Jabal al-Lughat

Back from holiday; this year's miscellaneous observations on Darja follow.

On holiday in Algeria, I've been going frequently to some coastal rocks called əṣ-Ṣṭuħ الصطوح, from the plural of ṣṭəħ صطح "flat terrace roof", and occasionally eating šṭiṭħa شطيطحة "stew".

Mubi is the best described member of a small "Mubic" subgroup consisting of Masmedje, Kajakse, and Zerenkel.

The remarkable voice system described for Mubi seems to interact with relativisation, but textual data is scarce.

Looking over Jungraithmayr's Mubi grammar again recently, I think I managed to make sense of the subject paradigms.

The core of the Eastern Sudanic hypothesis is the idea that Nubian - historically the largest language family of Sudan proper - is related to Nilotic, the largest language family of South Sudan.

Going through some old papers, I found some notes on Dellys dialect that I had taken years ago from Amti Khira; better to put them up (mainly so I can find them more easily) than leave them to get dusty.

Every time I go to Algeria, I come back with some linguistic observations that are new to me (if not necessarily to anyone else.)

The metaphorical identification of heads with gourds is probably obvious enough to arise spontaneously anywhere that gourds are in regular use (even English has expressions like "stoned out of his gourd".)

This is basically a note to myself, and may be updated.

Thomas Anour has posted a number of Bible extracts: Mark 10:13-18, John 1:1-13, and James 4:1-3.

The least well documented subgroup of West Nilotic is the Burun group, spoken around the borders between Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād, Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān, dialectal Arabic Tləmsā…

Searching Shamela, I recently realised that the earliest references to a language of (al-)Barbar in Arabic go back further than I had assumed, to the second century AH.

When I wrote my paper on the Arabic dialect of Dellys a couple of decades ago, I described it as using the participle "going (to)" - ṛayəħ رايح (m.) / ṛayħa رايحة f. / ṛayħin رايحين pl., depending on the gender/number of the subject - to form the futur…

While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly branches out there into linguistic historical morphology: Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; i…

In an episode of "Chadian Wisdom and Proverbs", Yaqub Muhammad Musa discusses three Mubi proverbs, providing the Mubi versions along with translation and extensive commentary in Arabic.

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer, freely available through Language Science Press.

Any educated English speaker nowadays is likely to be familiar with the idea that comedy should punch up, not punch down: i.e., that it's okay to make fun of people more powerful than yourself, but not of people less powerful.

A friend in Tabelbala just posted a translation of some lines from Abu'l-Atahiya into Korandje.

In Algerian Arabic, ngər نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; nəgru نڨرو "they died out" typically means they died leaving no descendants bearing the family name.

You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music, an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family's memoirs.

The modern borders of Algeria had no existence or meaning in the Roman era, but for any potential Algerian classicists, it may be interesting to consider which of the Latin texts that have come down to us were written by people born in Algeria.

It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - salat, namaz, wudu, shahada, masjid...

According to Ethnologue - or even to the HCA - Chenoua (Tacenwit) is one of the larger Berber/Amazigh languages of Algeria, spoken west of Algiers from Tipasa almost to Tenes.