الف لسان mille langues χιλιοι γλωσσῶν

Magritte

2009-10-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

Ceci n'est plus un blog.

Mauritanian minority languages of the southern Hodh

2009-06-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

Mauritania has a few mythic languages, including Imraguen, used by a coastal fishing group which used dolphins to fish. This you tube video claims to tell the story of how they fish: "With ancient rituals, they call to the dolphins by simulating the sound of leaping fish slapping the water. Finally the dolphins come, driving the mullet before them. Perhaps the dolphins are using the fishermen to gather a feast for themselves, in a spectacular display of interspecies cooperation."
Unfortunately, the Imraguen people only speak normal Hassaniya, though with a purported Azer influence, which has not been confirmed.
Another phantom language, Nemadi, also has a supposed Azer influence - which is actually a bit more likely, since they live in the Western Hodh region which also has a fair number of Soninke speakers, and is adjacent to Mali. More recent work has shown that the Nemadi is probably just Hassaniya with a few technical terms dealing with the hunting which those people do, with dogs no less, to complete the "spectacular display of interspecies cooperation." In Hassaniya they are called Ikokol.
In that same region are some other minority languages -a number of others have commented on Hassaniya language contact in use on the Mauritania-Mali border, I came across some non-linguistic academic work that suggests there is another language that is somehow distinct there. The surprisingly large amount of trade that occurs in the Modibougou market area has obviously led to a need for a trade language, or perhaps a language used by unassimilated Haratine, as this comment on the relationship between Beydhan and the economy of the Southern Hodh suggests:
"An example of the relationship between society and nature may be found in the villages of the southern part of the Hodh, and with which this study is concerned. In the area of rain-fed agriculture along the Mauritanian border with Mali are found numerous Haratine villages, known as adweba (singular debaye). Debaye is an offensive term to urban and politicised black Moors but is apparently perfectly acceptable in rural and remote eastern Mauritania. It is possible that the word derives from the word debba, for a beast of burden. If this is the case the word may be a semantic remnant of slavery itself, and point to a former function of Haratine villages in the southern Hodh. Thus, it is possible that many of the villages in the south of the Hodh were founded as summer grain-growing camps, visited by kabila overlords (Bidan Moors) only at harvest time. Regardless of the actual present legal status of the villagers, the practice of harvest-time visits to Haratine villages by Bidan Moors to receive free handouts of grain continues to this day, as the thesis will show. There are only very few signs that the practice is beginning to be questioned. This intriguing possible reason for the settlement of some villages may be supported by the actual names of some of them. For instance, two of the very largest Haratine villages of the central southern border area of the Hodh el Gharbi, Kerkerette Mohammed Saghir and Kerkerette Amar Beyou, belong to the Mohammed Saghir and Amar Beyou fractions of the Oulad an Nasser kabila respectively. Kerkeru in Bambara means ‘granary’, and kerkerette is the Arabised plural of kerkeru. It is therefore possible that these two large villages were founded as a source of grain for people living far beyond the actual village boundaries."

In addition, though, there seems to be a creole that has developed which is actually the 'mother tongue' of some villages like this one, called J'reif:

The village of Jreif is situated about 9 kilometres north of the border with Mali and about 4 kilometres south-west of the main village of Modibougou. As with Mosfeya, the village is due south of Aioun el Atrouss.
The exact ethnicity of the villagers of Jreif is unclear. The villagers are known locally as اهل الترني, meaning, ‘family of Terenni’. They say that they are of ‘Macina’ origin—presumably after the Macina empire of northern Mali of the 17th and 18th centuries. The story they relate about their origin is that under the leadership of their mysterious first ancestor, Mohammed el Hanchi—a being alleged to have been half-man, half-serpent—they migrated south from Tichit in east central Mauritania to the Aioun area, at the time when the ‘rocks were still wet’ (meaning when the rock escarpments around Aioun had not yet been fully formed, or when ‘the rocks were still soft’). This narrative appears to contain both fact and legend. Then, from a settlement close to the site of modern Aioun, they migrated south to Mali but came north again to their present location in 1905 in order for the men to avoid being drafted into the colonial army by the Malian authorities. The villagers also refer to themselves as Bidan or ‘white’. Almost all villagers have some knowledge of Hassaniyya Arabic, yet among themselves they appear to speak neither Arabic nor Sonninké—their own language appears to be a mixture of the two, possibly with a Berber element. The village seems to be integrated to some extent with the local Moorish kabila structure: they are allied with the Oulad an Nasser clan, yet do not appear to have been slaves at any time in the past, unlike most of the other Haratine villages of the area. Their exact origin remains a mystery, although this is not from want of asking questions.

Thanks goes to Jason Lawton for sharing this field work...

ideophony

2009-06-04T03:42:00.001-07:00

Due to my recent trip to Kenya, Ethiopia and Somali- "we are not Somalia" -land, and a good dose of laziness/uninspiration, I have been silent for far too long, but meeting the famous Ideophone and Jabal, known in the real world as Mark and Lameen, has inspired me to throw up a little something of an effort. Mark was presenting some of his work on the use of Siwu ideophones at SOAS, along with one of his colleagues from the Netherlands, presenting on ideophones in Semai, a Malay language. Some of the ideophones Mark shared that stuck out to me were these contrasting ideophones dealing with burning:
continuous burning: suuuuuuuu
piercing sporadic burning: yuaiuaiuai
This came directly after the use of an ideophone to describe "urinating forcefully out of a small opening" [tsiririri] - I wonder if it was in the same conversation and whether it was the yuaiuaiuai burning sensation, or the suuuuu burning sensation that accompanied the urinating... not that I am a doctor or anything.

One of the other highlights of Mark's presentation for me was hearing some songs in Siwu that contained ideophones, though I leave it to him to explain the meaning of kpia, kpia wagala wagala ee - hopefully he will write a post on ideophones in songs that expands on this one on kananana.

While in Kenya I met a few linguists who were working on languages there, and came across this resource online which has a number of songs, particularly of nomadic Kenyan ethnic groups some of my favorites were this Bajuni one, and another with an amazing lyre called an obokano. This one definitely sounds like it has some ideophones in, but I don't know the first thing about the Gusii language, so it is pure conjecture based on some of the sound patterns - anyone have better ears than I?

Interesting stuff from others

2009-02-24T07:45:00.000-08:00

An interesting post over at jabal al-lughat on a connection between Kwarandzie, Zenaga, and Hassaniya on a word for genie/devil - agwəḍ, pl. igwạḍən -> ugṛuđ̣an (original singular *ugṛuḍ) -> īgṛäwṭən. I am not sure that I have heard this word, though it does resemble iggawen very slightly. On the other hand if one were writing it in Hassaniya it would be أقروطن with a possible substitution of a marked up ك for the ق . I suppose it would be quite far-fetched to say this was a Zenagafied borrowing of قرط , arabic for chives, so I'll have to take Lameen's word for it ;) previous posts this month include one on historical linguistics and the constraints of Fusha. Looks like a mountaintop month!

ትግርኛ : አቡጊዳ or ኣብግድ?

2009-02-19T08:14:00.000-08:00

I have been teaching English to a few Eritrean refugees and they are in turn teaching me some Tigrinya (ትግርኛ) the language of Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. This requires my learning the Ge'ez script of course (YAY!), which I have begun to do before, but never quite had sufficient social motivation, being particularly intimidated by the idea that it is a syllabary. Or is it? Actually it is technically called an abugida, which is sort of like an abjad (mostly the "alphabets" of west Semitic languages such as Arabic or Hebrew) with explicit vowel inclusion in each phoneme. An abjad (from the arabic term for alphabet ابجد), according to the linguistic definition of Peter Daniels is a consonantal alphabet, in which vowels are not normally marked. An Abugida marks all vowels as part of the consonantal grapheme - to the extent that each consonantally-related grapheme is distinct it approaches a true syllabary, but to the extent they are similar, it resembles a vocalized abjad. Most modern "abjads" actually do have letters to represent long vowels, and in cases of ambiguity will mark short vowels with diacritics, which makes it quite difficult to distinguish them from abugidas. Furthermore, pedagogically, abjads are often taught as abugidas - if you have ever heard a child learning the arabic alphabet, they always recite each letter in all its vocalizations separately, as if the mental conception was of an abugida, which was for convenience's sake being transliterated more simply as an abjad. It's actually probably more likely that the influence of religious instruction on early education bears the lion share of the responsibility for the overzealous vocalization. This is borne out by the fact that countries in which arabic is taught exclusively for religious instruction are prone to hypercorrection of case endings, a primary occasion in which consonants are normally unvocalized except in very formal speech/writing. Thus Muslim West Africa is replete with 'Aminatou's, 'Khadijetou's, 'Abdoullahi's, and 'Mamadou's rather than 'Amina's, 'Khadija's, 'Abdallah's, and 'Muhammad's. We can see this is hypercorrection of case endings, because as the transformation Muhammad -> Mamadou shows us, whole syllables are left out elsewhere - even more striking in the transformation Abdallah -> Abdoullahi -> Ablai.
But the point of this digression was that the spectrum from Alphabet to Syllabary is far from clear, and the distinction between abjad and abugida can be particularly arbitrary. It may have more to do with
historical development of transcription of spoken language and the diachronous sociology of writing in the different cultures than with linguistic structure. In the first place, abjads come from Phoenician, but so does Greek, for that matter - the first "Pure Alphabet." But, I just happened to be reading a bit of greek the other day, and was reminded that in fact it may not be so alphabetic as it seems, structurally speaking. I always felt like all of the different verbal forms somehow made sense in the way that different Arabic verbal forms make sense with their tri-consonantal roots. The word which reminded me of this was γεγραπται (gegraptai) a middle perfect form of γραφω (grafo) which to me evokes a verbal system based on tri-consonantal roots - in this case g-r-p. Obviously all the vowels are written out, but there is something about the forms which always felt reminiscent of Arabic verbs, and subsequently easier for me to remember. And of course with the letter order α, β, γ, δ of course it could fit the bill - though maybe (for sheer variety) we should call it an αβαγδα, reminiscent of αβαγνα - untrodden. This works well with the multidirectional early writing of greek, making it a writing system untrodden upon by the turning oxen: a Boustrophedal abagda.

Arabinglizia

2008-10-27T05:41:00.000-07:00

I love hybrid language, in all its forms, but when it is written, it can be especially creative. It took me a little while to notice that the CNN logo here also spelled out بالعربية bi 'l-'arabiya in Arabic, but I think the 7-up designers take the cake with this one, which still looks like the 7-up logo until you look closely and see that the 7 is actually أب (though with 3 dots below) and then the rest is seven (I suppose it would ruin it to put in سبع instead). The question is whether any Arabic speakers would be confused and think it was more closely related to the number 6 which looks like a 7 in what we call Arabic numerals. Actually both systems are Hindu-Arabic, and the one used in the west came to Europe through the Maghreb and Andalusia, whereas, Eastern Arabic countries continued to use a number system more closely related to the Hindi original.

الامويّر

2008-10-24T03:42:00.000-07:00

I came across a french cultural group which has a similar name: "Mille et Une Langues" and offers language classes in Lyon. They also founded a group called KoToPo, which is probably both a creative acronym and a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria and Cameroon (where it is known as Peere).
But this then led me to another site on the Mille et Une Langues du Petit Prince which makes the astounding claim that the Little Prince is the best-selling work of fiction in the world. On our them of books I had to check that out, and verify it with the librass: In fact it does not come on any sort of top ten according to Wikipedia's list, nor according to Russel Ash's top 10 o f everythin g which I remember reading quite a while back and being surprised that the "What Would Jesus Do?" book was number 9. (Incidentally I bought a postcard 2 days ago on the WWJD? theme - slightly irreverent, but not as bad as th is). But I digress... The bit that was interesting about the Little Prince was that it has been translated into 150 many languages, and especially now (drum roll please...) Amazigh! It was disappointing to find out that Le Petit Prince wasn't originally written in French, despite it being Saint-Exupery's mother tongue - that my well have been the first book I ever read in French. But back to the Amazigh Principito, which is in Tifinagh script, and translated by a Québecois Moroccan, Fouad Lahbib. Though I haven't gotten very far in my berber studies, it appears that the title is Aglden not the article's stated Ageldun Amezzan. Which made me wonder if this is just the diminutive of Prince (as in Principito) or if the title is cut off. I think it sounds better with a diminutive rather than two words, and was really hoping I would find some creative Arabic diminutives, like امويّر (amweyer) as we might hear in Hassaniya. Instead, the only creativity was a disappointing replacement of رحالة for امير by one of the syrian translators... the only other noteworthy section of the little prince article was this bit on Argentinian language Toba: Il y a deux ans, la parution du Petit Prince en toba, dialecte parlé par une petite communauté aborigène du nord de l’Argentine et intitulé So Shiyaxawolec Nta’a, a permis aux membres de cette communauté de pouvoir lire autre chose que le Nouveau Testament.

Wir Philologen

2008-10-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

The ideophone's post about the fad among late 19th century philologists to dabble in African linguistics reminded me of this, my favorite passage of Nietzsche:

Griechen und Philologen.

Die Griechen huldigen der Schönheit
sie entwickeln den Leib
sie sprechen gut
religiöse Verklärer des Alltäglichen
Hörer und Schauer
für das Symbolische
freie Männlichkeit
reiner Blick in die Welt
Pessimisten des Gedankens

Philologen sind Schwätzer und Tändler.
hässliche Gehege.
Stammler.
schmutzige Pedanten.
Wortklauber und Nachteulen.
Unfähigkeit zur Symbolik
Staatssclaven mit Inbrunst
verzwickte Christen
Philister

BiblioBurro

2008-10-20T06:57:00.000-07:00

This Colombian bibliophile brings a new meaning to the term portmanteau with his rural walking library, which could best be translated as a "librass." Uses of portmanteau ("un galicismo que significa 'palabra combinada'"), which are not as common in Spanish as in English, (despite my own frequent encounters with and usages of Portanol recently). However the way of forming acronyms in Spanish speaking countries, as well as many other places in the world is very portmanteau-like. The English idea of acronyms taking one letter from each word is rarely true in the rest of the world, and produces what I think are much worse sounding names - like URL (earl?). Even with english's few cooler-sounding acronyms, the extra letters here and there in Spanish acronyms have the benefit of clarifying what the actual composition of the acronym is - most english speakers probably don't even know that laser stands for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation, not to mention radar and scuba...
May the Biblioburro march on!

The NYT article which brought this article to my attention ends with a stanza from Rubén Darío's poem "A Margarita Debayle":

A MARGARITA DEBAYLE

Margarita, está linda la mar,
y el viento
lleva esencia sutil de azahar;
yo siento
en el alma una alondra cantar;
tu acento.
Margarita, te voy a contar
un cuento.

Este era un rey que tenía
un palacio de diamantes,
una tienda hecha del día
y un rebaño de elefantes.

Un kiosko de malaquita,
un gran manto de tisú,
y una gentil princesita,
tan bonita,
Margarita,
tan bonita como tú.

Una tarde la princesa
vio una estrella aparecer;
la princesa era traviesa
y la quiso ir a coger.

La quería para hacerla
decorar un prendedor,
con un verso y una perla,
una pluma y una flor.

Las princesas primorosas
se parecen mucho a ti.
Cortan lirios, cortan rosas,
cortan astros. Son así.

Pues se fue la niña bella,
bajo el cielo y sobre el mar,
a cortar la blanca estrella
que la hacía suspirar.

Y siguió camino arriba,
por la luna y más allá;
mas lo malo es que ella iba
sin permiso del papá.

Cuando estuvo ya de vuelta
de los parques del Señor,
se miraba toda envuelta
en un dulce resplandor.

Y el rey dijo: "¿Qué te has hecho?
Te he buscado y no te hallé;
y ¿qué tienes en el pecho,
que encendido se te ve?"

La princesa no mentía,
y así, dijo la verdad:
" Fui a cortar la estrella mía
a la azul inmensidad."

Y el rey clama: "¿No te he dicho
que el azul no hay que tocar?
¡ Qué locura! ¡Qué capricho!
El Señor se va a enojar."

Y dice ella: "No hubo intento:
yo me fui no sé por qué;
por las olas y en el viento
fui a la estrella y la corté."

Y el papá dice enojado:
" Un castigo has de tener:
vuelve al cielo, y lo robado
vas ahora a devolver."

La princesa se entristece
por su dulce flor de luz,
cuando entonces aparece
sonriendo el buen Jesús.

Y así dice: "En mis campiñas
esa rosa le ofrecí:
son mis flores de las niñas
que al soñar piensan en mí."

Viste el rey ropas brillantes,
y luego hace desfilar
cuatrocientos elefantes
a la orilla de la mar.

La princesa está bella,
pues ya tiene el prendedor,
en que lucen, con la estrella,
verso, perla, pluma y flor.

Margarita, está linda la mar,
y el viento
lleva esencia sutil de azahar:
tu aliento

Ya que lejos de mí vas a estar
guarda, niña, un gentil pensamiento
al que un día te quiso contar
un cuento.

Rubén Darío (1908)

A Margarita Debayle

Margarita, how beautiful the sea is:
still and blue.
The orange blossom in the breezes
drifting through.
The skylark in its glory
has your accent too:
Here, Margarita, is a story
made for you.

A king there was and far away,
with a palace of diamonds
and a shopfront made of day.
He had a herd of elephants,

A kiosk, more, of malachite,
and a robe of rarest hue
also a princess who was light
of thought and beautiful as you.

But one afternoon the princess
saw high in the heavens appear
a star, and being mischievous,
resolved at once to have it near.

It would form the centrepiece
of a brooch hung with verse, pearl,
feathers, flowers: a caprice
of course of a little girl.

But also, because a princess,
exquisite, delicate like you,
the others then cut irises
roses, asters: as girls do.

But, alas, our little one went far
across the sea, beneath the sky,
and all to cut the one white star
that, high up, made her sigh.

She went beyond where the heavens are
and to the moon said, au revoir.
How naughty to have flown so far
without the permission of Papa.

She returned at last, and though gone
from the high heavens of accord,
still there hung about and shone
the soft brilliance of our Lord.

Which the king noted, said: you,
child, drive me past despair,
but what is that strange, shining dew
on your hands, your face, your hair?

She spoke the truth; her words shine
with the clear lightness of the air:
I went to seek what should be mine
in that blue immensity up there.

Are then the heavens for our display,
with things that you must touch?
You can be altogether too outré,
child, for God to like you much.

To hear that I am sorry, truly,
for I had no plans as such. But,
once across the windy sky and sea
so I had that flower to cut.

Whereupon, in punishment,
the king said, I'd be much beholden
if you'd go this moment and consent
to return what you have stolen.

So sad was then our little princess
looking at her sweet flower of light,
until and smiling at her distress
there stood the Lord Jesus Christ.

Those fields are as I willed them,
and your rose but signatory
to the flowers up there that children
have in dreaming formed of me.

Again the king is laughing, brilliant
in his robes's rich royalty,
he troops the herd of elephant,
in their four hundred, by the sea.

Adored and delicate, the princess
is once more a little girl
who keeps for brooch the star and, yes,
the flowers, and the feathers, the pearl.

Beautiful, Margarita, the sea is,
still and blue:
with your sweet breath have all the breezes
blossomed too.

Now soon from me and far you'll be,
but, little one, stay true
to a gentle thought made a story
once for you.

Rubén Darío (1908)

Translator: C. John Holcombe (2005-2006)

note azahar - great arabic loan word (الزهر)

Indiana Jones and the inaccurate depiction of pre-Columbian America

2008-05-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Quite to my surprise, I found out that the new Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull movie which premieres in the US tomorrow, opened here today, so I got to see it at one fifth the price of what it would have been back in the states... and free arabic subtitles to boot.

Some of the linguistic aspects of the movie were a bit laughable to be honest. First there was the combination of ancient Mayan and modern Quechua, which are not from the same areas at all. They seemed to be intending to mix the Norte Chico civilization of the 3rd millenium BC with the Incan empire (both of Peru), and then throwing in some random meso-american nonsense (is this where they got the strange alien connection). There doesn't seem to be any record of a pre-Incan (written) language, despite the fact that the Andes were one of the world's 6 indigenous developments of civilization. The stereotypical quest for El Dorado reminded me of the strange and dare I say creepy Werner Herzog film "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes" (Wrath of God).

Triglossia, and cinematic linguistics

2008-05-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Enough of this "diglossia" business, I want something a little more challenging. Let's try "tri-" !

Actually, while I was thinking about the whole diglossia issue a month ago with my friend in Switzerland, we shot a short film called "Anatomy of a decision" in which three characters act out the internal "monologue" of an individual whose will, reason, and emotions are debating... in three different languages of course. You can see it here. The quality is not great so it is tough to see what is going on visually, but the figures (all of them played by me) are supposed to appear as hollow mesh mannequins hovering over a brook. They are conversing (trilingually) about whether they should answer the phone call that was just made. My favorite line was that of the emotions, saying (in Spanish): "Or maybe it's the police asking me to identify a body at the morgue!"

But enough tooting of my own horn... I have been meaning to do a little movie review of "The Linguists" which I saw the UK premiere of at SOAS just last week in London, with commentary and Q&A by Swarthmore prof David Harrison. David said the inspiration for the film was the feeling of a couple Jewish filmmakers that Yiddish was dying. When they realized actually it wasn't, they decided to try to do a movie on some languages that actually were.

Here is a further convo with David about dying languages:

I thought the Bolivian language Kallawaya was the most interesting (and in true praeteritian fashion I will gloss over the appalling fact that though David and Greg claim to speak 33 languages between them, they don't know spanish!). The Kallawaya language, which even Bolivian linguists believed to be dead, or absorbed into Quechua, is actually passed down only through transmission from Adult-male medicine men to adolescent male trainees. I am not sure what one would call this sort of unnatural language transmission, but it reminds me of Lameen's observation about Kwarandzie, that it is only learned in adolescence, and only used in certain social situations (and I guess football matches and occult healing ceremonies are both frenzied religious experiences in a manner of speaking). So the question is what does one call that kind of language acquisition, where no "native speakers" learn the language from birth? Any suggestions? Could they be "latent languages," or "teenanguages," to take the portmanteau a bit further?

Diglossia

2008-04-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

It seems from some of the comments on the previous post, that there is some confusion on what diglossia actually is, and after looking into it a bit more, I see that it is with good reason, given the international nature of the input, and the different ways the term has been used historically. It comes to English through the French use of diglossie which is an adaptation, introduced by the Greek-French writer Jean Psichari (Ioannis Psikharis), of the Modern Greek διγλωσσία, which simply means ‘bilingualism.’ The French philologist Auguste Dozon already commented in 1889, in reviewing Psichari’s work, that the only possible rendition of διγλωσσία would be bilinguisme, which he however characterized as a mot barbare, and which did not become current in French until the linguist Antoine Meillet used it in 1917. It is a matter of semantics and technical usage to differentiate between these two words anyways, since bilingua is basically a Latin calque for the Greek διγλωσσία (but one which I personally identify with as significant, as I distance myself from my philologist friends in jest by identifying as a linguaphile - a mixed metaphor if you will). The term was not really used in a technical linguistic sense until 1959 by Charles Ferguson, though this was not broadly accepted as standard. In fact, in 1959 the word ‘diglossia’ was present in unabridged dictionaries (such as Webster’s Third International) with ‘condition of the tongue being bifid’ as its only meaning, while the linguistic term ‘diglossy’ was being used at least by linguists specializing in Greek, for example P. C. Costas, and continued to be so used after the publication of Ferguson’s paper, for example by Robert Browning. It is only in dictionaries published in 2000 or later that the sociolinguistic meaning of ‘diglossia’ can be found. Diglossia has settled into a more or less accepted usage that includes both a pair of languages which are quite genetically unrelated, as well as variations (I avoid 'dialects' because it is more often a literary standard or Dachsprache and a colloquial that form the pair).

Thus diglossia continues to be used ambiguously to refer to a continuum from stable bilingualism and ambilingualism, to code-switching and register change, all of it dependent on the specific languages involved and how discrete from one another they are considered to be (often based on somewhat arbitrary governmental policies concerning what is an 'official language'). I will not pretend to know anything about Finnish, but one of the funniest examples (I am told) is the Helsinki public transportation website which can be accessed in 'Suomeksi' and 'Slangi':

Reittiopas neuvoo perille
Reittiopas ehdottaa reittejä kahden valitsemasi paikan välille pääkaupunkiseudun joukkoliikennettä käyttäen.
Syötä lähtöpaikka ja määränpää tekstikenttiin. Paikka voi olla katuosoite, pysäkki tai paikannimi. Voit myös valita paikat kartalta tai hakemistosta.

Reissugaidi viisi vuotta!
Stadin kielellä joukkoliikennetietoutta tulkkaava Reittioppaan slangiversio juhli vappuna viisivuotissynttäreitään. Lue käyttäjien kommentteja Reissugaidista vuosien varrelta.

Just comparing this brief introduction in the two registers (which manifestly can both be written, though this is probably the exception to the rule) shows that there are numerous differences in word choice and order, and as someone who doesn't know the language, if I saw these two texts and knew nothing else, I would guess they were somewhat related, but certainly not the identical language.
In any case the fundamental definition of a language is significant to this discussion, but this will never be decided definitively because it is dependent on locally significant socio-political realities rather than linguistic principles. For the purpose of this question there should at least be a clear way of distinguishing between communities which extensively use two genetically (in terms of nuclear language family) unrelated manners of speech and communities which switch between closely related manners of speech.
For this it may be worthwhile to use the Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache continuum which refers to the social relationships among languages. I would characterize simultaneous use of two Ausbausprache (referring to their both being used - though perhaps to differing extents in spoken and written and educational contexts, such that they are each independent), as in Quechua-Spanish in South America, French-English in Quebec, Arabic-Spanish/Latin/Portuguese-Hebrew in Andalusia, Kabyle-Arabic in Algeria, Wolof-French in Senegal, etc. need not be classified as diglossia, since the term stable bilingualism sufficiently covers those situations. An Abstandsprache - Abstandsprache or Abstandsprache -Ausbausprache combination, might debatably describe some of the above, but would be certainly true of Guarani-Portuguese in Brazil (and possibly in Paraguay with Spanish, I am not sure how much Guarani is written and taught there), Pulaar or Soninke - French in Mauritania, Siswati - English in Swaziland, (and undoubtedly many languages in Africa that are not written extensively, alongside either lingua franca like Swahili, or colonial languages). This would be what Joshua Fishman calls "extended diglossia."
However this is problematic, because it doesn't acount for the fact that in a diglossic case like Arabic, you have numerous variants which are Abstand towards one another because they are mutually unintelligible, but they share the Modern Standard Arabic Dachsprache. Thus, they are almost as equally 'extended' in terms of intelligibility as an Abstand - Ausbau pair would be, but they are genetically related. Furthermore, the pairs of "extended diglossia" are qualitatively different than coexistent variants of the same language (using the term broadly). They in fact represent a case of linguistic co-dependence, where the primarily spoken language either does not have the cultural prestige or the commercial utility to merit the study and attention of the written Ausbausprache. Thus the situation should be described as co-dependent bilingualism (which from a sociological perspective does insinuate a certain dysfunctionality, or at least instability which is not true of the cases of "stable bilingualism").
I posit that it is more significant and precise to classify Abstand-Dachsprache cases such as the famous Kathaveroussa-Dimotiki in Greece (before the mid 20th century), Catalan-Spanish in Northern Spain, Schweizedeutsch - Hochdeutsch in Switzerland, Arabic dialects - MS Arabic across North Africa and the Middle East, etc. as diglossia not as a statement that Catalan is not a language (for example), but as a way of preserving the uniqueness of the term as a marker that differentiates itself from bilingualism in the relatively rare cases where the historical occurence of two different manners of speaking reflects diachronous standardizations/fossilizations of language, rather than contact between unrelated languages.

whirlwind tour of the world

2008-04-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

when I last wrote I was on my way to Mauritania, and I did in fact make it there, via Qatar to Morrocco and overland down to Nouakchott. On the always interesting stretch through the Western Sahara, I got to chat with some Hassaniya-speaking young men who were all too eager to share some poetry sha'bi with me, including not just givan but tulha, which are more like full sonnets where the gaf is simply a quatrain:
اصبر يا عقلي لا بعاد
وكر المدقوق بلا عنان
واصبر محدّاك بين زاد
اقلاب الدوقج ساكن
واصبر تشواشك لا نزاد
ولى حرك من ساكن
هذا ما كُن يغير بعد
أل؟ فخلاقي ما كُن
ماهو ما كُن فخلاق حد
احزيمُ ماهو ماكُن
سبحان الله الاشوي
عاد إلزم كفسارة
هذا ميجك؟ ما زال حي
وأقليبات الفرفارة

from the Tiris ( تيرس ) region...
I wish I could translate this accurately for you, but I have forgotten their explanation at the time, and too manz of the words are unfamiliar for me to spin it off right now... but on to more hassaniya poetry... this is one of my favorite tongue/twister givan:
سالكة من ورقتها تيات
وسلامة لهذاها الهاها
الهاها الين الهاها
نسات الناس لهذاها

Salecka from her leaves made tea
and Salama from over here [went] over there
that one there if over there
she forgot the ones over here

interpretation: Salecka was making atai (Mauritanian foamy espresso green tea with mint) and she spotted her buddy Salama (who in more suggestive versions of the poem is a man not a woman) over yonder. She was so preoccupied with her over there that she got the people nearby who she was making tea for. I'll have to confess I don't totally understand all the grammar and whatnot, but it always draws lots of exclamations of uskiin from the beydhan.

... carrying right along, I ended up losing my passport, getting stuck in Morocco, and ultimately denied entrance into the Sudan because of my emergency passport, and their unwillingness to accept my former residency and work permit and everything else. They even had the gall to write on my deportation papers "questionable or forged documents."

After finding out it would take a while to get a real passport with an acceptable visa, I figured I should take the opportunity to visit a friend who happened to be in Spain, my favorite phonologist and Finn, in Zaragoza, i.e. Tharagotha (homeland of Zarathustra, as one friend claimed). This city is a great example of mudejarismo, but I didn't really get a great opportunity to check that out... though I did get a bit of a start on Finnish language, which some say is magical...
I was particularly interested in the reality of diglossia among Finnish speakers - the written language is quite different from the spoken language, even to the extent that if you are learning Finnish from a book, the greeting they will teach will be "hei," when in reality people would only say "moi." As I travelled on through Barcelona, and then Switzerland, I realized that there is a surprising amount of diglossia going on around Europe. Catalan is now being written more, but it seems as though most all books and longer writing is Spanish, while in Switzerland there is quite a difference between the swizzedeutsch and spoken altedeutsch. Sure, everybody has to use a slightly different register between writing and speech, but I would have thought, there would be a tendency towards convergence, except in the cases like Arabic, where the spoken dialects are spread over many different countries. It seems like there is instead a more general move towards convergence in written language norms, and divergence in spoken language... which leads to greater difference for each individual between their speech and their writing.
Well, that is a summary of the last month, which also has seen the momentous return of bulbulovo to the blogosphere, most recently with an interesting post on foreign languages in "Law and Order."

bilad shinqit

2008-03-14T06:26:00.000-07:00

I regret that I have been negligent in posting the last month, but I have been away from internet access much of that time, and busy with humanitarian more of the time, and then losing my mind the rest of the time. But now I am going on holiday for a bit, and where would I go but... you guessed it : Mauritania! Having lived there for 2 years I really miss the place, and I can't wait to get back into a little Hassaniya... I have a soft spot in my heart for all the mixed up french/zenaga/wolof/arabic messiness, and most of all the occasionally poetry, known as givan (sing. - gaf) passed back and forth of glasses of sweet minty green tea. here are are a fewI still remember:

متنقلي ميات ذشهر
ومتنقلي بعد اوطاني
شوف نجمة واشهرعلامة موريتاني
mutanagli miat dha shhar
wa mutanagli ba'd watani
shouf nejma w'ashhar
'alamat muritani
Missing the end of the month
and missing yet my homeland
look, the star and half-moon
the standard of Mauritania
...and for your empty stomachs missing your favorite lunch:
اشبه القوت
مارو والحوت
بط من الماء
وسبما
ashbah al-qout
maro wal hout
batt min al-ma
wa soppema
The best of meals
is a fish and rice
a bottle of water
and cabbage
... and for the francophones out there, from the famous polyglot poet of chinguetti:
اراد عنك تو لفوا
والامحان بوركوا
انت لارن
وانا لاروا
arad 'annik,
tu le vois
w'al-amhan pourquoi
anti la reine,
w'ana le roi
I want you, you see
and the proof why is
you are the queen,
and I am the king

on the second one there are two Wolof words (from what I am told - my knowledge of Wolof is quite rudimentary) - "maro" is rice, and "soppema" is cabbage.
more givan to come in the next week hopefully!

Browne's Nubian bible

2008-02-11T22:48:00.000-08:00

I had a lot of trouble uploading this and had to compress it - I hope you can still see it...

Nubian Comparison

2008-02-11T22:28:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the kind and prolific Ideophone, I now have some new Nubian texts to compare to the mysterious inscription I have been writing about. Gerald M. Browne's "Old Nubian Grammar" is probably the most helpful work out there on Nubian, and Mark Dingemanse (the man behind the expressives) was kind enough to scan a dozen pages of it for me (before going off to catch the African Cup final, which once again was taken by a country which only considers itself African [at least socially] when it comes to sports ;), which included a couple of passages from Nubian translations of the Bible. A comparative analysis of the actual Nubian with the locally found inscription (well probably not local from Darfur, but brought from somewhere else in Sudan), reveals that the inscription could be Nubian, containing a lot of abbreviations, and possibly some letters used as numbers (accounting for the consonant strings). The strange vowel patterns which I commented on earlier were also consistent with some of the Nubian vowel groupings or diphthongs, but from what I could tell, there were not any identifiable Nubian words, nor were there any clearly Nubian letters, so I really couldn't discount the possibility of Coptic (since there are quite a few Coptic letters, and otherwise the letterforms are identical). I am leaning toward thinking the general text is not religious, since of all the Greek words only αναπαυσις is almost definitely religious in nature (signifying a certain type of prayer which requires standing up for a long time I believe), and it occurred to me that its use could be a prescription of prayer for someone who is sick perhaps the Πετρονος whom I had earlier been assuming was actually referring to the Biblical apostle Peter, but could just as well be someone simply named after him. In the next few weeks I will look for some Coptic texts online, and report on any findings of similarities there, but if you are able to pick out any common words between Browne's publication of the Nubian grammar, and the inscription, please let me know. I might even give a prize.

Multi-liingual poetry

2008-02-07T21:29:00.000-08:00

Language Hat's post concerning Antoine Cassar's Muzajk or "Mosaics" appearing in Chimaera was quite an inspiring exercise in interlinguality (as opposed to intertextuality) and reminded me of a poem I wrote while part of Kuumba quite a while ago which includes ten languages used in a very pastiche style, with a spoken word rhythm:

why do I learn another language?
so that I can share in your anguish;
A sorrow shared is half a sorrow;
but who can share sorrow in a language borrowed
"O si vous avez des yeux que vos yeux s'emplissent de larmes."[i]
But they don't have eyes: they don't see the harm
in everyone speaking their language
atrophied as their minds languish
at your feet is the same damned dish
of second hand adverbs and adjectives.
Day after day the same prison food to the non-native tongue tastes so crude
unable to express the subtlety of my mood
"I'm not trying to be rude I read all the way through to Jude
but there was no Revelation
I was expecting some kind of elevation
but you gave me French when I needed Haitian."
I can't describe the sensation that I saw
when I sang "Chamo Kwoni gibala”[ii]
with Nairobi’s orphans I can't describe the sensation that I saw
when I sang "Nkosi sikelele Africa"[iii] with Desmond Tutu
I can't describe the sensation that I saw when I sang
"Kwaze kwa wonakala"[iv] with a Kenyan woman exiled in Columbus
I can't describe the sensation that I saw “Jesu da ho ya”[v]
I can't describe the sensation that I saw “Hol no mbitiye da”[vi]
I can't describe the sensation that I saw…
because I didn't feel it, except vicariously
Oh how the mother tongue must hang precariously
on the lips of a motherless child who's too scared to sleep.

Yes, a sorrow shared is half a sorrow
weeping may remain for a night
but rejoicing, tomorrow.
because the other half of the proverb's also right:
Joy shared is twice a joy…

[i] “O if you have eyes, may your eyes fill with tears” – Chants Kabylie 1982 Anonymous Algerian Poet

[ii] The opening line of a traditional Kenyan song in Luo (?) a Bantu language spoken by a minority of Kenyans. The song is about a monkey stealing fruit; an arrangement by Mwashuma Nyatta ’02 was performed by the Kuumba Singers in the spring of 2002.

[iii] “God Bless Africa” – Xhosa, the opening line of the South African National Anthem

[iv] First line from a Swahili Christian song – “When He comes I will be like Him”

[v] Christian song in Kikuyu, a Kenyan language spoken by the largest ethnic group of Kenya

[vi] “What is your Name” – Pulaar, a West African Language

More on Nubian (and the claimed connection with Fur)

2008-02-04T02:12:00.000-08:00

I have looked a little more at the Nubian text, which I laboriously pieced together from about a dozen pictures I took of a stone tablet at a local museum (the former palace of Sultan Ali Dinar, in fact), and then attempted to decipher. I am afraid to say that I am actually not totally convinced that it is Nubian, since the only letter I can make out that might not be Coptic is a double-gamma, which is in fact not at all what a Nubian double gamma (representing ŋ) should look like - the second gamma should be rotated to the bottom so the letter looks like a bracket, but instead appears to be simply two gammas appended horizontally (see lines 10 and 11 for the clearest examples). So I thought for a minute it could actually be Coptic rather than Nubian (or even some other language written with a Coptic script for that matter). On the other hand it may be that in your average religious text (which is the theme of most extant Nubian texts) there would be so many loan words from Greek and Coptic, that very few of the uniquely Nubian sounds would show up. Unfortunately I can't back this hypothesis up, since I don't have access to any other Nubian texts, but I would bet on this pretty heavily.
The little that I can make out for sure from the text is a bit of Greek religious terminology:
pa,wni
de[potn
anapaucic
petronoc

...besides this there are a lot of perplexing strings of letters to be honest, and I am not necessarily even sure where to put the word breaks. What this makes me think is that perhaps this is either an early Nubian text before there was any sort of standardizing of the orthography. Perhaps it is an early attempt to approximate the spoken language, which makes me wonder if some of the difficulty, or repetition of letters is an attempt to render the tones of the language. All currently spoken languages of the Nubian family are tonal, so Ancient Nubian also must have been tonal, but there is no evidence of that having been marked in any way. What if early attempts at writing it like this, experimented in that? The only other possibility that comes to mind is that the consonant clusters represent strangely abbreviated words (there is one string of 8 consonants in a row 6 lines from the bottom). In addition to the strange consonants there are some pretty implausible dipthongs... how would you pronounce "uoiai"?
Finally, to revisit my somewhat preposterous assertion that Fur might be another Nubian language, having arrived in the region along with Midob, and then diverged under the influence of the Jebel Marra "accretion zone" languages. The first thing I was thinking of was merely the sounds of Fur consonants:

	bilabial	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
plosive, voiceless	p	t		k	(ʔ)
plosive, voiced	b	d	ʒ [dʒ]	g
fricative, voiceless		s			(h)
fricative, voiced		z
nasal	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
liquid	w	l, r	j

these seem to match up pretty exactly with Nubian, except for a few sounds in Nubian which are not in Fur, but are probably mostly for Greek loan words (like ξ, χ). I still have not gotten around to doing much of a lexical analysis since I have been quite busy here, doing health/nutrition and education projects here in Darfur... as well as entertaining other interests like the OLPC (the first G1G1 recipient of Darfur, if you've been following that project). Anyone else involved in i18n or L10n projects for Saharan and Sahelian languages? I am really interested to get my XO running in Arabic...

Zaghawa

2008-02-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

In light of the impending overthrow of Idriss Deby, the world's richest Zaghawa, and the continuing violence in Chad (most likely supported by Sudan) I wanted to write a follow-up post on Zaghawa. I was finally able to get the sound values for the Zaghawa Beria Alphabet that I wrote about before:

A B P S CD E F G H I J K L M N X O R T U Y W Z

A b p s c d e f g h i j k l m n x o r t u y w z

a b p s š/ʃ d e f g h i j k l m n ɲ/ñ o r t u y w ŋ

These are taken from camel brandings, as I mentioned earlier, and I can not figure out why there would be capital letters and lowercase letters, but in the only text I have access to, it seems to be used as it would in French (Chad being a francophone country). This one text I have, entitled "La Vendeuse de Lait" starts:

Kubayni, bagu oh barta ni geni ru / key key-gini. Ber kettié, oh kigo / narení.

More on the rest of the text, and some translation later, when I have a chance to talk to one of my Zaghawa staff people who has informed me that he, like other Beria, are a very different group of Zaghawa than the "wange" power mongerers like Deby and Minni Minnawi (whom he considers traitors for having signed the Bogus peace deal with Khartoum).

الخواجي

2008-02-01T02:58:00.000-08:00

A little random, but I just thought I would try my hand at translating a little TS Eliot into Arabic, using a few terms that I thought were funny, including "khawaji" for stranger, since this is what all of the sudanese children shout at foreigners passing by. But I don't let them get away with it

انتم تتجاهلون وتستصغرون البادية
البادية ليست بعيد في الاقاليم الاقسى الجنوبية
البادية ليست حول الركن بس

البادية مرصص في "التوب" القطاع بجنبك
البادية في قلب اخك

تسمح لي ابين لك شغلة المتوضع. اسمع.

في الاماكن الخاوية
نبنى بطوب جديد

اي حياة عندكم، لو ليست حياة جميعا ؟
اي حياة عندكم، لو ليست حياة جميعا ؟

حيث سقط الطوب
نبنى بحجر جديد
حيث رمّت الرافدة
نبنى بخشب جديد
حيث سكت القول
نبنى بنطق جديد.
هناك شغل جميعا
كنيسة للكل
وعمل لكل واحد

اي حياة عندكم، لو ليس حياة جميعا؟
لم يوجد حياة غير جماعية،
ولم يوجد جمعة لا تعيش في حمد الله.

والآن تعيشون اباديد على الطرق
ولا شخصاً يعرف جاره او يهتم له مَن جاره
إلا إن جاره بلبله كثير
لكن كل يجرون كذا وكذاك بسيارة
عارفين الطرق ولا وطنوا ايهم

كثير للتفريق وكثير للبناء وللرد.
اعطيتكم قدرة الاختيار وتبادلون
بين تنظير خائب وفعلة ما معتبرة

والريح يقول: "هنا كان شعب متعدل وملحاد
اثرهم الوحيد الزلط
والف قرة جولف مفقود."

ولما يقول الخواجي: "ما معنى هذه المدينة
انتم تتقربون لانكم تحبّ بعضكم البعض؟"
ماذا تتجوبون؟ "نعيش جميعا كلنا
لنتبدل الفلوس، وهذه الجمعة؟"

يا نفسي تستعد لمجئ الخواجي
يا نفسي تستعد لمجئ الخواجي

يا نفسي تستعد لمجئ الخواجي

تستعد نفسك للذي يعرف يطرح لك أسئلة

χιλιοι γλωσσων

2008-01-12T03:19:00.000-08:00

I was quite unaware that my blog had been garnering any attention from other language bloggers, though quite happy to have links from Mark Dingemanse and Lameen Souag - whose specialties are not far from my own (if I can even claim a specialty - dilettante that I am). When I found out however that Language Hat had also picked up on my random writings, I was quite surprised, and then even concerned at the scrutiny that my pastiche of a title was being subjected to - admittedly I may not have been thinking in a very rigorous grammatical sense when I wrote it, but rather the intertexts which the phraseology may suggest. Because of this I do still stand by χιλιοι γλωσσων as the Greek version of my title, despite the helpful suggestions that χιλιαι γλωσσων, χιλιαι γλωσσαι or χιλιος γλωσσων might be better.
I chose the trilingual title because each of the phrases echoed something which I wanted to invoke in this blog... obviously the arabic الف لسان (alf lisan - I only used "elf" in the URL because I thought it looked better than "alf" - a terrible TV show) echoes الف ليلة و ليلة (alf layla wa layla - a thousand and one nights)

يا ملك الزمان وفريد العصر والأوان أني جاريتك ولي ألف ليلة وليلة وأنا أحدثك بحديث تمني يا شهرزاد فصاحت على الدادات والطواشية…

O king of time and peerless one of all ages and epochs, I have been near to you for a thousand nights and a night, while I told you tales “To your heart’s content, o Shehrazad” [The King said] and she waxed eloquent to the wet-nurses and the eunuchs…

(certainly the authenticity of the thousand and one nights is suspect as an Arabic collection, but it is, for better or for worse, how early modern Europe was re-introduced to the Arabic-speaking world.)
I think it also evokes the early arabic poetic form of the الفيّة (alfiyya) - a wonderful example of which Lameen comments on here.
With French I thought mille langues echoed mille-feuille, the multi-layered dessert whose sumptuousness merits mention, as we don't use our tongues exclusively for talking - and I had to put in some language with a romance script.
ِThe Greek was actually taken from the Koiné New Testament, a reference which I thought would be more obvious when I wrote "tithe of the myriad manners of expression," since the word tithe (i.e. a donation of one-tenth of one's income) is not really used widely today except in churches, and myriad is obviously from μυριος. This specific pair of words does not occur together, admittedly, but it echoes this passage in the αποκαλυψις (which I consider a pretty nice picture of heaven):
Μετὰ ταῦτα εἶδον, καὶ ἰδοὺ ὄχλος πολύς, ὃν ἀριθμῆσαι αὐτὸν οὐδεὶς ἐδύνατο, ἐκ παντὸς ἔθνους καὶ φυλῶν καὶ λαῶν καὶ γλωσσῶν, ἑστῶτες ἐνώπιον τοῦ θρόνου καὶ ἐνώπιον τοῦ ἀρνίου, περιβεβλημένους στολὰς λευκάς, καὶ φοίνικες ἐν ταῖς χερσὶν αὐτῶν·
[After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude, which no one could number, out of all nations and kindreds and people and tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palms in their hands. - Revelations 7:9]

...and since I wanted to get "thousand" in their somehow, for consistency's sake, I had to replace οχλος with something used similarly, and χιλιοι echoed the τετρακισχιλιοι and πεντακισχιλιοι, who are mentioned elsewhere in the NT - I thought that would be more interesting to paste the two together and keep the intertextual continuity, rather than the internal consistency of the grammar, which I don't think is wrong, but it is certainly not the best way of expressing it in Greek, barring all other considerations.
I do appreciate the attention, and I hope that I can prove in a future post that I am not entirely a slouch when it comes to classical and medieval Greek, but for now I leave you with my favorite quote from the Odyssey, which actually has come in handy as a form of literary self-defense in my travels:

“Αντίνο', ου μὲν καλὰ καὶ εσθλὸς εὼν αγορεύεις:
τίς γὰρ δὴ ξεινον καλει άλλοθεν αυτὸς επελθὼν
άλλον γ', ει μὴ των οὶ δημιοεργοὶ έασι,
μάντιν ὴ ιητηρα κακων ὴ τέκτονα δούρων,
ὴ καὶ θέσπιν αοιδόν, ό κεν τέρπησιν αείδων;
ουτοι γὰρ κλητοί γε βροτων επ' απείρονα γαιαν.
πτωχὸν δ' ουκ αν τις καλέοι τρύξοντα ὲαυτόν .”

“Antinous, no fair words are these thou speakest, noble though thou art.
Who, pray, of himself ever seeks out and bids a stranger from abroad,
unless it be one of those that are masters of some public craft,
a prophet, or a healer of ills, or a builder, aye,
Or a divine minstrel, who gives delight with his song?
For these men are bidden all over the boundless earth;
But no one is likely to ask a beggar who will only worry him.”
-Eumaios, Odyssey17.381-387 (transl. A.T. Murray, Loeb Edition)

Nilo-Saharan and the Sahel

2008-01-09T22:26:00.001-08:00

So, it seems as though (from my relatively amateur perspective) languages of the Sahara and Sahel are particularly hard to classify, whether because of the relative lack of data already mined on them, or because of the inherent difficulties in the languages in finding conclusive similarities. Sociologically and anthropologically speaking, both of these probably have a lot to do with the relatively sparse populations in the region. The more contact, the more linguistic similarity one would presume, and the less contact, the less discernible links - except the region has historically been peopled by nomads and traders who traverse vast expanses and therefore have contact with languages from the Mediterranean to the jungle, and the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The dramatic climatic changes over time also complicate things to some extent, especially the further back you go. So the classification of many languages, or clusters of languages, is very unresolved.
The classification of languages could seem esoteric and irrelevant, but what if it could lead to a decrease in ethnic tensions, through more widespread understanding of the common roots of groups that see themselves as separated and opposed since time immemorial? This particularly tends to be the case between nomads and more sedentary groups, who are often so culturally tied to their occupational identities that they associate with any group of that occupation more than neighboring ethnic groups with whom they have lived in symbiosis for years. My favorite example of this sort of is a Fulani (Fuuta Toro) friend who said that the shepherds to whom the birth of Jesus was first announced by angels (as in the famous christmas carol “Angels we have Heard on High”), were Fulani. He stopped short of saying that King Herod (who tries to kill baby Jesus later in the story) was a Beydhani, but the recent memory of les évènements (’87 – ’91) had definitely colored his memory of centuries of co-existence as bitter.

On the other side of the Sahel, here in Darfur, we are seeing the extermination and absorption of minority ethnic groups, and what has been termed ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs. In Alexander De Waal’s book “Darfur: A short history of a long war,” (which is by far the best and most in-depth analysis of the history of a convoluted and confusing conflict) he reveals internal documents of the nomadic Arabic-speaking tribes, which indicate that they see themselves as Sudan’s only pure Arabs, and that their attempts to purify Darfur of non-Arabs is only the first step toward purging the entire country’s power structure of the dominant riverain Arabs.

Perhaps I am too hopeful in the possibility of linguistic analysis bringing about change, but this is the motivation that pushes me to explore the relationships of some of these languages, and of particularly are the Nubian languages, Meroitic, and Fur. Perhaps a later analysis will look at wider Sahelian trends through language groups such as Fulani, Tuareg, and Songhay (maybe with some help from Jabal al-Lughat and the Ideophone?). Specifically, my question is how the Nubian languages could be so widespread geographically within Sudan without evidence of other attendant elements of the culture having expanded, and without having had a greater overlap with Meroitic.

The common historical reconstruction of what happened is that at some point long ago (at le, the Nubian languages dispersed, and a major part of the family ended up in the Nile Valley and succeeded what remained of the Meroitic Empire. This is covered in the proceedings of a 1981 conference organized by Ehret and Posnansky, the reviewer of whose publication articulates thus:
“When and how [was] the Meroitic kingdom on the Nile penetrated and largely resettled by Nubians from Kordofan and Darfur? The conclusion reached is that, rather than a process of rough and rapid conquest narrowly anticipating that by the Aksumites of King Ezana, most of the Nubians arrived as peaceful settlers five or six hundred years earlier, at a time when the country between the first and third cataracts was temporarily underpopulated. The idea which is persuasively presented by William Adams, seems to have occurred to him in connection with the absence of archeological data for the first millennium BC revealed by all the elaborate surveys undertaken in preparation for the Aswan High Dam. It took shape when he studied the glottochronological evidence for the divergence of the Nobiin and Dongolawi languages, for which a linguistic paper by Robin Thelwall provides the wider background.”

Yet this does not fit with the obvious textual evidence that shows a gap between Meroitic and Nubian cultures (Note that there is evidence of Nubian inscriptions before the 8^th C. but not “texts” per se):

“The corpus of Meroitic Late texts can be dated to circa 5th century CE whereas the Old Nubian corpus extends from the 8th century CE (Browne 2002). The texts of Old Nubian and Meroitic are only distanced by a few hundred years. Diachronically this small length of time would allow us to see the relatedness of these languages if indeed they were, although the attempts to position Meroitic as an ancestor of Old Nubian have always resulted in disappointment for those who have chosen to pursue this line of investigation.” (Rowan 2006)

Though we can determine that Meroitic and Nubian are not very related linguistically, it seems likely that Nubia appropriated a lot of the imperial infrastructure left over from Meroe. They almost certainly did not co-exist along the Nile for the 1500 years that Adams proposes before the Nubians suddenly rose to prominence. However it is also unlikely that the Nubian languages spread to their current dispersal before they developed their writing system, given Arkell’s findings of Nubian inscriptions and pottery shards as far west as Dongola and Eastern Darfur, which one would have to date to (at earliest) the 10^th c. CE. This would seem to indicate a late dispersal date, but what drives the assumption that all the Nubian population movements occurred simultaneously? The Nuba Mountains branch of Nubian languages including Dilling, Ghulfan, and Kadaru seems likely to have been the center of gravity of the family, a theory supported by the fact that there exist the most number of dialects of Nubian here in a relatively small geographical area (the Nuba Mountains seem to be an “accretion zone” as Nichols describes it), and that there are no traces of any writing or other material cultural influence in these areas.

“For a long time it was assumed that the Nubian peoples dispersed from the Nile Valley to the south, probably at the time of the downfall of the Christian kingdoms. However, comparative lexicostatistic research in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that the spread must have been in the opposite direction (Thelwall 1982, Adams 1982, among others). Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2,500 years ago. This account is corroborated by non-linguistic evidence — for example, the oral tradition of the Shaiqiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile-Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago.” (Wiki)

In fact the Shaiqiya are quite significant further for the linguistic evidence found among a subgroup, the Nidayfab, which preserved many Nubianisms in a collection of legal documents from the early 19^th c. See Jay Spaulding’s “The Old Shaiqi Language in Historical Perspective.” for more of the specifics, but the key point is that until relatively recently, the Shaiqi and all riverain Arabs saw their identity as autochthonously Sudanese (and thus part of the Meroitic- Nubian Political continuity) rather than Arab.

So perhaps we can say that about 2500 years ago, a large number of Nubians went from the Nuba Mountains northward, but did not arrive to the area which the Meroitic empire was inhabiting until after it was destroyed by Aksum, at which point they saw an opening to establish themselves in the vacuum left behind… but in order to fill the large shoes left behind for them, they had to have a language and material culture to match their predecessors, but wanted to be a part of the global economy, which required Greek, so they borrowed Greek letters via Coptic and added 3 Meroitic letters for good measure, putting forth a standard literary language. This clearly would not have reflected the diversity of the different dialects which composed the greater Nubian empire (actually 3 sub-empires, of Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia), and the limited nature of Nubian writings (religious texts, political proclamations, and a few contracts) makes it likely that their was a vast discrepancy between spoken and written Nubian, and that this diglossia reflects the current diversity in modern riverain Nubian dialects, namely between Kenuzi-Dongolawi, and Nobiin, which probably represent two different empires. This diglossia and diversity of dialects also may explain why the subsequent move of the mysteriously stranded Darfurian dialects of Nubian could have occurred so late, and been accompanied by material evidence (the above mentioned inscriptions detailed by Arkell) and seem so lexically distant from the other strands. I suggest that not only did Midob and Birgid (now extinct) leave toward the waning of the Nubian empires in response to pressure from without, but that these were not the only Nubian languages to have moved out there, and that others have become extinct (like Birgid), and others remain to be classified as Nubian languages… And here’s where it gets crazy – I think the Fur language has significant Nubian influence both lexically and otherwise. The (as-yet unpublished) Fur dictionary I have is poorly organized and not conducive to searching, so more in depth analysis will be forthcoming from that angle, but superficially speaking, Fur and the Nubian languages both have a limited range of tones, they share some plural formations (Fur has multiple) and the ascendancy of the Fur Sultanate not long after the Nubian empire’s demise, in the midst of a jumble of different ethnic groups smacks of some sort of transmission of imperial memory.

To take it back to the meta-level and summarize, a language family (Nubian) within the Nilo-Saharan phylum originates in an accretion zone (Nuba Mountains) with contact with a number of Niger-Kordofanian* language families, then moves into an area dominated by languages within the Afro-Asiatic stock* (Meroitic, then Arabic) until most of the speakers adopted the dominant Semitic language. Some however migrated to an area which was again a Niger-Kordofanian dominated accretion zone (Jebel Marra) where their languages became heavily influenced by these languages until the dominance of Arabic again overtook them. The repeated and prolonged contact of this Nilo-Saharan language family with Niger Kordofanian languages contributes to the extensive lexical similarities noted by Blench in his designation of a Niger-Saharan macrophylum.

*Johanna Nichols has much more on the classification of "quasi-stocks" Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic here:

The type-defining example is probably Niger-Kordofanian, a set of families
and stocks mostly of sub-Saharan Africa including the Bantu family (Bendor-
Samuel 1989, Greenberg 1963), discussed below. The genetic marker of
Niger-Kordofanian is its complex systems of generally prefixal genders (also
called concord classes), in which there are particular prefixes for particular
classes and systematic correspondences between singular and plural concord
classes. The system is shared widely among the daughter branches and is identifiable
as a system even when individual elements are greatly changed or lost.
This kind of gender system is quite specific and quite rare worldwide and thus
useful as a genetic marker. Yet systematic sound correspondences and regular
lexical reconstructability are absent from Niger-Kordofanian, the internal
structure of the genetic tree is still in doubt...
An atypically stock-like quasi-stock is Afroasiatic, another African group
established by Greenberg (1963). It consists of the families Chadic and Berber,
the isolate Egyptian, the Semitic stock, a likely isolate Beja, a stock or pair of
stocks Cushitic, and possibly the family Omotic (see e.g. Bender 1989, Newman
1980). The Afroasiatic quasi-stock has a distinctive grammatical signature
that includes several morphological features at least two of which independently
suffice statistically to show genetic relatedness beyond any reasonable
doubt (the entire set is listed inNewman 1980; for statistical significance,
see Newman 1980 and Nichols 1996). Hence it is routinely accepted as a genetic
grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be
found and a received reconstruction may never be possible.

Egyptian Fur

2008-01-01T11:45:00.000-08:00

I was able to find quite a lot of material in Khartoum on the Fur language, the most interesting (though not necessarily most accurate) of which is a book by Dr. Idriss Yusuf Ahmed published in Arabic first in 2001 by New Star Printing House in Khartoum with a second printing by The Key Publishing House in Toronto, Ontario. Unfortunately they neither use the extended arabic letters for sounds that do not occur in standard Arabic, nor is there any attempt made to represent the tones.

I’ll include the most salient selections as I get to them, but I had to start with this list which made me just about roll on the floor laughing, though I defer to the judgment of the reader as to the plausibility of the connections:

Ancient Pharaonic influences on the Fur language:

Fur Language	Ancient Pharaonic Language	Meaning
Kwufuu	khufu	wind, breeze
Sing fi naro	sinfaro	“does what he says”
Uroum	alharam	mound
Toponyms:
Usou aan	Aswan	wait for the signal
Ubwa Simbla	Abu Simbel	black grandmother*
Jasis ah	Giza	“built for you”

(mentions al-abanus which has an interesting history of being borrowed into Coptic from greek, though it originally came from the demotic hbny)

The source of the information is given as Professor Zekariah Sayf al-Din of Nyala, South Darfur

Lunfardo

2007-12-27T00:37:00.000-08:00

On a little break in Khartoum for Christmas, and I was listening to some Gotan project … and “gotan” is tango, in the “vesre” Spanish which the RioPlatense area is most known for, particularly Buenos Aires, where it is incorporated into a very elaborate slang system known as Lunfardo. Tango music and dance is so closely associated with Lunfardo, that one could say that today this is its main function, as new, less localized slang systems come into use among youth, which don’t have much to do with Lunfardo. The onrush of Italian immigrants to Argentina between 1880 and 1900 brought Buenos Aires’ population to around 40% Italian, which inevitably led to a sort of pidgin, which became known (or at least parodied) as cocoliche, supposedly after a certain Antonio Cuccoliccio whose speech was mocked and imitated by comedian Celestino Petray to great applause:

“Mi quiamo Franchisque Cocoliche e sono creolio hasta lo güese da la taba e la canilla de lo caracuse, amico.”

Many of these Cocoliche terms came to be incorporated into the general slang, which was developing concurrently with the use of vesre, germanía, jeringonza as well as guaraní and other indigenous languages, and other external influences around the seedy underbelly of the Buenos Aires crime world, which seems to have been the milieu in which tango was most popular. The best place for a lot of glosses on Lunfardo words is the Spanish "gotan glosario". But the Spanish wiki site has much more in-depth descriptions of the formations and etymologies of the words, including this one on cop slang:

Cana

Police. Word of unknown origin from Lunfardo of unknown etymology. Could come from the Portuguese “encanado” which is to say: “imprisoned in a jail cell made of canes (sticks).” In fact the term cana is used with identical meaning in Brazil. Before it was very widespread among tango writers in their lyrics, and today it is in frequent use among the whole population. The Lunfardo word cana seems to be abbreviated from canario, a word already used in spain since the 16^th c. at least (Cervantes mentions it with the meaning of ‘cantor’ – delegate or confidante of the police), others suggest that the etimology is founding the French word canne (rod, stick, i.e. billy club/nightstick) as a metonymy for the stick which police use.

Other versions indicate that it was because of the mistreatment of retired police because of the small quantity of the same (i.e. sticks?). Upon seeing the color of their skin, the robbers made fun of them saying “canosos” or “canas.”

Order to the “cana” means at the same time “send to prison” and by extension, accuse (or with a certain comic tone) put someone to trial who has made some misstep, for example: “Cacho did some sort of nonsense and Juana accused him (lo mando en cana) in front of everyone.” On the other hand “batir la cana” or “dar la canaveri” could mean omit or leave out an intention or act that one wants to keep secret.

(see also cobani, vesre for abanico)

for more language games do not see Ludwig Wittgenstein. His language-games are not very fun.

code writing

2007-12-20T03:06:00.000-08:00

One of the things which first got me into languages I think, was writing in code as a kid... my friends and I used to make up all sorts of codes for secret communication, and even as I got older I still felt like speaking in a foreign language was some sort of code which allowed me a greater freedom to say anything I wanted. But recently I was trying to come up with a way of writing that would be a more or less private code, utilizing an already existing writing system and a language I already know. Obviously writing any romance language with an Arabic script has a precedent and anything written in a relatively widely used script would not take long to figure out, so I started looking for "mutually exclusive" languages. One of my initial impulses was to try to write Arabic with Hangul script, since there is almost no logical social, political, or economic reason anyone would know both of those languages, but there were just too many sounds that couldn't be represented accurately. My next attempt, which I undertook a bit more seriously, was writing Arabic in Georgian script, because why make up a script when you can use an existing one that looks made up?


Letters	Unicode	Name	IPA
ა	U+10D0	an	/a/
ბ	U+10D1	ban	/b/
გ	U+10D2	gan	/ɡ/
დ	U+10D3	don	/d/
ე	U+10D4	en	/ɛ/
ვ	U+10D5	vin	/v/
ზ	U+10D6	zen	/z/
თ	U+10D7	tan	/t̪ʰ/
ი	U+10D8	in	/ɪ/
კ	U+10D9	k’an	/kʼ/
ლ	U+10DA	las	/l/
მ	U+10DB	man	/m/
ნ	U+10DC	nar	/n/
ო	U+10DD	on	/ɔ/
პ	U+10DE	par	/pʼ/
ჟ	U+10DF	žan	/ʒ/
რ	U+10E0	rae	/r/
ს	U+10E1	san	/s/
ტ	U+10E2	t’ar	/t̪ʼ/
უ	U+10E3	un	/ʊ/
ფ	U+10E4	par	/pʰ/
ქ	U+10E5	kan	/kʰ/
ღ	U+10E6	ɣan	/ɣ/
ყ	U+10E7	q’ar	/qʼ/
შ	U+10E8	šin	/ʃ/
ჩ	U+10E9	čin	/ʧ/
ც	U+10EA	can	/ʦʰ/
ძ	U+10EB	ʒil	/ʣ/
წ	U+10EC	c’il	/ʦʼ/
ჭ	U+10ED	č’ar	/ʧʼ/
ხ	U+10EE	xan	/x/
ჯ	U+10EF	ǯan	/ʤ/
ჰ	U+10F0	hae	/h/

The Georgian alphabet has almost enough parallel sounds to cover all the arabic phonemes:

ا ა

ب ბ

ت თ

ث ტ

ج ჯ

ح ჰ

خ ხ

د დ

ذ ძ

ر რ

ز ზ

س ს

ش შ

ص ს

ض დ

ط თ

ظ მ

غ ღ

ف კ

ق ყ

ك ქ

ل ლ

م მ

ن ნ

و უ

ي ი

ه

as you can see I wasn't quite sure what to do about the 'ayn and the ha, but beyond that was a deeper issue of historical Arabic-Georgian interaction. While most people focus on the translation movement from Greek to Arabic in the 9-12 centuries due to the recent attention by Dimitri Gutas and the like, at roughly the same time Arabic Christian thought was being preserved by Georgian monks:
...from the modern scholarly point of view, one of the most important contributions of Georgian monks in the Judean desert monasteries, particularly in the early Islamic period, was their activity as translators. Numerous texts, originally written in Greek and Arabic, have survived into modern times only because they have been preserved in Georgian translations.
(from Griffith, 1997)
So, that might be one reason why Georgian-Arabic wouldn't be such a great combination for a tough to crack language code, but I imagine most of those Arabic-reading Georgian monks are dead now. Referring to the Linguistic Mystic's manual on cryptorthography I am tempted to throw a little Cyrillic in there, but I think it is too commonly known, and again there are a lot of Arabic sounds that aren't accounted for.
Short of stooping to "extinct" languages like Nubian, or recently invented scripts for languages that have almost never been written, like Zaghawa, I am not out of brilliant ideas. There must be some efficient way of finding the 2 most widely spoken languages with the least number of common speakers... any guesses?

Tonal languages of Darfur

2007-12-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

I got back from a field trip to a rural area which is predominantly Fur, and close to the heart of the ancient Fur kingdom/Sultanate in Jebel Marra, and I was able to pick up a fair amount of Fur on the trip, but I didn't realize until speaking with some staff members back in El Fasher that Fur is a tonal language!! They showed me 7 words that are very similar and the main distinguishing feature is the tonal difference, or minor consonantal differences which are almost imperceptible to non-native speakers. Here is my loose attempt at reproducing the sounds with the symbols I could find... (the đ is supposed to be an almost emphatic d, not quite as strong as a ض but I couldn't find the d with the dot underneath Unicode character, so I wasn't really sure how else to represent it). Also the superscript l (thunder) is supposed to be a very light afterthought of a sound:

dēj - a lalub tree

déi - male goat

đêj - oil

déĩ - ant (NB Darfuri Arabic = darr)

dëi¹ - thunder

đēwi - tail

đeui - grass

I was surprised that I hadn't perceived it was a tonal language at first, and in fact I had assumed that none of the languages of the area were really tonal, but in fact it seems quite common... it is also part of Masalit, which you would be able to see (if one could paste accurately from PDF files) in this story recorded by John Edgar in a study on Masalit storytelling:

k e l i m b e l l i m b o singeim waka. k e l i k o r n an g s i n g e i odoore.
girls boys-with wood-loc they-went. girls getting-up wood they-collect.
The girls and boys went to the woods. The girls started to collect wood.

kimamba duu a n y a n e l d l t i k e l a koko singm toyoona. anyaneldi
bop self gum-arabic he-saw going wood-loc he-climbed. gum-arabic
One boy saw a gum-arabic tree and went and climbed up it. He tried to

a w u l te ru tend tokomingi koogi tudona.
I-take-shall saying he-did hornbill eye it-plucked-out.
take the tree (as firewood), but a hombill (that was in the tree) plucked out his eye

suru koogi fong ken karaa s a r g i n kar tununga. s i n g e i
descending eye cover doing girl back coming he-stopped. wood
He got down and, covering his eye, came and stopped behind a girl. She was

toniede. s i n g e i t i r t e n a . kimamba ngo tirnanga: a i a i k o o g i
she-chops. w00d splinter it-did. boy thus he-said: ah ah eye
chopping wood. The wood splintered. The boy said thus: 'Ah ah, you put

mbalodaga! h i l l e m wakaamolo baabata t e n d e l a . kibinu
me-you-put-out. village-loc they-came-jfrom father-his he-told. seizing
out my eye!' When they reached the village, he told his father. Taking

karailimbd j i z e h a . kimadAaga. l e i l e t o mucota
girl that-with marriage they-made. child they-hore. day one wife-his
the girl, they married her with that one. They had a child. One day, his wife

kima Auwd ( n i i b i n d ) saamtaka. kambaa g i kimakuld
child giver (seizer) well-loc she-went. husband this child taking
gave him the baby and went to the well. The husband took the child and

t i A j i k a r i g g o t e r E : tokomiggikima andlya,
he-dandles thus he-says: hornbill child me-gave,
dandled it (on his knees) and said thus (singing): 'The hombill gave me a child;

kaa koikindag k o i t o k o m i g g i k i s a r i a . ndokom ndokom!
people all you-exist-if all hornbill you-play-not. dee dunz dee dum!
people, never play with the hombill. Dee dum, dee dum! '

monjokolatd j a a r i i n i y e ( t a g i t a muiljetagiinimolo) a j i
old-woman one neighhour (house-her near house-their-fronz) song
A certain old woman whose house was near to their house heard the song and,

t ~ i n a g akimakarawosaammolotaramolo tordga a j i kambata
she-heard child girl-the wellfronz she-came-fronz she-called song hushar~d-of
when the girl came back from the well, called her and related to her all of the

k o i t e n d e l a . k a r a g i baabata Tendela, k a a g g i i l u
all she-told. girl this father-her she-told. nzan that
husband's song. The girl then told it to her father. They (the community)

wandarbasiga.
they-made-separate.
divorced them.

five-oh

2007-12-06T00:11:00.000-08:00

Ever since I lived in Golden Gate park at the end of Haight St. in SF for a week, I have been interested in what people call police officers as slang, and what that says about their relationship with them. One of my fellow inhabitants in the park had the words "F*CK PIGS" tattooed on his knuckles. I also frequently heard "six-up" shouted right before people scrambled to hide their illegal possessions, followed by a police car cruising by to pick anyone up. "Six-up," I was told referred to the six lights in the siren on the top of the car. Then of course, there is "five-oh" which is originally a police radio code, which came into common parlance because of the TV program "Hawaii 50 [five-oh]." There are probably dozens more English terms for police (maybe hundreds if you count local variations from around the world) but I am more interested in what they are in other languages.
In French, the only two slang words I know of for this are "flic" and "cochon," which should be "cilf" and "chonco" in verlan (the french equivalent of pig latin, perhaps appropriately more sophisticated and complex). Instead "flic" becomes "keuf" which is apparently a parallel reconstruction to match the sounds of "meuf" for "femme," "teupo" for "pote," and "beur" for "arabe." I have heard plenty of examples of "cochon," but I don't remember any particularly of the verlan version, though unless it was in La Haine, a great french movie which goes into the banlieues of Paris to look at the climate of French race relations, which seem to be as much a powderkeg today as they were then. It is hard to say whether "cochon" is simply a calque of english "pig," picked up through TV, or if the idea that police officers are swine is just part of universal human consciousness. As for "flic," this is quite a common term, and may not even be considered slang. I wish I could tell the reader what it comes from... but I haven't heard of anything.
I am really interested in the Arabic slang terms though, as this has been a little more inaccessible socially. People either consciously self-censor candid terms around me about the authorities since I am so obviously an outsider, and they may not be sure which "side" I am on; or it could be a sub-conscious avoidance of more familiar register. So I was pleasantly surprised to be introduced to some relevant terms today:

[bomba] "cops" roughly - بمبا
emprison?, round up - خبس
- الابيضspecial police intelligence forces

the scenario being described was like so:

شماشة 1 الى شماشة 2: تفقفق يا زول البمبا خبس
شماشة 2 الى شماشة 1:كيف! المراة ذي كان مع الابيض انا قت لك
...
شماشة 2 الى زول تاني: انت فرد والناس منقرد

shamasha 1 ila shamasha 2: tafugfug ya zul, al-bumba khabas!
shamasha 2 ila shamasha 1: kayf! al-marra dhi kan ma' al-abyadh ana gutt lek
...
shamasha 2 ila zul tani : anta farda wa-'n-nas mangarda

hoodlum 1 to hoodlum 2 : scram! the police are on the prowl!

hoodlum 2 to hoodlum 1 : How!? That woman must have been a spy!
... (running away)
hoodlum 2 to another dude: oh buddy, you are the only friend I can count on!

Nubian text

2007-12-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

n??tepoonia(d)mpp[u>te

lpmiouogocmptniu paipet

??afehoueiammayemduouit

????satanho. nt?ujoocyiteihe

n?mpemeoomatwradmi je

ticoukahek(ic)naicoticonepicah.

Nteihehitmieficeteuciceafm

Toniomoonoipenhociwtatoo

Neiwtaiycoupepicicopoo

Han auopmina,ocyeigggg[[(pp)dm

Nooyjoywq(p) apeboit(gg) pa,wni

Pezooun ticuoiaicy nou?cou

Denjoco ntokhep de[poty

Mptyoyriei?e]naunanapaucic

impicounfnadua ammniowc

mni,iond nefpomoeeit

wlih li,mpgmnnnempate i

jiyt,irodoniantmn?iepicr

pocetyn auhmoocdee

petronoc e ggi do nei

pezetyros e ty o

okly ?ne

n??tepo oniamppsu te

?lp miou ogosmptniu paipet

aheHoueiammaéemduouit

shatankho. nt?édzoosniteiHe

n?mpe meo omatô radmi dze

tisou kaHek(is) naiso tiso nepisaH

ntei HeHitmi ehiseteusis eahm

toniomo onoipen Hosiôtato o-

neiôta insoupepis isopo o-

Hanau opmina khosneitshdm

nooé dzoé ôhpa pebong pakhôni

pezooun tisuoi aisn nou?sou

deédzoso ntokHep detshpoté

mptnpnriei? eTnaun anapausis

impisou nfnadua ammniôs

mnikhiond nefpompeeit

ôliH likhmg mnnnempate i-

dzint khirod oniantmn? iepisr-

posetén auHmoosdee

petronos e ngi do nei

pezetérosh e té o

oklé ?ne

Here is my first attempt at deciphering this inscription, and I thought I would be able to make some sense of it between the greek and some of the local stuff, but I think I am going to need a lexicon of some sort, and unless there is one online, I am up a crick without a paddle... or in an isolated place without a dictionary, as the case may be.

more speculation about the content upcoming...

Nubian text

2007-12-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

This is an old Nubian text I came across at the local museum (actually the former palace of Sultan Ali Dinar). It is almost certainly from somewhere closer to the Nile Valley, but it is interesting that they would have that in a local museum, marked "Sandstone with Greek Inscription" no less! When I can get a font for Nubian script, I will transcribe it and make my best guess at a translation...

Midob

2007-12-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

In addition to the wonderfully rich Sudanese Arabic colloquialisms that wrapped up the last post, I have the pleasure of access to half a dozen other languages about which relatively little research has been done. Of all these none happens to be more interesting and more accessible than Midob, or Tidd-náal, as they call themselves. One of my closest neighbors is tiddi, and I came upon a locally-published monograph on everything Midob entitled Qabilat al-Midob: taht mijhar al-bahth “The Tribe of the Midob: under the microscope of research,” by al-Hajj Adam ‘Abdallah Hassan. While most of the work is based on collective memory of the recent past, and it does quote some western historians about the more distant past (including “English historian Makmaykel”), the author does valorize oral history:

الجزء المدون من تاريخ الميدوب قليل ونادر واغلبها تعتمد على الروايات الشفوية فاجداد الميدوب يقولون انهم اتو من دنقلا ويدعي ال(كارقوى شلكوتا( بانهم من المحس (سكوت) ومنه اشتقوا لفظ شلكوتا ورواية اخرى تقول ان (الاورتى) هم المحس اما الكارقدى من الدناقلة. (8)

“The recorded part of the history of the Midob is few and far between, and seizing it depends on oral stories, so the grandfathers of the Midob say that they came from Dongola because our language and calls the Karqawi Shelkout because they are from the Muhiss (sukut) and from it they broke away from the remarks of the Shelkouta, and another story which says that the Aourti were the Muhiss as far as the Karqaday [Karqawi?] from Dongola.”

(forgive the translation)

Though we aren’t so lucky as to get any of this oral history written down verbatim (in Arabic or Midob) from the author, he does mention the names of some of his sources (two of whom live in my town), so maybe I will track them down or maybe just the author himself.

Besides just being quite accessible, Midob is of particular interest because it is related to Old Nubian reputedly, though it is the furthest linguistically and geographically from its purported medieval Nubian ancestor.

Roland Werner’s 1993 book on this branch of “Darfur Nubian” is reviewed below:

Roland Werner, Tidn-aal: a study of Midob (Darfur-Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993, 169 pp., DM68, ISBN 3 496 02507 7

The Midob are often referred to as ‘Meidob’: an erroneous spelling which does not reflect pronunciation and which goes back to a MacMichael 1918 article. Although the people have grown to accept the xenonym ‘Midob’, their self-name is tiddi (sg.) and their linguistic self-name is as in the title of this book , meaning ‘Tid (pl.) language’. The people live around Dar Midob, about 500 miles west of Khartoum. Werner says (p.13) the administrative area comprises 24,000 square miles. There are about 45,000 to 50,000 Midob, who are mixed pastoralists (goats, sheep, camels).

The introduction (pp. 13-18) takes up the name, location, tribe, place of Midob in Nubian, dialects and sub-groups, history of Midob linguistic research, methods, scope, and aim of the study.

The Midob are neither ‘Nile’ nor ‘Hill’ Nubians. According to the work of Becchauss-Gerst, Nubian consists of Nobiin (Mahas-Fadicca) as against four other languages, of which Midob is the most divergent. Midob was unknown to Western scholarship till MacMichael’s first published vocabulary list about 1912. Among the fifty bibliography items listed by Werner (pp. 167-9) there is no substantial grammar or dictionary of Midob, so that this book is the first such. A list of abbreviations is given on p. 166.

It contains an extensive Midob-English vocabulary of about 2,000 items (pp. 75-143) with Arabic loans identified and an English-Midob index (144-165). I obtained a copy just as I was in need of some Midob lexicon for a project but was surprised to discover that the English index does not list many basic terms such as ‘blood’ (although it is used on p. 25), ‘belly’, ‘claw’, ‘earth’, ‘feather’, ‘good’, ‘mouth’, ‘new’, ‘other’, ‘path’, ‘person’, ‘plant’, ‘road’, ‘seed’, or ‘smoke’. ‘See’ is given as kəl – on p. 159 but as kood – on p.46 and I could not find the latter in the lexicon. There are also two brief texts with translations (‘Of old times’ and ‘Wedding’, pp. 64-5) and 209 sentences (pp. 66-74).

The grammar is rather brief (pp. 18-63), consisting of (1) phonology, (2) tonology, (3) nouns, (4) pronouns, (5) postpositions, (6) the verb, (7) adverbs, (8) ideophones, (9) conjunctions. I will not go into any details here except to note that Arabic is invading the phonology and lexicon of Midob, as with all Sudanese languages.

The slim volume is well produced from what looks like computer print-out (with both margins justified)…. A sketch map of the location and general features of Dar Midob would have been helpful.

Despite some weaknesses, pointed out above, on balance this tone-marked grammar of Midob, based on fieldwork of 1987-88, is certainly a valuable addition to the Nubian linguistic literature.

M. Lionel Bender

Southern Illinois University

For a quicky wiki overview of contemporary Nubian languages see below:

“Of all the Nubian languages, the ones spoken along the Nile traditionally have received the most attention. Many manuscripts have been unearthed in the Nile Valley, mainly between the first and fifth cataracts, testifying to a firm Nubian presence in the area during the first millennium. Nobiin and a dialect cluster related to it, Kenzi-Dongolawi, are found in the same area. These languages were the languages of the Christian Nubian kingdoms. Historical comparative research has shown that the Nile-Nubian languages do not form a genetic unit; the speakers of Nobiin arrived first in the area, followed later by the speakers of the Kenzi and Dongolawi varieties.

“The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan. In the past, there has been debate as to whether the Nubian languages spread to the Nile valley from Kordofan and Darfur or moved in the opposite direction. For a long time it was assumed that the Nubian peoples dispersed from the Nile Valley to the south, probably at the time of the downfall of the Christian kingdoms. However, comparative lexicostatistic research in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that the spread must have been in the opposite direction (Thelwall 1982, Adams 1982, among others). Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2,500 years ago. This account is corroborated by non-linguistic evidence — for example, the oral tradition of the Shaiqiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile-Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago.”

Jay Spaulding has written an interesting article on the Shaiqiya tribe's relationship to Nubian, asserting that in fact they and several other riverain ethnic groups that have linguistically assimilated into the Arab majority spoke Nubian until a couple hundred years ago (and still retain traces of this in some of their speech)… a more detailed look at this will be in a forthcoming post addressing the question of whether and whither the different branches of the Nubian languages split… for now I leave you with a tree of how the branches of Nubian breakdown (thanks to the SIL Ethnologue):

* Nobiin (Not intelligible with Kenuzi-Dongola. Lexical similarity 67% with Kenuzi-Dongola)

o Mahas (Mahasi, Mahass)

o Fiyadikka (Fedicca, Fadicha, Fadicca, Fadija, Fiadidja)

* Kenuzi-Dongola (Not intelligible with Nobiin. Lexical similarity 67% with Nobiin, 56% with Debri)

o Dongola

o Kenuzi (Kenuz, Kunuzi)

* Midob or Meidob (Lexical similarity 51% with Birgid (closest)

o Shelkota (Shalkota)

o Kaageddi

o Urrti (Uurti)

* Birked/Birgid (extinct)

* ("Hill Nubian")

o Ghulfan (Wunci)

o Kadaru (Kodhin)

o Dilling (Lexical similarity 94% with Debri, 93% with Kadaru)

+ Dilling

+ Debri

o Dair (Thaminyi)

o El Hugeirat (El Hagarat)

o Karko (Kithonirishe)

o Wali

...and a tongue

2007-11-29T20:33:00.001-08:00

A thousand and one tongues shall be the name of this polyglot blog (though most of the writing will be in English, I hope to have snippets from numerous languages), and this tithe of the myriad manners of expression upon the earth shall consist of lesser-known languages, dialects, creoles, “extinct” and contact languages. My personal contributions will gravitate toward languages from majority arabophone countries, though I invite the contributions of others from spheres and climes beyond my reach and ken.

What better place to start than the linguistically rich medieval Iberian peninsula, thanks to the inspiration of a former professor of mine Luis Girón-Negrón, who can warm us up with an in inquisitorial debate about the biblical Hebrew term tsammah צמה in Song of Solomon… not only does he pack Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic (among other languages) into this paper entitled “Your Dove-eyes among your Hairlocks,” but he shows how the natural contact of these languages in Medieval Spain led to a re-interpretation of a Biblical term according to a humanist source-critical standard, rather than a dogmatically authoritarian one.

"There was a rich humanist tradition of Christian Hebraism in sixteenth-century Spain. It was pioneered by biblical scholars of Jewish descent [who were] recent converts to Christianity with an expertise on the Jewish exegetical and philological tradition, which they had ostensibly acquired in the Hispano-Jewish aljamas." (1211)

Looking at this in terms of the larger scope of linguistic contact and trends, it seems as though an intellectual (theological) tradition that was mired in misunderstanding (this one word is but a representative example) because of its myopic reliance on western interpretations (the Latin and Greek of the Vulgate and the Septuagint), through an interesting convivência came to recover a meaning which was closer to the roots of the religious text.

But this is a relatively tame and uninteresting situation of languages coming into contact with each other, particularly in light of the centuries of dazzling muwaššahāt, aljamiado writings, and Judeo-Portuguese (to name a few) which preceded it.
Tomes could be written about this period, but perhaps a brief overview with a few highlights will entertain the indulgent reader more than an exhaustive treatment. To avoid tedium, I will gloss over the historical aspects of the convivência and skip straight to the juicy linguistic bits.
Judeo-Portuguese, according to Devon Strolovitch in his Cornell dissertation on the subject, represents a significant enough representation of the Portuguese language that it should not be seen as an aberrant and inconsistent temporary substitute, but a standardized and widely accepted form of early usage. Thus, Judeo-Portuguese is somewhat unique among the many languages over the years that Jewish minorities have rendered with Hebrew script in that it reflects a more sophisticated and precise rendering of phonological realities which the Roman script was ill-equipped to reflect (because of letter/sound distributions):

Thus unlike Jews in some regions of what would become Spain, the Jews in
Portugal lived amidst a firmly Latin culture. But the Roman script was not
merely the "dominant" script of the literary milieu; it was a form of writing
that Jewish Portuguese writers were at the very least acquainted with, and at
best willing and able to exploit in adapting Hebrew script to write Portuguese.
Beyond the categorical adoption of vowel letters (cf. § 2.1.1), the clearest way
in which their adaptation was informed by Roman-letter writing is the use of
Hebrew letters to preserve distinctions, usually etymological but often
phonological, in Romance vocabulary items that were not necessarily
maintained in speech nor, curiously enough, in the contemporary Romanletter
spelling of Portuguese. (99)

Among the specific instances of poor roman-letter representations of Portuguese were the Arabic borrowings, of which there are not a few, and which Hebrew is obviously much better equipped to reflect:

As Jewish writers in a Latin-literate culture it was inevitable that the
biliterate writers of Hebraicized Portuguese would draw on some Roman letter
conventions in their writing system. Yet they also borrowed
conventions from Semitic writing beyond Hebrew that enable both
etymological and quasi-etymological spellings not captured (or even
capturable) by the conventional Roman-letter orthographies.
The Hebrew alphabet allows the Judeo-Portuguese writers to maintain
etymological distinctions between Arabic phonemes that have merged in their
borrowed Portuguese form, e.g. Ar. z/ç ‡ Pg. z:
(23) אלמופאריץ almofaris ModPg. almofariz < المحرص al-mihras 'mortar' אזוכי azoge ModPg. azogue < الزاؤق az-zā’uq 'mercury' Using different letters could, as always, suggest nothing more than the mere fact of distinct pronunciations intended or perceived by the Jewish writer, who may be more apt to do so with these Semitic loanwords than a non-Jew. What should be noted above all, however, is that the transfer of spelling convention is made especially feasible and perhaps even expected because the Hebrew letters ז and צ are in a real and practical sense cognate with and historically related to the Arabic lettersﺯ zay and ﺺ sad. (108) Turning our attention now to Aljamiados or romance texts written with Arabic script, we look at the same issues, but with a much broader base of texts, and a linguistic tradition which enjoys greater continuity than the Judeo-Portuguese tradition, since Strolovitch informs us again: "No modern-day lusophone population has descended from the Portuguese-speaking Jewish community, which shifted to co-territorial languages such as Spanish, Dutch, and English by the nineteenth century. In fact many of the émigrés from Portugal were Spanish speakers expelled from Castille-Aragon a few years prior to the Portuguese edicts of 1496-97. The Portuguese speakers who left the peninsula to settle in Italy, the Balkans, and Turkey assimilated to the Spanish-speaking majority, thus beginning the long-term language shift that eliminated Portuguese from the Sephardic repertoire. With a relative shortage of material there have consequently been very few linguistic studies of Jewish Portuguese, apart from those focused on written records from specific cities where Jews settled, such as Amsterdam (Teensma 1991) and Livorno (Tavani 1988). Judeo-Spanish, the only Judeo-Ibero-Romance language still spoken today, certainly boasts a richer documentary history from both the Iberian Peninsula and the resettled communities of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Yet its existence prior to the expulsions remains a vexed question (cf. Marcus 1962, Wexler 1982). The question of a distinct Judeo-Portuguese may at first blush seem less "vexed" simply because, given the small extant corpus and absence of a modern speech community, the field is less ploughed. Moreover, the prospects for discovering the expression of a distinct (spoken) dialect amidst the short ritual prescriptions and non-Judaic scientific discourse in the Hebraicized Portuguese corpus may well be discouraging. " (p. 87) Thus aljamiado writing is less standardized, though it does share some conventions with Hebrew renderings of Portuguese, including ambiguity towards sibilants (‘s’ vs. ‘sh’), which tend to be rendered ‘sh’ though not exclusively, nor consistently, it seems, as we can see in this text (with transliteration and an attempt at rendering in standard Spanish orthography…forgive my “creative vocabulary”):

Dal wa-lardun da lush shabyush
(del gualardon de los sabios)

Dishu un rakuntadur kiyan damandara burr kaminu ikra
(Diso un racontador quien demandara por camino y carre-[ra])
-ra bbara abbarandar sansiyya y shbidorya adarasul
(-ra para aperender sensilla y sabedoria ate ar-Rasool)
Diosh adakaltal a un kaminu da losh kaminush dal
(Dios edaqueltal? a un camino de los caminos del)
Baraishu i los anjalush ashtiandan shush alash alosh
(paraiso y los angeles extiendan sus alas a los)
Abrandiantas y damandantas dal shubar bbor akuntan
(Apprendientes y demandantes del saber por aconten)
Tasiun dal ka fazan i al dafandanta ibbarandian
(Tension del que fazen y el defendante iperendien)
Ta dal shabar damandan bbardon bbural lush anjalash
(-te del saber demandan perdon por el los angeles)
I tudush lush kashtan analsialu i lush ka a
(y todos los que estan en el cielo y los que e-
Shtan ‘an latiarra i los bbasash da lush marash
(stan en la tierra y los pasas de los mares)
I todosh lash coshash ka shon dantro ‘analawa I losh…
(Y todas las cosas que son dentro en el agua y los)

It seems to be a religious text (actually quite disappointingly formulaic, according to Qur’anic conventions) with the general sense of “whoever is looking for guidance and the way to heaven should consult the prophet [Mohammed] and he will gain wisdom and gain forgiveness from the angels and all who are on earth…"

And to top things off, the muwaššahāt are Andalusian Arabic poems which deviate drastically from the accepted classical Arabic form, in that they contain hemistich’s of variable length, usually much shorter, for the sake of facilitating endless internal rhymes (which _______ sees as a heightening of the Arabic tradition rather than an appropriation of a Romance tradition). Whether the form is primarily romance or the logical extension (/exaggeration) of Arabic poetical forms belies the fact that the most salient feature of these poems is that they combine a classical Arabic register with a mixed romance/colloquial Arabic (or even Hebrew) kharja at the end.
The distribution of usage of these languages and registers in Andalusia explains why this is so brilliant of a literary device and the power of its rhetorical effect. David Hanlon details the social aspects here, but in brief, high Arabic became the standard literary and poetic ideal of the elite conquerors:
"In al-Andalus there was probably little diglossia among the Arabic-speaking
population at the time of the invasion and the period of settlement that immediately
followed it; there was no Arabo-Islamic infrastructure through which
tuition in Classical Arabic was possible, and a knowledge of Classical Arabic
was probably rare among the rank and file of the invading forces. However,
subsequent to the process of imitation of Eastern cultural models in the ninth
and tenth centuries, all members of the Arabic-speaking population with a
modicum of education were diglossic in varying degrees. The cultivation of a
genre which censured the numerous phonological, syntactic and lexico-semantic
features of spoken usage not codified by classical grammarians, the lahn
al-'iimma literature, is concrete evidence of diglossia in this period. Its first
Andalusian exponent, al-Zubaydi (316-79 A.H./A.D9.2 8-89), undertook to contribute
to this body of writing when he noticed that his predecessors in the
Eastern Islamic world had failed to comment on features peculiar to al-Andalus:
...then I scrutinized the spoken usage of our time and country and found
sentences that Abu Hatim [al-Sijistani] and other linguists had failed to
mention among the [examples] they cite, of language which our populace
had corrupted, changed its form (ahalu lafzahii) or altered its meaning
(wada'ahu ghayra mawdi'ihi).
Outside the muwashshah, Romance was committed to writing either in
contexts which are consciously colloquial (the zajal), or as glosses for technical
terms (botanical dictionaries). Otherwise it must be assumed that it was used
only for informal spoken purposes, and was therefore a L(ow) variety in
common with spoken Arabic, and in contrast to the H(igh) variety, Classical
Arabic. All speech communities have strong attitudes towards varieties of their
own language and the languages of other speech communities." (p. 40)

These soldiers would often have taken wives or mistresses from the local populace whose native language(s) were romance, or an arab-romance mix. This social dynamics of this diglossia explains how the culmination of the love poem reflects the intimacy of a slip to a more familiar register. It creates quite a jarring verbal effect whose significance is locked in time to that specific environment of diglossia, which Hanlon posits as more socially keyed to register than to linguistic family:

"The sociolinguistic framework I employ necessarily attaches greater importance
to the fact that a change in linguistic variety in the muwashshah represents
a shift from H to L, rather than a switch from Arabic, in a generic sense, to an
unrelated language such as Romance. The 135 poems in the Arabic corpus that
employ vernacular Arabic exclusively are, from this point of view, typologically
equivalent to the 42 that use Romance (or an admixture of Romance and
Arabic). I shall therefore examine three poems by way of example: the first
employs vernacular Arabic in its kharja; the second and third employ predominantly
Romance on the basis of all textual reconstructions attempted thus far.
Thematically and stylistically, 'Bi-ab 'ilqu bi-'I-nafsi 'aliq' by 'Ubada is a
rather conventional piece characteristic of the amatory muwashshah which
makes it useful for the purposes of illustration. Within the framework adopted
here. the first four stanzas constitute the mu'rab. the kharia constitutes the
hazl, and the point at which the transition from mu'rab to hazl is made occurs
in the final aghsiin of the fifth stanza.38 The mu'rab is devoted almost entirely
to a description of the love object which relies heavily on the ghazal cliche to
the extent that it may be considered a catalogue of its stock elements. The
beloved has a round and shining face like a moon:
I have fallen in love with a crescent moon ...
A full moon that shines with well-proportioned beauty.
A full moon that triumphs with shining magic.
When he appeared [like a full moon], dragging the trains of beauty behind
him ...
His cheeks glow with red and white floral hues:
Lily-of-the-valley besieges a well-protected rose,
A curl of hair like a scorpion's tail upon jasmin.
His glances are like arrows that pierce the lover's heart:
Armies of beauty [dwell] on his eyes,
And the glance plumed with licit magic.
His saliva, like wine, intoxicates the lover:
His mouth is a wine jar made to be kissed.
His teeth are white and symmetrical like a string of pearls:
His teeth mock the pearl necklace [surpassing it in beauty].
References to the physical attributes of the love object are invariably cloaked
in metaphor, mentioned in succession, and little regard is shown for establishing
a syntactic relationship between them. The description is not mimetic, and relies
for its internal coherence not on any logical structure expressed through conjunction
and coordination, but on the juxtaposition of elements and the understood
background of a literary cliche. The beloved is an archetype, of which a small
number of elements are selected for representation in a collage, whose abstraction
is best articulated by the poet himself in the second stanza: 'there appeared to
me a being created for love' ('anna li khalqu bi-'l-'ishqi khaliq). The aghsiin of
the final stanza mark a change in tone and style:
After he had clothed himself in the garb of beauty,
I desired to kiss his delicious, dark red lips,
But he refused, quoting a verse,
And leant over coquettishly
With the sweetest of diction:
Ana qul ququ lis bi-llah tadhuqu.
انا قول قوقو ليس بالله تذوقو
' I say, [here's] a tidbit, by God you will not taste it.'
This literal translation belies a dramatic change in register which is marked
by common features of Andalusian spoken Arabic: ana qul, an approximation
of the Western Neo-Arabic first person singular of the incomplete tense, vs.
Classical aqulu; the negative lis vs. Classical la; the object pronoun -u vs.
Classical -hu; and finally ququ (' tidbit '), a word of unknown origin but whose
duplicated CV syllable identifies it as a creation of child language. The
thematic shift that accompanies the fall in register (from H to L) is appropriately
downward (from amatory to bawdy).

Unfortunately it is quite difficult to find Arabic texts of complete muwaššahāt (here are a couple on JSTOR) online (unless some kind reader knows of a great repository lurking somewhere), though kharjas abound (mostly without the Arabic original, only an ambiguous transliteration):

6
(Salá-Solé)
49 (Stern), 49 (Heger), XXXVII (García Gómez)
garide-me
k(u)and mio sîdî yâ qawmu
ker(r)a bi-llâh
suo al-asî me dar-lo

Decidme:
¿cuándo mi señor, oh amigos,
querrá, por Dios,
darme su medicina?

tell me:
When will m'lord, oh friends
want to, by God,
give me his medicine?

7a,b
(Salá-Solé)
38b,a (Stern), 38b,a (Heger), XXIb,a (García Gómez)
yâ mamma mio al-habîbi
bay-sê e no me tornade
gar ke fareyo ÿâ mamma
in no mio 'ina' lesade

¡Oh madre, mi amigo
se va y no vuelve!
Dime qué haré, madre,
si mi pena no afloja.

Oh mother, my love
has gone and won't return!
Tell me what I should do, Mother,
if I should not drown in my sorrow.

8
(Salá-Solé)
53 (Heger), 22 (García Gómez)
um(m)î qi qâl li-ahûb
'aql al-nisâ qaq(q)â
non sabet mio qawlî
hubbî li-man yabqâ

Madre mía, quien dijo al amigo,
'la constancia de las mujeres (es) caca,'
no sabe (que) mi máxima
(es que) mi amor es para quien persiste.

My Mother, the one who told my love
"the dependability of women is 'caca'"
did not know that my mantra
is that my love is for the one who persists.

What is most interesting about this is that the general concept of a poem or saying in a more standard register culminating with a disorienting colloquialism (which Hanlon attributes to the device of hazl or "ironic, disarming humor") has a lot of mileage as a literary device, particularly in the Arabic world, because of the widespread prevalence of diglossia. I noticed this in my growing collection of local proverbs, in which I saw a pattern - I could understand everything except for the last word:

المويه حر ولا لعب ﮔﻌوﭴﺞ/ﮔﻌوﻧﺞ

Al-mweya harr wa la li3b gu3uñj

The water hot and not play frog = frogs don’t play in hot water ~ play with fire and you’ll get burnt

This is very interesting because, I just realized, ‘harr’ is almost never used here – sukhun is the preferred term for hot, and the standard local way of negating a verb would be ‘ma’ rather than ‘la’ regardless of tense.

And for our second proverb, which I particularly love because it reminds me of my favorite Mauritanian proverb (التاي بلا نعناع كيف الكلام بلا معنى - tea without mint is like words without meaning):

الشاي بنعناع خيرٌ من
المَرة بسبعة ﭤاﭤا

Al-shai bi-na’na’ khayr-un min
Al-mara’ bi-sab’a nganga (ŋaŋa)

Tea with mint is better than
A woman with seven children

This one is really interesting because the construction (khayr-un min) mimics the 4 am fajr prayer call in which the mu’ezzin often says al-salatu kheirun min al-nawm (الصلاة خير من النوم) prayer is better than sleep! But your average Sudanese would never use that formal of a register in a non-religious setting, but it sets up so perfectly this word (ŋaŋa) which is so local and obscure that it can’t even be properly written with the existing extended Arabic unicode (well maybe that is not saying too much ;). Any news on additions to the Arabic Unicode for non-standard letters or extended sounds? A friend of mine submitted a proposal a couple years ago, but I never heard what happened to that and I am only in intermittent contact with him.