Triliterals in strange places

In a grammar I was looking at lately, I came across the following sentences:

"Nouns may be verbalized, or verbs nominalized, simply by bringing the stem into a suitable rhythmic form... Most of the rhythmic patterns call for a tri-consonantal stem. If a stem is di-consonantal in its primary form, a consonant (usually the glottal stop) is added to give it the proper structure... Often in the course of forming derivatives, stems that are too long are forced into one or the other of the regular patterns. They are cut down by the loss of quantity or of vowels or consonants as may be necessary."

Was this a Semitic language, or perhaps some less well known Afro-Asiatic cousin? No: this was Sierra Miwok, the pre-conquest language spoken by the Native Americans of central California inland from the Bay. (See map.) The "rhythmic patterns" only involve changes in quantity and CV>VC metathesis, not insertion of specific vowels as in Semitic, but the parallel is striking. Here are a few examples:

leppa- "to finish", with a CVCVCC pattern imposed, becomes lepa''- (gaining a glottal stop).
ṯolookošu- "three", with a CVCCV pattern imposed, becomes ṯolko- (losing the š).

Compare Arabic:
'ab- "father", with a 'aCCaaC plural template imposed, becomes 'aabaa'- "fathers", gaining a glottal stop (historically a semivowel, but never mind that)
`ankabuut- "spider", with a CaCaaCiC plural template imposed, becomes `anaakib- "spiders", losing the t.

Reference:
Freeland, L. S. 1951. Language of the Sierra Miwok. Baltimore: Waverley Press.

Chenanith b'Libya - in the 11th century AD?

Anyone interested in North African languages who doesn't speak Dutch should immediately check out Bulbul's posting on Latino-Punic. The Phoenicians brought their language with them to North Africa when they founded Carthage and other cities. Carthage was destroyed, of course, but many other cities continued to speak Phoenician for longer; however, like Arabic in more recent times, it changed a lot under Berber influence, and this later dialect is usually called Punic. This language was spoken by St. Augustine, who quotes a number of Phoenician words, such as salus (< shalu:sh < shalo:sh < shala:sh < thala:th) "three", in his works. In eastern Libya, as it happens, Punic continued to be written even after the Phoenician alphabet was forgotten; this body of inscriptions, using the Latin alphabet to write Punic, is called (logically enough) Latino-Punic, and a comprehensive database of such inscriptions is available from Leiden. Recently, as Bulbul points out, a thesis was submitted at Leiden on Latino-Punic and its Linguistic Environment; I would love to read it.

The twist in this tale is that Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD! Al-Bakri (whom I've mentioned before) enigmatically says of the inhabitants of Sirt in Libya that:

لهم كلام يراطنون به ليس بعربي ولا عجمي ولا بربري ولا قبطي ولا يعرفه غيرهم
‍They have a speech in which they jabber which is neither Arabic nor Ajami (by which he probably means Latin but might mean Persian) nor Berber nor Coptic, which no one but them knows.

The location (in eastern Tripolitania) is about right for it to be Punic, and if it were Greek you would expect him to know, considering he cites (more or less correctly) the Greek etymology of طرابلس (Tripoli) in the next page. So was Punic still spoken in the 11th century? Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks plausible.

Ugaritic inscription

Last weekend I got a chance to indulge my longstanding passion for ancient Semitic languages at the Louvre. The Ugaritic collection was, as you might expect, especially good; I took many photographs, including this particularly clear one here, a ceremonial axe from the 13th or 12th century BC. Since the Ugaritic alphabet only contained some 30 letters, it's easy enough to read the inscription (turn it 90 degrees counterclockwise), although no word dividers are present:

xrṣn rb khnm

which the museum caption translates as "la hache du Grand Prêtre". xrṣn is presumably "axe"; I can't find it in my small dictionary, but it looks like it might be related to xurāṣ "gold" (itself cognate not only to Hebrew ḥarūṣ, but also to Greek chrysos, a Semitic loanword.) rabb- means "great one", identical to Arabic ربّ "lord" and cognate to Hebrew rav "great one; rabbi". kāhin- is "priest", identical to the Arabic كاهن "soothsayer" and cognate to Hebrew kohen "priest" - yes, the same word from which the surname "Cohen" comes from. -īm is the oblique plural, identical to Hebrew -īm (which however is no longer inflected for case) and cognate to Arabic -īn. Once you start looking, it's so easy to spot the connections between Semitic languages; no wonder people a thousand years ago noticed.

Destroying Harsusi

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

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

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

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

Semitic snake spells pop up in Pyramids

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

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

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

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

The plural-breaking mountains of Oman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

A comparative linguist of the 11th century

Ibn Hazm (994-1064) was a polymathic intellectual of Cordoba, equally well-known for his poetry and his religious commentary. Less well-known are his opinions on Semitic linguistics, which turn out to have been rather impressive. In the quote below, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the process of historical change than Ibn Quraysh, who seems to have seen the mutual similarities as as resulting as much or more from intermixture than from common ancestry, although both ultimately succumb to the temptation of explaining linguistic family trees in terms of religiously given genealogies. As near as I can translate it off the cuff, he said:

...What we have settled on and determined to be certain is that Syriac and Hebrew and Arabic - that is the language of Mudar and Rabia (ie Arabic as we know it), not the language of Himyar (ie Old South Arabian) - are one language that changed with the migrations of its people, so that it was ground up... For, when a town's people live near another people, their language changes in a manner clear to anyone who considers the issue, and we find that the masses have changed the pronunciation of Arabic significantly, to the point that it is so distant from the original as to be like a different language, so we find them saying `iinab for `inab (grape), and 'asTuuT for sawT (whip), and thalathdaa for thalaathatu danaaniir (three dinars), and when a Berber becomes Arabized and wants to say shajarah (tree) he says sajarah, and when a Galician becomes Arabized he replaces `ayn and Haa with haa, so he says muhammad when he means to say muHammad, and such things are frequent. So whoever ponders on Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac will become certain that their difference is of the type we have described, through changes in people's pronunciation through the passage of time and the difference of countries and the bordering of other nations, and that they are in origin a single language. Having established that, Syriac is the ancestor of both Arabic and Hebrew, and to be more precise, the first to speak this Arabic was Ishmael, upon him be peace, for it is the language of his sons, and Hebrew is the language of Isaac and his sons, and Syriac is without doubt the language of Abraham, blessings and peace be upon him and upon our prophet. (Ihkam Ibn Hazm; see Wikisource for original text, beginning الذي وقفنا عليه وعلمناه يقينا أن السريانية والعبرانية والعربية...)

My attention was originally drawn to this remarkable quote by an article by Ahmad Shahlan, in a rather strange Libyan book fusing pan-Arab nationalism with Semitic philology, at-Tanawwu` wal-Wahdah fi l-lahajaati l-`uruubiyyati l-qadiimati, which probably merits a post in its own right at some point.