Monday, October 5, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Mauritanian minority languages of the southern Hodh
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...
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...
Thursday, June 4, 2009
ideophony
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?
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Interesting stuff from others
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!
Thursday, February 19, 2009
ትግርኛ : አቡጊዳ or ኣብግድ?
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 cas
es 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.
es 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.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Arabinglizia
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.
Friday, October 24, 2008
الامويّر
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 everything 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 this). 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-Exupe
ry'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.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Wir Philologen
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
Monday, October 20, 2008
BiblioBurro
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)
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Indiana Jones and the inaccurate depiction of pre-Columbian America
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).
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Triglossia, and cinematic linguistics
Enough of this "diglossia" business, I want something a little more challenging. Let's try "tri-" !
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?
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?
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Diglossia
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.
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.
Monday, April 14, 2008
whirlwind tour of the world
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."
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."
Friday, March 14, 2008
bilad shinqit
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!
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!
Monday, February 11, 2008
Browne's Nubian bible
I had a lot of trouble uploading this and had to compress it - I hope you can still see it...
Nubian Comparison
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.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Multi-liingual poetry
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:
[i] “O if you have eyes, may your eyes fill with tears” – Chants Kabylie 1982 Anonymous Algerian Poet
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
when I sang "Nkosi sikelele
I can't describe the sensation that I saw when I sang
"Kwaze kwa wonakala"[iv] with a Kenyan woman exiled in
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.
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
[vi] “What is your Name” – Pulaar, a West African Language
Monday, February 4, 2008
More on Nubian (and the claimed connection with Fur)
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...
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Zaghawa
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:
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:
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
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).
Friday, February 1, 2008
الخواجي
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
تستعد نفسك للذي يعرف يطرح لك أسئلة
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