It turns out that the earliest and most extensive published source on Kwarandzyey (Korandje), the language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria which I am studying, is downloadable online:
* Cancel, Lt. 1908. "Etude sur le dialecte de Tabelbala". Revue Africaine 52.
Readers may also be interested in Biarnay's study of the probably extinct Tarifit dialect that was then spoken at Arzew, in volumes 54 and 55 of the same publication.
Showing posts with label Songhay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Songhay. Show all posts
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Songhay and Nilo-Saharan
Following up on the preceding post, I've been looking at Greenberg's (1966) Nilo-Saharan comparisons - specifically, the 29 ones involving Songhay that have reflexes in Kwarandzyey, the Songhay language least likely to be involved in recent contact with Nilo-Saharan. Of these, 20 have comparanda in Saharan (Kanuri/Kanembu + Teda/Daza + Berti + Beria/Zaghawa), 17 in Eastern Sudanic (Nubian, Nilotic, Surmic, etc.), vs. a maximum of 13 for any other branch. (At least 7 also have plausible Mande comparisons.) Now, Saharan only consists of about 4 languages (9 by Ethnologue standards.) For Eastern Sudanic, excluding Kuliak, the Ethnologue counts 103 languages, and a huge amount of internal diversity. If Songhay were equally distant from the whole of Nilo-Saharan, you would expect far more cognates with Eastern Sudanic than with Saharan; the figures suggest that the link (whatever its nature) is primarily with Saharan, and only secondarily, if at all, with the rest of the languages he classified as Nilo-Saharan.
The grammatical comparisons that Greenberg offers are interesting but not compelling; there are only 10 of them (only 4 with Kwarandzyey reflexes), and they often incorporate misrepresentations (as Lacroix noted, for example, -ma forms verbal nouns, not relatives/adjectives, and 1sg ay < *agay, reducing the similarity to forms like Zaghawa ai.) Some of the lexical ones, however, are rather good; similarities such as Koyraboro Senni kokoši “scale (of fish)” = Manga Kanuri kàskàsí “scale (of fish)” cry out for explanation, and, though quite rare, look sufficiently numerous that chance seems unlikely. But whether they should be explained by contact or borrowing remains unclear. Either scenario would be historically interesting, since at present rather a large expanse of Tuareg and Hausa-speaking land separates Songhay from even Kanuri, and Saharan originated closer to modern-day Darfur than to Lake Chad.
The grammatical comparisons that Greenberg offers are interesting but not compelling; there are only 10 of them (only 4 with Kwarandzyey reflexes), and they often incorporate misrepresentations (as Lacroix noted, for example, -ma forms verbal nouns, not relatives/adjectives, and 1sg ay < *agay, reducing the similarity to forms like Zaghawa ai.) Some of the lexical ones, however, are rather good; similarities such as Koyraboro Senni kokoši “scale (of fish)” = Manga Kanuri kàskàsí “scale (of fish)” cry out for explanation, and, though quite rare, look sufficiently numerous that chance seems unlikely. But whether they should be explained by contact or borrowing remains unclear. Either scenario would be historically interesting, since at present rather a large expanse of Tuareg and Hausa-speaking land separates Songhay from even Kanuri, and Saharan originated closer to modern-day Darfur than to Lake Chad.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Open to interpretation
Songhay's lexical economy - the way it keeps its lexicon rather smaller than its neighbours' by using a single word to fulfill the functions of what in most languages would be several different words - has attracted the attention of several of those who have written about the language from the 1850s onwards. While Kwarandzyey (Korandje) is so full of Berber and Arabic loanwords that the size issue probably no longer applies, it still has many striking examples of polysemy. Take "open", for example.
fya (from Songhay *feeri) is best translated as "open" (its commonest sense). Of course, to open one's mouth can be to start eating - hence the frozen compound fya-mmi "open-mouth" means "breakfast". But opening is also what you do to release something from an enclosed space; hence to "open water (for something)" (fya iri), or just "open", is to irrigate, and to "open for an animal or person" is to release them. Likewise, to "open a rope (for something)" is to untie it. To release something from your grasp is to let it fall - hence to "open for something" is also to drop it. And for a man to release his wife from her obligations towards him is to end the marriage - hence to "open for a woman" is to divorce her.
We can map the connections between these easily enough, making it clear that they form a coherent network of meaning:
But not only will any single English translation applied literally and consistently yield ludicrous results for at least some of these cases - translating it differently in different circumstances will force you to choose a single meaning in cases where the text is ambiguous. "He opened for the woman" probably means he divorced her, but in principle it could mean he released her (eg from prison), or untied her, or (literally) dropped her; in fact, since Songhay has no gender distinctions in pronouns, it should even be able to mean "It (eg an automatic door) opened for her". And of course, this kind of ambiguity can be deliberately exploited for effect, as in puns.
In Kwarandzyey, this is never likely to cause serious ambiguity - the language is almost never written down, and it's a small enough community that the context is usually known to everyone anyway. But imagine worrying about this kind of thing in a millennia-old text in a language that no one today speaks natively, and you can really see why even the most literal translation of such a text is unavoidably an act of interpretation.
fya (from Songhay *feeri) is best translated as "open" (its commonest sense). Of course, to open one's mouth can be to start eating - hence the frozen compound fya-mmi "open-mouth" means "breakfast". But opening is also what you do to release something from an enclosed space; hence to "open water (for something)" (fya iri), or just "open", is to irrigate, and to "open for an animal or person" is to release them. Likewise, to "open a rope (for something)" is to untie it. To release something from your grasp is to let it fall - hence to "open for something" is also to drop it. And for a man to release his wife from her obligations towards him is to end the marriage - hence to "open for a woman" is to divorce her.
We can map the connections between these easily enough, making it clear that they form a coherent network of meaning:
breakfast untie
\ / \
open - release
\ / \
irrigate divorce
But not only will any single English translation applied literally and consistently yield ludicrous results for at least some of these cases - translating it differently in different circumstances will force you to choose a single meaning in cases where the text is ambiguous. "He opened for the woman" probably means he divorced her, but in principle it could mean he released her (eg from prison), or untied her, or (literally) dropped her; in fact, since Songhay has no gender distinctions in pronouns, it should even be able to mean "It (eg an automatic door) opened for her". And of course, this kind of ambiguity can be deliberately exploited for effect, as in puns.
In Kwarandzyey, this is never likely to cause serious ambiguity - the language is almost never written down, and it's a small enough community that the context is usually known to everyone anyway. But imagine worrying about this kind of thing in a millennia-old text in a language that no one today speaks natively, and you can really see why even the most literal translation of such a text is unavoidably an act of interpretation.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
išni: a Berber ovine, or a Songhay goat?
In Kwarandzyey (Tabelbala), the non-specific word for a sheep or goat is išni. It looks kind of Berber, and the words for different ages or sexes of sheep and goat are definitely from Berber, so I had assumed it must be Berber. But I've never found a term like it in any Berber dictionary. Maybe some reader will tell me that the word is familiar from his/her own hometown, but I just realised that there's an alternative explanation...
The word for "(female) goat" across Songhay may be reconstructed as *hìnčìnì (Nicolai 1981 gives *hìnkìnì, but in all the Songhay languages he cites except Kwarandzyey, original *k and *č both turn into the same sound before front vowels.) Nicolai 1981 gives amkkən "male goat" as the Kwarandzyey reflex of this word, but in fact (as Kossmann first pointed out to me) that turns out to be another one of the Berber etymologies that only Zenaga seems to explain: ämkän "jeune bête (tout animal de pâturage)" (Taine-Cheikh 2008). Instead, I'd like to propose that išni is the Kwarandzyey reflex.
*n is occasionally lost in Kwarandzyey (eg gwa "see" < *guna); I don't know any rule for this so far, but here it might be motivated by dissimilation. Initial *h is lost fairly commonly (at least "water", "man", "two", "three", "hunger"), so that's not necessarily a problem. Short vowels, most commonly (but not always) *i and *u, are frequently deleted, according to a rule whose conditioning I've been investigating lately. *č regularly becomes ts, but when immediately followed by a consonant regularly simplifies to s for all but some of the most conservative speakers. And s and š are not phonologically distinct (except for younger speakers, under heavy Arabic influence); the consistent use of š here would be explained by the i's flanking it. So that would yield *hìnčìnì > *inčni > *itsni > isni = išni.
Of course, if išni is attested in Berber then all this reasoning may have to be rethought - so if you speak Berber and have heard the word before, please tell me now!
The word for "(female) goat" across Songhay may be reconstructed as *hìnčìnì (Nicolai 1981 gives *hìnkìnì, but in all the Songhay languages he cites except Kwarandzyey, original *k and *č both turn into the same sound before front vowels.) Nicolai 1981 gives amkkən "male goat" as the Kwarandzyey reflex of this word, but in fact (as Kossmann first pointed out to me) that turns out to be another one of the Berber etymologies that only Zenaga seems to explain: ämkän "jeune bête (tout animal de pâturage)" (Taine-Cheikh 2008). Instead, I'd like to propose that išni is the Kwarandzyey reflex.
*n is occasionally lost in Kwarandzyey (eg gwa "see" < *guna); I don't know any rule for this so far, but here it might be motivated by dissimilation. Initial *h is lost fairly commonly (at least "water", "man", "two", "three", "hunger"), so that's not necessarily a problem. Short vowels, most commonly (but not always) *i and *u, are frequently deleted, according to a rule whose conditioning I've been investigating lately. *č regularly becomes ts, but when immediately followed by a consonant regularly simplifies to s for all but some of the most conservative speakers. And s and š are not phonologically distinct (except for younger speakers, under heavy Arabic influence); the consistent use of š here would be explained by the i's flanking it. So that would yield *hìnčìnì > *inčni > *itsni > isni = išni.
Of course, if išni is attested in Berber then all this reasoning may have to be rethought - so if you speak Berber and have heard the word before, please tell me now!
Monday, February 23, 2009
`baskundza igwạḍən!
I don't suppose there are more than about two or three people on earth who care, but I just figured out an etymology that's been puzzling me for a while. In Kwaṛandzyəy, the word for "genie" is agwəḍ, plural igwạḍən. It looks Berber for its form alone, but I had never found it in any dictionary - until now, going through Taine-Cheikh's new Zenaga dictionary, when I came across ugṛuđ̣an (original singular *ugṛuḍ) "démons, diables (plus dangereux, plus forts que les autres)". It turns out to have been borrowed into Hassaniya too - īgṛäwṭən. The loss of ṛ is more or less regular in Kwarandzyey (usually it's restricted to intervocalic positions, but there are a few other examples like this); so is the shortening of a long vowel to ə in a final closed syllable, with a w remaining to indicate its former quality. Quite possibly the next commenter will tell me that actually this word is well-known in Kabylie or Morocco or something, but for now it's another piece of evidence for my claim that Kwarandzyey includes a number of loanwords specifically from the Zenaga branch of Berber.
UPDATE: see comments - it wasn't the next commented, but the third one who established that this word is attested in southern Morocco too, which makes sense both since that region is also fairly close to Tabelbala and since it tends to be easier to find Zenaga cognates there than further north or east.
UPDATE: see comments - it wasn't the next commented, but the third one who established that this word is attested in southern Morocco too, which makes sense both since that region is also fairly close to Tabelbala and since it tends to be easier to find Zenaga cognates there than further north or east.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Verbal adjectives in English
It may seem pretty exotic to English-speakers that in some languages adjectives behave almost exactly like verbs, but this strategy is not as un-English as it looks. Consider the following colloquial American English sentences, with more formal approximate "translations":
This rocks! - This is good. (and not *This is rocking!)
That would rock! - That would be good.
That rocked! - That was good.
That was a rockin' day. - That was a good day.
This sucks! - This is bad. (and not *This is sucking!
That would suck! - That would be bad.
That sucked! - That was bad.
That was a sucky day. - That was a bad day.
In these, a property usually expressed with an adjective ("good", "bad") is being expressed using a stative verb, but only in predicative constructions (that is, to form a sentence.) In attributive function (that is, modifying a noun) an adjective derived from this verb is used. Like other stative verbs ("know", "be") but unlike non-stative verbs, it uses the simple present form to express a current situation, not the present continuous.
Within English, this pattern may seem pretty odd. But it corresponds rather well to how adjectives are expressed in Songhay languages, eg Koyra Chiini (Heath 1999:73). There, properties are expressed in predicative contexts just like verbs, with the same mood/aspect/negation particles, and in attributive contexts usually take a suffix:
ni beer - you are big (like ni koy - you went)
hal a ma beer - until it gets big (like a ma koy - he will go)
har beer - a big man
ni futu - you are bad
har futu-nte - a bad man
In Songhay the perfect aspect is used with stative verbs to express a current situation; but, like the English simple present tense, this is the simplest indicative verb form. The chief difference is that in Songhay the predicative verbs are used for inchoative senses too, as if "That rocks!" could mean "That is becoming good" as well as "That is good".
Typologically, I find it kind of interesting that what looks like a couple of verbal adjectives should be lurking in the recesses of the English lexicon. But it also has practical applications: if I were trying to teach Songhay or a typologically similar language to Americans, I would certainly start by discussing the example of these two English words.
This rocks! - This is good. (and not *This is rocking!)
That would rock! - That would be good.
That rocked! - That was good.
That was a rockin' day. - That was a good day.
This sucks! - This is bad. (and not *This is sucking!
That would suck! - That would be bad.
That sucked! - That was bad.
That was a sucky day. - That was a bad day.
In these, a property usually expressed with an adjective ("good", "bad") is being expressed using a stative verb, but only in predicative constructions (that is, to form a sentence.) In attributive function (that is, modifying a noun) an adjective derived from this verb is used. Like other stative verbs ("know", "be") but unlike non-stative verbs, it uses the simple present form to express a current situation, not the present continuous.
Within English, this pattern may seem pretty odd. But it corresponds rather well to how adjectives are expressed in Songhay languages, eg Koyra Chiini (Heath 1999:73). There, properties are expressed in predicative contexts just like verbs, with the same mood/aspect/negation particles, and in attributive contexts usually take a suffix:
ni beer - you are big (like ni koy - you went)
hal a ma beer - until it gets big (like a ma koy - he will go)
har beer - a big man
ni futu - you are bad
har futu-nte - a bad man
In Songhay the perfect aspect is used with stative verbs to express a current situation; but, like the English simple present tense, this is the simplest indicative verb form. The chief difference is that in Songhay the predicative verbs are used for inchoative senses too, as if "That rocks!" could mean "That is becoming good" as well as "That is good".
Typologically, I find it kind of interesting that what looks like a couple of verbal adjectives should be lurking in the recesses of the English lexicon. But it also has practical applications: if I were trying to teach Songhay or a typologically similar language to Americans, I would certainly start by discussing the example of these two English words.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Adjectives - who needs 'em?
Most languages have a class of words that express properties and behave differently from other words. These are called adjectives. In English, for example, words like "red" or "old" or "tall" behave differently from nouns or verbs. For example, you add -s to verbs in the present tense if their subject is 3rd person singular, like "he sings" or "she eats"; but you can't add -s to an adjective, so you say "he is red" rather than *"he reds". You can put "very" before an adjective ("very red"), but not usually before a noun (you can't say *"very food".) Verbs can't be placed between "the" and the noun (unless you add an ending like -ing or -ed), but adjectives can (you can say "the red car", but not "the move car").
It turns out, according to Dixon 2004, that practically every language - perhaps every language - has at least one separate class of words, definable purely on the grounds of their (morphosyntactic) behaviour rather than their meaning, that refer to properties. This class typically includes words expressing size, age, value, and colour, and sometimes more.
But often, a concept expressed using an adjective in one language is expressed only by a verb or a noun in another. For example, in Kwarandzyəy adjectives come between the noun and the plural marker:
ạdṛạ kədda yu
mountain small PL
"little mountains" (hills)
But there is no adjective "happy" in Kwarandzyəy; instead, you use a verb, yəfṛəħ "be happy, rejoice". And to say "the happy people", you say "the people who are happy/have rejoiced":
bạ γ i-ba-yəfṛəħ
person who they-PF-happy
Moreover, though they may always be distinguishable by some test, they usually tend to behave very much like another word class. In fact, Stassen 1997:30 (link goes to 2003) postulates that in every languages adjectives handle predication (saying "X is red", for example) in the same way as either verbs, nouns, or locations. For example, in English or Arabic, adjectives handle predication like nouns (you say "He is tall", just like "He is a footballer"); in Korean or Tamasheq, they do it like verbs; and some languages, like Japanese, have both verb-like and noun-like adjectives.
So clearly people can do without some adjectives, and clearly the behaviour of adjectives tends to be very similar to the behaviour of some other word class. Why not do without them altogether? It would be easy enough to construct a language where no morphological or syntactic tests could distinguish adjectives from verbs, or from nouns. So if practically every language does take the trouble to distinguish them, there must be some pretty powerful cognitive motivation for it - and some pretty powerful historical tendencies acting to separate adjectives from verbs and/or nouns. The question isn't directly relevant to my current work, but it's worth thinking about.
It turns out, according to Dixon 2004, that practically every language - perhaps every language - has at least one separate class of words, definable purely on the grounds of their (morphosyntactic) behaviour rather than their meaning, that refer to properties. This class typically includes words expressing size, age, value, and colour, and sometimes more.
But often, a concept expressed using an adjective in one language is expressed only by a verb or a noun in another. For example, in Kwarandzyəy adjectives come between the noun and the plural marker:
ạdṛạ kədda yu
mountain small PL
"little mountains" (hills)
But there is no adjective "happy" in Kwarandzyəy; instead, you use a verb, yəfṛəħ "be happy, rejoice". And to say "the happy people", you say "the people who are happy/have rejoiced":
bạ γ i-ba-yəfṛəħ
person who they-PF-happy
Moreover, though they may always be distinguishable by some test, they usually tend to behave very much like another word class. In fact, Stassen 1997:30 (link goes to 2003) postulates that in every languages adjectives handle predication (saying "X is red", for example) in the same way as either verbs, nouns, or locations. For example, in English or Arabic, adjectives handle predication like nouns (you say "He is tall", just like "He is a footballer"); in Korean or Tamasheq, they do it like verbs; and some languages, like Japanese, have both verb-like and noun-like adjectives.
So clearly people can do without some adjectives, and clearly the behaviour of adjectives tends to be very similar to the behaviour of some other word class. Why not do without them altogether? It would be easy enough to construct a language where no morphological or syntactic tests could distinguish adjectives from verbs, or from nouns. So if practically every language does take the trouble to distinguish them, there must be some pretty powerful cognitive motivation for it - and some pretty powerful historical tendencies acting to separate adjectives from verbs and/or nouns. The question isn't directly relevant to my current work, but it's worth thinking about.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Fieldwork and address books
Linguistics, with its regular sound shifts, unidirectional grammaticalisation processes, and tree diagrams, is perhaps the most satisfyingly scientific of the social sciences. But today I found myself reminded that it is still emphatically social, particularly when you want to actually gather new data about undocumented languages. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous even in such far-flung corners of the Sahara as Tabelbala and Siwa, used even by illiterate people - making it possible to keep asking people about the language well after you've gotten back to the university. So over the past months of fieldwork my phone has accumulated quite a lot of numbers, which I backed up to my computer today. The final count? At least 84 phone numbers from Tabelbala and 43 from Siwa. To put this in perspective, there are only about 3000 Kwarandzyey speakers, so I can call something like 3% of the population.
The field linguistics courses at SOAS lay a commendable emphasis on teaching the practicalities of fieldwork - what microphone, what recorder, what software... But there's a gap in the course: managing contacts. Going through these I found a few casual contacts I could barely or even not at all remember, and some people I could remember but not easily remember the relationships between. There's some information in my field notebooks, but it's scattered and not always detailed. I should have been making concise but informative notes about all these people somewhere as I took their numbers - not something you can do easily with my already somewhat antiquated mobile, but that might be a reason in itself to take a more sophisticated one along, or even to use a paper address book, if you have space in your pocket for one alongside your field notebook. If you plan to do any fieldwork, bear this in mind!
The field linguistics courses at SOAS lay a commendable emphasis on teaching the practicalities of fieldwork - what microphone, what recorder, what software... But there's a gap in the course: managing contacts. Going through these I found a few casual contacts I could barely or even not at all remember, and some people I could remember but not easily remember the relationships between. There's some information in my field notebooks, but it's scattered and not always detailed. I should have been making concise but informative notes about all these people somewhere as I took their numbers - not something you can do easily with my already somewhat antiquated mobile, but that might be a reason in itself to take a more sophisticated one along, or even to use a paper address book, if you have space in your pocket for one alongside your field notebook. If you plan to do any fieldwork, bear this in mind!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The puzzle of the extra pronouns
Like most (all?) Songhay languages, Kwarandzie has two sets of 3rd person pronouns: in this case, they are a (sg.) / i (pl.) vs. ana / ini. In southern Songhay (eg Koyra Chiini, the longer set are used as logophors - that is, used to refer back to the speaker in reported speech. This is not the case in Kwarandzie, though.
ana/ini are obligatory in pre-sentential topic and focus position (including when followed by a preposition), while a/i are obligatory for possessors:
ana (*a) a e-kka. ghi "it's him that hit me."
ini (*i) i-bbey ibbagen "them, they know tales."
an (*anan) kembi "his hand"
But in normal object position, either set can occur:
e-ggwa / e-ggwana "he saw him"
After much checking, I still have no idea what factors drive the selection of one or the other in this position. These are not used, Algonquian-style, for tracking two distinct referents: ²e-gga.r.ana ²e-kka.r.a "I found him and hit him" can as easily refer to hitting the same person as to two different objects.
So it's not logophoricity (much less reflexives), it's not an obviative or a switch-reference system, it's not related to politeness or gender... can anyone think of another possibility for me to check before I leave?
ana/ini are obligatory in pre-sentential topic and focus position (including when followed by a preposition), while a/i are obligatory for possessors:
ana (*a) a e-kka. ghi "it's him that hit me."
ini (*i) i-bbey ibbagen "them, they know tales."
an (*anan) kembi "his hand"
But in normal object position, either set can occur:
e-ggwa / e-ggwana "he saw him"
After much checking, I still have no idea what factors drive the selection of one or the other in this position. These are not used, Algonquian-style, for tracking two distinct referents: ²e-gga.r.ana ²e-kka.r.a "I found him and hit him" can as easily refer to hitting the same person as to two different objects.
So it's not logophoricity (much less reflexives), it's not an obviative or a switch-reference system, it's not related to politeness or gender... can anyone think of another possibility for me to check before I leave?
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Songhay words in El Jadida, Morocco
Bulbul sent me a link I just had to post about: the article describes, among other things, a secret language used by the Gnaoua, descendants of West Africans brought to Morocco as slaves in precolonial times, in El Jadida, Morocco (on the Atlantic coast.) The author makes no attempt to seek an etymology for the words recorded, but a lot of them are immediately obvious to me - as Songhay. Thus:
* sindi "sommeil": Songhay cindi "rest"
* kuy barkuy "on s'en va": Songhay koy "person", koy "go"
* katihari "...apporter de l'eau": Songhay kati hari "bring water!"
* noro "money": Songhay nooru
* dangi bamatcin "tais-toi": Songhay dangey "be silent", ciine "speak"
Significantly, these words do not display any characteristics that would link them with Kwarandzie. To the contrary - noro and hari are unambiguously Southern, not Northern, Songhay in form, and most of the other words haven't survived in Kwarandzie.
A few words are clearly non-Songhay, and as such harder for me to identify, but these include some Bambara words:
* sgho "viande" - Bambara sogo
* dominika "nourriture" - Bambara dumuni ke
Elsewhere, I've read of Hausa words showing up in Moroccan Gnaoua music (I don't have the reference handy here in Tabelbala). The various sources of the vocabulary attest to the wide geographical range from which slaves were brought, and it's interesting that the words were preserved at all. I look forward to finding out where the other words come from... any ideas?
* sindi "sommeil": Songhay cindi "rest"
* kuy barkuy "on s'en va": Songhay koy "person", koy "go"
* katihari "...apporter de l'eau": Songhay kati hari "bring water!"
* noro "money": Songhay nooru
* dangi bamatcin "tais-toi": Songhay dangey "be silent", ciine "speak"
Significantly, these words do not display any characteristics that would link them with Kwarandzie. To the contrary - noro and hari are unambiguously Southern, not Northern, Songhay in form, and most of the other words haven't survived in Kwarandzie.
A few words are clearly non-Songhay, and as such harder for me to identify, but these include some Bambara words:
* sgho "viande" - Bambara sogo
* dominika "nourriture" - Bambara dumuni ke
Elsewhere, I've read of Hausa words showing up in Moroccan Gnaoua music (I don't have the reference handy here in Tabelbala). The various sources of the vocabulary attest to the wide geographical range from which slaves were brought, and it's interesting that the words were preserved at all. I look forward to finding out where the other words come from... any ideas?
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Metathesis everywhere
When two sounds exchange their positions (for example, clip > plik) we call it metathesis. In most languages, this doesn't seem particularly common, neither in historical changes nor in the grammar. Kwarandzie has no grammatically caused metathesis, but nonetheless is absolutely full of historically metathesised words, sometimes even coexisting with non-metathesised variants. Thus for palm spines, some speakers say taqaneft and others tanaqeft; "forget" is dnagh for some speakers, dghan for others; "irrigation channel" is variously qentret or qetrent... I've found tens of examples where either synchronic variation or transparent external comparison demonstrates metathesis (usually of non-adjacent consonants, though there are one or two cases with vowels, not counting standard North African schwa alternations), and hear new ones every couple of days. Does this remind anyone of anything they've seen, or is it just odd?
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Colour vision and language shift
In a brief Edge article (see LH), Lera Boroditsky makes the thought-provoking remark - regarding perception of colours - that “It turns out that languages meddle in very low-level aspects of perception, and without our knowledge or consent shape the very nuts and bolts of how we see the world.” If this is so, what happens when pretty much every speaker of a given language is also fluently bilingual in another one which divides up the spectrum (or indeed the world) differently - as has been the case here in Tabelbala for at least two generations? As it happens, some of my recent work here points to an answer.
I've recently been examining the colour system of Kwarandjie, trying out the second half of the Berlin and Kay tests (focus identification) with a number of speakers (well, 13 so far.) Of course, like all speakers of Kwarandjie, they are bilingual in Algerian Arabic; in fact, many of the speakers tested speak Arabic better than Kwarandjie. The colours they see turn out to be remarkably consistent, with more or less the same foci from speaker to speaker: black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue (as well as some secondary colours, most commonly pink (Arabic wəṛdi or, in reference to a darker shade, ħənnawi), that are less widely agreed on.) However, the words used to refer to “green” and “blue” show significant variation. For some speakers, zəgzəg means “blue” and “green” is (Arabic) xḍəṛ; for others, zəgzəg means “green”, and “blue” is (Arabic) ẓərrig!
It doesn't require too much speculation to think up a scenario to explain this. A few generations back, Kwarandjie must have had a five-colour system, featuring (like Japanese aoi, for example) a colour zəgzəg which covered both green and blue, whose focus was somewhere between the two. As speakers grew more fluent in Arabic, this focus split; they came to see both green and blue. Depending on whether they more frequently heard older speakers refer to, for example, plants or the sky as zəgzəg, they decided it meant one colour or the other, and gave the other colour an Arabic name; but different choices were made in different families. In the coming weeks I hope to gather more evidence on the issue - in particular, to learn whether even older speakers than those examined see a single colour grue or not.
I've recently been examining the colour system of Kwarandjie, trying out the second half of the Berlin and Kay tests (focus identification) with a number of speakers (well, 13 so far.) Of course, like all speakers of Kwarandjie, they are bilingual in Algerian Arabic; in fact, many of the speakers tested speak Arabic better than Kwarandjie. The colours they see turn out to be remarkably consistent, with more or less the same foci from speaker to speaker: black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue (as well as some secondary colours, most commonly pink (Arabic wəṛdi or, in reference to a darker shade, ħənnawi), that are less widely agreed on.) However, the words used to refer to “green” and “blue” show significant variation. For some speakers, zəgzəg means “blue” and “green” is (Arabic) xḍəṛ; for others, zəgzəg means “green”, and “blue” is (Arabic) ẓərrig!
It doesn't require too much speculation to think up a scenario to explain this. A few generations back, Kwarandjie must have had a five-colour system, featuring (like Japanese aoi, for example) a colour zəgzəg which covered both green and blue, whose focus was somewhere between the two. As speakers grew more fluent in Arabic, this focus split; they came to see both green and blue. Depending on whether they more frequently heard older speakers refer to, for example, plants or the sky as zəgzəg, they decided it meant one colour or the other, and gave the other colour an Arabic name; but different choices were made in different families. In the coming weeks I hope to gather more evidence on the issue - in particular, to learn whether even older speakers than those examined see a single colour grue or not.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Climate change, etymology, and speaker population
A quick Google search turns up a number of theories on the etymology of the name Tabelbala, none of which correspond to the one that old men here tell me, which appears to me to be much the most plausible. The oasis' name is Tsawerbets in Kwarandzie, Tabelbalt in local Tamazight, and Belbala in local Arabic; they derive it from a tree called awerbel in Kwarandjie and belbal in local Arabic, that used to be common but (presumably due to the lower water table) no longer grows here. [e=schwa] It turns out that belbal is fairly widespread in North African Arabic, and refers to a type of pine; it's also attested in Taznatit, as abelbal. The normal Berber diminutive gives tabelbalt, and the usual Kwarandjie shift of l>r and t>ts would give tsaberbelts; intervocalic b>w is irregular, but I have heard it in other contexts, and final clusters tend to be simplified, which would give tsawerbets. Berber diminutive morphology is not productive in Kwarandjie, so it's hard to imagine this being a folk etymology. If this is correct, the very name of the oasis, like its many acres of ruins and its hundreds of dried-up foggaras, is a mute testimony to a time not too long ago when it was much greener and wetter.
At the moment, Kwarandjie turns out to have roughly on the order of 3000 speakers, adding up the populations of the three villages as given to me by a local official (himself a speaker) and assuming the minority that doesn't speak it at all is made up for by all the emigrant speakers in Tindouf and Bechar. This represents about half the population of the oasis; the other half is in el-Kartsi (le Quartier), the newer town centre. Despite the endangerment discussed in the previous post, this is larger than it's been at any point since 1908, when Cancel counted barely 500 or so speakers. But even in Cancel's time most of the foggaras were dry, and a few centuries earlier refugees had fled the area for places like Mlouka and Ktaoua; in earlier periods the number of speakers may have been significantly larger, judging by the ruins of their houses, which seem to cover an area rather larger than the present settlements do. That former climate might help explain why the oasis not only kept a language that has remained practically nowhere else in the thousand kilometers between it and Timbuktu, but also kept much more Songhay vocabulary than the other northern Songhay languages - even words like hawi "cow", referring to items currently totally absent from the oasis, or tsyu "read" and genga "pray", referring to concepts strongly associated with Arabic. The historic decline in the oasis's population and prosperity has surely itself had its effect on the language, letting words associated with particular specialties (perhaps silverwork, for example) to vanish for lack of customers to sustain them, or ones for species to vanish with their referents (as the word asiyed, "ostrich", has nearly finished doing - I've only found one speaker who knew it, although Champault confirms it). But is there any way to prove the existence of such an effect, or measure it?
At the moment, Kwarandjie turns out to have roughly on the order of 3000 speakers, adding up the populations of the three villages as given to me by a local official (himself a speaker) and assuming the minority that doesn't speak it at all is made up for by all the emigrant speakers in Tindouf and Bechar. This represents about half the population of the oasis; the other half is in el-Kartsi (le Quartier), the newer town centre. Despite the endangerment discussed in the previous post, this is larger than it's been at any point since 1908, when Cancel counted barely 500 or so speakers. But even in Cancel's time most of the foggaras were dry, and a few centuries earlier refugees had fled the area for places like Mlouka and Ktaoua; in earlier periods the number of speakers may have been significantly larger, judging by the ruins of their houses, which seem to cover an area rather larger than the present settlements do. That former climate might help explain why the oasis not only kept a language that has remained practically nowhere else in the thousand kilometers between it and Timbuktu, but also kept much more Songhay vocabulary than the other northern Songhay languages - even words like hawi "cow", referring to items currently totally absent from the oasis, or tsyu "read" and genga "pray", referring to concepts strongly associated with Arabic. The historic decline in the oasis's population and prosperity has surely itself had its effect on the language, letting words associated with particular specialties (perhaps silverwork, for example) to vanish for lack of customers to sustain them, or ones for species to vanish with their referents (as the word asiyed, "ostrich", has nearly finished doing - I've only found one speaker who knew it, although Champault confirms it). But is there any way to prove the existence of such an effect, or measure it?
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Is this normal in language shift?
When I first got here, I thought I was seeing a textbook language shift situation. But I gradually realised something that I don't remember encountering mention of in my textbooks: there's a whole generation of fluent speakers here (most speakers under 25, actually) who only learned it in their early teen or preteen years. Most parents since the eighties speak only Arabic to their children, but the language is in wide use in situations like football games and farm work, and the younger ones seem to have picked it up there; in fact, it seems possible that the process is continuing with the even younger kids. Does anyone know of a similar case, or am I right in thinking this is a little unexpected?
Monday, December 24, 2007
Eid Mubarak / Happy Holidays!
Sahha Eidkoum, Eid Mubarak, and `agbwa lgabel to everybody out there! And to the rest of you, hope you're having a great holiday and a well-deserved break. Eid here in Tabelbala was good - plenty of mutton, couscous, and maqq, a dish made with boiled dates and bread which tastes rather good. And as a nice seasonal bonus, ADSL has arrived: it looks rather unreliable, but no more so than the phone system. The language is still getting more interesting every time I look at it, and I've started making some rather extensive recordings; just the day before yesterday Hadj Berrouk gave me a rather detailed explanation of astronomy. Mind you, all the star names are (dialectal) Arabic, but nonetheless interesting (and the two planet names are Kwarandzie, as are terms like "eclipse", "crescent moon", and "falling star".)
My friend Smail, who works at the local school, has just started a new blog (with some help from me): you can go read it at http://tyahiaoui.jeeran.com.
My friend Smail, who works at the local school, has just started a new blog (with some help from me): you can go read it at http://tyahiaoui.jeeran.com.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
More from Tabelbala
“əl`əyš ṭazu, əlma iri العيش طازو، الماء إيري
əlləṛḍ gəndza, ssma bini.” الأرض قندا، السما بيني
“Couscous is ṭazu, water iri,
earth is gəndza, sky bini.”
- A locally widely known ditty summarising Kwarandjie. Its antiquity is shown by the second line: across Songhay ganda and beene mean “earth” and “sky”, but in Kwarandjie their cognates have been restricted to “down” and “up”, with “earth” and “sky” normally expressed by dzəw and igərwən respectively - and the latter, while Berber, appears from the absence of an a before the w to have been borrowed not from Middle Atlas Tamazight nor Tabeldit (“ksours sud-oranien”) nor but from a language similar to Zenaga, which has not been spoken around here since the Reguibat's ancestors reached the area some five hundred plus years ago. Readers who know a little Berber may assume the r is a typo, as I at first did on reading Cancel, but it is not: I take it to be the product of dissimilation (n...n > l...n) plus the common Kwarandjie sound shift l > r. On the other hand, for the rhyme (such as it is) to work, the sound changes –e > -i and –a- > -e- [and thence to > i] / _r, at least, must already have happened.
The work continues. I've filled up five notebooks and made another few recordings, some quite interesting; my sketch grammar has reached 30 pages. I've gotten to know quite a large number of faces, something I find far more difficult than memorising words - although the latter is made easier by the habit of many people in this town of testing my knowledge of every noun they can think of on the spur of the moment.
Kwaṛa-n-dyəy, like many non-Arabic languages of the region, has a coded register in which Arabic loanwords or other expressions likely to be comprehensible to an outsider listener are replaced with other expressions. This register is quite extensive, and is known to many though not all speakers in all three towns. Since all numbers above 3 are Arabic borrowings, and hiding numbers is often particularly useful in trade, it perforce uses a base-5 counting system based on kembi "hand", a situation with parallels in several other Saharan oases which has led some to the probably mistaken idea that proto-Berber was base 5.
I have an open request from several interested citizens of Tabelbala for a competent archeologist, geologist, paleontologist, or other specialist in disciplines relevant to understanding and preserving the area's heritage to come and study. If you know or are such a person, please take note: you will find ample assistance and encouragement, and be welcomed hospitably. (Relevant bibliographical references would also be great.) The ruins of several medieval if not older towns are buried under the sands here, and some people at least would like to see them studied. You would be expected to make whatever information you find available to the town's citizens, and to help lobby for a local museum to put them in.
Qriqesh just came in, and requests that I put his nickname online for all to see: so here it is. (His real name is Abdallah Yahiaoui.)
əlləṛḍ gəndza, ssma bini.” الأرض قندا، السما بيني
“Couscous is ṭazu, water iri,
earth is gəndza, sky bini.”
- A locally widely known ditty summarising Kwarandjie. Its antiquity is shown by the second line: across Songhay ganda and beene mean “earth” and “sky”, but in Kwarandjie their cognates have been restricted to “down” and “up”, with “earth” and “sky” normally expressed by dzəw and igərwən respectively - and the latter, while Berber, appears from the absence of an a before the w to have been borrowed not from Middle Atlas Tamazight nor Tabeldit (“ksours sud-oranien”) nor but from a language similar to Zenaga, which has not been spoken around here since the Reguibat's ancestors reached the area some five hundred plus years ago. Readers who know a little Berber may assume the r is a typo, as I at first did on reading Cancel, but it is not: I take it to be the product of dissimilation (n...n > l...n) plus the common Kwarandjie sound shift l > r. On the other hand, for the rhyme (such as it is) to work, the sound changes –e > -i and –a- > -e- [and thence to > i] / _r, at least, must already have happened.
The work continues. I've filled up five notebooks and made another few recordings, some quite interesting; my sketch grammar has reached 30 pages. I've gotten to know quite a large number of faces, something I find far more difficult than memorising words - although the latter is made easier by the habit of many people in this town of testing my knowledge of every noun they can think of on the spur of the moment.
Kwaṛa-n-dyəy, like many non-Arabic languages of the region, has a coded register in which Arabic loanwords or other expressions likely to be comprehensible to an outsider listener are replaced with other expressions. This register is quite extensive, and is known to many though not all speakers in all three towns. Since all numbers above 3 are Arabic borrowings, and hiding numbers is often particularly useful in trade, it perforce uses a base-5 counting system based on kembi "hand", a situation with parallels in several other Saharan oases which has led some to the probably mistaken idea that proto-Berber was base 5.
I have an open request from several interested citizens of Tabelbala for a competent archeologist, geologist, paleontologist, or other specialist in disciplines relevant to understanding and preserving the area's heritage to come and study. If you know or are such a person, please take note: you will find ample assistance and encouragement, and be welcomed hospitably. (Relevant bibliographical references would also be great.) The ruins of several medieval if not older towns are buried under the sands here, and some people at least would like to see them studied. You would be expected to make whatever information you find available to the town's citizens, and to help lobby for a local museum to put them in.
Qriqesh just came in, and requests that I put his nickname online for all to see: so here it is. (His real name is Abdallah Yahiaoui.)
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Brief update
Today I'm in Bechar, with a somewhat more effective net connection; I apologise for the poor appearance of the previous one, which I sent by email. I am currently sitting with Omar Yahiaoui (who asked me to mention this); I've been hanging out mainly with the Yahiaoui extended family of Kwara, one of the three villages that speak the language, although I'll have to balance this soon with some extended staying in Ifrenyu, the other main village with which there is a certain amount of mostly but not totally friendly rivalry. The phonology keeps getting bigger and richer - never mind all the emphatics and labiovelarised consonants and affricates, there are a few contrasts involving h and gw that have clear effects on surrounding vowels but that I simply can't seem to hear. I've made a few more recordings, and done a bit more sightseeing, going into the erg a little - sand dunes and not much else from Tabelbala all the way to Ougarta.
PS: should have written Shelha, not "Shelhiyya", in my previous Bechar post.
PS: should have written Shelha, not "Shelhiyya", in my previous Bechar post.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Fieldwork post I
Hello everybody! I am alive and well in Tabelbala, speaking "Korandje" ([kwɑ́:ṛɑ-n-dʒji], probably /kwaṛa-n-dzyəy/) on a regular basis and writing down vast numbers of obscure words enthusiastically volunteered by the more fluent older generation of speakers, while trying to figure out grammatical issues from natural speech overheard or addressed to me and from occasional elicitation when I can find someone who will put up with it. I've filled a notebook of more than two hundred pages with notes already, but I've done only a very small amount of recording, which has so far proven harder to negotiate.
The people here are incredibly hospitable, and the area remarkable for its beauty - an oasis of gardens (ləmbyu) and irrigation canals (tsirgyanən) between the mountain (aḍṛa) and the erg (amrər). However, it is remarkably isolated, connected to the outside world (and the nearest towns are a very long way away) by only a single road and a single telephone line, which has not been conducive to job creation; there is talk of a second road to Adrar, which might help. Its inherent touristic potential, which some here are keen on expanding, is difficult to realise in the absence of any hotels.
The language is clearly endangered. People from about 30 and up speak it routinely (though all speakers appear to speak dialectal Arabic to native standard), but most younger speakers seem to have a primarily passive knowledge of the language, always answering in Arabic or struggling to find even basic vocabulary, though this is more true of some families than others. Most people I've spent time talking with have been keen on the idea of reviving its fortunes, or even teaching it in school "like Kabyle", but some have been rather more negative, dismissing it as not a proper language and of no use.
There's some very interesting stuff going on in the language, including what I take to be a sound shift in progress of affricated [kç] (the sound that Cancel wrote as <χ>) to affricated [ts] (of which speakers are well aware.) Cancel's <th>, incidentally, is itself [ts]. The tense/aspect/mood system has been reworked much more radically than existing materials indicated, with a past copula (also used for what I so far interpret as a past progressive) ga showing up before personal agreement rather than, like aspect and mood markers, after. The phonology is complex: tone and most vowel contrasts have definitely been lost, but a lot of emphatics have been gained, including such unusual sounds as affricated [ṭṣ]. Vowels reduced to schwa, and lost coda r's, reappear in verbs when you add a 3rd person direct object pronoun "clitic" (but not when you add a 3rd person indirect object one.) The language has a specialised focus marker, which interacts interestingly with subject person/number markers. The vocabulary is of major interest in its own right for what it has to say about the history of this part of the Sahara. It defies any simple effort to pin down the immediate source of the agricultural technologies that have allowed the Belbalis to survive and flourish here: "palm" is Songhay kungu, but "date" Berber tsini; a foggara is Songhay bəng-bini as long as it stays underground, but Berber tsargya once it emerges.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Bechar
I am currently in Bechar, the local capital, and plan to take the four-hour coach trip to Tabelbala tomorrow inshallah. After corresponding with a computing student here whose family is from Tabelbala for some time, I've finally met him in person; he seems a nice guy. Interestingly, when speaking Arabic, he calls Korandje "shelHiyya" - the name usually applied to the Berber dialects of the region and of southern Morocco. This suggests to me that this word may have become a generic term for non-Arabic local languages, in which case all statements about a given oasis around here speaking "Tachelhit" or "Shelha" need to be checked carefully.
Naturally, I've combed the local bookstores (there aren't too many, but there is a university here after all); I only found one book relating to the linguistics of this rough area, a work by Mohamed Bouali (2004) on the attitudes of people in the Berber-speaking oasis of Boussemghoun in western Algeria to a number of issues, including their own and other Algerian languages. Not very surprisingly, these seem closely aligned with moderate conservative opinion in Algeria generally, rather than showing any particularly strong similarity to the spectrum of attitudes common in Kabylie; his interviewees displayed pride in their language, but also identified fairly strongly with Arabic, and were more often than not hostile to the idea of teaching Berber ("Tachelhit") in school. The author reports that, unlike in some nearby oases, the Semghounis have consistently retained Berber and show no signs of shifting to Arabic as a home language. In Bechar itself, all talk I've heard has been in Arabic; the local accent is distinguished a lot of affricated t's (ts) and frequent use of "wah" for "yes", but is overall even closer to my own dialect then I was expecting.
Naturally, I've combed the local bookstores (there aren't too many, but there is a university here after all); I only found one book relating to the linguistics of this rough area, a work by Mohamed Bouali (2004) on the attitudes of people in the Berber-speaking oasis of Boussemghoun in western Algeria to a number of issues, including their own and other Algerian languages. Not very surprisingly, these seem closely aligned with moderate conservative opinion in Algeria generally, rather than showing any particularly strong similarity to the spectrum of attitudes common in Kabylie; his interviewees displayed pride in their language, but also identified fairly strongly with Arabic, and were more often than not hostile to the idea of teaching Berber ("Tachelhit") in school. The author reports that, unlike in some nearby oases, the Semghounis have consistently retained Berber and show no signs of shifting to Arabic as a home language. In Bechar itself, all talk I've heard has been in Arabic; the local accent is distinguished a lot of affricated t's (ts) and frequent use of "wah" for "yes", but is overall even closer to my own dialect then I was expecting.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Leiden conference on African languages and linguistics
I'm just back from a conference at Leiden, and heading off to take a holiday in Algeria very soon; here's my interim report to tide my readers (to whom I apologise for the interruption in service:) over.
Leiden turns out to be a very nice little town, clean, quiet, full of canals, and practically empty. I imagine all that changes when the students get there! The conference was good - I got to talk to several other people working on Berber and Songhay, and heard some interesting talks. To name a few, Jeffrey Heath discussed the remarkable ways in which syntax affects tone in Jamsay Dogon; Maarten Kossmann argued (and I am inclined to agree) that the Mande influence discernible in southern but not northern Songhay, and especially strong in "Inner", or Eastern, Songhay, is particularly to be linked to Soninke, and is not a feature of proto-Songhay; Alain Bassene presented a paper on topicalisation and focus in a Jola variety where both proved to behave in a manner almost completely identical to their behaviour in Algerian Arabic; and Mary Pearce presented in impressive detail what turned out to be a clear ongoing sound change (a shift from phonemic tone to phonemic voicing) in the Chadic language Kera. My own paper was perhaps a little too esoteric even for a conference like this - I'm not sure that more than two or three people in the audience actually cared about sound shifts in Songhay - but I heard corroborating evidence for one of my statements immediately afterwards, which was satisfying.
I also picked up a pleasing number of free language/linguistics books, including review copies (look for them on Afrikanistik sometime in the indefinite future) of a new dialectological atlas of the Moroccan Rif and of a book by Pichler on the history of Tifinagh which (I'm not sure whether to be amused or annoyed) briefly quotes me verbatim regarding Neo-Tifinagh without attribution or even quotation marks.
Leiden turns out to be a very nice little town, clean, quiet, full of canals, and practically empty. I imagine all that changes when the students get there! The conference was good - I got to talk to several other people working on Berber and Songhay, and heard some interesting talks. To name a few, Jeffrey Heath discussed the remarkable ways in which syntax affects tone in Jamsay Dogon; Maarten Kossmann argued (and I am inclined to agree) that the Mande influence discernible in southern but not northern Songhay, and especially strong in "Inner", or Eastern, Songhay, is particularly to be linked to Soninke, and is not a feature of proto-Songhay; Alain Bassene presented a paper on topicalisation and focus in a Jola variety where both proved to behave in a manner almost completely identical to their behaviour in Algerian Arabic; and Mary Pearce presented in impressive detail what turned out to be a clear ongoing sound change (a shift from phonemic tone to phonemic voicing) in the Chadic language Kera. My own paper was perhaps a little too esoteric even for a conference like this - I'm not sure that more than two or three people in the audience actually cared about sound shifts in Songhay - but I heard corroborating evidence for one of my statements immediately afterwards, which was satisfying.
I also picked up a pleasing number of free language/linguistics books, including review copies (look for them on Afrikanistik sometime in the indefinite future) of a new dialectological atlas of the Moroccan Rif and of a book by Pichler on the history of Tifinagh which (I'm not sure whether to be amused or annoyed) briefly quotes me verbatim regarding Neo-Tifinagh without attribution or even quotation marks.
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