Arabic loanwords in "proto-Nilo-Saharan"

Ehret 2001 (or see Nostratic.ru) looks at first sight like an astonishingly detailed reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, with nice binary splits and loads of technology-related words for archeologists and anthropologists to sink their teeth into. Why shouldn't specialists take advantage of this amazing opportunity to correlate historical developments to linguistic ones?

I just found a handy answer to that question. Bender (1997:175ff) gives the 15 cognate sets in Ehret 2001 that are represented in the most sub-families of Nilo-Saharan. 3 of the 15 look distinctly like Arabic loans.

1387 *wàs “to grow large”: Fur wassiye “wide” and Songhay wásà “to be wide” are both from Arabic wāsi`- واسع. The other items cited – Ik “stand”, Kanuri “yawn”, Kunama “increase, augment”, and Uduk “to tassel, of corn” – are scarcely obvious candidates for being related to one another in the first place.

1297 *là:l “to call out (to someone)”: Kanuri làn “to abuse, curse” and Songhay láalí “to curse” are obviously from Arabic la`an- لعن; Kunama lal- “to denigrate” might be from the same source. That only leaves Uduk “to persuade, incite to do something” and Proto-Central-Sudanic “to call out”.

718 *t̪íwm “to finish, complete”: almost certainly Songhay tímmè “to be finished”, very likely Uduk t̪ím “to finish”, Ocolo t̪um “to finish”, and maybe even Fur time “total”, are from Arabic tamm- تمّ (impf. -timm-), as Bender (ibid:177) considers probable. That leaves Proto-Central-Sudanic, Kunama, and Maba “all”, Kanuri “ideophone of dying animal” (!), and Proto-Kuliak “buttocks”. The “all” set looks rather promising – the whole etymology, not so much.

There are plenty of other Arabic loanwords in Ehret's “Proto-Nilo-Saharan” – a particularly egregious example is Kanuri zàmzàmíyɑ̀ “leather bottle-shaped water vessel for journeys” (#1223 *zɛ̀m “to become damp, moist”), and other especially clear-cut cases include #1173 < sawṭ, #1185 < šamm – but the fact that they include a significant proportion of the best cognate sets is what really strikes me. If a reconstruction attempt can't distinguish a widely distributed recent loan from a cognate set that split more than eleven thousand years ago, any information it gives about readily diffused items like technologies is completely unreliable. For another review from a similar perspective, try Blench 2000 (not sure why it appeared a year before the book's nominal publication date...)

The more I read about Nilo-Saharan, the less convinced I am that it exists (much less that Songhay belongs to it.) That means the classification of the languages of quite a lot of Africa is basically up for grabs. It would be great to have a reexamination of the area.

Beni-Snous: Two unrelated phonetic forms for every noun?

I got flabberghasted recently by a casual statement in Destaing (1907:212)'s grammar of the Berber dialect of Beni Snous in western Algeria (near Tlemcen). I nearly missed it as I skimmed it; see if you can spot it. (The translation is mine, as are the bits in brackets.) All the numerals above 1 are from Arabic here, but that's nothing surprising - the same is true in Tarifit, and few Berber varieties have retained the numbers above 3.

"The numbers from 2 to 9 inclusive are followed by the Berber noun in the plural [eg]:

two men ..... θnāịẹ́n ịírgǟzĕn
six women ... sttá n tsénnạ̄n
[...]

From "10" to "19" inclusive, the number is followed by the Arabic singular substantive:

eleven women ... aḥdăɛâš ĕrmra (Algerian Arabic mṛa "woman" مرة; contrast Beni Snous Berber θä́mĕṭṭūθ "woman")
fifteen cows ... ḫamstaɛâš ĕrbégra (Algerian Arabic bəgṛa "cow" بڨرة)
sixteen mares ... sttɛâš ĕrɛấuda (Algerian Arabic `əwda "mare" عودة; contrast Beni Snous Berber θáimārθ "mare")

After the number nouns "twenty, thirty, forty" etc., one uses the Arabic substantive[...]

twenty women ... ɛašrîn ĕmra
fifty mules ... ḫamsîn beγla (Algerian Arabic bəγla بغلة "mule")

a thousand rams: âlĕf kebš (Algerian Arabic kəbš كبش "ram"; contrast Beni Snous Berber išérri "ram")"

If I thought it were remotely possible for Destaing's claim to be true of counting every noun in the language - rather than, say, just the six nouns he gives appropriate examples for - I would be putting together an application to head out to Tlemcen instead of making this posting. (I might still do that anyway some time, mind you.) But for rather a lot of minority languages, all or nearly all speakers are bilingual. And if all speakers are bilingual, what in principle is there to prevent the grammar from containing a rule like this?

So I ask: have you ever come across anything similar elsewhere?

Berberologie colloquium at Leiden

I've spent the past couple of days at the Berberologie colloquium in Leiden, and it's been great fun. There were plenty of very interesting speakers, but for me two languages stole the show: Tetserrét and Ghomara.

Tetserrét (discussed by Cécile Lux) is spoken by a Tuareg tribe, the Ayt-Tawari, in Niger. But it's not linguistically Tuareg at all - its closest relative is Zenaga, the Berber of Mauritania (not northern Berber, contrary to Wikipedia), and Tuaregs can't even understand it. It seems to be an isolated survival of the Berber language spoken in the region before the Tuareg got there. It's not in Ethnologue either. (Taine-Cheikh's new Zenaga dictionary is out, by the way, and was selling as fast as a book reasonably can in a conference of twenty people.)

But Ghomara, in northern Morocco, is something else. Across Berber, borrowed Arabic nouns typically behave like in Arabic (keeping their Arabic plurals, and not changing for case.) In Ghomara (discussed by Jamal El Hannouche), Arabic adjectives take Arabic rather than Berber agreement marking - and even some Arabic verbs get conjugated fully in Arabic, not in chance code-switching but regularly by all speakers, and up to and including pronominal object suffixes. It's not quite unprecedented worldwide, but that level of contact influence is pretty darn rare.

I didn't put Tadaksahak in the first paragraph because it's much less unfamiliar to me, but Regula Christiansen's paper on that had some interesting implications. Basically, Tadaksahak has all but lost the Songhay method of forming attributive adjectives; instead, it's substituted a simplified version of the Tuareg one (suffixing -an), which has become productive for Songhay adjectives too. The funny part is this: Songhay has a lot of CVC adjectives (stative verbs). Tuareg doesn't really do CVC adjectives; it prefers longer words. So when you add the -an to these, you typically reduplicate the adjective. For example, kan "be sweet" > kankanan "sweet". This comes worryingly close to invalidating a conjecture I had made on the borrowability of templatic morphology (but not quite!)

My own paper established that much of the Berber element of Kwarandzyey derives from an extinct close relative of Zenaga. In effect, the "Western Berber" genetic subgroup of Berber has four members: Zenaga itself (finally with a decent dictionary), Tetserrét (awaiting further publications), the large Berber element of Hassaniya, and part of the proportionally larger Berber element of Kwarandzyey.

African influence on native Nicaraguan languages!

...and I bet that got your attention, if you're the sort of person who reads this blog.

Ulwa is a language native to the eastern highlands of central Nicaragua, and now spoken mainly in Karawala on the Atlantic coast. It belongs to the small Misumalpan language family, along with Miskito; an interesting characteristic of this family is the position of nominal possessive affixes, which may be suffixed or infixed depending on the word's syllable structure. The Miskito kingdom had a longstanding relationship with the British, as a result of which English Creole is widely spoken on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast; both Miskito and English have influenced Ulwa, as has Spanish of course. You can find a nice dictionary and a brief grammar at the Ulwa Language Home Page.

Anyway, the Ulwa word for "east" turns out to be mâsara. I'm sure some readers will already be thinking of Maghrebi Arabic/Berber mâṣəṛ (from Arabic مِصْر), with reflexes in a variety of West African languages along the lines of masara - meaning Egypt! Unfortunately, a second glance reveals that "west" is mâ âwai, suggesting that maybe mâsara is some kind of compound with mâ. mâ, sure enough, turns out to mean "sun", while sara means "origin". So much for that idea; but what a good example of how a coincidental lookalike can emerge. I can't find any similar way to explain the word for "God", though - which is Alah...

So what about that African loanword I promised? There really is at least one, but it is somewhat less exciting. "Peanut", in Ulwa, is pinda. This word, referring to a post by Polyglot Vegetarian, appears to derive from Kikongo m-pinda, and was borrowed into English as pindar (various spellings) before being ousted by peanut. So this word may have been mediated by English, but is of clear Kikongo origin - sensibly enough, given that peanuts themselves come from Africa. If you want more African loanwords into Caribbean Native American languages, try Garifuna - where the word for "man" is a Bantu loanword.

Prenominal adjective borrowed into Arabic from Persian?

A major interest of mine lately is the way in which lexical borrowings can affect syntax, dragging bits of the source language's word order with them. I came across what looks like a nice example of this in a book on Gulf Arabic. In Kuwaiti dialect, as in all dialects of Arabic, adjectives normally follow the noun. However:

The (Persian) adjective kooš precedes the noun it qualifies. It does not occur in association with defined nouns. It is not inflected for gender or number. Thus:
    kooš walad, bint    a good boy, girl
(T. M. Johnstone, Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, London: Oxford University Press 1967, p. 147.)

Only trouble is, my Persian grammar doesn't say anything about the Persian adjective in question being pre-nominal, and virtually all adjectives in Persian are post-nominal. Does anyone know more about this?

Who has more than 40 words for camels?

Geoffrey Pullum is annoyed to hear a reporter state that "Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel" - not so much for whether it's true or not as because "they are presented as if profound and significant and clearly supportive of exoticizing claims about far-away nomadic peoples like Arabs and Eskimos, when in fact even if they were true they would be utterly unsurprising." I suppose I should point out that it is true - unsurprisingly. I don't know much more than three (Classical) Arabic words for "camel" ('ibil camels in general, jamal male camel, nāqah female camel); but people I can only describe as camel geeks have taken the trouble to post lists of terms for camels of various ages, sexes, colours, and breeds - and there appear to be 38 more terms for female camels classified by their breeding status alone, and another 14 for different Saudi camel breeds (and I'm ignoring at least another 6 lists of specialised terms for camels just on that site.) If I were a professional camel breeder or something (perish the thought!) I would no doubt know all these terms; but otherwise, who needs them?

But "Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel" is nonetheless misleading. People have a habit of thinking of technical vocabularies as aspects of a language - English has n terms for types of dog, Japanese has x terms for types of seaweed, etc. But that doesn't really work. It's not English speakers that have more than thirty terms for places of articulation; it's linguists working in a certain tradition. If they publish in a different language but studied in the same place, they'll just calque or borrow the words; if they cut their teeth on Panini or Sibawayh - in the original or in English translation - they will use a differently organised vocabulary even if they're writing in English. Likewise, an English camel breeder (if such a thing exists) will most likely just borrow the terminology of whichever region he got his camels from wholesale, as sure as an English sushi restaurant will borrow Japanese sushi terminology. Some Fulani tribes have shifted to Songhay - primarily a language of town-dwellers, with few native words for livestock types - but kept their cattle-herding lifestyle; unsurprisingly, they've also kept Fulani's enormous set of words for different types of cow, and not suddenly forgotten how to tell one cow from another. If practically every speaker of a language knows a given technical terminology, then it might make sense to view it as a property of the language; but that certainly isn't the case here.

Tamghazinut

I'm writing my core chapter at the moment on Kwarandzie (Korandje), the Northern Songhay language of Tabelbala. (Ethnologue and basic historical common sense notwithstanding, it is specifically Northern Songhay in ancestry, sharing common innovations with the language of places like In-Gall rather than the city it used to trade extensively with, Timbuktu.) It is very heavily influenced by Berber, like other Northern Songhay languages, and I found a great example the other day: the word for "old woman" is tamghazinut. Amghar is a Berber word meaning "old man"; zinu is a Songhay word meaning "old"; and ta-...-t is a Berber circumfix forming the feminine, which, even though Kwarandzie doesn't have gender agreement of any kind, seems (judging by this remarkable case) to be marginally productive as a derivational affix. (Postvocalic r is regularly lost in Korandje.)

On the map below (which I put together for my thesis using Google Earth and GIMP), you can see something of the geographic improbability of the situation:

Yexisti!

A query on LINGUIST List the other day asked for examples of other languages which, like English, have a verb "exist" distinct from the general-purpose existential "there is". In Algerian Arabic, such a verb has emerged in recent years through borrowing from French - and has enjoyed the rare distinction of being publicly condemned by the president:

"Ma tinsistish", "ma texistish", the President of the Republic repeated, exclaiming: "What is this language?! It's not French, nor Arabic, nor Tamazight." Looking irritated, he added "I've heard some say that this is a matter of Algerian specificities. If so, I refuse as a citizen to be a part of these specificities."
(L'Expression 9 Mar 2006. The quote can't be found on the official record, which just has a general condemnation of the "repulsive jargon we use in our daily dealings, in which it's sometimes hard to find our national language or even our original unadulterated colloquial dialect.")

Silly as it may sound, this borrowing does have advantages. kayen is the usual way of expressing "there is" in Algerian Arabic, but there are contexts in which it simply won't work - you could not reasonably render "I exist" as *kayen ana, or "Homer existed" as kan kayen Homer (any more than "there's me" or "there used to be Homer" really mean the same thing.) You have to have recourse to loanwords for that, whether you use a Classical Arabic word (mawjuud, say) or a French verb.

Anyway, I did a quick web search for examples of this, not expecting much - but it seems that the online corpus of colloquial Algerian Arabic is bigger than you might have thought, and as full of code-switching as you might expect given who is most likely to have web access. Anyway, presidential proscription or not, a number of examples come up:
* hahahaha mazal yexisti had nou3 taa les femmes? (lol does this kind of women still exist?)
* Antik yerhem waldik, can u send me the link of derja dikssiounaire blenglizia ila yexisti bien sour (Antik please can u send me the link of Darja Dictionary in English if it exists of course)
* Hiphop ma zal yexisti (Hiphop still exists)
* en deux mots : ma yexistich en un mot makachou. (In two words: it doesn't exist. In one word: there isn't any.)
* c un ideal li ma yexistich (It's an ideal that doesn't exist)

Note the -i in this verb. In Algerian Arabic, Classical final-y verbs have mostly merged to end in -a in the past 3rd person and -i everywhere else: bka "he cried", yebki "he cries", bkit "I cried", ebki "cry!"; wella "he returned", ywelli "he returns", wellit "I returned", welli "return!". The rest of the stem remains constant throughout the conjugation; only the final vowel changes in such cases. Some of the commonest forms of French verbs happen to end in [e]: j'existais, il existait, exister, existez... So by an interesting compromise, throughout North Africa most French verbs are borrowed as final-y forms: tilifuna "he called", ytilifuni "he calls", tilifunit "I called", tilifuni "call!" (< telephoner). exister is no exception.

I wonder if other dialects have adopted this word too? I found one example from Tunisia, but that scarcely counts as a different dialect...

Back from CamLing

I'm just back from a linguistics conference in Cambridge, CamLing 2007, where I presented a talk on number borrowing in Berber. If you missed it, you can view the slides at my homepage.

The conference was interesting, and I won't go into too much detail on it, but one thing I was surprised and saddened to learn (from Mary Ochoa) was that Yucatec Maya, one of the largest Maya languages, is extremely threatened. It has nearly a million speakers, but, except in the remotest villages, practically all Yucatec children are being spoken to exclusively in Spanish by their parents. Some parents even tell their children not to speak Yucatec or they'll punish them. Like Navajo, another Native American language that was flourishing until lately, it seems to be headed for a massive, rapid decline over the next fifty years.

Slovak diglossia and Papuan Austronesian

If you're interested in diglossia, or sociolinguistics, or prescriptivism - and who isn't? :) - check out Bulbul's latest post on Standard Slovak. Also, a rare linguistics post on Far Outliers discusses the development of the Austronesian languages of the Huon Gulf.

Frananglais in Cameroon - but what exactly is it?

The BBC has recently reported that "Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais - a mixture of French, English and Creole - is affecting the way students speak and write the country's two official languages." An interesting language contact story, in a remarkably multilingual country none of whose own languages are used for official purposes; shame you can read straight through the article without being any the clearer on whether Frananglais is a system in its own right or just what they choose to call the local brand of code-switching between the two. Many of their examples suggest a French syntactic frame with English vocabulary inserted ("Tu as go au school", "Tu play le damba tous les jours?") - raising the possibility that certain English words consistently replace their French counterparts, while others remain in French - but other examples suggest plain old code-switching, ie shifting from one language to another in mid-sentence ("Tout le monde hate me, wey I no know", "je ne suis pas sure about this"). The one other example of frananglais I could find online is very much in line with it having a French frame with English words (and at least one Italian one) inserted, but there simply isn't enough data to see whether the replacement is systematic or ad hoc. I wonder if anyone can tell me :)

Quand je tellais aux djo de came put leur hand dans la marmite ici ,les djo me tellait que je ne suis pas reglo,que sam est un reglo,l'autre que france foot ne prenait pas en consideration de tels votes,et l'autre que je devais plutot appuyer ma petite au lieu de stay ici un saturday afternoon a game come les muna.(au fait moi je l'ai appuyé hier).Je remercie tous les toileurs qui ont sensibilisé le peuple et qui continue a do leur work reglo.Un seul mot....................jusqu'à ce que notre muna soit en haut sur tous les yahoo de ce web.Je vous en prie camez ici sur yahoo italie,la situation se fait inquietante,que les djo des state là quando tout le monde ici en europe nang deja began a do ce qu'ils Know.C'est notre arme segrete,la force du muna c'est le jour,et nous les grands continuons a work meme la nuit grace aux djo des state.J'ai began a speach avec notre frananglais parceque les djo tell qu'ils y'a des Mazembe ici qui boblé nos tactiques et vont les appliquer pour eux memes.Alors il faut qu'on leur show qu'on peut speach sans qu'il ne yah rien..... - Saittout, le 26/10/2006 à 15:33, Lions Indomptables

UPDATE: Language Log has a helpful post on this, citing some literature. See comments also - apparently it is very much a system rather than code-switching.

Aboriginal language of the Ahaggar

Tuareg oral tradition records that, when the Tuareg arrived in the Ahaggar (Hoggar) Mountains of southern Algeria sometime in the first millennium AD, they encountered people called the Isăbătăn - a sparse population of hunters and goat herds, stereotyped in popular anecdotes as stupid. Parts of the Dag-Ghali tribe claim descent from them. What language did they speak? We may never have enough data to know for sure, but Tuareg stories provide possible clues, sometimes putting seemingly nonsensical, or at least non-Tuareg, words into the mouths of Isăbătăn characters. I recently came across an example, quoted from Pandolfi 1998:132 in Kossmann 2005:15 (transcription slightly modified):

Ikkəršərmadən tangarən damadən.
The ants come in and go out.

The morphology of the sentence is Tuareg - -ən is the normal Tuareg masculine plural suffix, while i- is a normal Tuareg nominal plural prefix. But the lexical stems - -kkəršərmad- "ant" (?), tangar- "come in", damad- "go out" - have no obvious Tuareg or broader Berber cognates. Unlikely as it is, it would be interesting if one of my readers happened to recognise an obvious source for these...

Bibliography:
Kossmann, Maarten. 2005. Berber Loanwords in Hausa. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
Pandolfi, Paul. 1998. Les Touaregs de l'Ahaggar (Sahara algérien). Parenté et résidence chez les Dag-Ghali. Paris: Karthala.

The earliest recorded pidgin - Maridi Arabic?

Some years ago, browsing in a bookstore, I came across a mention of a Mauritanian Arabic-based pidgin recorded by the medieval geographer Al-Bakri. For years since, I have been regretting not having written down the details; even reading through a copy of Al Bakri's description of North Africa brought no joy. Today, I finally found the mention again, and managed to track down the original reference - and understand why I didn't find it before...

Al-Bakri (1014-1097) was a noted geographer and less noted writer from Huelva in modern-day Spain. His description of North Africa was the most detailed since Roman times, and his descriptions of West Africa are among the earliest surviving - despite the fact that he himself never seems to have left Spain, relying instead on travellers' descriptions. Only some twelve manuscripts of his greatest work, al-Masālik wal-Mamālik, survive, none complete. The passage containing the pidgin text, unfortunately, is absent from most printed editions of al-Bakri, including every edition that I could find at SOAS: according to Thomason and Elgibali, "we have found our text only in a printed copy of al-Bakrī located in the national library of Egypt in Cairo; this copy is dated 1943, but we do not know who compiled it or - more importantly - what its manuscript source was."

Without further ado, here is the text, as given by Thomason and Elgibali, who apparently found it somewhere in a section describing Aswan and other Egyptian towns:

Someone told me that a dignitary from the people of Aswan used to travel a lot. One day he reached a small town called Maridi. Upon his return, he said to the prince of the believers: 'Sir, may God give you plenty of good and honour your face, here is my case! Its goal is to preserve and spread the word of God. The Blacks have mutilated our beautiful language and spoiled its eloquency [sic] with their twisted tongues. During my visit, Sir - may God protect you - only God's guidance helped me escape the dangers and understand their miserable Arabic. Sometimes, and may God forgive me if I did wrong, I could only laugh at what they called Arabic; and may God forgive me if I call what they uttered Arabic. Listen, Sir:

[and here I add my entirely conjectural vocalisation; for the original, see below] bī waħid yūm rādūl, Dūmā lū 'isim. damal lū 'ū wa bin lū 'ū. 'umnī dī rūħ 'a`adnī bī maħall. kīk lū 'ūl "ħaram, 'inta barbar, bin mū rūħ, 'inta barbar; 'a`adū!" 'umnī damal fū' 'ū, kīk lū 'ūl "ħaram, 'inta barbar, bin 'a`ad, dūmā rūħ." kīk lū 'ūl ħaram 'inta barbar. Dūmā 'ūl: "kīk mū diyyid mū muhī."

One day there was a man whose name was Jumu`a. He had a camel and a son. They were going to stay in a place. People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian! Your son should not walk, you barbarian; seat him!" They were on the camel. People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian!" The son sat and Jumu`a walked. ̂People(?) said to him, "Shame! You are a barbarian!" Jumu`a said "People(?) are neither good nor important."

The prince of the believers ordered that his need be met.

The chances of copyists having mangled this bizarre passage are high; the chances that the printers mangled it (or left out whatever vocalisation might have been present) makes the situation even worse. (Certainly De Slane's edition shows instances of both; thus his īħan Yākūš, given as Berber for "God is one", is almost certainly a mistake for ījan Yākūš, by the omission of a dot.) However, it shows some striking features.

The near-absence of morphology, the apparent presence of tense particles, and the simplification of the phonology are all suggestive of a pidgin, and a pidgin is exactly what one would expect given the nature of the trans-Sahara trade. Phonetically, the substitution of ' for qāf is characteristic of lower Egypt and the Levant, but also of several city dialects in the Maghreb and of Maltese; the substitution of d for j is widespread in upper Egypt, but I know of no modern dialect that has both features. The word kīk scarcely looks like Arabic; Thomason & Elgibali suggest a possible interpretation, based on two etymons reportedly widespread in Nilo-Saharan (koi "person", -k "plural"), as "people".

Where was this pidgin spoken? Unfortunately, the text is thoroughly vague on this point, and Maradi's location is unknown. The paragraph after it is a condensed version of a passage elsewhere in al-Bakri describing the Lamtūna tribe of Mauritania, so Thomason and Elgibali suggest that it was spoken in Mauritania; however, Owens notes that both the phonetics of the text and the attribution to a person from Aswan (not to mention the possible presence of a Nilo-Saharan word) suggest a location somewhere in modern-day Sudan.

Of course, until someone finds the manuscript containing this passage, I will be unable to banish a slight suspicion that this whole passage might be an obscure joke by the printers (whoever they might be - the book in Cairo in question does not appear in Thomason and Elgibali's bibliography) on linguists worldwide... However, if authentic (and it scarcely seems likely that the printers would have made it up), this may well be the earliest attested passage in a pidgin, and certainly the earliest Arabic-based pidgin reported. It also provides an illustration of several rather common responses to pidgins and creoles: the half-shocked half-amused contempt for its differences from the lexifier language, the idea that the pidgin itself constitutes an obstacle to learning that needs to be overcome by education in the lexifier language, and the idea that this latter task is the state's responsibility.

PS (23 Dec): In Arabic, this story is more usually told of Juha; it occurs to me that دوما (Dūmā) may well be a misreading/miscopying of دوها (Dūhā), which would be a plausible rendition of Juha, rather than of the rather unusual name Jumu`a.

Arabic: (unfortunately, the portion given starts at "Sir, may God give you plenty of good"; the typeface is also extraordinarily blurry. I have taken the liberty of adding some punctuation.)

مولاي الخليفة جزاك الله خيرا وأكرم وجهك، إليك قضيتي ومحتواها حفظ كلمة الله ونشرها... فإن السود قد قطعوا اوصال لغتنا الجميلة تقطيعا وأفسدوا بيانها بشرير ألسنتهم المعوجة، فأثناء زيارتي (حفظك الله) كان إلهام الله ووحيه المعينين الوحيدين للنجاة من الأخطار وفهم ما أرادوا قوله لي بعربيتهم المزرية، فأحيانا يا مولاي (وسامحني الله إن أخطئت) كنت لا أملك الضحك على عربيتهم - وليسامحني: الله إن أطلقت على ما نطقوا بها اسم العربية، فاسمع يا سيدي:

بي وحد يوم رادول دوما لو اسم دمل لو او وبن لو او امني دي روح اعدي بي محل كيك لو لوب حرم انت بربر بن مو روح انت بربر لو اعدو امني دمل فوء او كيك لو اول حرم انت بربر بن اعد دوما روح كيك لو اول حرم انت بربر دوما اول كيك مو ديد مو مهي

Bibliography:

• Al-Bakri, Description de l'Afrique septentrionale, M. G. De Slane, trans. (Alger, 1913).
  
• Jonathan Owens. "Arabic-based Pidgins and Creoles", in Contact languages: a wider perspective, ed. Sarah G. Thomason. Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1996.
  
• Sarah G. Thomason and Alaa Elgibali. "Before the Lingua Franca: Pidginized Arabic in the Eleventh Century A.D.". Lingua 68 (1986) 317-349.

Gulf Arabic (and Hindi?) Pidgin

It should be unsurprising that a pidgin trade-Arabic has evolved in the Gulf, given the incredibly large proportion of the population from non-Arabic-speaking countries. But this is the first info I've seen on it online. Not much actual detail (I would add the word siida "straight ahead"), but it also mentions a pidgin Hindi, which is more surprising. Sounds worth investigating...