Climbing the Mountain of Languages
On holiday in Algeria, I've been going frequently to some coastal rocks called əṣ-Ṣṭuħ الصطوح, from the plural of ṣṭəħ صطح "flat terrace roof", and occasionally eating šṭiṭħa شطيطحة "stew". I haven't done any dancing ( šṭiħ شطيح) - not really my thing. But if I go into the mountains where they speak Kabyle, I might hear someone call something aməšṭuħ (amecṭuḥ) "small"; if they ask me…
Mubi is the best described member of a small "Mubic" subgroup consisting of Masmedje, Kajakse, and Zerenkel. The other members are much more poorly described, but enough can be gleaned from published materials to show that they share essentially the same system of subject pronominal suffix series with different syntactic functions . For Masmedje, a short text is provided in Marti et al. (2007) ,…
The remarkable voice system described for Mubi seems to interact with relativisation, but textual data is scarce. In textual examples of subject relativisation, the same suffix shows up that Jungraithmayr describes as forming attributive adjectives; compare: njó tú gì hìtt-ìt sàhíi tú person ? M.REL pronounce.IPFV-ADJ truth ? a person who speaks the truth (Jungraithmayr 2013:64, 115)…
Looking over Jungraithmayr's Mubi grammar again recently, I think I managed to make sense of the subject paradigms. Presumably all this was clear to Jungraithmayr, but it certainly wasn't clear to me, nor was it mapped to cross-linguistic typological categories; it may therefore be useful to comment. At first sight, Mubi looks like its basic order is SVOX, as in sentences like: màb-í nyúbùt…
The core of the Eastern Sudanic hypothesis is the idea that Nubian - historically the largest language family of Sudan proper - is related to Nilotic, the largest language family of South Sudan. One complication for this analysis is that, as the primary language of the medieval Nubian kingdoms, Nubian was well-positioned to influence the more northerly Nilotic languages from an early date. A…
Going through some old papers, I found some notes on Dellys dialect that I had taken years ago from Amti Khira; better to put them up (mainly so I can find them more easily) than leave them to get dusty. A nursery rhyme, legendarily said by the swift ( əl-xŭṭṭayfa ) on its return from migration: يا مولات البيت البيت أعطيني كسيرة بالزيت قالتلي كولي وكليت Ya mulat əlbit, əlbit Aʕṭini ksira bəzzit…
Every time I go to Algeria, I come back with some linguistic observations that are new to me (if not necessarily to anyone else.) Here are this year's. Many collective nouns take plural agreement: sqit əššjəṛ əttəħtaniyyin “I irrigated the lower trees”, kanu sjəṛ “there were trees”, ənnməl haðu “these ants”. Not all do, though, or at least not all the time: nnamus bəkri kʊnna nšufuh nəqqʊtluh…
The metaphorical identification of heads with gourds is probably obvious enough to arise spontaneously anywhere that gourds are in regular use (even English has expressions like "stoned out of his gourd".) In Algeria, it is historically reflected in some varieties' lexicon. Kabyle has in most contexts replaced pan-Berber ixf with novel a-qəṛṛu , whose ṛ betrays its loanword origin. The…
This is basically a note to myself, and may be updated. Eastern Sudanic is generally taken to embrace most of the languages of Sudan, including the following families: Nubian Nara Taman Nyima Jebel Daju Surmic Nilotic Temeinic Its existence, however, remains debatable ( cf. Güldemann 2022 ). A reconstruction of Eastern Sudanic (much less anything above it, such as Nilo-Saharan) remains out of…
Thomas Anour has posted a number of Bible extracts: Mark 10:13-18 , John 1:1-13 , and James 4:1-3 . Comparing these to a published translation from 2002 (from which he sometimes diverges slightly) and to the anonymous dictionary linked in the previous post makes it possible for a beginner to parse much of the text. No more examples of /ħ/ were heard; but another pharyngeal, /ʕ/, was. This phoneme…
The least well documented subgroup of West Nilotic is the Burun group , spoken around the borders between Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. The largest language in this subgroup is Mabaan, spoken in South Sudan, for which there exists at least one dictionary (available without bibliographic information on Roger Blench's site), and several very interesting articles by Torben Andersen. But we are no…
In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād , Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān , dialectal Arabic Tləmsān ): تسمى بلغة البربر تلمسنين كلمة مركبة من تلم ومعناه تجمع وسين ومعناه اثنان اي الصحراء والتل فيما ذكر شيخنا العلامة ابو عبد الله الابلي رحمه…
Searching Shamela , I recently realised that the earliest references to a language of (al-)Barbar in Arabic go back further than I had assumed, to the second century AH. While these are unlikely to shed much light on actual linguistic practices, they are worth a look. Two occur in the Qur'ānic commentary ( tafsīr ) of Mujāhid ibn Sulaymān (d. 150 AH = 767 AD); one in his discussion of sūrat…
When I wrote my paper on the Arabic dialect of Dellys a couple of decades ago, I described it as using the participle "going (to)" - ṛayəħ رايح (m.) / ṛayħa رايحة f. / ṛayħin رايحين pl., depending on the gender/number of the subject - to form the future. In more recent years, I've started to notice women speakers reducing feminine ṛayħa and plural ṛayħin to ħa حا and ħin حين respectively. On…
While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West ) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly branches out there into linguistic historical morphology: Instead of sum , Gothic im , we say ich bin , I am , je suis ; instead of fecisti , we say tu habes factum , tu as fait , du habes gitân , and again, daz wîp , un homme , man hat . This has hitherto been…
In an episode of "Chadian Wisdom and Proverbs" , Yaqub Muhammad Musa discusses three Mubi proverbs, providing the Mubi versions along with translation and extensive commentary in Arabic. Mubi is comparatively well-documented as East Chadic languages go, thanks primarily to Jungraithmayr's excellent 2013 monograph ; but even this miniscule corpus reveals some aspects of the language that I was…
I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer , freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have little experience of Atlantic languages as such, and therefore not much useful to say about most of the book (though it made me want to also read…
Any educated English speaker nowadays is likely to be familiar with the idea that comedy should punch up, not punch down: i.e., that it's okay to make fun of people more powerful than yourself, but not of people less powerful. But I remember being struck by the novelty of this expression when I first encountered it, well into adulthood. Notwithstanding the recency illusion, a bit of research…
A friend in Tabelbala just posted a translation of some lines from Abu'l-Atahiya into Korandje. Given the general unreliability of Facebook, I think this deserves to be recorded elsewhere, and re-translated into English: آغَمْفْ بَا قُوُخْ * نَمْڨَآنَا لَكْوَانْكَا الْكَاسْفْ نِيرْ بَا يَّا نَوْ * نَمْنِينَانَا اَيْصْفَا مَسْفْكَا اَيْضِيقْ * مْبَاڨُّوكَا نَنْفُونِي وَلاَّ تَمْزْڨِيدَافْ…
In Algerian Arabic, ngər نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; nəgru نڨرو "they died out" typically means they died leaving no descendants bearing the family name. I've usually heard it in reference to small families that had no sons, but it can also be caused by mass killing, as recent events horribly remind us; expressions used in the news,…
You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music , an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family's memoirs. It features a neat little song for teaching musical notes, "Do, a Deer", which has been translated into a number of languages. Let's contrast three versions - English, Japanese, and Arabic - and see what they suggest. English Japanese Arabic Do, a deer, a female…
The modern borders of Algeria had no existence or meaning in the Roman era, but for any potential Algerian classicists, it may be interesting to consider which of the Latin texts that have come down to us were written by people born in Algeria. So far, I've found the following: Suetonius , born in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba), ca. 70 AD; historian Fronto , born in Cirta (modern Constantine), ca.…
It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - salat , namaz , wudu , shahada , masjid ... There are even a few such words that aren't borrowings from Arabic or Urdu: circumambulation comes to mind. It is much more difficult, at least for me, to think of characteristics of "Islamic English" that go beyond the lexicon. I was recently…
According to Ethnologue - or even to the HCA - Chenoua (Tacenwit) is one of the larger Berber/Amazigh languages of Algeria, spoken west of Algiers from Tipasa almost to Tenes. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the speakers, who call their own language Haqḇayliṯ or Haqḇayləḵṯ - i.e. Kabyle. Chenoua is the name of one particular area, a mountain near Tipasa , and speakers from other…
Back in the late 1990s as human genetic data started piling up, it became increasingly clear that there were a lot of language families where most speakers shared relatively recent common male-line ancestry, visible by looking at Y-haplogroups. George van Driem memorably turned this observation into the Father Tongue Hypothesis : that language expansions are typically male-led, with children often…