Jabal al-Lughat

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer, freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have little experience of Atlantic languages as such, and therefore not much useful to say about most of the book (though it made me want to also read Merrill's work, with which much of it is in dialogue.) However, while proto-Fula-Sereer is dated by the author to 2000 years ago or more, some of the comparisons are relevant for studying contact with other regional families. Two forms are particularly interesting to me for exploring contact with Berber:

• *xiris "slay (vb)": Sereer xiris 'couper le cou, décapiter, égorger' (Merrill: 'slit the throat') ~ Fula hirsa 'égorger; sacrifier (un animal, pour en rendre licite la consommation)' [p. 63]
  Sereer x- : Fula h- is a very well represented regular correspondence; however, Fula -r- in -rC- would normally be lost in Sereer (p. 173), and no regular pattern of vowel elision is given in the book. The word also looks like Soninke xùrùsi "to kill by cutting the jugular vein", yet the vowel correspondence is difficult there as well. The explanation is to be found in their common source as a loanword from widespread (non-Zenaga!) Berber əɣrəs, with the same meaning. The religious importance of slaughtering an animal for meat in this precise manner is sufficient to motivate the borrowing, which would thus have spread with Islam - presumably through northern Saharan travellers rather than Zenaga scholars, given the form.
• *Guf "foam": Sereer kuf 'gonfler, écumer en bouillant', kuf a...al / kuf a... ak 'écume de la mer, à la marée montante' ~ Fula ngufo / (n)gufooji 'mousse, écume' (cf. Fula ƴufa 'mousser, écumer (trans.)', ƴufo 'mousse, écume) (Laala kuuɓ 'mousse', Nyun Gubaher gʊ-gʊfʊri 'mousse', Nyun Guñamolo tɪ-gʊf / tɪ-gʊf-ɔŋ 'écume, mousse', Joola Fonyi ka-gʊf 'bave, écume de mer, mousse du savon'). [p. 102]
  The correspondence of Sereer k to Fula ŋg (let alone ƴ) is completely irregular, with no other examples cited. A comparison to Berber forms such as Tamasheq tə-kuffe, Tamazight a-kuffi, Zenaga tu-ʔffukkaʔ-n "froth" is thus not ruled out, although the other Atlantic forms make it more likely that the resemblance is coincidental. Cp. also Zarma kùfú "écumer" and related forms in Songhay, which probably do derive from Berber.

Other forms are interesting to examine in the context of Songhay and Mande:

• *bon "bad (svb)": Sereer bon 'être mauvais, être méchant, être maigre', ponu l / ponu k "le mal [la chose mauvaise]' ~ Fula bona 'être mauvais, être mal; être méchant', mbonki / bonkiji 'méchanceté ; malfaisance ; perversité' (widespread root in Atlantic and Mel) [p. 86]
  Also widespread well beyond; looks originally Atlantic, but the suffixed vowel in Bambara bɔ̀nɛ and Zarma bòné betrays a borrowing path via Soninke rather than directly from Fula.
• *bul "blue (svb)": Sereer bule 'bleu' ~ Fula bula 'rincer au bleu (du linge blanc); passer au bleu de lessive; colorer en bleu pâle' (The root *bulu is common for Atlantic and Mel languages. It is not a European borrowing). [p. 86]
  If so, then this is also the source for Bambara búla and Zarma búlà "blue", and other forms across the region. But this is a widespread Wanderwort, and one wonders how a European source was ruled out.
• *mbedd "road, path": Sereer mbed o...ong/ped k 'petit chemin laissé entre deux champs à l'hivernage, ruelle, rue, allée" ~ Fula mbedda / mbeddaaji 'grand route' (Wolof mbedd 'rue', Jaad mbɛdɛ 'grand route'; Manjaku umbɛra 'chemin carrossable, route'). May be an ancient Soninke borrowing: < béddè 'rue principale, route'. [p. 87]
  Gao Songhay has albedda / mbedda, with an interesting prefix alternation; Heath very tentatively suggests a link to Arabic blṭ, but that probably doesn't work.
• *Birq (mb-/w-) "manure": Sereer mbiqi n 'fumier, tas de fumier' ~ Fula wirga 'labourer le sol en éparpillant la terre (en luttant au sol ou pour la mélanger ou encore pour brouiller des traces...); disperser du fumier (sur un champ)' [p. 88]
  The correspondence mb:w is not regular, arguably reflecting differences in consonant mutation; only four examples are found, although they look like plausible retentions. The loss of r in Sereer would be regular (p. 173). The correspondence of q to g does not appear regular either (p. 192), unless this is related to the preceding r; one would expect q:kk. It's just as well that the correspondence is irregular, since the Fula term is clearly at least in part a borrowing from Songhay, not vice versa: it reflects a merger of two tonally distinct verbs, found in Zarma as bírjí "fumer le sol; fumier" and bìrjí "mélanger, embrouiller", used in the expression laabu birji "mélanger la terre". Conceivably the "spread manure" sense could be original to Fula, with only the "mix" sense being borrowed; but it strains credulity to imagine Zarma borrowing the same verb but giving it two different tonal patterns depending on the intended meaning. Soninke boroko "manure" is suspiciously similar, but the vowels rule it out as an intermediary.
• *gaw "hunt (vb); throw (vb)": Sereer xaƴ 'lancer, envoyer un projectile, tirer une arme à feu; lancer un dard, pêcher au harpon', nGawlax n / qawlax k ~ nGaƴlax n / qaƴlax k 'la chasse [gibier]' ~ Fula gawoo 'chasser, être chasseur (professionel)'. [p. 111; poorly justified correspondences - 5 words for x:g]
  The Fula term is certainly the same root as (Songhay) Zarma găw "hunter", gáwáy "hunt (v.)". The term doesn't seem to be used in Mande, from a quick look. If the Sereer form is related to the Fula one, then the direction of borrowing must be Fula to Songhay. However, the correspondence looks rather poorly justified. For x-:g-, only 5 correspondances are given, including such eminently borrowable words as "indigo" and "okra". For -ƴ:-w, the expected regular correspondence is rather ƴ:ƴ (p. 192), cf. "limp" (p. 180), "lick" (p. 174). The question of borrowing direction thus remains open.

The following cases may be only coincidentally similar, but perhaps they reflect contact at a much earlier period in prehistory, related to the spread of the practice of milking:

• *Gang "chest": Sereer ngang n / kang k ~ Fula gannde / ganndeeje (Fula < gang-nde?) [p. 103; irregular initial correspondence with only two other examples found)
  Cp. Zarma gàndè "chest".
• *gand "nipple": Sereer hand 'être pleine (femelle), être en gestation, porter [femelle]', hand l / qand a...ak 'mamelle (des animaux), pis', and l / and a...ak 'mamelle (des animaux), pis, téton, tétine' (to note a variety of Sereer forms: h-,q-,Ø-) ~ Fula ʔenndu ~ ʔenɗi 'sein, mamelle; pis, trayon'
  Cp. Zarma gánì "udder".

The Fulani abstract noun formative -(aa)ku is analysed (p. 231) as an "extension suffix" -aa- plus a class suffix -ku explained as a taboo-motivated allomorph of -ngu, citing Koval 2000:230 (a source in Russian). This requires further investigation; it certainly cannot be unrelated to Soninke -aaxu with the same function, but what was the direction of borrowing?

Efforts to exclude Arabic loanwords were largely successful, but even so, one crept in: Fula waabiliire "pluie d'orage" is from Arabic waabil rather than proto-Fula-Sereer *(b)waam/b (p. 79). On the other hand, Sereer tuɓaaɓ and Fula tuubako "European, white man" are derived from nonexistent Arabic *tubaab (pp. 115-116), following a long if poorly evidenced tradition connecting this to the real Arabic word ṭabiib "doctor".

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt, impf. ti-dubu-t). There are no compelling cognates for this in Berber outside Tuareg, as Naït-Zerrad's comparative dictionary confirms; at best, one might speculatively compare Siwi dabb "a lot" and Tarifit dab 'have an appetite', both within Macro-Zenati. The word can therefore not be reconstructed for proto-Berber. A better candidate for 'be able' in proto-Berber would seem to be *ăzmər; cf. Awjila, Kabyle əzmər "be able", Tamajeq əzmər "stand up to, endure", etc. The corresponding verbal noun a-dabu has, however, been borrowed from Tuareg into Standard Algerian Tamazight to provide the noun "power"; its widespread use in political discourse in reference to le pouvoir has made this one of the more successful neologisms.

The Tamahaq of the Ahaggar Mountains attests a second sense of dub-ət that seems to be isolated even within Tuareg. Foucauld glosses it (p. 153) as:

2. ("by extension") 'be able to succeed someone (to an office), by virtue of his being your maternal uncle'
3. ("by extension") 'have as maternal uncle'

It yields the equally Ahaggar-specific word tădabit "person(s) of either sex with the right to succeed to someone's suzerainty due to the latter being their maternal uncle", used in the Ahaggar instead of pan-Tuareg tegăze. Examples include (retranscribed, perhaps imperfectly):

Biska d Mənnək ăddoben Musa daɣ ăra n tăññaten.
Biska and Mennek are potential successors to Musa by virtue of being sisters' children.

Luki d Mikela ăddoben Musa kaskab.
Luki and Mikela are potential successors in suzerainty to Musa.

Barka wa-n ăkli yăddobăt akli hin Mămmădu kaskab.
Barka the slave has as maternal uncle my slave Mămmădu, in a maternal uncle-nephew relationship.

Note the very un-Berber-looking word kaskab, lacking even the characteristic Berber nominal prefix, in the latter two examples. In the not obviously related sense of "metallic part of a camel bridle", akăskabbu (Tamasheq kiskab) is attested throughout Tuareg; but kaskab, in the relevant sense, appears just as unique to the Ahaggar as this sense of dub-ət. Foucauld's entry on the term runs to three pages (pp. 918-920), with neat kinship diagrams, but starts "in the direct line of succession to suzerainty, from maternal uncle to nephew or niece (in a kinship relation of maternal uncle to child of full sister or maternal sister (when speaking of succession to suzerainty over vassals))". One might be tempted to link the first half to Tuareg kus "inherit", but the vowel and the absence of any good explanation for the second half militates against it.

Not to beat around the bush, both dub-ət and kaskab look like great candidates for non-Berber substratum vocabulary loaned into Tuareg, especially in the kinship sense. Considered from this perspective, a non-Berber comparison for the former immediately presents itself: Songhay *túbí "inherit (v.); inheritance (n.)", with its derivative *túbá "sister's child (of either sex)" (the latter may be absent in Zarma and Dendi; both are absent from Northern Songhay, which substitutes Tuareg loanwords). Reflexes of the former include Zarma, Gorwol, Hombori, Djougou túbú (in Hombori also "succeed as chief", just as in Tuareg), Gao and Timbuktu tubu (in Gao also "bequeath, leave (to)"), Kikara túbí ...; of the latter, Gorwol túbéy, Gao tubey / tuba, Hombori túbê, Kikara túbá, Timbuktu tuba. (For modern Timbuktu Heath instead documents kaaya for "inherit", but Dupuis-Yacouba recorded "toubou".)

To my mind, a borrowing from Songhay into Tuareg looks more appealing, as I would expect a high-low tone if it came from Tuareg to reflect Tuareg stress; but the opposite direction could also be defended. Either way, however, there can be no reasonable doubt, given the good formal match and perfect semantic correspondence, that the Ahaggar forms are related to the Songhay ones. (Oddly enough, Nicolaï appears to have missed this connection in his wide-ranging hunt for Berber matches, instead focusing on Kabyle (originally Arabic) ətbəʕ "follow".) Yet their distribution is almost the opposite of what one would expect: in both groups, they are attested only in the varieties least in contact with the other. This suggests that the contact situation they reflect happened quite early, rather than being recent.

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(References consulted include, for Tuareg, the dictionaries of Foucauld, Heath, and Alojaly; for Awjila, Paradisi; for cross-Berber comparison, Naït-Zerrad; for Songhay, Heath, White-Kaba, Ducroz and Charles, Zima, and Dupuis-Yacouba, not to mention Nicolaï's La force des choses.)

In 2019, a new alphabet was invented for Songhay, joining a long list of West African script creation efforts from the 19th century onwards. It may sink without a trace like Garay, or (less probably) it may enjoy a success comparable to that of N'Ko; even in the former case, however, it may be of interest as a case study in script creation. I will therefore summarize what little I know about it below.

According to this page, the script was invented by Ibn Achour Ousmane Touré in 2019, based on livestock marks used by Songhay villages, towns, and regions. He intended it to allow Songhay speakers to write in their own language rather than in French or Arabic, and thus to enable them to continue and progress, following in the footsteps of the Songhay Empire, which he supposes must have had its own writing system at some point. (Songhay is, of course, sometimes written - officially in a Latin-based orthography, unofficially also in Ajami Arabic - but is frequently not thought of as a written language; the primary target of education is literacy in French and/or Arabic, and most locally available printed materials are in one of these languages.) A volunteer committee was set up to promote the script, including the inventor himself, Dr. Imirana Seydou Maiga (secretary), M. Housseiny Ibrahima Maiga (expert advisor), and M. Faissal Kada Maiga (general coordinator and secretary of information). This group seems to use Arabic as their primary language of wider communication, and consists at least in part of Songhay diaspora in the Arab world; the secretary and coordinator seem to have spent time in Saudi Arabia, and the latter is reported to be based in Libya. One might speculate that the script offered them a "third way" to get past the French-Arabic binary.

The alphabet is as follows:

A series of YouTube videos, and posts on Afkaar.Online, clarify the orthography. The writing direction is right to left, and the alphabetic order is obviously inspired in large part by Arabic; there is no capitalization. The diacritics are explained here (titled Hantum maasayan "adding diacritics to writing"):

Vowel length is marked with a macron over the vowel, and vowel nasalization by a tilde (both betraying the influence of a Latin-based transcription); if placed over a consonant rather than a vowel, these respectively indicate that the consonant should be followed by aa or ã. (In this sense, if not in the more usual one, the script has a default vowel a.) In principle, all other vowels are marked plene (though short a occasionally seems to be omitted). Consonant gemination is indicated by a circle over the consonant. The dot under the letter n is dropped when it assimilates to a following consonant (Arabic ikhfā'), a feature inspired by Quranic orthography. (The text above gives an example of final dotless n with a tilde over it at the end of maasayan; this combination is not explained as far as I can see.) Besides this, dots distinguish affricates (dot above) from palatoalveolar sibilants (dot below), and d and g (no dot) from z and ŋ (dot above). The letter for ñ is close to being a graphic hybrid of ŋ and j, appropriately enough.

The system is completed by a set of numerals, using place notation (titled Soŋay-k(a)buyaŋo "Songhay counting"):

Punctuation evidently includes hyphens, used somewhat inconsistently at morpheme boundaries (thus the nominalizing suffix -yan/-yaŋ is not hyphenated in the two previous examples, but is hyphenated in denden-yaŋ "learning"), but fairly consistently in compounds (e.g., in the same post, Soŋay-senni m(a) duuma "may the Songhay language last"). Until examples of longer texts are available, little else can be said about punctuation.

If further data becomes available, I will update this post; if you know of any, comments are welcome! Particular thanks to "Oudi" for indispensable clarifications.

Yesterday, H. Yahiaoui posted what might be the first continuous story written down in Korandje by a 1st-language speaker (translated from a cynical little fable in Arabic): The Donkey, the Lion, and the Tiger. In this text, we clearly see the "consecutive aorist" used after imperatives but not after perfectives: contrast n-as abəqqạ nə-m-t-as "give_imperative him a slap and tell_irrealis him" with a-hh-ana a-tt-asi lit. "he asked_perfective and said to him_perfective". More crucial among this text's points of interest, however, is the placement of spaces. Word boundaries are surprisingly tricky to determine in Korandje. Plenty of elements could be analysed as bound forms or just as free forms with a somewhat restricted syntactic distribution, and it's hard to decide which is which. A text like this provides suggestive (though certainly not conclusive) data on where speakers perceive them. A few generalizations quickly emerge. In the verb word:

• Subject markers are written as prefixes to the verb or MAN marker (2Sg n, 3Sg a, etc.)
• The aspectual auxiliary ba, which turns perfective into perfect and imperfective into progressive, is written as a separate word - but only in contexts where the b is preserved; contrast ənnmər ba bə-kkạ-γ "the tiger is hitting me" with a-(a)-b-kkạ-γəy "he is hitting me".
• Otherwise, mood, aspect, and negation (MAN) markers are written as prefixes to the verb (Neg s, Prosp (b)aʕam, etc.)
• Directionals (ti "hither" are written as suffixes to the verb.
• Object pronouns (2Sg ni, 3Sg ana, etc.) are written as suffixes to the verb.
• Oblique pronouns (2SgDat nisi, 3SgDat asi, etc.) are usually written as suffixes to the verb word, but in one case (kəs γəys "leave to me") as an independent word, plausibly reflecting its less closely bound status.

In the noun phrase:

• Genitive n is written as a prefix to the head noun.
• Possessive pronouns are written as prefixes to the head noun (1Sg ʕan, etc.)
• The indefinite article (or numeral) fu "a, one" is written as a suffix to the noun it quantifies.
• "Other" (fyạṭən), despite historically containing "one", is written as a separate word.
• Demonstratives are written as suffixes to the noun phrase (γu "this", etc.)
• Dative si and locative ka are written as suffixes to their objects.
• The focus marker a is written as a suffix to its noun phrase.
• The identificational copula (aγu "this is", etc.) is written as an independent word, despite historically incorporating the focus marker.

Pending more data, the following cases seem sui generis:

• səndza-n-a (Neg.Cop-2Sg-Foc) "it's not you who..."
• mu-kunna-ni (what.Rhet-find-2Sg) "what's wrong with you?"
• ku-xəd (each-when) "whenever"

For those who can't read the original, here's a transcription of the fable:

1. Fəṛka a-ddər izmmi-s a-yzʕəf a-hh-ana, a-tt-asi: "Maγạ səndza-n-a lγabət n-uγ bya?"
2. Izmmi a-tt-asi: "Iyyah… mu-kunna-ni, tuγ ba yzra?"
3. Fəṛka a-tt-asi: "Nnmər ba bə-kkạ-γ ʕam-mu-ka ku-xəd a-ggwa-γəy, a-m-ti 'Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-ḍəb taššəyt?', maγạ a-(a)-b-kkạ-γəy kʷəl ana?? Aha tuγa taššəyt-γ ʕamḍəb kʷəl aγəy?"
4. Izəmmi attasi: "Kəs γəys ləxbạ-γu, nə-s-bə-zzu lhəmm haya."
5. Aywa ləxʷəddzi(d) izəmmi a-kbʷəy ənnmər a-hh-ana "Tuγ-a taššəyt-γ n-ləxbạ?"
6. Nnmər a-tt-asi: "ʕa-b-talla γar əssəbbət ndzuγ ʕa-b-kkạṛ-ana wəxḷaṣ.."
7. Izəmmi a-t ənnmər-si: "Təlla ssəbbət fyạṭən-ka, a-a-ybən… T-as a-m-zu-t-nis əttəffaħ-fu ndzuγ, ndza a-zzu-t-a-nis yạṛạ, n-as abəqqạ nə-m-t-as 'Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-zu-t-ana tirəy?' Ndza a-zzu-t-a-nis tirəy, n-as abəqqạ nə-m-t-as 'Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-zu-t-ana yạṛạ?'"
8. Nnmər a-žžawb-ana a-tt-asi "Lfikrət-f hannu aγu."
9. Am-bibya ənnmər a-kbʷəy fəṛka a-tt-asi: "Zu-t-γis əttəffaħ-fu."
10. Fəṛka a-nnəg-aka mliħ a-hh-ana a-tt-asi "Waš ʕa-m-zu-t-ana tirəy wəlla yạṛạ???"
11. Nnmər a-ttəmtəm an-nin n-tiri a-tti "Tirəy yạṛạ…"
12. A-ħħərrəm an-kambi ạ-kkạ fəṛka ndza abqa-fu, a-tt-as "Maγạ nə-ss-aʕam-ḍəb taššəyt???"
13. *** Uγ ba b-iḍləm a-ss-a-bə-ttəlla əssəbbət ndzuγ a-b-yəḍləm.

In English:

1. The donkey went to the lion angry and asked him: "Hey, aren't you the chief of the forest?"
2. The lion told him "Yes... what's wrong with you, what has happened?"
3. The donkey told him "The tiger is hitting me on my face every time he sees me, saying 'Why won't you wear a cap?' Why is he hitting me?? And what cap would I wear anyhow?"
4. The lion told him "Leave this affair to me, don't worry about it at all."
5. So when the lion met the tiger, he asked him "What's the issue of this cap?"
6. The tiger told him "I'm just looking for an excuse to hit him, that's all."
7. The lion told the tiger: "Look for another excuse, it's (too) obvious... Tell him to bring you an apple so that, if he brings it to you yellow, give him a slap and tell him 'Why won't you bring it red?' If he brings it to you red, give him a slap and tell him 'Why won't you bring it yellow?'"
8. The tiger replied "This is a good idea".
9. The next day the tiger met the donkey and told him "Bring me an apple."
10. The donkey looked hard at him and asked him "Should I bring it red or yellow?"
11. The tiger mumbled under his breath "Red, yellow..."
12. He lifted up his hand and slapped the donkey and said "Why won't you wear a cap?"
13. *** An oppressor doesn't need an excuse to oppress.

Whether animals can talk is, above all, a question of definition. There are obviously important differences between human language and animal vocalizations; modern linguists and biologists find it useful to emphasise these by reserving words like "talk" for humans. There are, however, also important similarities which can be used to justify a common term for both - above all the fact that both often seem to be used for communication.

In traditional Songhay discourse, as in many other places, it's perfectly reasonable to say that animals talk. A "Kaado" text by Adama Seydou, recorded at the heart of the Songhay world in northwestern Niger near Dolbel by Ducroz and Charles (1982:55), expresses this attitude concisely:

Dábbèy, ì gó ǹd ŋ̀gêy wón héenó kâŋ ì ǵ té, kâŋ sénní nô, sénníyóŋ mó nô kâŋ, mán t́ bórà kúl nàŋ ǵ má r à. Amá bòryóŋ gò nô kâŋ ǵ nê, ŋ̀gêy ǵ má, wó kâŋ círôw fìláanà gó k̀ nê, wàl wó kâŋ háw fíláan gó k̀ hẽ́ k̀ nê, wàl wó kâŋ bèrì fìláanà, à gó k̀ hẽ́ k̀ nê.
Animals, they have their own cries that they do, which are speech/language; those too are speech/language, which no one can understand. But some people say they understand, what a certain bird is saying, or what a certain cow is saying with its cry, or what a certain horse is saying with its cry.

Some years ago in Tabelbala, the northernmost (Korandje) Songhay-speaking settlement, I recorded a similar attitude towards animal vocalizations, by Mr. Mohamed Larbi Ayachi (tabelbala2010-1-035). After he explained the idea, implicit in animal tales across North Africa, that long ago all the animals used to talk, I asked him why that stopped; he replied:

Aṛṛə̣yyəd, ala wạlu. Ala əytsa lħəywan ba təndzi abdzyəy. Lħəywan. Mħal išənyu, mħal ə ɣuna. Išənyu ndza nbạṛṛaḅḅạna gạka, uɣudz abnnas nɣayu, gundz ə iššəmm an ərriħəts amgẉa anna tsiwktsyu, maʕ maʕ. Itsa abdzyəy.
Did it stop? No, no way. No; look, animals still talk. Animals. Like goats, like uh whatsit. Goats, if you've raised them in the house, the one who gives them food, when they smell his smell they start crying out, maa! maa! So they talk!

How did the precolonial spread of literacy combine with these attitudes? An unpublished Arabic manuscript recently posted by Endangered Libraries In Timbuktu - Kitāb fīhi Kalām al-Bahā’im wa al-Ṭuyūr [A Book Containing the Speech of the Animals and the Birds] (from the Essayouti Library, early 19th c.) - strikingly mirrors Adama Seydou's discourse above, while integrating a specifically religious spin. This apocryphal text, probably composed locally to judge by the occasional gender agreement errors, portrays ten Jewish religious scholars challenging the Caliph Umar with a bunch of difficult questions, including:

وأخبرنا عن الفرس وما يقول في صهيله وعن الإبل وما يقول في رخائه وعن البقر وما يقول في نهاره وعن الحمار وما يقول في نهاقه وعن الريح وما يقول في هبوبه وعن العصفور ما يقول في صرصرته وعن الشاة وما يقول في صياحها وعن الكلب وما يقول في نباحه وعن الثعلب وما يقول في ترنيه

"Tell us about the horse and what it says in its neighing, and the camel and what it says in its grunting, and the cow and what it says in its mooing, and the donkey and what it says in its braying, and the wind and what it says in in its blowing, and the sparrow and what it says in its chirping, and the sheep and what it says in its bleating, and the dog and what it says in its barking, and the fox and what it says in its crying..."

Umar forwards the questions to (his future successor) Ali ibn Abi Talib, who replies:

وأما كلام البهائم والطيور فإن الفرس يقول في صهيله اللهم اغفر للمؤمنين واحزن الكافرين واما الابل فانه يقول يا رب كيف يستطيع السكوت من يفهم القنوت واما البقر فإنها تقول يا غافل انت في شاغل يا غافل انت عن القريب راحل يا غافل ما حدثت ما انت فاعل واما الشاة فانها تقول يا موت ما افجاك يا موت ما انشاك يا ××× ما اغفلك واما الحمار فانه يقول اللهم لعن المكا××××××××× الكلب فانه يقول اللهم اني محروم وانت الرحمن ××××××××× واما الثعلب فانه يقول يا رب ا...

As for the speech of animals and birds: The horse says in his neighing "O God, forgive the believers (al-muʔminīn) and sadden the disbelievers (al-kāfirīn)". The camel says "Lord, how can one remain silent (sukūt) who understands supplication (qunūt)?". The cow says "Neglectful one (yā ġāfil), you are in distraction (šāġil); neglectful one (yā ġāfil), you are soon to depart (rāħil); neglectful one (yā ġāfil), what have you made new and what are you doing (fāʕil)?" The sheep says "O Death, how surprising you are (mā ʔafjaʔak); O Death, how established you are (mā ʔanšaʔak); [...], how neglectful you are (mā ʔaġfalak)!" The donkey says "O God, curse the [...]". The dog says "O God, I am deprived (maħrūm), and you are the merci[...]". The fox says "Lord, [...]".

In form, these loosely reflect the actual sounds of the animals: each of the phrases attributed to the animals have a rhyme in Arabic that recalls the animal's stereotypical sound (the horse in -īn, the camel in -ūt, the sheep in -aʔak/-alak.) In meaning, on the other hand, they reflect not any actual intentions that the animals might reasonably be seen to have, but rather their species' role within human society: horses used for war, sheep bred to be killed, dogs relegated to a lowly position.

The real purpose of this invention is obviously devotional and mnemonic: it creates a memorable association between an animal's cry and a sort of mini-sermon, ideally making every animal's cry trigger dhikr (remembrance of God) in its human readers.

On the surface, this text not only admits the possibility of animals speaking but gives it a stamp of religious authority. Yet the specific interpretations it gives make it impossible to read such speech as contextually relevant in any specific here and now, or as relating in any way to the animal's desires or circumstances. The animals are not so much being anthropomorphized as being "angelized" - turned into messengers of an abstract cause, like Smokey the Bear. In fact, the pretense of translating the language of animals here, as so often around the world, actually deprives them of the voice that less "sophisticated" approaches like Adama Seydou's acknowledge.

The ideal people to ask about this topic, in some respects, are neither farmers nor scholars, but hunters and herdsmen (not that those categories are mutually exclusive!) Unfortunately, I'm not aware offhand of any work on Songhay-speaking hunters' attitude to animal communication; it would make a very interesting counterpoint to statements like these.

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This little foray into linguistic anthropology was partly inspired by discussions with James Costa. My thanks to him, to Mohamed Larbi Ayachi, and to the ELIT team.

I'm posting these mostly so I don't forget them...

Algerian Arabic jəḥmum جحموم "blackbird", and its Kabyle counterpart ajeḥmum, derive from Classical Arabic yaḥmūm يحموم "soot-black". This otherwise very irregular change y- > j- is perfectly paralleled in another animal name of the form yaCCūC: jəṛbuʕ جربوع "jerboa" from yarbūʕ يربوع. Could this be the regular outcome of this particular template? We need to check if any other yaCCūC animal names have survived.

The Korandje word for "vulva", imən, looks phonologically like an obvious match for Berber iman "soul, self". However, I could never see any sufficiently clear connection between the two semantically. The missing link is provided by Colin's (1918:118) description of the Moroccan Arabic dialect of Taza: there, rōḥ is glossed as a euphemistic term for "vulve de la jument ou de la vache". Is this attested in Berber itself anywhere, I wonder?

Another Korandje word, tasənɣəyt, refers to a type of rock; after Paleolithic discoveries near Tabelbala, paleoarcheologists ended up giving its name to an Acheulian cleaver type, the "Tachenghit" cleaver. This seems to match Jijel Arabic ašənɣud "pierre lisse (pour broyer)" (Marçais 1954:333), although Hassaniya Arabic may offer a more direct point of comparison. I don't remember seeing this in any Berber dictionary so far; is that attested?

Two languages of the northwestern Sahara, spoken reasonably close to each other, have basic motion verbs derived from a word that originally meant GET LOST. Let's see if we can figure out how that happened.

For COME, practically all Berber languages consistently use reflexes of the proto-Berber word *asəʔ. In the largest Berber variety, however - Tashelhiyt, in southern Morocco - this root has been lost, and a quite different verb is used: ašk (ⴰⵛⴽ). The original meaning of this verb can still be seen in other Berber languages, such as Tamasheq: GET LOST (a meaning which in Tashelhiyt has been replaced by what's probably a borrowing from Arabic جلا.) Presumably, GET LOST came to mean WANDER, and WANDER (over) came to mean COME.

In Songhay, GET LOST is *dere(y), preserved as such in most varieties. In Korandje in western Algeria, however - uniquely within the family - this root's reflex has undergone a very similar shift in meaning: dri now means GO. (Songhay speakers might assume this comes from dira WALK, but this word, from Proto-Songhay *dida, rather corresponds to Korandje zda WALK.) Meanwhile, Berber *aškəʔ GET LOST has itself been borrowed - probably from Tamasheq - as wuška GET LOST (the vowels reflect the Berber perfective form.)

In summary:

	COME	GET LOST	GO
Tashelhiyt	ašk	žlu	ddu
Tamasheq	as	ašk	ăkk
Gao Songhay	kaa	dere	koy
Korandje	ka	wuška	dri

Both changes can be summarized as GET LOST > BASIC-MOTION-VERB. Lexically, Korandje shows heavy influence from southern Moroccan Berber, much of which seems to match Tashelhiyt better than it does the Southern Tamazight varieties currently spoken closest to Tabelbala. That makes it rather tempting to seek a contact explanation. But if Korandje was copying a Tashelhiyt pattern, why would it replace GO rather than COME?

To make sense of what happened, I think we have to envision an intermediate earlier stage where WANDER (from GET LOST) was getting used as a generic verb of motion irrespective of direction in some (perhaps expressive) contexts. Both Tashelhiyt and Korandje require direction towards (and sometimes away from) the speaker to be expressed with a directional morpheme outside the verb root proper, so no ambiguity would necessarily result. From this situation, WANDER could end up replacing either COME or GO, while still maintaining the existing (seemingly superfluous) lexical distinction between the two by keeping the other root.

Now I think about it, British English offers a possible parallel for the initial stages of such a development, with particles substituting for the directionals of Berber and Songhay. In phrases like "he wandered over" ("he came over"), "he wandered off" ("he went away"), the original implication of aimlessness has faded away in informal usage to the point of being virtually absent. Should we expect some peripheral English dialect to replace "come" or "go" with "wander" altogether? Check back in a few centuries to find out...

The Proto-Chadic word for "go out" was reconstructed by Newman and Ma (1966) as *p-t-, with attested reflexes in all primary subgroups of the family; the best known of these is of course (West Chadic A.1) Hausa fìtā.  The vowels vary across languages, and there is often no final vowel.  Only one subgroup, as far as I can see on a quick check, shows the consistent vocalisation *patā: the Bole languages (West Chadic A.2), spoken in Nigeria's Yobe State along the boundary between Hausa and Kanuri.  Thus Bole pàtā, Ngamo hàtâ, Karekare fàtā.

Most Songhay varieties have reflexes of two near-synonyms for "go out": *hùnú and *fáttá.  Usually, the distinction seems to be roughly "leave (a place or event)" vs. "go out of (an enclosed or concealed space)".  In Northern Songhay - the subgroup most isolated from the rest for longest, spoken in the Sahara - only reflexes of *hùnú seem to be attested, covering both senses (eg Korandje hnu).  This could be interpreted as reflecting Northern Songhay's general tendency to reduce its inherited vocabulary by widening the usage of generic terms.  In light of the Chadic data, however, it is tempting to interpret it the other way around: did Northern Songhay preserve the original situation, while a West Chadic borrowing spread throughout the rest of the family via the Niger River?

Almost every attested Songhay variety (Tasawaq is perhaps the only exception) has a reflex of the proto-Songhay word *gúrú "draw water" (from the river, from a pond, from a well, etc.)  To express this concept, most Berber varieties (including Tashelhiyt, Kabyle, Tumzabt, Ghadames, Awjila, Tamajeq...) use reflexes of a verb *āgum "draw water", which is thus equally securely reconstructible for proto-Berber.  Zenaga, however, has a rather different verb: ägur "puiser l'eau d'un puits, remonter le delou, tirer la corde du seau; faire parvenir qqc (à qqn)" and "se lever (astre)", with an irregular corresponding noun tgäʔrih "eau tirée du puits".  It seems to be distinct from äggur "pull".

The only Berber cognates Taine-Cheikh suggests for ägur are reflexes of a verb that may be reconstructed as *agir "throw; rise (of sun)" (eg Tashelhiyt gr, Kabyle gər, Chaoui gər).  Presumably the semantic shift of "throw" to "draw water" would be explained via the idea of throwing the bucket down the well.  If the comparison is accepted, then the verb shows an innovative semantic shift specific to Zenaga.  (It would be interesting to see if Tetserrét shares this, but unfortunately the relevant term doesn't seem to have been recorded.)

If the Zenaga word is indeed cognate to the suggested Berber forms, then it seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that proto-Songhay borrowed *gúrú "draw water" from an early relative of Zenaga.  This would fit well with the evidence for a Western Berber language having played an important role in the history of at least northern Mali.  If not, then it would become tempting to draw a conclusion much harder to fit with what is known of the region's history: that Zenaga borrowed the word from proto-Songhay.

Playing around a bit more with PCA, I decided to apply the method* to a dataset I've worked with more extensively: Songhay, a compact language family spoken mainly in Niger and Mali. On a hundred-word list (Swadesh with a few changes), randomly choosing one form in cases of synonymy and including borrowings, I get the following table of lexical cognate percentages:

	Tabelbala	Tadaksahak	Tagdal	In-Gall	Timbuktu	Djenne	Kikara	Hombori	Zarma	Djougou
Tabelbala	1	0.678	0.67	0.687	0.636	0.667	0.625	0.622	0.616	0.602
Tadaksahak	0.678	1	0.857	0.8	0.63	0.635	0.567	0.576	0.58	0.586
Tagdal	0.67	0.857	1	0.857	0.632	0.649	0.579	0.588	0.582	0.588
In-Gall	0.687	0.8	0.857	1	0.65	0.667	0.598	0.606	0.6	0.606
Timbuktu	0.636	0.63	0.632	0.65	1	0.979	0.773	0.808	0.79	0.778
Djenne	0.667	0.635	0.649	0.667	0.979	1	0.753	0.789	0.771	0.768
Kikara	0.625	0.567	0.579	0.598	0.773	0.753	1	0.835	0.814	0.823
Hombori	0.622	0.576	0.588	0.606	0.808	0.789	0.835	1	0.838	0.867
Zarma	0.616	0.58	0.582	0.6	0.79	0.771	0.814	0.838	1	0.808
Djougou	0.602	0.586	0.588	0.606	0.778	0.768	0.823	0.867	0.808	1

Running this through R again to get its eigenvectors, the first two principal components are easily interpretable:

• PC1 (eigenvalue=7.3) separates Songhay into three low-level subgroups - Western, Eastern, and Northern, in that order - with an obvious longitude effect: it traces a line eastward all the way down the Niger river, jumps further east to In-Gall, and then proceeds back westward through the Sahara.
• PC2 (eigenvalue=1.1) measures the level of Berber/Tuareg influence.

All the other eigenvectors have eigenvalues lower than 0.4, and are thus much less significant.

The resulting cluster patterns have a strikingly shallow time depth; as in the Arabic example in my last post, this method's results correspond well to criteria of synchronic mutual intelligibility (Western Songhay is much easier for Eastern Songhay speakers to understand than Northern is), but it completely fails to pick up on the deeper historic tie between Northern Songhay and Western Songhay (they demonstrably form a subgroup as against Eastern). It's nice how the strongest contact influence shows up as a PC, though; it would be worth exploring how good this method is at identifying contact more generally.

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* Strictly speaking, this may not quite count as PCA - I'm starting from a similarity matrix generated non-numerically, rather than turning the lexical data into binary numeric data and letting that produce a similarity matrix.

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Update, following Whygh's comment below: here's what SplitsTree gives based on the same table:

In Niamey, where I went last week for a workshop on Songhay as a cross-border language, the crows do something I've never seen them do in any other country: they come to the window and start tapping on the glass, like something out of Edgar Allen Poe. The reaction of my fellow attendees taught me a new Songhay word - gaaru-gaaru "pied crow" (Heath 1998) - which in turn revealed a new Korandje etymology. In Korandje, "raven" is gạḍi. The shift of intervocalic *d to r in mainstream Songhay is well-established (Nicolaï 1981). But the vowels are more interesting.

Korandje ạ usually derives from *ar or *or. In several inherited Songhay words, however, ạ seems to derive from *a not followed by *r: thus kạṣ-əw "rough" < kas-ow, bạzu "skin bucket, waterbag" < baasu, hạmu "meat" < *hamu, kə̣kkạbu "key" < *karkabu. Yet *a otherwise usually yields a in similar contexts: contrast gani "louse" < *gani, akama "wheat" < *alkama, dzam-a "do it" < *dam-a. It looks as though the vowel in the following syllable is what makes the difference: if it's rounded, you get ạ, otherwise you get a (though one or two exceptions suggest that the story may be more complicated: notably, "difficult" is gab-ə̣w < *gab-ow.) Assuming this rule, *gaadu should regularly have yielded gaaru in mainstream Songhay and gạḍu in Korandje.

What we actually get, however, is gạḍi. Why? Well, Korandje has a rule of final high vowel deletion phrase-internally: if a word ends in i or u, its final vowel will be deleted unless it comes before a pause, ie most of the time. (Basically the opposite of Classical Arabic.) In a number of words, this seems to have led to confusion between original -i, -u, and consonant-final words. For instance, ạṣạnkri "skink" comes from Berber asrmkal, which should regularly have yielded ạṣạmkər; the i is unetymological (Souag 2015). In effect, speakers must have been hypercorrecting final high vowels - a fact which suggests that, if Korandje survives, it may be on its way towards phonologically losing them altogether, much as Classical Arabic did with final short vowels.

The proto-Songhay word for "(pair of) shoes, sandals" is *tàgmú (Zarma tà:mú, Kandi tà:mú, Gao taam-i, Hombori tà:mí, Kikara tă:m, Djenne taam, Tadaksahak taɣmú, Korandje tsaɣmmu). It is evidently related to a less widely attested verb *tàgmá "step on" (Zarma tà:mú, Gao taama, Hombori tà:mà, Djenne taam). (Velar stop codas are lost in all of Songhay except the Northern branch, leaving behind either compensatory lengthening or a w; see Souag 2012.)

In Hausa, the word for "shoe, boot, sandal" is tà:kàlmí: (borrowed directly into the Songhay (Dendi) variety of Djougou as tàkăm). Within Hausa, this likewise corresponds to a verb tá:kà: "step on". The two-way similarity is striking, but if there was borrowing, which way did it go? A cognate set in Schuh (2008) casts some light on the question.

Hausa belongs to the West Chadic family, in which the best comparison to Hausa "shoe" seems to be Bole tàkà(:), with no obvious cognates within its own subgroup, Bole-Tangale (Ngamo tà:hò looks similar, but Ngamo h seems normally to correspond to Bole p, not k.) For "step on", however, Schuh points to a potential cognate set in a slightly more distantly related West Chadic subgroup, Bade. In this subgroup, we have Gashua Bade tà:gɗú, Western Bade tàgɗú, Ngizim tàkɗú which Schuh analyses as *tàk- plus an unproductive verbal extension -ɗu supported by Bade-internal evidence, eg tə̀nkùku "press" vs. tə̀nkwàkùɗu "massage". Within Bole-Tangale, one might speculate that Gera tàndə̀- is cognate, but Gera seems to be known only from short wordlists, so that would be difficult to show.

So the comparative evidence provides some support for the idea that Hausa tá:kà: "step on" goes back to proto-West Chadic. If tà:kàlmí: "shoe" could be regularly derived from this verb within Chadic, then the answer would appear clear: Songhay borrowed it from Chadic. However, while Hausa frequently forms deverbal nouns with a suffix -i: (Newman (2000:157), there seems to be no plausible language-internal explanation for the -lm-. In Songhay, on the other hand, a suffix -mi forming nouns from verbs (sometimes -m-ey with a former plural suffix stuck on) is reasonably well-attested: Gao (Heath 1999:97) dey "buy" vs. dey-mi "purchase (n.)", key "weave" vs. key-mi "weaving", Kikara (Heath 2005:97-98) kà:rù "go up" vs. kàr-mɛ̂y "going up", húná "live" vs. hùnà-mɛ̀y "long life". A shift *-mi to *-mu seems natural enough, especially since a few Songhay varieties actually have reflexes of "shoe" with a final -i in any case; so the Songhay form looks kind of like it could be **tàg "step on" plus deverbal -mí̀. To top it off, deverbal noun-forming suffixes in -r- are widely attested in Songhay, and Zarma attests a combined suffix -àr-mì: zànjì "break" vs. zànjàrmì "shard", bágú "break" vs. bàgàrmì "piece of debris" (Tersis 1981:244). If we treat the Hausa form as a borrowing from Songhay, we can then analyse it as **tàg "step on" plus deverbal -àr-mí. But before we get carried away, we should note that within Songhay there's no motivation for analysing the -mu / -mi in "shoe" as a suffix; the verb and the noun differ (if at all) only in the final vowel.

So what to make of all this? So far, the scenario that suggests itself is something like the following:

1. Songhay borrows a verb *tàk "step on" from West Chadic (or vice versa?).
2. Songhay internally forms a deverbal noun *tàk-mí "shoe" (there is no reconstructible contrast between *k and *g in coda position in proto-Songhay), alongside a variant *tàk-àr-mí.
3. Hausa borrows this as tà:kàlmí:.
4. Songhay replaces *tàk with a denominal verb formed from "shoe" (which becomes internally unanalysable): *tàgm-á. This step has possible internal motivations: in most of Songhay, final velar stops disappeared leaving behind only compensatory lengthening on the preceding vowel, and the resulting form tà: would have been homophonous with the much commoner verb "receive, take".
5. Djougou Dendi, a heavily Hausa-influenced, somewhat creolized Songhay variety spoken in Benin, borrows the Hausa form as tàkăm.

Further Chadic comparative data may yet turn out to bear upon this etymology, but one thing seems clear: these two families have been affecting each other for a long time.

With only 30,000-odd inhabitants, and fairly poor road connections, Dellys is a reasonably small and out-of-the-way place. In summer it briefly fills up with the unfamiliar faces of other Algerians looking for a quiet beach holiday, but I've never seen, for instance, a Chinese person here, even though there are plenty in Algiers. Nevertheless, the problems of the Sahel have made themselves felt even here: this year, for the first time, a couple of families from Niger seem to have made it to Dellys. As I was browsing in a little bookshop, a little girl came in, holding up a bowl and saying "Sara, sara". She said the same word to each of us in turn, then left to proceed along her route. Shortly after she left, I belatedly realised what she was saying. In Zarma (the main language of western Niger), historic intervocalic d became r, and intervocalic velars were lost. Arabic ṣadaqah "alms" (Hausa sadaka) is thus reduced to sara. She can't have been here long, or surely she would have found a more effective expression to use; I imagine everyone else was assuming that she was simply repeating her own name.

As a town, Dellys is not particularly fond of strangers, though it leaves them alone; coincidentally, the owner of the bookshop had just been complaining to me about how all the post-independence immigrants into town - from villages a few kilometres away - had made a mess of the place. Absorbing Nigerien immigrants may take some work. But I expect more will arrive; right now, Niger has the fastest growing population in the world, with a birthrate last seen in Algeria in the 1970s, and in the industrialised world during the 19th century. Many Algerian young people dream of escaping the country's sclerotic economy, sometimes illegally by boat from Dellys - there used to be a graffiti near the lighthouse alluding to the early Muslims' flight to Abyssinia: "I shall go to Spain, for it is ruled by a king who does not oppress anyone." But compared to Niger, Algeria might as well be the US.

I am very happy to announce the publication of my freely accessible overview of Language Contact in the Sahara, written for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Apart from being the first introduction to this topic to cover both sides of the Sahara, it encapsulates a good deal of my research program over the past few years, and gives some idea of what remains to be done in this domain. Here's the abstract; if it sounds interesting, go read it!

As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers’ ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analyzing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.

There are a rather large number of words in Songhay, the language of the Niger River valley between Timbuktu and southern Niger, which are almost the same as in Soninke, the language of the semidesert regions around the Mali-Senegal-Mauritania borders well to the west. Since most of the basic vocabulary is very different, these must be considered loanwords. But how do we tell which language coined them and which one borrowed them from the other? In some cases, this can be tricky, but in others it's quite clear-cut.

Three years ago, I discussed a Songhay-Arabic poem including the Timbuktu-area word sete "caravan". This word is well-attested elsewhere in Songhay, from eastern Mali to northern Benin (though not in the Sahara proper):

• Gao šeta "(camels) go on caravan", šetete "go in single file" (Heath)
• Hombori sèt-ò "convoy, caravan", sétt-ó "pack of horses" (Heath)
• Kaado sété "village delegation sent to seek food in times of famine" (Ducroz and Charles)
• Zarma sátá "group, troupe, team" (White and Kaba)
• Kandi sété "row" (Heath)

The root is also found in Fulani, eg Gambian Fula sete "caravan" (Gamble), Pular seteejo "traveller, caravaneer", setagol "go on a trip" (Bah), and Heath glosses it as a Fulani loan in his Hombori Songhay dictionary. In neither language, however, does it have an obvious derivation from some shorter or more basic form. For that, we need to turn to a third language - Soninke.

In Soninke, setú is the normal word for "to ride", glossed by Diagana "to be on top, to ride, to perch". By applying the productive morphological process C1V1C2V2 > C1V1C2C2V2, normally used to form imperfectives, we get sètté "caravan, cavalcade, group on horseback, riding". This etymology is not possible in Songhay, where "ride" is kaaru, nor in Fulani, where "ride" is maɗɗ- / waɗɗ-. We thus see that this commercially and politically significant word must have been coined within Soninke. That fits some aspects of the known history of the region: the early Soninke kingdom of Ghana played an important role in the development of the trans-Saharan trade, and even after its fall a diaspora of Soninke traders, the so-called Wangara, played an important role in tying the region together economically.

For English speakers, it is mysterious and highly debatable whether we have souls, but obvious except to the odd philosopher that we have bodies. In other languages, this intuition doesn't translate so well; quite apart from the question of the soul(s), many languages - reportedly including Homeric Greek - don't seem to have a word for "body" in the sense of "the ​whole ​physical ​structure that ​forms a ​person or ​animal", notwithstanding the protests of NSM-ists. In Wintu, a language of northern California, Lee (1950:134) was only able to elicit kot wintu "all person". (Wintu is not that well documented, but in this case Lee's account agrees with later work; Schlichter (1981:242) gives winthu:n thunis "person altogether".) For Korandje, my data suggest the same, although further checking is needed; when asked, the oldest of my Korandje consultants came up with a precise equivalent of this expression, bɑ kamla "person whole", while others gave Arabic loans like ṣṣəħħəts (literally "health") or žžhaməts (which so far seems rather to mean "corpse").

In Siwi, the situation is slightly different. Unlike the hesitations and disagreements of Korandje speakers asked about this subject, Siwi speakers asked to translate Arabic jism "body" confidently reply aglim, and early wordlists confirm that they have been doing so for over a century. However, if you ask them to translate aglim, they equally consistently reply with Arabic jild "skin". A person or animal has an aglim, but so does a potato, and its aglim can be peeled off. To further complicate the semantic field in question, ilem also translates as jild "skin", but refers to a piece of skin rather than to the whole: kteṛṭiyya aksum ɣair ilem "You have brought me meat that is nothing but skin"; ilem en ṭad yekkes "Some skin came off his finger". This renders the interpretation of aglim questionable. Does it have two distinct meanings, "body" and "(whole) skin"? Or does it just mean "(whole) skin", and refer to the body only as the volume encompassed by the skin?

Thinking out the question here makes it obvious what I should try to elicit next time the occasion arises: how to say "The human body is covered with skin" or "A snake sheds its skin many times, but always has the same body". Any other suggestions for contexts that clearly bring out the relevant differences in meaning?

(I should mention that this question was inspired by a recent talk by Mustapha El Adak of the University of Oujda, arguing that all non-borrowed Berber words for "body" either include non-physical aspects of the person or relate specifically to a particular aspect of the body rather than referring uniformly to the whole.)

Americans of a certain age probably remember the "chupacabra" (goat-sucker), a nonexistent reptilian monster supposed to suck the blood of Puerto Rican goats back in the 1990s. The notion of goat-suckers, however, has a longer, less bloody, and slightly more respectable history. In European folklore, a goat-sucker (Spanish chotacabras, Latin Caprimulgus) is a kind of nocturnal bird, thought since Pliny to steal goats' milk as they slept. In Middle Eastern folklore, however, it's a creature a little more reminiscent of the chupacabra that is popularly supposed to steal milk from goats: namely, the monitor lizard (varan, ورل‍). In Persian, this lizard is even called بزمجه bozmajeh "goat-sucker" (Anderson, "Lizards", Encyclopaedia Iranica). Unlikely as this notion seems a priori, it does appear that monitor lizards will drink milk offered to them, if we may believe an aside in Kesteloot and Veirman's "Le culte du Mboose à Kaolack" (p. 85). I recently came across a passage describing how this is said to work in a recording in Korandje (a Songhay language of southwestern Algeria):

akka,	xʌdz	a-ggw	išən=yu,
monitor lizard,	when	3Sg-see	goat=PL,
a-m-gwab	maʔʔʔʔ maʔʔ,
3Sg-IRR-INCEPT	maaa maaa,
a-b-ṣʌyyaħ	ħar	išən	kadda
3Sg-IMPF-bleat	like	goat	little
ndzuɣ	a-b-
so that	3Sg-IRR-
ndzuɣ	išən-y	əm-ki-a.si	a-m-dər	a-m-mʌṭmṭ-ini.
so that	goat-PL	IRR-stand-3Sg.DAT	3Sg-IRR-go	3Sg-IRR-suckle-3PlEmph.

The monitor lizard, when it sees goats, it starts going maaa maaa, it bleats like a kid goat so that it- so that the goats will stand by it and it can go and suckle them.

I'll leave it to the biologists to determine whether this story has any basis in fact, and folklorists to consider if it can be connected to the Puerto Rican chupacabra. However, it does have one linguistically interesting feature as well. In Korandje, an aspect marker is ordinarily directly followed by a verb. It is possible to hesitate after an aspect marker, but not to insert anything between it and the verb it governs. However, in this sentence we find an aspect marker (gwab) followed directly by an onomatopeia representing the sound made. This suggests that, despite the inseparability of the verb from the aspect marker, it might be plausible to take them as two distinct words rather than as a single long word.

Korandje, the seriously endangered Songhay language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, is a longstanding research interest of mine. As far as I can see, it has the most complicated contact history of any language in the Sahara, with multiple extensive layers of loanwords from each of at least five languages which successively dominated the region. I recently wrote a short summary of the history of Korandje (as I understand it), aimed at a non-specialist audience, for a special issue of The Middle East in London. You can read it here:

Gaining a language, losing a language: Korandje from the 12th to the 21st century.

Northern Songhay is a small group of languages (Korandjé, Tadaksahak, Tagdal, and Tasawaq) spoken in the Sahara, with a Songhay core vocabulary and grammar but extremely heavy Berber influence on vocabulary and structure. In Tadaksahak and Tagdal, this has gone so far that verbal derivational morphology consists exclusively of Berber affixes attached to Berber roots, making the causative and passive of every inherited Songhay verb suppletive. How these languages emerged - often in areas quite far from the Songhay-speaking banks of the Niger River - remains mysterious in several respects, but my recently published article "Non-Tuareg Berber and the Genesis of Nomadic Northern Songhay" (Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 36:1, pp. 121-143, 2015) brings new comparative Berber data to bear on this problem for Tadaksahak in particular, showing that it wasn't just an encounter between Songhay and Tuareg as generally assumed. Copies are available on request, and here's the abstract:

With massive borrowing resulting in systematic suppletion, the nomadic Northern Songhay languages, Tadaksahak and Tagdal, are some of the most striking products of intense language contact in Africa. While the importance of Berber in their formation is obvious, published comparisons have focused almost exclusively on Tuareg, the currently dominant Berber language of the region. This paper, however, demonstrates that Tuareg-Songhay contact alone cannot adequately account for their emergence. Tadaksahak at least seems to have as its substrate not Tuareg, but rather a Western Berber language closely related to Tetserrét, a small minority language of Niger; such a language also played a role in the development of Tagdal. Western Berber influence, however, is not reconstructible at the proto-Northern-Songhay level, despite being attested in most Northern Songhay languages individually. A closer look at the Western Berber stratum in Tadaksahak indicates that language shift there was accompanied by broader cultural changes, including a shift away from the regional norm of cross-cousin marriage towards the North African preference for patrilineal parallel cousin marriage. These linguistic and cultural changes may have been part of an effort to assert an identity as specialists in Islamic learning, following regional political shifts around the sixteenth century.

A persistent problem for research in this domain is the inadequacy of the published data. A new article by Maarten Kossmann takes an important step forward in this regard, providing a sketch grammar of Tasawaq along with the first adequately transcribed published text in it: "A Tasawaq (Northern Songhay, Niger) Text with Grammatical Notes" (Linguistic Discovery 13:1, 2015). Conveniently, this article is freely downloadable - no subscription necessary.

[This article presents] a Tasawaq story with glossing and comments, recorded in Agadez in October 2003, told by Mrs. Ibrahim, born Nana Mariama Aweïssou, originary from In-Gall, but then living and working in Agadez. Mrs. Ibrahim speaks Tasawaq, Hausa and French; at the time of the recording her daily language was Hausa. [...] The text presented here is a well-known story in the region, a version of which appears, for instance, in Jacques Pucheu’s collection of Nigerien Hausa stories (Pucheu 1982:45ff.). There is a clear connection to Hausa stories in the name of one of the participants, the bóóráy tree.

Northern Songhay is just the most extreme example of a strong tendency to intense language contact throughout the Songhay-speaking world. Paulo Moraes Farias' article Bentyia (Kukyia): a Songhay–Mande meeting point, and a “missing link” in the archaeology of the West African diasporas of traders, warriors, praise-singers, and clerics (Afriques 4, 2013) - also freely available online - gives a historically oriented picture of some of the migration patterns that helped produce this, with a particular focus on a contact whose linguistic effects still need to be elucidated: between Soninke, the Mande language of the Kingdom of Ghana along the modern-day Mali-Mauritania border, and mainstream Songhay in places such as Gao.

The present tragedy in Mali draws our attention to the divisions, tensions and conflicts between West African ethnic groups, religious persuasions, and populations from different regions, in both the present and the past. But a long-term critical perspective on the past brings to light borrowings between cultures, and shows how the mobility of people across West Africa links regional and ethnic histories. The communication axis running from the Aḍagh to the Niger and, along the Niger Valley, from Gao to Busa (in Nigerian Borgu) and beyond, is a strategic locus for investigating this mobility and connectivity. It has linked together the Saharan, savannah, and forest zones of West Africa. It was a magnet for diasporas of Soninke praise-singers and Mande warriors and traders. Fishermen and other waterfolk along the river, oral traditionists and other craftspeople, priests and priestesses of African cults, and Islamic clerics, as well as armies, long-distance merchants, and enslaved human beings, moved along it. Although the archeological sites at Bentyia/Kukyia occupy a strategic position on this historical axis, they have not been excavated, whence a serious gap in our knowledge of the history of the eastern Niger Valley and of West Africa as a whole.

Much work remains to be done in this domain, but the picture is gradually becoming clearer, despite a political situation in the area which is not very conducive to research.

Korandje, the language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, requires the comitative preposition "with" to agree in person and number, not with its object, but with its subject (strictly speaking, with its external argument):

ʕa-ddər ʕ-indza xaləd, I-went I-with Khaled.
nə-ddər n-indza xaləd, you-went you-with Khaled.

This seems to be vanishingly rare worldwide. The nearest parallels I have encountered are ones in which the comitative is expressed using a serial verb, but a closer look at the syntax and morphology of Korandje shows that indza is indeed a preposition, not a verb or a noun. Perhaps most strikingly, when you relativise on its object, you pied-pipe not only the preposition but the agreement marker on it too:

ʕan bạ-yu ʕ-indz uɣudz əgga ʕa-b-yəxdəm
my friend-s I-with whom PAST I-IMPF-work
"my friends with whom I was working"

Its historical source, proto-Songhay *ndá "with, and, if", was also a preposition, and did not display agreement. Comparative data makes it possible to reconstruct how this change took place: it developed out of a strategy, common in Berber and found in some Songhay languages, of expressing "I went with Khaled" as "I went, I and Khaled", which seems to be the result of reinterpretation of a postverbal subject as part of the adjacent comitative phrase. This development in turn provides the first attested way to reverse the well-known grammaticalisation chain "with" > "and". If you want to know more, read my article, which has just been published:

"How to make a comitative preposition agree it-with its external argument: Songhay and the typology of conjunction and agreement". In Paul Widmer, Jürg Fleischer, and Elisabeth Rieken (eds.), Agreement from a diachronic perspective, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 75-100, 2015. (offprints available on request - just email me.)

Here's the abstract:

This article describes two hitherto unreported comitative strategies exemplified in Songhay languages of West Africa – external agreement, and bipartite – and demonstrates their wider applicability. The former strategy provides the first clear-cut example of a previously unattested agreement target-controller pair. Based on comparative evidence, this article proposes a scenario for how these could have developed from the typologically unremarkable comitative and coordinative strategies reconstructible for proto-Songhay, in a process facilitated by contact with Berber. The grammaticalisation chain required to explain this has the unexpected effect of reversing a much better-known one previously claimed to be unidirectional, the development COMITATIVE > NP-AND.