mande scholar Muhammad Baghayogho; other scholars came from the Soninke (such as Ahmad Kati), the Fulani (such as Muhammad al-Kaburi), and other groups. The Arab presence at this period was minimal, although Sidi Yahya came from the Thaaliba Arab tribe of north-central Algeria; that would change later, as the tribes of the western Azawad - notably the Kunta - shifted their identities and languages. But the language of scholarship linking these diverse groups was Arabic, and the vast majority of the manuscripts are written in Arabic. The exceptions have not been well-studied, but reportedly include religious poems in Songhay and Fulani and a medical manuscript in Tamashek.

In 1986, according to Jeffrey Heath, the first languages spoken at the town were as follows: 80% Koyra Chiini (Songhay), 10% Tamasheq, 10% Arabic. Most of the Tuaregs and Arabs were driven out during the Tuareg rebellion of 1990-1994, but many came back afterwards. Right now, the situation is in flux: reporting indicates that "white" people's shops are being looted in revenge for their perceived support of the rebels. (Yes, many Tuaregs are black by American or European standards; but other Malians consider them white, and not without reason when the point of reference is the skin colour of other West Africans.)

On book-burning in Timbuktu

The images are a shock: empty manuscript cases scattered about, their contents apparently reduced to ashes; centuries of learning left to blow away in the wind. Hearing that only a small portion of the collection was destroyed, and even that scans had been made, is cold comfort. The act invites incomprehension. What sort of person burns books? And what sort of Islamist attacks a library full of painstakingly calligraphed copies of the Qur'an?

I can claim only the most tenuous of connections to Timbuktu: its patron saint, Sidi Yahya al-Tadallisi, was a native of my hometown, Dellys, and its main language, Koyra Chiini Songhay, is a close relative of the endangered language I've worked on most, Korandjé - both in Algeria. I don't understand what happened, but the background suggests some possibilities.

Timbuktu's hundreds of thousands of manuscripts are part of a local tradition of Islamic learning continued since the 1300s or so, involving scholars from all ethnic groups - Arab, Tuareg, Fulani, Songhay, Manding... (Most of them are in Arabic, that community's language of scholarship; a few are in other languages, and have barely been studied.) But the value of their content to this small though admirable community is overshadowed by their symbolic value and its power to attract foreign money, on a scale marginal to the world but overwhelming in a small, isolated Malian town. The library that was attacked was a state-of-the-art archive recently built in partnership with South Africa; the Mellon Foundation had already built one earlier; UNESCO, Norway, Saudi Arabia had all contributed to giving these manuscripts a good home. This brought Timbuktu, as a whole, jobs and prestige. But those who didn't benefit from it must have had sour thoughts sometimes: they build palaces for books, while we live in huts? This would apply all the more to outsiders in the midst of a hostile population, as most of the rebels seem to have been.

Money attracts not just jealousy, but crime. Until the past year, AQIM's leadership were best known for two highly profitable and religiously questionable practices: smuggling cigarettes, and kidnapping tourists. The monetary value of Timbuktu manuscripts has soared even within the past couple of decades, and the fairly small amount of ashes seen in the pictures hardly seems proportionate to the number of empty manuscript boxes. Let's just say it would not be surprising to find some of the missing manuscripts turning up on the black market...

Finally, there are undoubtedly some books in these libraries that a committed Salafi would see as heretical. The local Islamic tradition reflected by these manuscripts continues practices that were normal in pre-modern North Africa, but suspect or anathema to most modern North Africans following the religious reforms of the early 20th century: most conspicuously, joining Sufi organisations (some themselves holding controversial beliefs, ranging up to Ibn Arabi's near-pantheism) and visiting saints' tombs. But while this may have played a part in shaping attitudes, this is unlikely to have been decisive; otherwise they would have burned them earlier.

The order of motivations I'm postulating is kind of sad in its own right. The books of Timbuktu aren't just a symbol for proving that Africa has a written heritage, or an image to look at in museums or coffee table books. They were intended to be read and taught from, to form part of a living tradition. Yet their content is the one thing that not only their attackers but even most of their defenders seem oblivious to; oh, you'll find glittering generalities about the astronomical and mathematical manuscripts all over the place, but quotes or translations are much scarcer. You can read a few dozen of them (in Arabic, but with English summaries) at the World Digital Library; the Tombouctou Manuscript Project is working on translating them. But as you read, spare a thought (or a donation) for the people caught up in this, not just the books...

The subclassification of Songhay and its historical implications

Just about two years after its acceptance, my article The subclassification of Songhay and its historical implications has finally appeared, in Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 33:2. (If you don't have access to this journal, you can contact me for offprints.) The linguistic history of Songhay is not well-understood; in particular, although much ink has been spilled in speculation about its possible distant relationships, very little has been done to understand its internal classification and what that tells us about its recent history. This paper is an attempt to get to grips with the latter. The abstract is as follows:

This paper seeks to establish the first cladistic subgrouping of Songhay explicitly based on shared arbitrary innovations, a prerequisite both for distinguishing recent loans from valid extra-Songhay comparanda and for determining how Songhay spread. The results indicate that the Northern Songhay languages of the Sahara form a valid subfamily, even though no known historical records link Tabelbala to the others, and that Northern Songhay and Western Songhay (spoken around Timbuktu and Djenné) together form a valid subfamily, Northwestern Songhay. The speakers of Proto-Northern Songhay practised cultivation and permanent architecture, but were unfamiliar with date palms. Proto-Northwestern Songhay was already in contact with Berber and probably (perhaps indirectly) with Arabic, and was spoken along the Niger River. Proto-Songhay itself appears likely to have been in contact with Gur languages, confirming its relatively southerly location. This result is compatible with two scenarios for the northerly spread of Songhay. On Hypothesis A, Northern Songhay spread out from an oasis north-east of Gao, probably Tadmakkat or Takedda, and Northwestern Songhay had been spoken in areas west of Gao which now speak Eastern Songhay. On Hypothesis B, Northern Songhay spread out from the Timbuktu region, and Western Songhay derives from heavy “de-creolising” influence by Eastern Songhay on an originally Northern Songhay language. To choose between these hypotheses, further fieldwork will be required.

Actually, since writing that I've put together another paper that suggests a more specific explanation for the presence of Northern Songhay in Tabelbala – but that's still under review...

Nightmares in the desert

Sleep paralysis, more colourfully known as "old hag's syndrome", is a phenomenon that seems to have left traces in the folklore of just about every culture around the world; but it also seems to be commoner in some areas than others. In particular, while rare to the point of unfamiliarity in Britain or in my Algerian hometown of Dellys, it seems to be familiar to almost everybody in Tabelbala (and, similarly, within the US, it seems to be commoner among African-Americans than whites). The following Kwarandzyey text explains how it is experienced there, and as such might be of some medical interest:

ah, tsaddərts ndza askundzan ləxla aɣudzi. ndza aggwạ niš nn axnuq ka, e! asbạ uɣ bsəlləkni kʷəll, ləxla aɣudzi. nəmgwạ ɣaṛ nəmtqaqa. bəɣ sabmmə̣w niši. nəbʕəyyəṭ, nbəẓẓəgga ndza nən žžəhd... wara affu asmmə̣w niši ni ɣar nn haya si. nən kudzi, amgạ ttsən. attsən amgwạbzda ɣaṛ ndza bəssyas... nəbʕəyyəṭ, nəbẓəgga; wara affu issabmmə̣w niši. uɣu ibtsas tsaddərt. abgwạ niš adaɣ ka nn axnuq ka, amgwạ niši nən kəmbi ka ndza an tsiyu, amkạnika mʕad - ʕad nəmmiħəmda ṛəb si, həlla ʕad nəmfạktsi. xəd nəffạktsi nəmdza ufff! itsa adri.

Oh, sleep paralysis, if it gets hold of you, it's a terror. If it sits on you at your throat, he! there's no one to save you, it's a terror. You start just squawking. Nobody hears you. You're shouting, you're screaming with all your might... no one hears you, you're just on your own. Your blood runs slow. It's slow, it starts moving only slowly... You shout, you scream; no one hears you. This, they call "taddert". It sits on you here, at your throat, it sits on your hands with its feet, it hits at you until - once you praise God, only then do you wake up. When you wake up, you go "Phew!" It's gone.

Particularly if you speak Berber or Arabic, this text should pose an interesting challenge: how many words can you recognise? How much of it can you gloss?

Les déictiques en berbère oriental

Thanks to some filming at a recent conference, you can now listen to me butcher the French language while discussing the demonstrative systems of eastern Berber, in particular Siwi: Les déictiques en berbère oriental. It's not just Berber studies, although it has a good deal of Berber data. You see, it turns out that Siwi, like Qur'anic Arabic, has a typologically unusual feature called addressee agreement; so I attempt here to place this phenomenon within a wider typology of allocutivity, a phenomenon found in languages like Basque and Maithili too.

Gendered verbs: A thought experiment

Plenty of languages have gender for nouns. As far as I know, no language has gender for verbs. Obviously some languages have subject agreement in gender (Arabic, for one), but what I mean is a language in which some other word agrees with the verb it modifies or refers to. This is a bit odd, because - even if we assume that gender always starts out as a property of nouns, which is a pretty big assumption if you think about it - it's not too hard to imagine how verbs could develop gender.

Imagine a language that, like Japanese or Persian, expresses a lot of verbs using "do/make" plus a noun (English allows this in some contexts: "make a donation", "do a runner"). But, unlike Japanese or Persian, let's suppose this language has gender - like Kurmanji, say - and adjectives that agree with the noun in gender. In such a case, it would seem reasonable to have at least some adverbs expressed as adjectives agreeing with the verb's noun: "make frequent donation" for "donate frequently", say. Likewise, ellipsis could be handled with an appropriate pronoun: "I made a donation (masc.) to the library, and he made one (masc.) to a charity."

Now let the forces of phonetic erosion work on the verb phrase for a while, until the former support verb is reduced to a mere suffix attached to the stem (rather like what happened to Latin habere in the development of the future tense in Romance.) Unless the rest of the system has been reworked in the meantime for some reason, the result should be a language in which adverbs and pro-verbs agree in gender with verbs.

Is there any language that has done this? If not, why not?

Blida Atlas Tamazight

In the mountains above the town of Blida south of Algiers, there still survives an isolated variety of Kabyle, a remnant of the era when this region was Berber speaking. If you look through bibliographies for material on this, about the only thing that comes up is Laoust's (1912) Etude sur le dialecte berbère du Chenoua : comparé avec ceux des Beni-Menacer et des Beni-Salah, in which only the Beni-Salah material scattered here and there in the book comes from the region under discussion, while the rest deals with the varieties west of Algiers (almost as badly documented, but not closely related). But I recently came across a PDF that single-handedly changes this. Tamazight de l'Atlas blidéen (from Atlas de Blida) is a 57-page trilingual French-Berber-Arabic dictionary, followed by a sketch grammar, comments on toponymy, and a bibliography. The anonymous authors have done a fine job, and apparently are still working on it.

Leafing through it, I was struck by the extension of deg "in" to "from", replacing seg. While this is clearly not a Zenati variety, it seems to have picked up some Zenati characteristics, as you might expect from its westerly location: for instance, "one" is m. iǧ, f. ict. It's kept the word aryaḏ* "lion" (pl. iyraḏen); this explains the form recorded more than a thousand years earlier in Ibn Quraysh (with a slight copying error, 'ry'r), much better then the more widespread Berber form ar/ahar that Cohen (1972) suggested for it. There are some etymological puzzles to be examined - for example, why the prefixed q in iqic "horn", and why the shift d > l in laba "now"? The prefixed j in ijifer "wing" is presumably originally the indefinite article "one", but it occurs in the plural as well (ijufar). The double negative is ur...-k rather than ur... ara, a sort of non-Zenati version of the widespread Northern Zenati ur... -c (which I posted about a long time ago). No doubt plenty more remains to be seen. (* Typo corrected.)

LACITO move; Siwi text online

First, a big update I should have posted a month ago: I'm working as a researcher at the CNRS now, in Paris; the lab is LACITO. It's a great research atmosphere, and a much easier commute!

Second: Every time I pass through Alexandria, I try to photocopy as much of Gen. Rif'at al-Jawhari's book "Garden of the Sahara" (1964) as the Library of Alexandria will let me - which is generally not much, since they take copyright very seriously. This important - and hard to obtain - resource for Siwi is now viewable free online in its entirety: جنة الصحراء سيوه أو واحة آمون (Garden of the Desert: Siwa, or the Oasis of Amon). It includes a rather long vocabulary at the end (starting on p. 131) along with a few poems (starting on p. 208). The main text itself is of some interest for its description of Siwi customs, although the author's attitudes are sometimes a bit patronising.

Sacred Phonology

The artistically fruitful intersection between geometry and mysticism has a fairly well-established label: "sacred geometry". Phonology and mysticism have historically intersected in a similar, but perhaps less familiar, way.

The notion of "place of articulation" predates modern linguistics by millennia, as is obvious from the order of the Indic alphabets. In the Arabic context, while it was first developed by early linguists such as al-Farahidi and Sibawayh, it is probably most commonly studied in the context of Qur'anic recitation, where it provides a cross-check on the pronunciation of consonants. The number of places of articulation used is rather larger than in the Western tradition, allowing a more linear ordering of the consonants, as follows: chest (long vowels ā ī ū), lower throat (glottal ʔ h), mid throat (pharyngeal/epiglottal ʕ ħ), high throat (uvular fricatives x ɣ), back tongue (uvular stop q), velar (k), mid-tongue (palatal/postalveolar j š y), back lateral (ḍ), front lateral (l), apico-alveolar (n), front tongue (r), apico-dental (ṭ d t), sibilants (ṣ s z), interdentals (ð̣ θ ð), labiodentals (f), bilabials (b m w). (I have used odd terminology for some positions in an attempt to reflect divisions not usually made by Western linguists.)

This ordering of consonants by place of articulation, familiar to any religious specialist of the period, gave Ibn Arabi a structure onto which he could map his vision of the cosmic order (see Appendix II of the link). The throat is the seat of the intellective world, ie universal underlying principles; the back of the mouth is the higher realm of imagination; the mouth proper is the celestial spheres, followed in front by the elemental globes; finally, the "progeny", or classes of beings, are at the gap between the teeth and lips. In short, the more contingent something is, the higher up the vocal tract - just as sounds originate at its bottom with air expelled from the lungs, are shaped as they pass through the vocal tract, to finally emerge from the mouth.

The metaphor is reasonably effective as it stands; but its one-dimensionality is somewhat unsatisfactory. Most consonants reflect combinations of articulatory gestures, rather than being elementary movements. For instance, the difference between d and n, for instance, lies not primarily (if at all) in the place of articulation, but rather in whether or not air is allowed to flow out of the nose, and the difference between t and d lies in how the vocal chords are held. Wouldn't it be nicer to have a symbolism for consonants that allowed for compositionality? What would Ibn Arabi have done with Element Theory, for instance?

Arabic /ē/ gets colloquial: the case of al-Kisā'ī

My description of Khalaf's reading in the previous post applies to all readings transmitted from Ḥamzah ibn Ḥabīb al-Taymī of Kūfa: Khalaf, Khallād, Idrīs al-Ḥaddād, and Isħāq al-Warrāq. There is one other set of readings with final -ē, however: those transmitted from ʕAlī ibn Ḥamza al-Kisā'ī of Kūfa, through his students Abū al-Ḥārith and al-Dūrī. Here's an example (sūrat al-Shams, al-Dūrī's reading):

This set shows two interesting differences for the words examined before:

• Verbs with medial /ē/ in the Ḥamzah tradition simply have [ā]; contrast Ḥamzah's xēba خاب "he lost" with al-Kisā'ī's xāba. In other words, medially *aya and *awa both become ā, just like in the standard Classical pronunciation.
• Verbs with final /ā/ in the Ḥamzah tradition have /ē/, just like the ones with /ē/; contrast Ḥamzah's talāhā تلاها "it followed it" with al-Kisā'ī's talēhā. In other words, final *aya and *awa both become ē, whereas original *ā remains ā.

The latter development is phonetically quite counterintuitive - why would *awa become ē, when it didn't even contain any front vowel? But it makes more sense when you look at it on a morphogical rather than phonological level. Arabic has a huge number of final-y verbs, and a much smaller number of final-w verbs. In the rather common 3rd-person perfect forms, they are indistinguishable. This makes it tempting to simplify the system by reducing the differences between the two classes, and in fact practically all modern Arabic dialects have taken this to its logical conclusion and simply conjugate all final-w verbs as if they were final-y: thus Algerian Arabic, for instance, has dʕa دعا, dʕit دعيت, yədʕi يدعي instead of daʕā دعا, daʕawtu دعوت, yadʕū يدعو. What al-Kisā'ī is doing looks like an early step along that road.

You may notice that another characteristic of this reading is also distinctly reminiscent of certain modern colloquials, in particular those of Syria: prepausal feminine -ah ة is pronounced -ih.

/ē/, Arabic's fourth long vowel

(Warning: This post assumes some knowledge of Arabic, although you should be able to follow the argument even without it.)

Everyone knows that Classical Arabic has three short vowels (a, i, u) and three long (ā, ī, ū). But is this true of all varieties of Classical Arabic? Listen to this recitation of sūrat al-'Aʕlā:

There are several distinct Qur'ān recitation traditions, thought to reflect (in part) early dialectal variation in pronunciation. The best known are Ḥafṣ (Asia and Egypt) and Warsh (mainly North and West Africa); the recitation above is in one of the more obscure ones, Khalaf (ʕan Ḥamzah). In it, you will notice that words like šē'a “he willed” شاء, tansē “you forget” تنسى, appear with ē where more common pronunciations of Classical Arabic would use ā. But not all cases of ā are pronounced ē: contrast for instance ġuθā'-an “chaff” غثاء, lā “not” لا. Let's try to figure out what's going on here.

Start with the verbs ending in ā. Verbs which end in ā in the 3rd person masculine singular (“he did”), such as hadā “he guided” هدى, ṣallā “he prayed” صلى, daʕā “he invited” دعا, sajā “it covered with darkness” سجا, divide into two classes in other forms, one ending in y, the other in w: haday-ta “you guided” هديت, ṣallay-ta “you prayed” صليت vs. daʕaw-ta “you invite” دعوت, sajaw-ta “you covered in darkness” سجوت. You have just heard that the former set become hadē, ṣallē. For the latter, we will have to examine different sūras: in the 10th verse of sūrat al-Qamar (1:20) we hear daʕā, and in the 2nd of al-Ḍuħā we hear sajā.

Now ordinary three-letter verbs have the same stem throughout: katab-a “he wrote” كتب vs. katab-ta “you wrote” كتبت. What if the same used to be true of these verbs: *haday-a “he guided” vs. *daʕaw-a “he invited”? (The asterisk means that these are just hypothetical forms.) As it happens, that idea is confirmed if you look at one of Arabic's closest relatives. In Ge'ez, the Semitic classical language of Ethiopia, the cognate verbs are pronounced precisely as reconstructed: with aya (eg ṣallaya “he prayed”) and awa (eg ṣalawa “he roasted”, Arabic ṣalā صلا, ṣalaw-ta صلوت). So if we assume those forms were original, then we can easily see what's going on: in ordinary Classical Arabic both original *aya and *awa end up as ā at the end of a word, but in the Khalaf reading they remain distinct: *aya becomes ē, but *awa becomes ā.

A similar division can be made among verbs with medial ā. Verbs with medial ā in the 3rd person masculine singular, such as zāda “he increased” زاد, ħāqa “he surrounded” حاق, kāna “he was” كان, qāla “he said” قال, divide similarly into two classes in their verbal nouns, one in y, the other in w: zayd زيد, ħayq حيق vs. kawn كون, qawl قول. So we might expect a similar original difference: *zayada, ħayaqa vs. *kawana, *qawala. Sure enough, the pronunciation is as expected. Listen to sūrat al-Baqarah, verses 10 and 11 (about 2:00) and sūrat al-'Anʕām, verse 10 (about 3:00): zēda, ħēqa vs. kāna, qāla. A near-minimal pair is provided by sā'a “he was bad” ساء (sūrat al-Munāfiqūn, v. 2, about 0:50) vs. šē'a “he willed” شاء (already heard in sūrat al-'Aʕlā.)

So – depending on how abstract you are willing to make your representations – this variety of classical Arabic seems to have four long vowel phonemes rather than three. It is also unambiguously more conservative in this respect than the mainstream pronunciation reflected both in the Ḥafṣ reading and in educated standard Arabic, which underscores the philological value of such reading traditions.

(Note: The Qur'ānic Arabic Corpus was useful in preparing this post.)

"Inability to read or write in your mother tongue was a prerequisite for upward mobility"

If Mohammed Hanif's account of growing up in Pakistan below doesn't ring any bells, then congratulations: you're from one of the minority of countries worldwide with relatively low levels of diglossia. If you're Arab, you know exactly what he's talking about: substitute Darja/3ammiyya for Punjabi, Fusha for Urdu, and French/English as appropriate for English.

"When I was growing up in Pakistan, the complete inability to read or write in your mother tongue was a prerequisite for upward mobility... In my rural version of the state education system, the first thing they did was to try and save me from my mother tongue. Everyone spoke Punjabi in my household and like every five-year-old I had a vocabulary. I could name a goat, a donkey, a chicken. But since the medium of instruction in my school was Urdu, I had to learn alien names for familiar things. I must have spent the next 10 years learning in a language that I would be considered pretentious for speaking in my own street. By the time I finished high school, I realised that there was no college physics in Urdu, forget mathematics, and if you were destined to study aviation, you might have had to wait for centuries while someone drew up navigation maps in Urdu. So I began to learn English and by the time I drifted into writing I had no idea what my own language was. I was more like, “How much are you paying?”"

You might also think it's odd that there's no college maths in Urdu, given that there is such a thing in, for instance, Polish, a language with about a third as many speakers...

Talking Dictionaries (Celtic, Tuvan, Athapaskan, ...)

This link needs posting: Talking Dictionaries, which does what it says on the tin. Included are comparative Celtic (Breton, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scottish, and Manx), which should interest some readers; Tuvan (a Turkic language of Siberia with which Richard Feynman was obsessed); a couple of Munda languages; three Native American languages; and an Oceanic language of New Guinea.

Inalienable possession and social change

Many languages make some sort of distinction between "alienable" and "inalienable" possession. The exact factors vary a lot from language to language, but typically, inalienable possession is when the possessor inherently can't end his relationship to the possessed at all - for example, your father, your brain, your birthplace - or at least not without unacceptably drastic measures - for example, your tongue or your kidney. Alienable possession is when the relationship is more easily changeable - for example, your book, your room, your beef tongue.

In Berber, the roughly corresponding distinction is in general limited to inalienable relations mediated through your parents, ie those that have an important role to play in determining your own social identity: thus father, mother, brother, uncle, aunt, etc. use a different possessive construction than other nouns. For these words, the bare form means "my _" - eg Siwi aṃṃa "my brother". To say "X's brother", you have to add a 3rd person possessive marker first - thus aṃṃa-s n X (brother-his of X) "X's brother". In contrast, for other nouns, including people outside this category - eg amdarrəs "teacher" - there's no 3rd person possessor: "X's teacher" would just be amdarrəs n X.

As widespread as it is, the notion of inalienability rests on an experience of the world that, although it would be immediately recognisable to most people anywhere any time, has been under increasing pressure in a modern context. High mobility - geographical and occupational - makes even parents a rather less meaningful determiner of your identity and position in society, let alone uncles or aunts or birthplaces. For a person who has spent life far from most relatives and with no very strong ties to them, the saying "friends are the real family" has a resonance to it which would seem bizarre to most people throughout history. The body and the brain remain more or less inalienable for life - organ transplants notwithstanding - but a few half-mad futurists like Moravec dream of changing even that. The point of inalienable possessions is not just that they happen to be inescapable but that they define your identity in a way you can't control. The spirit of this age resists such impositions on one's freedom - just ask Dr. Phil. But as Chomsky points out, blank slates don't get anywhere, and "creativity presupposes fixed structure".

Siwi semantics

I recently arrived in Siwa – a pleasant experience as always, quite unaffected by the political turbulence of Cairo – and since getting here, I've repeatedly been learning the meanings of words I thought I already knew. Siwi has turart and adrar, whose cognates throughout Berber mean “hill” and “mountain” respectively. But a turart can hardly be called a hill – some are rock outcrops not much taller than a man – and the flat-topped layered “mountains” of Siwa that they call adrar would in English usually be considered hills, though the term can be used for larger ones too. ləbħaṛ can obviously mean “sea”, as in Arabic; but in fact, in a Siwi context it primarily refers not to the sea but to the two large lakes of the oasis. lašqəṛ is familiar from Arabic – Ibn Hazm notes, for example, that the Umayyad dynasty of al-Andalus were all blond ('ašqar), thanks to their seemingly heritable marital preferences – but it doesn't actually mean “blond” in Siwi, though that's an associated symptom; it means “albino” (albinism is fairly common in Siwa for some reason; it must be hard having no melanin in a place which hardly ever sees a cloud, but they seem to manage.) iləm is “skin”, as elsewhere in Berber; but the thick skin or hide of a sheep, which Siwis cook on special occasions, is not iləm, it's the Arabic loan əjjəld. Semantic elicitation is trickier than it might seem! Another etymologically interesting item of vocabulary I've learned is agbez “cowrie shell”, used in decoration. The word must be related somehow to Kwarandzyey (Korandje) tsyagmʷəš, but the correspondences are fairly funky. I wonder what it's called in Libyan Berber...

Berber in Libya and Egypt

I am glad to announce a new collaborative blog, in which I will be participating along with Marijn van Putten, Adam Benkato, and possibly others: Oriental Berber, on the Berber languages of Libya and Egypt. Not much there yet, but keep an eye out... The subject seems timely, with Berber having started to be used in Libyan media.

In other news, my Dardja etymology blog now features posts on the origins of zṛudiyya / sfənnariyya / xizzu (carrot), čina (orange), njəm (a kind of grass), jṛana (frog), and ʕətrus (billy-goat.)

Some updates: Darja etymologies, sub-Saharan loans, Libyco-Berber

Back again :)

I've often talked about why it's not enough for developing countries to use English or French as a working language for research and leave the majority of their own citizens in the dark. So I'm putting my money where my mouth is (so to speak) and starting a blog in Arabic focused on dialect etymology, a subject rife with popular misconceptions: الأصول التاريخية للدارجة الجزائرية (Historical Origins of the Algerian Dialect). Some of this blog's readers may be interested.

I've written up a finding first posted here - Songhay words in El-Jadida, Morocco - as part of a recently submitted article on sub-Saharan loanwords into North African Arabic. (There aren't many, but more than you might think: one of them, شطة šaṭṭa "Cayenne pepper" from Hausa cìttā, has even made it into Modern Standard Arabic via Egyptian dialect, and another, كابوية kābūya "pumpkin" from Hausa kàbēwā̀, is quite widespread in Algeria.)

MNAMON have posted a video of my talk about Libyco-Berber at Pisa - if you can stand the poor delivery, the content may be interesting. Among other things, I discuss the question of where LB fits into the Berber family tree.

Genetic and linguistic perspectives on Afroasiatic

Via GNXP, I hear there's been a new study on North African genetics: Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migrations. It provides an interesting cross-check on linguistic hypotheses.

In brief, the story these geneticists propose is: the main ancestors of modern North Africans, in particular Berbers, migrated into North Africa at least 12,000 and perhaps as much as 40,000 years ago; this "Maghrebi" component is close to Western Eurasian populations, and is dominant in most of their Moroccan and Algerian samples (and prominent in Libya). Arabs migrated in more recently starting 1,400 years ago, and Near Eastern influence is prominent throughout, especially in Libya, and dominant in Egypt. The Sub-Saharan African component seems to have arrived even later (~1,200 years ago in southern Morocco) and thus probably reflects the trans-Saharan slave trade; in Morocco it looks West African, while in Egypt it appears more diverse. Some European admixture is visible in Algeria and northern Morocco as well, but its nature is not clear. The data set is a bit small: a better coverage of Sahelian populations would be highly desirable, as would more Near Eastern populations, and one wonders where the ancient Egyptians fit in. However, the overall picture seems reasonable.

The more recent stages fit trivially with the detailed linguistic and historical data available (see my earlier post on linguistic traces of sub-Saharan immigration into North Africa), but the genetic divergence between Maghrebis and western Eurasian populations takes us into a realm where both fields offer much less certainty. Linguistically, we know that Berber, Semitic, and Egyptian are all distantly related to one another (and to Chadic and Cushitic, though that doesn't show up in the genetic data here); but we don't know when they split apart. There is no generally agreed upon method for dating linguistic divergences, and Swadesh's original "radioactive decay" glottochronological formula has proved too poor an approximation to be relied upon. However, a much-modified glottochronological formula was more recently proposed by Sergei Starostin in an attempt to fit a curve of attested data points. As it happens, two of his followers, George Starostin and Alexander Militarev, have ventured to offer estimates for Afroasiatic; for the split between Semitic and Berber, they respectively estimate 9,700 or 11,000 years ago. This seems strikingly close to the lower limit of the geneticists' estimate here. But even if this estimate is rejected, if the divergence date is anywhere near what the genetics is suggesting, then we have to conclude that genetic relationships older than 10,000 years can be discerned, contrary to some claims in the literature.

There is a way around this: one could propose a pre-Phoenician immigration that changed the language but had relatively little impact on the gene pool. In fact, such an event may have to be postulated for Afroasiatic's history in at least some areas anyway: speakers of one Chadic language are represented in this paper - Hausa - and their genes look nothing like North Africans or Near Easterners. However, it hardly seems like a parsimonious hypothesis in this case, given the split dates suggested. So... is this a corroboration of Starostin's method, or just a lucky guess?

Do you speak Tashelhit?

If you speak Tashelhit (or, indeed, another Berber language) and feel like helping me test a hypothesis, I would really appreciate it if you can send me a translation of these two slightly inane short stories (preferably by email). I'll be happy to explain later...

Abdallah had two sons, Brahim and Cherif. Brahim told Cherif: “I can run faster than you can.” Cherif told Brahim: “Let's have a race.” Brahim said: “All right.” They raced 100 metres. Cherif won. Cherif said: “You thought you could run faster than I can?” Brahim got angry. He told his father Abdallah: “Cherif is bad, he went running instead of doing his homework.” His father laughed and told Brahim: “Who was running with him?”

---

Khaled and Youcef were friends; they lived in a village. Khaled went on a long trip to the city with his son. A few days later Youcef went to the doctor, and the doctor told him: You need a medicine called such-and-such.” So Youcef called Khaled and asked him: “While you're in the city, can you get me this medicine?” Khaled was busy, so he told his son to find the medicine. His son went to the pharmacy; he said they didn't have it, but they might have it in another city nearby. So he went there and got the medicine. Then he came back and gave it to his father. When they got back his father gave it to Y.

Multilayered meanings in Dellys

In my hometown, the small port of Dellys in north-central Algeria (and probably elsewhere for all I know), older women traditionally throw water after a family member who is departing for a long voyage. When I asked my oldest aunt (who speaks no language but Arabic) about this recently, she said it was to bring them safety – Arabic 'amān – on the road. The Berber word for “water” is, precisely, aman. The action reveals itself as originally a pun rather than a mere superstition – but one that only makes sense in the light of both languages at once, not Arabic or Berber alone. A useful case to bear in mind in trying to understand North African culture...

When Emir Abdelkader came to Dellys in 1840 and inquired about its defences against the French (who would occupy it four years later), he was allegedly told that the town places its trust in its saints: Sidi Abdelkader by sea, Sidi Soussan by land. In the account of Bennaamane (2011:61, citing Daumas and Fabar 1847:197), Emir Abdelkader reacted in a very modern way: he got angry at their superstition and pointed out that Algiers had not been saved by its "patron saint" Sidi Abderrahmane. But somewhere along the transmission of this account, a bit of metonymy has been misunderstood. The tomb of the supposed saint Sidi Abdelkader was located at the tip of a 700-metre-long peninsula next to the town, from which you can see any incoming ship for at least 20 km (map). That of Sidi Soussan was located at the top of the hill on whose side Dellys stands, and was such an obvious location for defenses that the French turned it into a blockhaus soon after. The speaker was using religious language, but his trust was as much in the scouts posted there as in the saints buried there.

Dellys (dəlləs, medieval Tadallas), owes its name to a common plant used in net-making and thatching (Ampelodesmos mauretanicus), locally called dalis (better known in Algeria as dis.) The name is not attested before the 11th century, and does not resemble its earlier Latin name (Rusuccurium, from Phoenician rus “head, cape”.) However, Murcía (2011) points out that the plant name is a good deal more ancient: a 5th-century work, Ars sancti Augustini pro fratrum mediocritate breviata, states that non-Latin regional words are barbarous, ut si quis dicat in latino sermone dellas pro carice, quod utique punicum est (“like if someone says in Latin dellas, which is undoubtedly Punic, in place of carex (sedge)”). Murcía reasonably takes the word to be Berber rather than Punic in origin: as he points out, forms similar to adlis for this plant are found all across northern Berber. But as Bennaamane (2011:22) points out, there is a comparable classical Arabic form in Lisān al-`Arab – dalas “the remains of plants and vegetables; land that bears plants after having been barren; plant that leafs after late summer” – so this could be an old Semitic loan into Berber too; more extensive comparative work is called for.

References
بن نعمان، اسماعيل. 2011. مدينة دلس (تدلس) : دراسة تاريخية وأثرية خلال العهد الإسلامي. تيزي وزو: دار الأمل للطباغة والنشر والتوزيع.
Daumas, M. et M. Fabar. 1847. La Grande Kabylie : études historiques. Paris: Hachette.
Murcía, Carles. 2011. Que sait-on de la langue des Maures? Distribution géographique et situation sociolinguistique des langues en Afrique Proconsulaire. In C. Ruiz Darasse et E. R. Luján (éd.) Contacts linguistiques dans l’Occident méditerranéen antique. Madrid: Collection de la Casa de Velázquez (126), pp. 103-126.

Libyco-Berber (ancient Tifinagh) at MNAMON

Libyco-Berber is the writing system used in pre-Roman and Roman times to write an apparently Berber language in North Africa – especially inland in Numidia (northeastern Algeria and northwestern Tunisia), where the large majority of surviving inscriptions have been found. We can read the letters, thanks to a few bilingual inscriptions, but only a small number of words are known, because most of the inscriptions are very short (usually gravestones) and have no translations. It seems to have disappeared in the Maghreb by the end of the Classical period (there are no known Christian Libyco-Berber inscriptions, much less Muslim ones), but a variant of it, called Tifinagh, has survived among the Tuareg of the Sahara up to the present day – and, since the late 20th century, an adaptation of that called Neo-Tifinagh has been revived in Algeria and Morocco.

Last week MNAMON published pages by me on the Libyco-Berber (or ancient Tifinagh) script and language, which may be of interest to readers. I gave a talk at the Scuola Normale in Pisa for the occasion, giving an overview of what we know and discussing the language's position within the Berber family; I understand the video may appear online soon. A notable conclusion is that the glottal stop, recently reconstructed for Proto-Berber, had probably already been lost in the language of these inscriptions.

Meaningless morphemes from Malta to Matrouh

A while back, Bulbul pointed out to me that in Maltese (the Arabic-derived language spoken in the EU member state of Malta) the plural of "guru" (guru) is "guruwijiet" (where "j"=y.) Obviously, the stem is "guru". The plural suffix is -iet, which is one of the commonest Maltese plurals, and derives from Arabic -āt; compare saltn-a "kingdom" > saltn-iet. But in that case what is the -ij- (ie -iyy-) doing there, and in other cases like omm "mother" > omm-ij-iet? On the face of it it looks like a morpheme without a function.

Oddly enough, as I discussed in my PhD thesis, you get the same phenomenon in Siwi Berber. It happens with Arabic external plurals, eg lə-kdew-a "squash" > lə-kdew-iyy-at, but also with Berber ones, eg ta-ngugəs-t "wagtail bird" > ti-ngugs-iyy-en, baṭaṭəs "potatoes" > baṭaṭs-iyy-ən (the usual plural suffixes are feminine -en and masculine -ən.) You seem to get it occasionally in western Libyan Arabic too (eg žnarāl "general" > žnarāl-iyy-a.)

In both Maltese and Siwi, it appears to be used mainly on nouns whose form is unusual - ones with syllable structures and vowel patterns that are unusual for nouns in the language. The -iyy- suffix looks just like the suffix used to derive nouns indicating origin from a place (eg Sīwi(yy) < Sīw-a); most plural markers in Arabic are specific to nouns of a particular shape, but this suffix can be attached to nouns of any shape. In a sense, it serves as a bridge to reformat the input (the singular) into a form acceptable to the plural function. It thus has a functional value within the context of the morphology. However, it fairly clearly has no meaning at all - which seems fairly remarkable to me. I suppose you could compare the -iss- that shows up in some forms of French -ir verbs (fin-ir "to finish" > nous fin-iss-ons "we finish"), but historically that seems to be part of the stem rather than just an originally meaningless add-on as here.

Can you think of another morpheme (suffix/prefix/whatever) that has to be there in some contexts, but that has no meaning?

South Arabian languages on YouTube

In eastern Yemen and western Oman, there are spoken several South Arabian languages - Semitic, but more distantly related to Arabic than Arabic is to Aramaic or Hebrew. The largest of these is Mehri. If you speak Arabic and want to learn how to form questions in Mehri (or just want to hear what this language sounds like), there's a recording on YouTube for you: اللغة المهرية - محب اللغة المهرية وليد التميمي. For its rather smaller relative Jibbali, there's some poetry. Someone has even attempted to put up recordings of all the major dialects of Yemen (mainly Arabic.)

A longstanding rumour claims that these languages are mutually comprehensible with Berber. As some listeners will be able to see, this is not correct.

Improbable regular cognates

In Zenaga (the Berber language of Mauritania), the word for "slave" is oʔḅḅäy.

In the "Shelha" Berber spoken near Touggourt, the word for "black" is aɣəggal. (In Tamasheq - Malian Tuareg - ɣǎggal means "to be brown".)

As you've probably guessed from the title, these are originally the same word. The semantic shift is sadly predictable, given Saharan history, but how can the consonants be related? Well:

Zenaga ʔ regularly corresponds to pan-Berber ɣ, eg iʔf "head" = iɣəf, iʔy "arm" = iɣil, iʔssi "bone" = iɣəs.

Proto-Berber *ww becomes bb in Zenaga and gg(ʷ) almost everywhere else in Berber, eg "year": Zenaga äššäbbaš = pan-Berber asəgg(ʷ)as.

Pan-Berber l becomes Zenaga y word-finally, eg ađ̣abbäy "male in-law" = pan-Berber aḍəgg(ʷ)al. But if you add the feminine ending -t, the resulting cluster lt becomes L. Sure enough, "slave (f.)" in Zenaga is toʔḅḅäL.

So if you're tired of repeating Armenian "erku" = English "two" every time you need an example of a non-trivial sound change, consider opting for a Berber example.

(All Zenaga data from Taine-Cheikh 2010; Tamasheq data from Heath 2006; Touggourt (specifically Tala n Aʕməṛ) data courtesy of a friend. The correspondences in question are discussed in more detail in Kossmann 1999.)

Marzouki's Tunisian language policy proposals: once more against code-switching

Following up on the previous post, my wife just sent me a link to Moncef Marzouki, the head of the centrist party that came second in the Tunisian elections, talking (in Arabic) about the language issue in Tunisia: "What language will the Arabs speak next century?" It's well worth a look for anyone wondering what democratic Tunisia's language policy will look like; his position is not far from Ghannouchi's in this regard, but he gives a lot more detail.

Marzouki warns that the language used in Facebook postings and private stations, with its undigested French loans or even phrases, freedom from prescriptive grammar, and Latin transcriptions, is a foretaste of what future Arabic may look like if we're not careful. The solution, in his view, is a Society for the Defense of the Arabic Language in Tunisia - but "will the authorities license this, when most of the parties are using dialect in their political advertising" and the state used a slogan in dialect ('وقيت باش تقيّد') to advertise the elections? If we're not careful our children may end up speaking "a language like Creole, dominant in the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific - a strange mixture of European and African languages" and a Tunisian will need an interpreter to talk to a Yemeni (many might already!) He blasts the station-owning promoters of code-mixing as "Westernised counter-revolutionary forces who dread Islamists' and Arabists' victory and support Westernisation and separation from the Arabo-Islamic world through a narrow isolationism."

So far so familiar, you may well say. I'm not impressed with his rather authoritarian desire to restrict what language private broadcasts can use - he specifically states that he wants laws on broadcasting requiring "the exclusive use of Fusha and refined Darja" and "banning this Creole language - we don't think that the BBC would allow pub talk, or French TV teen slang." (He's definitely wrong there!) I was also surprised by the way he seems to set up dialectal Arabic as the enemy of Standard Arabic (Fusha), when in fact Fusha has stayed alive only through dialectal Arabic speakers' attachment to it; but he later clarifies that his opposition is to the use of dialect in inappropriate contexts and not to the dialect itself, which he deems worthy of "preservation and development".

He has some good proposals on language policy too, though. We need more translation into Arabic, more digitisation of Arabic books, and more use of Arabic in science; "no community has flourished in the language of another" (absolutely right, but how to pay for these?) The single-foreign-language policy that makes the Maghrib Francophone and the Mashriq Anglophone needs to be replaced by a policy of teaching different foreign languages to different pupils (this I agree with 100%, although again the cost of training is a formidable obstacle), including those of Asia and even Africa. He also takes a progressive line on minority languages, calling it "obligatory" for the state to support languages like Berber in Algeria and Morocco or Pulaar in Mauritania, and even teach them to Arabic speakers - although he doesn't have anything to say on what's left of Berber in Tunisia... And despite my reservations about the heavy-handedness of his prescriptivism, I was pleasantly surprised by his ability to summarise the opposing position; he devotes a lot of the article to answering potential challenges to his positions:

• Isn't linguistic cross-fertilisation a longstanding phenomenon? Have our people ever spoken an unmixed language? Isn't it natural for languages to change and develop? Doesn't our dialect contain hundreds of French and Italian words anyway? (He doesn't really try to answer these.)
• Couldn't Arabic develop into multiple literary languages just as Latin did? (But we see the opposite: more and more people are using Arabic thanks to broadcasting, education, and Islam, and the dialects are now getting closer to the standard language. "As long as the Qur'an remains, Arabic will continue to develop and to accumulate around it dialects close to it, like planets circling around the sun.")
• Doesn't this position discriminate against the less-educated in favour of an elite? Shouldn't the revolution restore the freedom to speak the language of the masses? (Arabic was discriminated against under the dictatorship, being excluded from administration, higher education, and research; and talk of "the dialect" camouflages discrimination against regional ones. "What we hear in broadcasting is not the dialect of the northwest or the south (which are nearly Fusha) but the dialect of a few posh neighbourhoods in the capital who count it as a mark of backwardness to utter a sentence without stuffing it with French expressions, even when out of place. Franco-Arabic is the language of some bourgeois, Westernised sections who despise the public and call them 'beggars'." - Needless to say, this is a tu quoque reply: while more or less correct, it doesn't really address the question.)

The picture he paints suggests some much broader questions: do laissez-faire language policies simply amount to letting the rich impose their language preferences on the rest of us? And do democratic language policies simply amount to letting the majority force their language preferences on the minority? How can we avoid such traps, especially given the requirement of universal education?

Ghannouchi vs. French-Arabic code-switching

A few posts ago, we saw Francophone objections to North African code-switching via Wikileaks. Now a story has come up illustrating Arabophone objections to the same phenomenon - on the grounds not on economics but of identity.

Following Ennahda's plurality in the recent Tunisian elections, its leader Rashed Ghannouchi commented that "We are Arabs and our language is Arabic... We have become Franco-Arab; this is linguistic pollution. We encourage the learning of all languages, especially the most alive ones, without losing our identity. He who is not proud of his language cannot be proud of his country." (AFP, can't find the original quote on Express FM) A party activist clarified that "We have no problem with French - many of our activists speak it perfectly. The problem is with mixing it with Arabic." (Slate Afrique)

The Slate article quotes a source identifying this as an implicit attack on the Francophone elite of Tunisia, "notably those who did their studies in France and are most at ease in French both in private and in public." While identity politics has its dangers, such statements should not be surprising: a core constituency for Ennahda, like its Turkish counterparts, is people who want to succeed and become middle class without having to reject their own principles and origins to adopt the highly Westernised identity of the elites that emerged in the early 20th century, and defending Arabic amounts to defending that choice. In any Francophone country, teaching English is an obvious long-term strategy for connecting the country to the wider world while bypassing the Francophone elite (and possibly creating a new one?); "all languages, especially the most alive ones" is obviously intended to refer mainly to English. This seems to have caused some concern among supporters of French even in France (it is remarkable that Google turns up the press release on the French Department of Defense website!)

Linguistically rather than politically speaking, though, does this make sense? Well, up to a point:

• "our language is Arabic" is true, and truer of Tunisia than of any other country in North Africa: barely half a dozen small villages in the entire country speak Berber, and many of them are abandoning it (for much the same reasons that impel the elites towards French.) But, in the context of a very large difference between Classical/Standard Arabic (fusha) and Tunisian dialect(s), it also slides over the question of what kinds of Arabic count as "our language".
  
• "Linguistic pollution" combines a factual statement with a value judgement: it is true that French words show up commonly in Arabic contexts to the point that people have trouble thinking of a corresponding Arabic word, and calling that "pollution" just amounts to saying that this is bad.
  
• He's quite right to link language to identity: in the words of Andrée Tabouret-Keller, "The language spoken by somebody and his or her identity as a speaker of this language are inseparable: This is surely a piece of knowledge as old as human speech itself." Tunisian identity would not be lost even if every Tunisian shifted to French - but it would be profoundly changed.
  
• "He who is not proud of his language cannot be proud of his country" is not correct: of course you can be proud of your country in the abstract without even liking its language (I don't know about Tunisia, but there are, sadly, plenty of vehemently patriotic Algerians who have nothing positive to say about the Algerian dialect!) However, it's obviously intended less as a factual statement than as a call for Tunisians to be proud of their language - a call I would enthusiastically endorse.

Kwarandzyey

Sorosoro have just put up a webpage by me, giving a general picture of the language of Tabelbala: Korandje. It's also available in French and Spanish.

Berber dictionary online

A link I've been meaning to post for a while: Amawal n Tiddukla Tadelsant Imedyazen. The guy behind it, Omar Mouffok, deserves credit for his efforts to document Kabyle dialects outside of the mainstream, like the one spoken near Blida; many entries indicate which regions the word is used in, though unfortunately a fairly impenetrable system of abbreviations is used. Translations into French, Spanish, and Arabic are given for some words, but many are only given definitions in Kabyle.

Songhay online

The Northern Songhay family is of some general interest, both for the study of language contact - all its members are astonishingly strongly influenced by Berber and/or Arabic, to the point that only a few hundred Songhay words survive and much of the grammar has been replaced - and for understanding the history of the Sahara (they suggest both that the spread of Songhay predates the Songhay Empire and that a Berber language different from Tuareg used to be spoken in much of Mali and Niger.) I've recently put together a sort of homepage for Northern Songhay linguistics: Northern Songhay. It includes a more or less complete bibliography.

Anyone interested in that will also be interested in a site I recently came across: Songhay.org, offering lexicographical data, lessons, software, and some references focused mainly on the Songhay of Gao (Koyraboro Senni.) I particularly appreciated the pictorial dictionaries under "Encyclopédie".

Wikileaks and Algeria's "language crisis"

Among the newly released Wikileaks US diplomatic cables is one from Algiers that presents a fairly uncritical review of Algerians' own worst stereotypes about the way they talk, with a notable Francophone slant coming from its sources: TRILINGUAL ILLITERATES: ALGERIA'S LANGUAGE CRISIS. The report paints an alarming picture: "Decades of government-imposed Arabization have produced an under-40 population that, in the words of frustrated Algerian business leaders, 'is not fluent in anything' and therefore handicapped in the job market and more vulnerable to extremist influence... The 20-40 age group now competing for jobs speaks a confusing mixture of French, Arabic and Berber that one business leader called 'useless,' as they cannot make themselves fully understood by anyone but themselves." But there are some serious problems with this.

Let's break it up into individual claims:

1. Arabisation of the educational system has led to a lack of fluency

It takes some ingenuity to reconstruct the reasoning behind this claim, since the cable doesn't give much of it. Its main basis seems to be statements like this: "Ameziane Ait Ahcene, Northrup Grumman's deputy director for Algeria, complained that he had to recruit in francophone Europe to find skilled accountants and engineers who were fluent in spoken and written French. Mohamed Hakem, marketing and communications director for the ETRHB Haddad group, shared the same sentiment, adding that the process of providing language training in French or English to new recruits was often prohibitively expensive and added too much time to the recruitment process." In other words, what they really mean is that Arabisation of the educational system has led to a lack of fluency in French - the (very real) problem of non-fluency in Standard Arabic is not really on the radar here, perhaps understandably for the business leaders given that most of Algeria's foreign trade is with non-Arabic-speaking countries. But correlation is not causation. The educated people over 40 whose passing they're lamenting certainly were more fluent in French; but they were also a minority within their own generation, and the state had a lot more money per capita to spend on educating them than it did in the 1980s or 1990s, the era of low oil prices and regular shortages. Keeping French as the language of education might have increased the number of those most fluent in French; but, given the difficulty of studying in a language totally unrelated to the one spoken in daily life, it would certainly have decreased the number of educated people (as well as alienating them even more from their own heritage.) The flip side of this question is: why, almost 50 years after independence and 20 years after Arabisation of secondary school, do so many Algerian jobs that don't involve any contact with foreign countries at all - notably in the civil service - still demand fluency in French? Why do many Algerian government websites, as I've noted previously, not even provide Arabic versions?

However, our anonymous embassy official makes a telling mistake about the extent of Arabisation. He claims that "University subjects are also taught in Arabic -- without exception since former Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem refused to allow scientific and technical subjects to revert to French-language instruction", and that "The Algerian school system now produces graduates who must first take the time and money after university to re-learn subjects like engineering, science and commerce in French in order to compete for jobs in Algeria and abroad." But any Algerian university student can tell you that scientific and technical subjects are still consistently taught in French, except for a few quasi-experimental English-language courses. In fact, a quick Google search reveals a 2009 paper, Pratiques langagières d'étudiants en médecine de la Faculté d'Alger, whose abstract complains about this: "In Algeria, although school leavers accede to higher education with all their secondary education in Arabic, they pursue medical studies in French. This language, ill mastered by the majority in spite the fact that they were strictly short listed when they enrolled, is felt as a setback in their studies."

2. Lack of fluency has handicapped youth in the job market: "several Algerian business representatives lamented what they called the "lost generation" of Algerian workers, who are left out largely because of their inability to function at a professional level in any single language." "You are trilingual illiterates."

No argument there. White-collar jobs almost by definition require fluency in written, prescriptively defined standard languages, and most Algerian youth aren't fluent enough in any such language; it's a scandal, and the educational system needs to be fixed, and the kids need to study harder. However, these kids do have at least one linguistic asset that tends to be ignored. The primary everyday language of Algeria - at home, on the street, in the shops - is Algerian Arabic (Darja), Arabic in origin but so far removed from Standard Arabic that Middle Easterners can barely understand it. No one would dream of listing fluency in Darja as an asset; but just try living in Algeria without it! And if you think it's easy, try learning it from scratch.

3. Lack of fluency has made youth vulnerable to extremism.

Hmm... hard to figure out the reasoning here (I addressed a more extreme similar claim a while ago.) It might simply mean that lack of fluency leads to poor economic prospects, which lead to extremism - though whether poverty in fact leads to extremism is arguable. It might be code for "Now that the kids speak Arabic better than French, they're more influenced by Middle Eastern preachers instead of by French movies" - which is sort of true, but is still a gross oversimplification (part of the causality even runs the other way - the availability of satellite channels since the early 1990s seems to have had a positive impact on kids' abilities in both languages.) Or perhaps the idea is that fluency in a literary language gives a person the confidence to argue against ideas being advanced by authority figures? There might be something in that, but I'd say Algerians are fairly argumentative without it...

4. We now face "an entire generation fluent only in a linguistic collage known as 'Algerian'", which is "useless." "Diplomats coming to Algeria after serving elsewhere in the region are amazed that Algerians rarely finish a sentence in the same language they started it in."

The idea that Darja is "useless" I already addressed above: how can the primary language you need for everyday life almost everywhere in the country be dismissed as "useless"! Darja itself, in general, is not a particularly mixed language: it's a coherent Arabic dialect with an unusual number of words taken from French, but with its grammar essentially unchanged from the dialect of Arabic already spoken in Algeria before the French arrived. If it's a "linguistic collage", what are we to say of English, more than half of whose vocabulary derives from French or Latin?

However, there are some parts of Algeria - mainly Algiers and its surroundings - where many people commonly practise code-switching and code-mixing, ie the incorporation of whole phrases and sentences from French into a conversation whose main language is Darja. I personally find this practice irritating, and inconsiderate when directed towards strangers: you can usually take it for granted that another Algerian will be fluent in Darja, but many Algerians speak French haltingly or not at all, and peppering your speech with French phrases tends to make them feel unwelcome. But it's certainly not "useless" from an educational perspective; to the contrary, it causes Algerois who would otherwise have little occasion to use French to maintain a fairly high level of conversational fluency in it, and keeps them in practice. Nor is it "useless" from a practical perspective: being able to comprehend this mix is a fairly essential skill in Algiers, as important in commercial contexts as in social encounters. And, in my experience, the most persistent language-mixers aren't the uneducated at all: they're the ones who speak the best French, and either find it easier to express some thoughts in French or want to make very sure you don't take them for country bumpkins. It's also worth emphasising that code-switching isn't some kind of uniquely Algerian pathology: it happens in almost every genuinely bilingual society, all over the world.

5. English is the way out of this mess: "We hear at all levels that this problem has led to a tremendous appetite for English -- a neutral, global language unburdened by Algerian history -- as the best way forward... As the director of cooperation at the Ministry of Higher Education recently told us, Algeria 'needs a Marshall Plan for the English language.'"

Algeria emphatically does need more graduates fluent in English (and I'm glad to say this is slowly happening - check out E-DZ); given the current dominance of English in global research and business, this is a far higher priority than increasing fluency in French. But that's yet another challenge for the educational system, not a solution for its ills. Algeria has far more fluent French- and Arabic-speakers to draw on than English speakers, yet it still ends up with high school graduates who can't write a letter in any language without numerous mistakes. If English teaching is expanded without otherwise reforming the educational system, then all that Algeria will get is more "trilingual illiterates".

Why German is strange

Following up on comments to the previous post, some readers may be interested in the following list of the top ten rarest typological features of Northwestern European languages (on WALS), ordered from most to least unusual:

1. Polar Questions - coded through word order (Did he? He did.); very unusual outside Europe.
   
2. Uvular Consonants - continuants only (French/German/Dutch "r"); usually languages with uvulars have a uvular stop.
   
3. The Perfect - coded with a word meaning "have" (I have done it); unparalleled outside Europe.
   
4. Coding of Evidentiality - using a modal verb; unusual outside Europe
   
5. Demonstratives - no distance contrast (German); rare worldwide.
   
6. Negative Indefinite Pronouns - used without a predicate negator (I saw nothing, instead of I ain't seen nothing); very rare outside Europe.
   
7. Front Rounded Vowels - high and mid (ü, ö); unusual outside northern Eurasia
   
8. Relativization on Subjects - using a relative pronoun; most of the world's language use non-pronominal strategies.
   
9. Weight-Sensitive Stress - Right-oriented, antepenultimate involved; unusual.
   
10. Order of Object and Verb - alternates depending on clause type (German, Dutch); most languages keep this fixed irrespective of clause type.

This is from: Cysouw, Michael. 2011. Quantitative explorations of the world-wide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of northwestern European languages. In: Horst Simon & Heike Wiese (Eds.) Expecting the Unexpected. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 411-431.

For a list of some linguistic features common in Europe more generally but rare outside it, see Haspelmath 2001 (summarised here.)

Forthcoming talk: the history of Kwarandzyey viewed in areal context

Some readers may be interested in a talk I'll be giving at the end of this month in Paris, at LACITO on 30 September in a colloquium called Journée d'étude : Aires linguistiques. The title is "Du Sahel au Maghreb : essai d'une histoire linguistique du korandjé, langue songhay loin de son aire d'origine". (Yes, I'm going to try to deliver it in French - a foolhardy decision, given that I've only ever studied two years of it, but there you are.)

Basically, Kwarandzyey - the language of Tabelbala in SW Algeria - is a Songhay language, brought originally from at least a thousand kilometres to the south in the Niger valley. The Songhay family typologically fits reasonably well into West Africa - for Güldemann, it is a peripheral member of the Macro-Sudanic area - and shares some features widespread throughout sub-Saharan Africa and rare north of the Sahara (such as Noun-Numeral order). In particular, Songhay shows strikingly close structural similarities to the Mande languages (eg S-Aux-O-V order); these similarities for the most part appear likely to reflect early Mande influence on Songhay, rather than a common genetic origin. The languages of Northwestern Africa - Arabic and Berber varieties alike - share a number of characteristics which contrast sharply with Songhay and with the West African languages around it: some of these reflect common inheritance (eg a two-gender system), others reflect convergence, having been absent from both proto-Berber and early Arabic (eg a vowel system consisting of a i u, plus neutral ə restricted to closed syllables.) Over the past millennium, Kwarandzyey has changed a lot; most of these changes (lexical, grammatical, and phonological) have brought it closer to the Arabic and Berber varieties spoken around its current location. But the changes do not derive from a single language; the lexicon lets us discern influence at least three different branches of Berber (Western, Atlas, and Zenati) and two rather different Arabic dialects (Western Maghrebi and Hassaniya). One way to view this phenomenon is to say that Kwarandzyey, having been isolated from the Macro-Sudanic area to which its ancestor belonged, has been getting integrated into a Northwest African linguistic (and indeed cultural) area. But is this a helpful way of viewing things, or does it misleadingly present an essentially local phenomenon as a product of a wider region? We'll have to see...