Prescriptivism and scientists

Back in high school, my physics teacher once told us that people who touched an ordinary strip of metal and called it "cold", as almost everyone would, were making a big mistake. In reality, that strip was at room temperature; it only feels cold because, since metal is a good heat conductor, it conducts heat away from our fingers when we touch it. I was already enough of a linguist (or pedant) to retort that this was fallacious: if everyone except physicists uses the word "cold" in reference to things that feel cold when you touch them, then that's what "cold" means. Undaunted, he responded that such people would also expect a thermometer to show a lower temperature when placed on the metal than when placed on, say, an adjacent piece of wood – which it would not.

The latter mistake has nothing to do with language. In general, things that feel cold have lower temperatures, and things that feel hot have higher ones; unless you carry a thermometer around everywhere, it's easy to assume that the correlation is perfect, and anything that feels colder has a lower temperature. But in the former, prescriptivist fallacy, language plays a crucial role. This fallacy consists of redefining a well-known popular term for scientific purposes and then declaring its original meaning wrong, forgetting that its original meaning was based on quite different principles. A similar example which I came across recently is the notion that the Bible was mistaken in listing the bat as a bird, or rather the ʕǎṭallēp as a ʕôp (via); it should be obvious that if everyone was calling bats birds, then "bird" (or rather ʕôp) did not mean "member of the clade Avialae" at the time! In this case, however, the new meaning has gained enough popular acceptance in English to have driven out the old one almost entirely, thereby making Bible translators' lives harder but biology teachers' lives easier. (I covered a similar Qur'ānic misunderstanding involving "atom" a while back.)

Usually, prescriptivism involves declaring that a new (or allegedly new) meaning or usage is wrong. Scientists' prescriptivism is rather the inverse, in that it consists of declaring an old, previously generally accepted meaning or usage wrong. At its best, this can be an effort to popularise knowledge: everyone ought to know that bats are more closely related to humans than to sparrows, and if we can just persuade them to stop calling bats birds, they'll remember. But, fundamentally, this is also a power grab: we're the experts on this field, so we're the ones who get to say what the word means, not you. Giving old terms new definitions can be useful, but we should never forget that that's what we're doing.

Have you come across any examples of the scientists' prescriptivist fallacy lately?

Why having "no word for X" can matter

The nice thing about French, from an English speaker's perspective, is that its lexical structure is so much like that of English that you can often translate a sentence without having to think much about what it means. Let's try this sentence, for example:

"Process and Reality presents a system of speculative philosophy which is based on a categorical scheme of investigation designed to explain how concrete aspects of human experience can provide a foundation for our understanding of reality."

Without seriously contemplating whatever it is that the author of this sentence is trying to say, I can render this in French as:

"Procès et Réalité présente un système de philosophie spéculative qui est fondé s'appuie sur un plan catégorique d'investigation destiné qui vise à expliquer comment des aspects concrets de l'expérience humaine peuvent fournir une base pour notre compréhension de la réalité."

No doubt there are some issues with this translation – my French has a long way to go. (fixed) But producing it was a relatively easy, almost mechanical task. Translating it into Standard Arabic I have to think a good deal more about the sense of each word (and also have less confidence in the results since I don't own a philosophy-focused dictionary) but I can still readily make it nearly word-for-word:

"كتاب السيْر والواقع يقدم نظام فلسفة نظرية مبني على مشروع فحص تصنيفي معمول ليفسر كيف يمكن لبعض الجوانب الملموسة لتجربة الإنسان أن تعطينا أساسا لفهم الواقع.
("kitābu s-sayri wa-l-wāqiʕ yuqaddimu niđ̣āma falsafatin nađ̣ariyyatin mabniyyun ʕalā mašrūʕi faħṣin taṣnīfiyyin li-yufassira kayfa yumkinu li-baʕđ̣i l-jawānibi l-malmūsati li-tajribati l-'insāni 'an taʕṭiyanā 'asāsan li-fahmi l-wāqiʕi.")

Now suppose I want to translate this into Algerian Arabic. What am I going to do about words like "process", "reality", "speculative", "concrete"? Plenty of Algerians have studied such notions, but they've done so in French or in Standard Arabic. What I would normally do in such cases is simply substitute a Standard Arabic word wherever I can't think of one that would count as Algerian Arabic, yielding something like this:

"كتاب السير والواقع يقدّم واحد النظام تاع الفلسفة النظرية اللي مبنية على مشروع تصنيفي تاع الفحص، خدمُه باش يفسّر كيفاش الجوانب الملموسة نتاع تجربة الإنسان تقدر تعطيلنا أساس باش نفّهمو الواقع."
("ktab əs-sayr w-əl-wāqiʕ yqəddəm waħəd ən-niđ̣am taʕ əl-fəlsafa n-nađ̣aṛiyya lli məbniyya ʕla məšṛuʕ təṣnifi taʕ əl-fəḥṣ, xədmu baš yfəssər kifaš əl-jawanib əl-məlmusa ntaʕ təjribt-əl-'insan təqdər təʕṭi-lna 'asas baš nəffəhmu əl-wāqiʕ.")

On the other hand, what a lot of other educated Algerians would do is something more like this, filling in all the gaps from French:

"كتاب بروسي إي رياليتي يقدّم واحد السيستام تاع لا فيلوزوفي تيوريك اللي مبنية على أن پلان كاتيڤوريك دانفيستيڤاسيون خدمُه باش يفسّر كيفاش ليزاسپي كونكري نتاع ليكسبيريانس إيمان يقدرو يعطولنا إين باز باش نفّهمو لا رياليتي."
("ktab pRose e Reạlite yqəddəm waħəd əs-sistam taʕ lạ-filozofi teoRik əlli məbniyya ʕla ãn plõ kạtegoRik d-ãvestigasyõ xədmu baš yfəssər kifaš lizạspe konkRe ntaʕ l-ekspeRyõs üman yəqqədru yəʕṭu-lna ün bạz baš nəffəhmu lạ-Reạlite.")

Neither of these rather macaronic passages would be comprehensible to any monolingual speaker of Algerian Arabic; they're essentially parasitic on the speaker's knowledge of Standard Arabic or French. Granted, probably most Algerian Arabic speakers are not really monolingual; but even then, there is no guarantee that a speaker who understands one version will understand the other. If you really wanted to produce a consensus-friendly Algerian Arabic version, that a monolingual speaker would understand – then, basically, you need to completely rephrase the whole sentence to explain these notions in advance. And before I can do that, I need a clearer notion of what the writer means by things like "concrete aspects of human experience". My job has morphed into something that's not so much translation as totally rewriting, and frankly, for a sentence like this I'm not even willing to try it.

Now suppose you're dealing with a language none of whose speakers have ever studied academic philosophy, or for that matter gotten into high school. You can no longer expect to get away with the dodge of code-switching at appropriate moments. How much effort do you think it would take to translate this sentence, compared with the amount of effort it takes to translate it into French? What effect do you think this would have in practice on the cross-cultural transmission of such ideas?

That's one reason why having "no word for X" can matter. The absence of the word – or more precisely, of a fixed expression for it – impedes translation, and hence impedes the transmission of foreign ideas to monolingual speakers. And fixing the problem isn't just a matter of inventing or borrowing a word; to be able to do either, you need to have formulated the corresponding concept, and, in the case of abstract words like these, that presupposes putting a lot of speakers into an originally foreign system of education, with a lot of associated time and expense and all-round hassle.

---

(Chain of thought prompted by How would you say that in Derja?).

Isagoge

In Dellys a few years ago, local writer A. Chabani was kind enough to show me the following manuscript page, all that was left of a larger work:

The two-layered commentary struck me, of course – the red is the original text, the black is the commentary, and the margins seem to be commentary on the commentary – but what really got my attention was the curious word إيساغوجي īsāghūjī, prominently displayed in the middle right-hand side. It looked like a Greek word, but I had never heard it before – and what was a Greek word doing in an Arabic manuscript from a little town in Algeria, which could hardly be older than the 18th century?

A closer look at the page confirmed my guess about the word’s origin: it says:

إيساغوجي ...وهو لفظ يوناني علم على الكلمات الخمس التي هي الجنس والفصل والنوع والخاصة والعرض
“Eisagōgē... is a Greek proper expression for the five words, which are: genus, difference, species, property, and accident.”

Actually, eisagōgē (Εἰσαγωγή) in Greek means "introduction". But those five words should ring a bell for any philosophers reading this; they relate to Aristotelian logic, which indeed appears to be the topic of the work from which this page is taken. So how is it that some religious scholar from pre-colonial Dellys came to be studying Aristotelian logic?

It turns out that around 270 AD, in the heyday of the Roman Empire, a Neoplatonist philosopher from Lebanon named Porphyry wrote, in Greek, a little introduction to Aristotelian logic, and gave it the title Eisagogē. This work became a standard textbook of logic both in the Middle East and (via Boethius' Latin translation) in Europe. It was translated into Syriac in the 5th century, and from Syriac into Arabic in the 9th. It thus became an important reference point for the study of logic among Arabic speakers; Averroës was only the most famous of dozens who wrote commentaries on it. In fact, the particular commentary in this picture is apparently not online, and I haven't been able to identify it; if some reader happens to be familiar with it, let me know!

The study of Aristotelian logic became part of the curriculum in Algeria, as elsewhere, and continued at least into the 20th century in the zaouias; its influence is obvious in such works as al-Sanūsī's creed. There was some controversy over its validity, however, as Ibn Khaldun points out.

Back in high school, a friend of mine once reflected that the history books he had read generally presented ancient Egyptian civilisation as a predecessor to Western civilisation; it had never occurred to him before that it might be regarded as a predecessor to, say, the civilisation of modern Egyptians. That cuts both ways. Arab-Islamic civilisation is less self-consciously modelled on the Greeks than Western civilisation, but it has been profoundly influenced by their legacy just as the West has.

Anti-borrowing

I was recently involved in an online discussion of the origins of the greeting "Azul", which over the past few decades has become very popular in Berberist circles, and may even be in the process of replacing "Axir" as the normal Kabyle greeting. Apparently it was probably taken from a Zenaga word for "peace", azol, recorded by Faidherbe, rather than being created out of thin air (as some had assumed), or based on Tuareg (as I had assumed.) Be that as it may, I found one of the last comments on the thread particularly telling:

azul ou aqzul kif kif,l essentiel on a un propre salut en tamazight
(Azul or Aqzul, whatever; the important point is to have a greeting specific to Tamazight)

This motivation is obvious in Berber activists' language planning efforts, sometimes to an almost painful degree; English speakers may be satisfied to have a mathematical vocabulary made up almost entirely of Latin and Greek loanwords, but a mathematical lexicon (Amawal n tusnakt) was one of the very first targets of the Kabyle language movement, published back in 1984. It is equally obvious in the activity of the various Arabic language academies, who, while frequently unable to agree on a single translation of a technical term, can generally at least agree that it must look nothing like the English or French equivalent. And it can be felt even at a much less organised popular level; in Tabelbala, when one speaker gave me an Arabic loan as Korandjé, another would frequently pipe up with "No, that's Arabic, not Korandjé" – even in the case of loans as securely established as the higher numerals. And, while it may not be so active in modern Germany or Finland, its after-effects can still be seen there...

Now axir, while of Arabic origin (خير "good"), is not actually used on its own as a greeting in Arabic, and has a purely Berber prefix a- attached for good measure. The only reason that it can plausibly be targeted by activists for replacement is the fact that most Kabyle speakers know enough Arabic to spot the etymology. No one is clamoring to replace Punic loans (like agusim "walnut") with purely Berber terms – any more than Arabic academies are trying to replace Turkish loans like جمارك or Persian loans like جزر with purely Arabic terms.

In that sense, puristic replacement is just as much a product of language contact as borrowing itself is. If you find a language in which loanwords are being selectively targeted for replacement by neologisms, the one thing you can be almost sure of is that a significant number of speakers know the language those loanwords come from. Widespread bilingualism tends to make lexicon boundaries a bit fuzzy anyway – is such and such a rare word really part of language A, or just of language B? – and when people try to reaffirm the boundaries, they don't always agree on where to draw the lines.

Siwi political slogans

If there's one genre I was convinced would never develop in Siwi, it's political slogans. All my previous experience with the oasis had left me convinced that they would remain withdrawn from national-level political activity as they always have, cautiously attempting to court whoever wins – a sensible policy, perhaps, for a peripheral oasis with no political power and highly vulnerable to changes in policy. However, this year's events in Egypt have apparently brought even Siwa to the point of mounting a couple of demonstrations. Egyptians have displayed a seemingly inexhaustible facility for coming up with rhyming couplets for use as slogans in demonstrations, and I woke up this morning and saw an example of the same genre in Siwi:

فل اسيسى فل نشنى نمل لا جندول
fəl a Sisi fəl • nišni nəṃṃəl la ga-nədwəl
Go, Sisi, go! • We have said we won't go back

I asked a few Siwis about the issue, and apart from general points, one reason they gave for supporting Morsi particularly struck me. Since long before the revolution, the Egyptian security forces have viewed the border populations – Bedouins in Matrouh and Sinai, as well as Siwis – with great suspicion; many army/police jobs are closed to them simply for where they come from. As far as the core state is concerned, they're not thought of as real Egyptians, but as clannish minorities under Egyptian control, with undesirable cross-border ties and a predilection for going places the state doesn't want them to be in. Many Siwis felt that Morsi was reversing this situation, attempting to develop the border regions and treating their inhabitants as fellow Egyptians; a resurgence of military rule obviously threatens those gains. The long-term prospects remain to be seen; I can only hope that whatever government emerges from the current situation tries to address the problem of exclusion of border dwellers.

La diversité des noms de prières islamiques et ses origines

(English translation)

Presque chaque musulman, quelque soit sa confession ou sa langue, et chaque arabe, donne aux cinq prières quotidiennes de l'Islam des variantes des même noms : Fajr / Ṣubḥ avant l'aube, Ḍhuhr à midi, `Aṣr à l'après-midi, Maghrib au coucher du soleil, et `Ichā’ au soir. Mais à partir de l'ouest de l'Egypte, la situation est tout autre, et on trouve des noms totalement différents pour les cinq prières. Par exemple, comparez les noms bien connus donnés ci-dessus avec ceux qui sont utilisés dans la plus grande langue berbère, le tachelhit (sud Marocain): ṣṣbaḥ, tizwarn, takʷẓin, tiwutch, et tin-yiḍs. Sauf le premier, ils semblent être sans relation.

Or, les noms des prières au Moyen-Orient n'ont pas toujours été aussi standardisés que maintenant. Al-Boukhārī nous donne le hadith suivant (#516):

“... Sayyâr ben Salama a dit : "J'entrai avec mon père chez Aboû-Barza. Mon père lui demanda comment l'Envoyé de Dieu faisait la prière canonique. “Il faisait, répondit-il, al-hajīr, que vous appelez al-’ūlā, aussitôt que le soleil déclinait ; puis, quand le soleil avait baissé, il faisait al-‘aṣr et, celle-ci finie, on avait le temps de retourner à sa demeure située à l'extrémité de Médine (pendant que le soleil était encore bien vivant)." J'ai oublié ce qu'il a dit d'al-maghrib. "Et il préférait de retarder al-‘ishā’, que vous appelez al-‘atama ; il n'aimait pas dormir avant cette prière, ni causer après elle. Il retournait d'al-ghadāt au moment où on y voyait de façon à reconnaître son voisin de prière, et il y récitait de soixante à cent versets du Coran.””

En siwi, la langue berbère de l'Egypte, on utilise encore une série de noms qui pourraient avoir été pris presque directement de ce hadith : ils appellent les cinq prières sra (le matin), luli, la`ṣaṛ, mməghrəb, et l`ətmət. On trouve des traces de ces noms même plus loin ; au songhay (une langue de Mali et Niger), Dhuhr s'appelle aluula.

Ce même hadith explique le nom tachelhit du Dhuhr : tizwarn veut dire littéralement "les premières", une traduction littérale de l'arabe al-’ūlā. Ce terme n'est pas seulement répandu en berbère ; il est également, grâce au zénaga, la source du mot wolof (Sénégal), tisbaar. En soninké, la langue de l'empire médiéval de Ghana entre la Mauritanie et le Mali, une autre traduction littérale nous donne sállì-fànà (“prière-premier”), qu'a emprunté le bambara et beaucoup d'autres langues ouest-africaines.

Un autre hadith, moins bien attesté (Maṣḥaf `Abd al-Razzāq 2067) explique également le nom tachelhit de l'Icha:

“De Yaḥyā ben al-‘Alā’, d'al-A‘mash, d'Abū Wā’il qui a dit : J'ai demandé Ḥuḏayfa, et il m'a dit : Pourquoi m'as-tu demandé ? J'ai dit : Pour la conversation. Il a dit : “‘Umar ben al-Khaṭṭāb, que Dieu l'agrée, nous mettait en garde contre la conversation après ṣalāt al-nawm (la prière du sommeil).”

En comparant avec d'autres versions du même hadith, on voit que la prière en question est l'Icha. Et en fait, tin-yiḍs en tachelhit veut dire littéralement "celle du sommeil". Cette forme est répandu en berbère, et elle a été traduite littéralement en soninké comme sákhú-fó (sákhú "sommeil", fó "chose"). Cette forme à son tour est introduite en songhay (saafoo) et quelques autres langues de la région.

Cela implique que :

• La terminologie islamique du berbère a été créé très tôt dans l'histoire de l'Islam, avant que ces formes variantes n'ont disparus de l'usage arabe ;
• Les soninké et les wolof ont appris l'Islam en grande mesure des berbères, et pas directement des arabes ;
• Les soninké ont joué un rôle important dans la propagation de l'Islam à des autres groupes ethniques en Mali et Niger.

Il implique aussi, plus généralement, qu'il ne faut pas trop vite traiter les traditions islamiques spécifiques à une région particulière comme des innovations.

(Ce billet résume une article à moi qui sera publié au Bulletin of SOAS, titrée "Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara" [Noms archaïques et innovatifs des prières islamiques autour du Sahara].)

Diversity in Islamic prayer names and its roots

(Traduction en français)

Practically all Muslims whatever their sect or language, and all Arabs, refer to the five daily prayers of Islam by versions of the same names: Fajr / Ṣubḥ before sunrise, Ḍhuhr at noon, `Aṣr in the afternoon, Maghrib at sunset, and `Ishā’ in the evening. West of Egypt, however, things look very different: there we often find quite different names for the five prayers. For example, contrast the familiar names above with those used in the largest Berber language, Shilha (southern Morocco): ṣṣbaḥ, tizwarn, takʷẓin, tiwutsh, and tin-yiḍs. Except for the first, there seems to be no relation.

However, Middle Eastern Islamic prayer names haven't always been so uniform. Al-Bukhārī reports the following hadith (#516):

“... from Sayyār b. Salamah: “My father and I entered into the presence of Abū Barzah al-’Aslamī. My father asked him: “How did the Messenger of God, blessings and peace be upon him, pray the prescribed (prayers)?” He replied: “He used to pray al-hajīr, which you (pl.) call al-’ūlā, when the sun declines (from the meridian), and pray al-‘aṣr such that one of us could return to his home at the far end of Medina while the sun was still lively.” I forget what he said about al-maghrib. “And he used to prefer to delay al-‘ishā’, which you (pl.) call al-‘atamah, and he used to hate sleeping before it or speaking after it. And he used to return from the ghadāt prayer when a person could recognise the one sitting next to him, and read sixty to a hundred (verses.)””

Siwi, the Berber language of Egypt, still uses a series of mostly Arabic-derived prayer names that might as well be taken straight from this hadith: they call the five prayers sra (morning), luli, la`ṣaṛ, mməghrəb, and l`ətmət. Traces of these names are found further afield too: in Songhay (Mali/Niger), Dhuhr is referred to as aluula.

It turns out that this hadith also explains the Shilha name for Dhuhr: tizwarn literally means "the first ones (f.)", a literal translation of Arabic al-’ūlā. This form is not just widespread in Berber, but is also (via Zenaga) the source for Wolof tisbaar. In Soninké, the language of the medieval Ghana Empire between Mauritania and Mali, another literal translation yields sállì-fànà (“prayer-first”), which has been borrowed into Bambara and many other West African languages.

A similar, much less well-sourced hadith (Maṣḥaf `Abd al-Razzāq 2067) likewise explains the Shilha name for Isha:

“From Yaḥyā b. al-‘Alā’, from al-A‘mash, from Abū Wā’il who said: I asked for Ḥuḏayfa, and he said: Why have you asked for me? I said: For conversation. He said: “‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, may God be pleased with him, used to warn against conversation after ṣalāt al-nawm (the sleep prayer).”

Comparison to other versions makes it clear that the prayer being referred to is Isha. As it happens, Shilha tin-yiḍs means, literally "that (f.) of sleep". This form is widespread in Berber, and was literally translated into Soninke as sákhú-fó (sákhú "sleep", fó "thing"). The resulting form was borrowed into Songhay (saafoo) and several other regional languages.

All of this tells us three things:

• Berber Islamic terminology was created very early in Islamic history, before these variants disappeared from Arabic usage;
• Soninké and Wolof speakers adopted Islam in large part from Berbers, not directly from Arabs;
• Soninké speakers played an important role in the spread of Islam to other ethnic groups in Mali and Niger.

It also has a wider moral, though: that we shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss region-specific Islamic traditions as innovations.

(This post summarises about half of an article of mine which is forthcoming in the Bulletin of SOAS, under the title of "Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara".)

So how different are Algerian and Egyptian Berber?

In the previous post, we looked at how hard Egyptian Arabic was for an Algerian to understand (answer: not that hard) and how it diverges from the rules of Algerian Arabic (answer: a lot). What if we try the same exercise for Berber – specifically, Kabyle vs. Siwi? Obviously, I don’t speak Kabyle fluently or even well; if you do, feel free to correct me or give me your own impressions. However, with a bit of help from a dictionary, I think it’s worth a try. There aren’t any Siwi stories recorded online at the moment, about Juha or otherwise, but here’s a short fable with a sad ending retranscribed and retranslated from Laoust’s grammar:

Azidi dilla g adrar, itessu aman. Tizmert ttella adday. Azidi yeṃṃ-as: “Itta xeḅḅecṭ-i aman nnew?” Tizmert teṃṃ-as: “Aman dillan g ɛali, iteggezen i gda!” Yeṃṃ-as: “Ɛam-nuwwel nic uṭnaxa, cemm edduqqaṭ ṭaren nnem!” Teṃṃ-as: “Nic n aseggasa!” Yeṃṃ-as: “Namma eṃṃa nnem namma axxa nnem!” Baɛdin yečč-ét.

There was a jackal on a mountain, drinking water. A ewe was below. The jackal said to her: “Why have you muddied my water?” The ewe said: “The water is above, and goes down to here!” He said: “The year before last when I was ill, you stamped your feet (disturbing him with the noise)!” She said: “I’m from (I was born in) this year!” He said “Or (it was) your mother, or your aunt!” Then he ate her.

Only seven words (out of 44) have no cognates in Kabyle as far as I know – in three cases, this is because one language or the other has borrowed an Arabic term:

• azidi “jackal”: in Kabyle this would be uccen.
• yeṃṃ-as “he told her”: in Kabyle this would be yenn-as.
• itta “why”: in Kabyle this would be ayɣer. The Siwi form is from i “to, for” and -tta < tanta “what”, a local variant of widespread Berber matta, which Kabyle has replaced with the Arabic loan acu.
• ɛali “above”, from Arabic: in Kabyle this would be asawen, but the Siwi form is easy to guess from Arabic.
• iteggezen “they go down”: in Kabyle this would be trusun.
• ɛam-nuwwel “year before last”, from Arabic: in Kabyle this would be sell-ilindi, but the Siwi form is easy enough to guess if you know Algerian Arabic.
• namma “or”: the first syllable is cognate to Kabyle neɣ, but the word has changed enough to make guessing difficult.
• axxa “aunt (mother’s sister)”: in Kabyle this would be xalti, from Arabic.

So in terms of vocabulary, the situation is pretty similar to what we saw between Algerian and Egyptian Arabic. However, as with the previous example, there are many more subtle differences – and those differences are of a more significant kind. If we look at grammatical differences alone and ignore phonetic or semantic ones, we notice that:

• g adrar “in the mountain”: in Kabyle this would be g wedrar; Siwi has no “état d’annexion”.
• dilla, ttella: “he is at, she is at”: Kabyle yella, tella, with no d- prefix. adday “below”: Kabyle does have a noun adda “below”, but it can only be used in combination with certain prepositions, not on its own as here.
• xebbecṭ-i: Siwi marks the 2nd person singular (“you”) with just -(a)ṭ; Kabyle uses t-...-ḍ.
• nnew “my”, nnem “your (f.)”: in Kabyle this would be inu, inem.
• iteggezen: Siwi marks the 3rd person plural (“they”) with y-...-en; Kabyle, like all other Berber languages, uses -en alone.
• i gda: in Kabyle, i is usually used just for the dative, but in Siwi it’s used for destinations in general; the g- in gda was originally the preposition “in”, but in Siwi it became part of the word for “here”.
• uṭnaxa “I am/was ill”: the -a suffix is a Siwi verbal form marking the perfect, frequently used in subordinate clauses to mean “while”. Kabyle doesn’t have such an ending, and would just use uḍnaɣ.

This contrasts with what we saw between Algerian and Egyptian Arabic, where very few of the textual differences were strictly grammatical. Of course, a longer text would have revealed more grammatical differences between Algerian and Egyptian, for example in the formation of comparatives – and would reveal many more between Kabyle and Siwi. This makes sense; for many centuries, Siwi has been much more isolated from Kabyle than Algerian Arabic has been from Egyptian Arabic, and the expansion of Berber happened earlier than that of Arabic, so they’ve had longer to develop separately.

How different are Egyptian and Algerian Arabic, really?

Recently, The Economist decided to introduce its readers to the extent of variation across Arabic, by comparing Algerian and Egyptian retellings of a Juha story from Reddit (via LL). Most Arab commenters felt that the post exaggerated the differences, since the stories were being retold in individuals' own words, not translated per se. So let’s try and figure out part of the question this raises here: To what extent can an Algerian understand the Egyptian version of this story, and to what extent does this ability stem from: a) his knowledge of his own dialect; b) his knowledge of Fusha (Standard Arabic); and c) his experience watching Egyptians on TV?

This is the Egyptian quote, in their own transcription (3 = ʕ, 7 = ħ, 2 = ’ [ʔ], 9 = ’ < q; listen):

fi youm min el ayem, kan go7a we'bno bey7addaro 7aget-hom 3ashan yeroo7o el balad elli gambohom. farekbo el etnein 7omarhom 3ashan yabtedo yesafro. we 3a'sekka marro 3ala balad soghayyara keddaho. ba7ala2o el nas feehom we 2alo:  ayoh! bo99o el nas el 2asya elli mabter7amshi rakbeen kollohom 3ala el 7omar.

The first obvious hurdle is pronunciation: an Algerian listener needs to convert Egyptian g back to j, Egyptian ’ back to q / g, and drop most of the short vowels. School won’t help with that – but most Algerians already know this much from watching Egyptians on TV, and even if they didn’t, it shouldn’t take too long to catch on.

What about vocabulary? Well, the good news is that only nine words in this passage are completely absent from Algerian Arabic. The bad news is that six of them won’t be familiar from Fusha either – and that that amounts to something like 15% of the passage.

• b- in b-iħaḍḍaru “they prepare”, marking, loosely speaking, the present tense, has no Algerian equivalent, and no Fusha equivalent either. It is very common in the Middle East, though, so most Algerians will have encountered it on TV; we may not know exactly what it does, but we know to ignore it!
• ʕašān “in order to” corresponds to Algerian bāš. Knowing Fusha won’t help much with this one; its Fusha root, ʕalā ša’n, means “on the affair of”. However, the form is so common in Middle Eastern broadcasts that most Algerians probably know it.
• yibtadu “they start” corresponds to Algerian yəbdāw; both forms derive from the same root, but Algerian Arabic has lost the derived form with infixed -t-, which is also used in Fusha.
• sikka “road” corresponds to Algerian ṭrīq. Both forms are used in Fusha, so a knowledge of Fusha will help here; even a lightly educated Algerian would probably recall as-sikka al-ħadīdiyya, the Fusha word for “railroad”.
• marru “they passed” corresponds to Algerian jāzu. marra is preferred in Fusha in this sense, and would be familiar to any moderately educated Algerian.
• kidahu: I couldn’t even guess what this meant, so I looked it up in my Egyptian Arabic dictionary... apparently it’s the same as kida “thus, like this”, which in Algerian would be hākđa, corresponding to Fusha (hā)kađā. The word itself is thus reasonably easy to identify. But I don’t understand why it’s being used here.
• baħla’u: I assume from context that this means “stare” or something. Let me check... yes, it’s glossed as “to stare, be goggle-eyed”, so Algerian xuẓṛu. I can’t think of any Fusha form that would help you guess this.
• ayyūh: I assumed from context that this was for expressing disgust, but my dictionary says it indicates “forceful intent” (and that it comes from Coptic). Either way, Algerians don’t say this; the best equivalent in context is probably the exclamation of disgust yəxxa. It’s not in Fusha either.
• bu’’u buṣṣu “look” (I think) corresponds to Algerian Arabic šūfu. This word has no commonly used Fusha counterpart, so again a knowledge of Fusha won’t help.

So an Algerian can understand something like 85% of this passage just by figuring out sound changes, and probably more from context – so far, so good!

However, even if we convert the sound system and substitute these eight words, the result will still not be acceptable Algerian Arabic – it violates the language's rules. Most Algerians will tell you that Algerian Arabic has no rules, but that won’t stop them from looking at you funny if you try saying something like:

*f-yūm məl-l-əyyām, kān jħa w-əbn-u yħəđ̣đ̣ṛu ħājəthum bāš yṛūħū l-əl-blād əlli jənbhum, fā rəkbu l-əθnīn ħmāṛhum bāš yəbdāw ysāfru. u ʕla ṭṭriq, jāzu ʕlā blād ṣɣiṛa hākđa, xǔẓṛu n-nās fīhum u qālu: yəxxa! šūfu ənnās əlgāsya əlli mātəṛħəmši rākbīn kullhum ʕla lħmār.

The reason this doesn’t work is because there are a lot of other less obvious differences between Algerian and Egyptian Arabic. The most clear-cut are:

• yōm: Algerians only use yum in əlyum “today” and in counting (xəms-iyyam); for other purposes, “day” is nhāṛ (“days”: nhāṛāt). You can’t say “f-yūm məl-l-əyyām”; the best equivalent would probably be wāħəd ən-nhāṛ (one day).
• ibn-u: (Most) Algerians don’t use bən as an independent word; they only use it in compounds with the meaning “son of...”. In a context like this, you would have to say u-wlīd-u.
• balad: In Algerian Arabic, blād is either broader than “village” (“country, region”) or more specific (“hometown”). A village is dəšṛa or duwwāṛ (or, let’s face it, vīlāž.)
• ħagit-hum: While ħāja means “thing” in Algerian, as in Egyptian, Algerians don’t normally use it to mean “baggage”. The Algerian equivalent would be dūzān-hum.
• ganbu-hum: In Algeria, this would mean literally “their side”. “Next to them” would be ħdā-hum or quddām-hum, depending on the region.
• l-itnēn: In Algeria, this would be interpreted as “Monday”. “Both of them” is fī-zūj; θnīn is used as a number only in compounds, like “thirty-two” (θnīn u θlāθīn).
• ’āsiya: While gāsi does mean “hard” in Algerian Arabic, you wouldn’t use it in the metaphorical sense of “cruel” as here. The feminine singular agreement with “people” would also be odd in much of Algeria, but some do use it.

So even an uneducated Egyptian could more or less make himself understood in Algeria (depending on how sharp the person he's speaking to is and how many Egyptian films they've watched), but to actually speak Algerian, he'd need to do a lot of learning and relearning. It's up to you to decide whether that makes them two quite similar languages or two very different dialects...

Reconstructing metaphors?

One of the most exciting – and riskiest – applications of historical linguistics is for reconstructing aspects of the culture of a proto-language's speakers, and using that to figure out where they lived and identify their archeological remains. The usual way to do this is to reconstruct a word and its meaning, and take it from there (for example, if they had a word for "plough" they were probably farmers.) A while ago, I came across a different technique that I hadn't previously seen described, outlined in this paper: Using cognitive semantics to relate Mesa Verde archaeology to modern Pueblo languages.

Basically, the idea is that the favourite metaphors of a given culture will be reflected both in its language (notably by compounds, but also in semantic shifts) and in its arts. Thus, to quote one of his examples, in Tewa "roof" is literally "wooden coil-basket", although modern Tewa roofs do not look much like that, while the roofs of Mesa Grande kivas were built to resemble coil baskets. He takes both to exemplify a metaphor BUILDINGS ARE CONTAINERS, which he takes to be supported not only by this case but by a number of other features, such as the use of pottery design motifs on walls and the polysemy of a word meaning "lake", "ceremonial bowl", and "kiva".

I'm not sure how often this is likely to work in practice. For it to work, your metaphors have to be reflected in the kind of material culture that archeologists can dig up – buildings, pottery, baskets if you're lucky. It would seem to require, minimally, a strong tradition of more or less representational art. I would be hard-pressed to think of such cases in, say, North Africa, unless you go further back than we can reconstruct the languages. But where those preconditions are fulfilled, it does strike me as an interesting approach to try, because it targets the kinds of meaning that the speakers themselves would have considered important.

Ethnologue update comments

Ethnologue recently announced an update. Since, at least online, they are the easiest to find and hence most commonly cited authority on worldwide language distribution, this merits some comment. They've made some improvements in North Africa, including a much prettier map. However, there still remain a fair number of errors. This is perhaps natural given that SIL, which produces Ethnologue, is basically a Christian missionary organisation and as such is unwelcome in a number of countries. (Why is there no neutral source doing something comparable, one might ask? UNESCO has attempted a language endangerment atlas, but sadly that one is both less complete and far less reliable.) However, quite a few errors could have been avoided simply by closer attention to sources.

In Algeria, they've updated the Korandjé entry with my population estimate and endangerment classification, and corrected the Tashelhiyt one based on my thesis - although they apparently couldn't be bothered to cite the source of this estimate! They've reclassified the Berber dialects of the Southwest (Boussemghoun, Igli, etc.) as Taznatit, along with the Berber of Timimoun; in previous editions, the former were classed as part of Moroccan Tashelhiyt. The new classification is rather more tenable than the old one, at any rate; the former dialects are not called "Taznatit" by their speakers, but they are rather closely related to it, and are not at all closely related to Moroccan Tashelhiyt.

There are still a fair number of errors, though: the Tarifit of Arzew became extinct a century ago (and there is no such place as "Alteria"); "Tamazight de l’Atlas blidéen" is rather more like Kabyle than like Chenoua, and is missing from their map; the boundaries they give for Kabyle are rather inflated, annexing the Arabic-speaking areas of the Boumerdes coast to the west and half of Jijel in the east; the enormous circle they draw for Teggargarent contrasts oddly with the tiny ones they draw for Korandjé and Temacine Tamazight, which in reality occupy comparable areas (perhaps this was to take into account Ngouça, but the latter oasis is even smaller than Ouargla); Hassaniyya Arabic is still missing even though it's the primary language of Tindouf; and the curiously precise boundaries they give for "Saharan Arabic" leave me baffled as to what this "language" is supposed to be. The "Algerian Arabic" dialect of Jijel or Skikda is far more different from the Algiers koine than the "Algerian Saharan Arabic" I heard in Bechar or Timimoun or Abadla; perhaps the dialect further east is more different, but the boundaries shown are indefensible. They also seem to have misunderstood the constitutional amendment: it's Tamazight in general that is legally a national language now, although it's admittedly Kabyle that benefits the most in practice.

In Morocco, they've belatedly figured out that Ghomara and Senhaja are still spoken - for the past several editions they've been labelled extinct - but according to the entry French has no presence in the Moroccan linguistic landscape, unlike Algeria or Tunisia. For Egypt, their map ignores Gara (the other oasis where Siwi is spoken), and their population figures for Siwi are extremely optimistic. For Libya, their map (unlike their text) ignores Zuwara, while grossly inflating Ghadames and Sokna (especially in contrast to Siwi, which actually occupies a much larger oasis). For Mauritania, they still include the apocryphal Imraguen "language", whose reported existence Catherine Taine-Cheikh deconstructs in a forthcoming article, and their population figures of Zenaga are mutually inconsistent bad guesses which should have been updated based on the introduction to the latter's Dictionnaire zénaga-français.

Review: La question linguistique en Algérie

I just finished reading Benmayouf's (2009) La question linguistique en Algérie. It was... interesting.

The narrative this book presents is easy to summarise, although when stated baldly it verges on self-parody: By 1930 or so, Standard Arabic had practically vanished from Algerian life, apart from the Friday sermon. At independence, most literate Algerians were literate in French; but, tragically though inevitably, the revolutionary government opted to make Standard Arabic the official language, and tried to Arabise the educational system. The beleaguered Francophones found their job security threatened and their students demotivated, and the level of French spoken in the country dropped lower and lower. The new generation, having been deprived of the salutary effects of French culture and brought up to hate everything foreign, became Islamists and terrorists, leading to the civil war of the 1990s. "The individual produced by the Algerian school is a rigid being with no value but Islam, radically opposed to his open-minded father nourished by French school." (p. 76!) But after 1988, the government gradually woke up to the political and economic dangers of Arabisation, and started expanding the use of French; meanwhile, the satellite dish enabled millions of ordinary Algerians to watch French media. Apart from a few dangerous attacks on the position of French – such as the introduction of English as a third language in schools – the future is now bright, under the leadership of our "enlightened" president (p. 108). Eventually, she hopes (p. 118), Standard Arabic will be limited to the role of a liturgical language, while French comes to occupy an even more important place than it does today, and Algerian Arabic gets recognised as the language that binds the nation together. But it's French which is crucial: it not only "satisfies a need for modernity that none of the local languages can handle" but constitutes "a maquis in which resistance develops to every form of constraint, oppression or denial." (p. 98)

This view, of course, ignores a long history of Standard Arabic in Algeria – the zaouias' continued presence even after the French confiscated most of their land, the manuscripts and imported books of my grandfather's generation, the excellent work of Ben Badis and the Association of Ulema starting in 1931, the expanding ranks of Arabophone intellectuals and writers since independence (tellingly, she finds time to mention Jean Amrouche but not Ahlam Mostaganemi), and even the satellite dishes tuned to Arabic channels. If Francophone professors and officials have felt threatened by institutional Arabisation, their extremely successful efforts to hold it back in turn denied (and deny) positions to the much more numerous Arabophone graduates. The social tensions caused by this did help set the stage for the violence of the 1990s, but that can hardly be blamed on Arabic, let alone caricatured in the terms above.

As for her vision of the future, I would consider it close to a worst-case scenario. Her tactical and qualified support for Algerian Arabic does not entail actually using it for anything important; while rather hostile to Standard Arabic as a medium for university education, she takes it for granted that French is appropriate in that context, and indeed is the perfect vehicle for anything related to modernity. But, frankly, I do not want a French-language-mediated "transfer of modernity from the north shore to the south shore of the Mediterranean" (p. 118); I want an Algeria with the self-confidence and self-awareness to learn from a variety of examples and choose its own path, not mechanically follow in France's footsteps. Nor do I believe that relegating "modernity" to a foreign language is likely to help Algeria achieve it!

Nonetheless, I'm glad I read the book. It's fascinating – if sad – to discover that there exists an Algerian intellectual prepared to take a position this extreme in favour specifically of French; I don't believe I've ever met one. Could one find a corresponding phenomenon in France, I wonder – some professor eagerly advocating for more English in the bureaucracy and the universities, and condemning supporters of French as narrow-minded nationalists? It's difficult to imagine... But what this book mainly leaves me wondering, to be frank, is: why on earth does the author feel this way? And that points the way towards a more anthropologically oriented book that I really would like to see. A person's feelings towards a language are shaped by memories – a mother's voice or a teacher's scolding, a story you couldn't put down or a tedious manual, a group that you hung out with or couldn't stand. To really understand the wide variation in Algerian language attitudes, we need to go beyond the political history and into experiences of learning and living the languages.

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.)