The history of pre-Islamic Arabia, and of what languages preceded the rise of Classical Arabic, is a fascinating subject and one still emerging. Most may have heard of the Old South Arabian languages, which are quite a separate matter, but the various scripts and languages of Northern Arabia are less well known. The 15-Minute History Podcast at the University of Texas at Austin has a podcast for those interested in Ancient Arabia and Comparative Semitics (and who isn't?), "Episode 82: What Writing Can Tell Us About the Arabs before Islam", which is introduced as follows:
In most world history survey courses, Arabia is introduced for the
first time only as backstory to the rise of Islam. We’re told that there
was a tradition of oral poetry in Arabic, a language native to central
Arabia, and that the Qur’an was the zenith of this oral tradition. New
evidence, however, suggests that Arabia was linguistically diverse, that
the language we’ve come to know as Arabic originated in modern day
Jordan, and that the looping cursive writing system that’s become the
language’s hallmark wasn’t the original system used to write it. What to
make of all this?
Guest Ahmad al-Jallad co-directs archaeological/epigraphic projects
in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, uncovering new inscriptions thousands of
years old, and shares his research that’s shedding new light on the
writings of a complex civilization that lived in the Arabian peninsula
for centuries before Islam arose.
I like to think there is some small, eccentric subset of my readers who have been asking themselves, "why is he spending so much time on history and current events and neglecting posts on obscure linguistics of dead Middle Eastern languages?" I even like to think that a subset of that subset has been mumbling, "You haven't had a single post on Punic since the summer of 2013! " Then, you may recall, we discussed the question of whether spoken Punic (the language of Ancient Carthage) survived until the coming of Arabic.
Actually, maybe none of you are thinking that. But not being a linguistics expert, I have to refer you to someone who is, Lameen Souag over at Jabal al-Lughat, who also deserves congratulations for his 10th anniversary of blogging. I also recently linked to his posts about the officialization of Tamazight in Algeria.
In this particular link. "Raisins from Carthage to Siwa," Souag, citing a Facebook post, notes that the standard word in Tamazight dialects for "raisin" is usually either a Berber phrase meaning "dried grapes" or is a loan word from Arabic, but that in Djerba in Tunisia, Zuwara and other places in western Libya — and, curiously, at Siwa, the only Berber enclave in Egypt —the root in use is found in a late inscription in Neo-Punic. The root is also documented in Hebrew, as is often how Punic and Phoenician inscriptions are deciphered. (Hebrew, Phoenician, Punic and Canaanite are extremely similar languages.)
Souag, who has written a book on Siwi and its relations to other Berber languages, notes that Carthaginian influence, and Neo-Punic, never extended east of central Libya, so what explains the presence in Siwa of all places? He answers:
The answer is simple, as I discuss in the introduction to my book Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt):
modern Siwi seems to derive mainly from a Berber variety spoken much
further west, which reached Siwa only during the Middle Ages. There
very probably was a Berber language spoken in Siwa before that, but if
so, it has left very few traces.
Last year I blogged about "The Endangered South Arabian Languages of Oman and Yemen." These languages are quite distinct from Arabic, belonging to a different branch of the Semitic subfamily of Afro-Asiatic, and are actually coser to the Ethiopian languages.
For more, see my earlier post. But here's a piece from Al Jazeera about one of them, Soqotri, (which the article spells Socotri), spoken on Yemen's island of Soqotra. Because of itsinsular loction, it is the most distinctive of the Modern South Arabian language, with little mutual intelligibility with the others.
The article deals with the work of Russian linguists who began to study Soqotri during the era of Soviet influence in South Yemen. It adds some color to my earlier post, from which I take a map and a video of Soqotri poetry:
I do hope that as a linguist he gives points for my utterly inappropriate sports metaphors and hyperbole, especially in the title, even though as an Algerian educated in London and working in Paris he may have no clue what they mean.
And the Dutch Institute for the Near East is digitizing its out-of-print backlist and making them available online. At least so far it's all the Ancient Near East. A few titles are in Dutch but the bulk are in French or English.
I realize the vast majority of my readers have never heard of Harsusi, or probably of Hobyot or Bat'hari either, but they are real, living, if endangered languages of Oman (with Hobyot extending into Yemen). Along with the Soqotri and the much healthier and widely spoken Mehri (or Mahri) and Shehri (or Shahri or Jebali/Jibbali/Jibali) in Oman, these are the surviving Modern South Arabian languages, . They are quite distinct from Arabic, and are usually classed as part of the Southern Semitic subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, while Arabic is more closely related to Northwest Semitic. Even if you've never heard of these six languages, this post will not only make sure you hearof them, but will give you a chance to actually hear three of them.
A seventh language may deserve inclusion. Razihi, spoken in the Jabal Razih in the extreme north of Yemen, is sometimes classified as the only direct survivor of Old South Arabian, rather than as Modern South Arabian. UNESCO lists it as an endangered language, but others consider it an Arabic variant; Ethnologue doesn't list it.
The Modern South Arabian languages have many affinities with the Ethiopic languages, including Classical Ge'ez and Amharic, but they are also distinct. Though it was long assumed the Modern South Arabian languages were descended from Old South Arabian, some linguists say they are distinct even there; I'm not qualified to judge.
Let's start with some maps from Wikipedia and the language reference site Ethnologue.com:
Wikipedia
Ethnologue
Ethnologue
Endangered languages are a key issue in the 21st century. This may be,
for example, the fatal century for Native North American languages. Of
3000 or more languages spoken when Columbus landed, only about 175-200
survived at the turn of the 21st century, mostly in Canada, Alaska, and
Hawaii. In the "lower 48" US states, the scene is bleak, except for
Navajo, Cherokee, and Cree. In 1997 it was estimated that 55 languages
in North America had between one and six native speakers. That was 17
years ago, and many of those are likely now extinct.
And UNESCO says that one half of some 6000 languages in the world today will be extinct by the end of the century.
When
any language dies, a part of its culture is lost; not everything
translates. When a written language dies, it doesn't die forever; there
are still web pages published in Latin, and we have learned to read
Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic and even Linear B
Mycenean Greek again, awakening long silenced voices. Even Mayan is now
re-emerging. There are efforts to revive Manx and Cornish, and many on
the Isle of Man and in Cornwall are learning them, but they are not native speakers and it will never be their first language.
The Middle East, of course has seen what is as far as I know the only
example of a language that once had no native speakers not just revive
but become a language which is the only language of many: Hebrew. But
it's a unique case: it was always the liturgical language of Jews
everywhere,a nd Israel was created from immigrants whose first languages
were as different as Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic and many others. Israeli
Hebrew is not just an exception; so far it's the only exception.
Some languages that once seemed moribund like Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Provencal etc. have had a new lease on life, while others that once were endangered by a dominant language have strongly rebounded (notably Catalan and at least up to now, Ukrainian). In the Middle East, Amazigh (Berber) has been one of the big winners in the Libyan and Tunisian revolutions; if "Arab Spring" has withered, "Berber Spring" survives. Kurdish has always held on, and Aramaic continues to survive. But (with asterisks on Amazigh) those are all written languages.
But when an unwritten language dies, its words are gone forever, except what anthropologists or explorers may have written down. All of the Modern South Arabian languages (unlike Old South Arabian), lacked a writing system, though Arabic, English transliteration systems, and the International Phonetic Alphabet have been used to record them. This is a disadvantage.
Though the largest of the surviving South Arabian languages, Mehri, has over 100,000 speakers, all of them are endangered. As with Native American and other minority indigenous languages, as rural, mountain, or nomadic peoples move to the cities, or as central governments provide schooling, there is great pressure to adopt the dominant language to succeed. The younger generation are likely to prefer Arabic, and literacy is only possible in Arabic. All the languages are already heavily influenced by Arabic vocabulary.
Before providing some comments and examples of the six Modern South Arabian languages, here are some resources dealing with them as a group:
Susan Al Shahri, "The Language Crisis," A blogpost by a blogger from Dhofar. Though her name suggests an affiliation with the tribal group speaking Shahri/Jibali, she admits that "Although I have lived in Dhofar my entire life, I have never had the privilege of hearing Hobyot or Batthari being spoken."
Except for Soqotri, separated by sea from the others, there is reportedly some mutual comprehensibility among these languages.
For the individual languages themselves many of the published grammars and such are published by E.J. Brill or other high-end publishers and are only found in specialist libraries. Leaving aside the uncertain case of Razihi, mentioned above, here are brief descriptions for he other six, along with estimates of the number of speakers from 1) UNESCO, 2) Ethnologue, the language reference work by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (a Christian missionary endeavor), 3) the SOAS Endangered Languages Archive cited earlier, and 4) Wikipedia. I also include related links, and videos where I found them. I am taking the languages alphabetically.
Bat'hari
One of the most endangered is Bat'hari, spoken by a few hundred fishermen along the Bay of Khuriya Muria on the coast of Oman. UNESCO estimates 300 speakers, Ethnologue 200, and Wikipedia "about 200." SOAS gives no estimate.
Spoken in the Jiddat al-Harasis area of Central Oman. Estimates of speakers vary dramatically: UNESCO says3000 in 1996, 3500-4000 today, both based on fieldwork by Dawn Chatty; Ethnologue says 600; SOAS says between 600-1000; Wikipedia says 1000-2000.
A post about numbers in Harsusi. Clearly all but a few of those from 1-10 differ significantly from Arabic; 11 upwards resemble Arabic.
Hobyot (or Hoby籀t)
Hobyot is spoken on either side of the Yemen-Oman border. It may have fewer than 100 speakers today. UNESCO puts it at 400; Ethnologue says 100 in Oman, not citing Yemeni figures; SOAS says under 1000; Wikipediasays 100 in Oman.
Jibbali/Jibali/Jebali or Shehri/Shahri
The two sets of names are respectively from the Arabic and Shehri words meaning "of the mountains." The second largest of the Omani South Arabian languages, Jibbali or Shehri is spoken in several areas off Dhofar, including the capital Salalah, and on the Khuria Muria islands. UNESCO, Ethnologue, and Wikipedia all put the number of speakers at 25,000, based on the 1993 (21 years ago!) Omani census, while SOAS puts it at 30,000, and the previously cited blogger Susan Al Shahri, a Dhofari whose name is the same as the language, says
Contrary to what our ever-so-useful Wikipedia says, general consensus
seems to be that Shahri (Jebbali) is spoken by approximately 50,000 or
more Dhofaris from mountain tribes as well as a large number of
individuals from town tribes. Mahri is also spoken by a decent
percentage of the Bedouin population of Dhofar.
Other materials on Jibaali/Shehri: Lameen Souag, "Plural-Breaking in the Mountains of Oman."
The two videos below show general scenes of Oman (not just Dhofar, but the background audio is recordings of Jibbali speakers, including a recitation of numbers.
Mehri
Mehri, or Mahri, is by far the most widely spoken of the surviving South Arabian languages, and by dar the most studied. Though unwritten historically, it has a rich poetic tradition (see songs below). It is spoke on the coast and inland in the Mahra Province of eastern Yemen and in Dhofar in Oman. UNESCO puts its speakers at 100,000; Ethnologue at 115,200, of whom 50,000 are in Yemen and the rest in Oman; SOAS estimates 180,000; and Wikipedia gives 120,000.
Lameen Souag has noted in "Why They Thought Berbers Came From Yemen" a tradition in Arabic that Berber and Mehri were linked due to some common features not shared by Arabic. Though both part of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, Mehri belongs to the Semitic group, not the Berber.
Some Mehri songs:
Soqotri
Last alphabetically but no means least is Soqotri. It is spoken on the Yemeni island of Soqotra in the Yemeni island of Soqotra, and while is second only to Mehri in number of speakers, being hundreds of miles from the others and insular, there is said to be no mutual comprehensibility with the other languages.
UNESCO says 50,000 speakers; http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/language-id-1949; Ethnologue 64,000 overall, 57,000 in Yemen; and Wikipedia 64,500. SOAS does not appear to have an entry for it.
I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've
prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural
interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There
will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on
current developments as required.
For four posts now we have examined the question of whether Punic, the Phoenician language of Ancient Carthage and its colonies, survived as a spoken language (presumably alongside Berber and Latin, throughout the life of Roman North Africa. Some have argued that the presence of a Semitic vernacular in North Africa actually made the adoption of Arabic smoother, and some Punic enthusiasts have even gone so far as to argue that Punic influence can still be found in the spoken dialects (darija) of North Africa, along with Maltese (which, though today considered a separate language, has a grammatical structure comparable to North African Arabic dialects, though its Semitic vocabulary includes many borrowings from Romance and from Greek). Let's look at each of these assertions in turn.
It has often been noted that while the Arab conquests swept as far east as India and Central Asia and as far west as southern France, Arabic did not become the spoken language in all of that vast area; though Iran, India, and Central Asia became permanently Muslim, they retained or soon regained their original Persian, Turkic, or Indic vernaculars, though with a large input of religious and legal terms from Arabic. (Even in areas that did not remain Muslim, Arabic had a lasting influence; consider the huge presence of Arabic-based words in Spanish, and the entire Maltese language.) But neither did Arabic remain limited to the Arabian Peninsula: it became firmly established from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Persian/Arab Gulf.
As far back as the era of Ernest Renan the idea was floated that Arabic remained established in those areas which already spoke a closely related language. Renan was an early comparative Semiticist; today the Semitic languages are understood not as a separate language family but as a sub-family of closely-related languages within the broader "Afro-Asiatic" language family (comparable to the way the Romance or Germanic or Iranian languages are embraced within the broader Indo-European famiily).
Although non-Semitic languages have always existed in the Levant and Iraq (Sumerian, Hittite, Armenian), it is indisputable that for more than a millennium before Arabic spread outside the Arabian Peninsula, closely related Semitic languages were dominant: first Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian, and later Aramaic/Syriac. There is little doubt that the spread of Arabic was greatly aided by the prior presence of a closely related language in Aramaic/Syriac; the Nabatean script, for example, originally was used to write Aramaic but gradually adapted to Old North Arabian, the immediate ancestor of Classical Arabic. And early Arabic was sometimes written in the Syriac alphabet, the texts known as Karshuni in Arabic (Garshuni in Syriac). Arabic simply supplanted (though to this day not completely, for we have discussed modern Aramaic here frequently) the older, closely related language. In Jewish communities across the Arab world, various forms of Judeo-Arabic supplanted or were established alongside Hebrew and Aramaic.
The establishment of Arabic in Egypt and North Africa raises other questions, though. Last August my vacation postings examined why Coptic, which once was more entrenched than Aramaic, had died out as a spoken language while Aramaic has not. There are multiple reasons, but clearly Egypt is an Arabic-speaking country with only small pockets of Nubian and Siwi Berber speakers. If Arabic only took hold where Semitic languages were spoken, Egypt would seem to be a huge exception. And so would the rest of North Africa, though the survival of the Amazigh or Berber languages in the Maghreb show that Arabic is not as thoroughly entrenched as it is in Egypt. To this Maghrebists such as Georges and William Mar癟ais and others have pointed to the survival of Punic as a factor facilitating the adoption of Arabic. But Punic was never spoken in Egypt, so what about Egypt?
Ancient Egyptian, and its later form Coptic, are not unrelated to Semitic; like the Berber languages and some other Saharan languages they are part of the broader Afro-Asiatic family, so one could say that Arabic took root because the languages were still related; that could also apply to the Berber languages of North Africa, regardless of any Punic survival. The Berber languages, while Afro-Asiatic, are much farther removed from the Semitic group than is Egyptian. Though not itself considered part of the Semitic sub-family, Egyptian has features that seem more Semitic than other Afro-Asiatic languages outside the Semitic group. Some basic vocabulary (including numerals an pronouns) are closely kin, as are some triliteral roots.
This question of whether Arabic put down deeper roots where Semitic languages were already spoken underlies much of the debate about the survival of Punic, and you can find, for example, an online discussion of some of the issues here.
But the question of Punic does not end with whether its survival made the adoption of Arabic easier. There are those who argue that a Punic substratum can still be identified in the colloquial dialects of North Africa (plus Maltese). At first glance this seems extreme, but there is definitely a detectable Coptic substratum in colloquial Egyptian, and plenty of Berber loan-words in North African Arabic; could there be a Punic substratum as well? This argument today is primarily identified with the Algerian-born linguist Abdou Elimam, who is a strong advocate of treating the darija of the Maghreb as languages independent of if related to Standard Arabic.
At least one of Elimam's articles on Punic influence on Maghrebi can be found online:
Du Punique au Maghribi: Trajectoires d’une langue s矇mito-m矇diterran矇enne, published in Synergies Tunisie No. 1, 2009, pp. 29-38.The article (obviously) is in French, and while I believe he has written more extensively on this subject, I presume this summarizes his arguments.
Now Elimam is a Sorbonne-trained linguist and I certainly am neither, nor do I find anything impossible about the idea of an identifiable substratum of Punic in Maghrebi dialects of Arabic, but I am struck by several things. First, there is the rather tiny corpus of actual Punic texts, most of which tend to be tombstones, funerary inscriptions, and the like; Punic is a form of Phoenician but the total corpus of Phoenician texts is not great either, and the fact that we know as much as we do about either language is based in part on their extremely close resemblance to Hebrew. And all of these language are themselves relatively close to Arabic.
At the end of his article, Elimam presents a table showing vocabulary in common between Punic and Maghribi. These include Ab for father, Um for mother, bny for build, and so on. But wait: those are all good Arabic as well as good Canaanite (though modern Hebrew pronounces the first as Av today). For life he notes the similarity between Punic hayim and "Maghribi" hayat, but the latter is of course perfectly good Arabic as well. (To be fair, not all his examples are this obviously equivalent to Standard Arabic, but most are.) I have to say that this particular article doesn't completely convince me, but perhaps if I read more of his work I'd be persuaded.
I know this long discussion of Punic and Arabic may not have been everybody's cup of tea; on to other subjects in my remaining vacation posts, and back to normal blogging on Monday.
I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've
prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural
interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There
will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on
current developments as required.
In the third part of this survey of the survival of Punic yesterday, we examined the rather extensive evidence provided by St. Augustine of Hippo of the survival of Punic as a spoken language in his day (d. 430). But the argument that Punic was still a living language when Arabic arrived two centuries and more later requires the assumption that Punic did not die out in the interim. Skeptics have gradually yielded ground as evidence has been assembled, and many scholars accept that Punic may indeed have survived in a few places. But the evidence trail thins out considerably after Augustine. Today we will look at the evidence for the fifth to the 11th centuries; tomorrow this series will conclude with a discussion of some of the interpretations scholars have put forward about the legacy of Punic in North Africa in the Arab period.
Roughly contemporary with Augustine we also have epigraphic evidence of the survival of Punic in the trilingual funerary inscriptions in Sirte, Libya from the fourth and perhaps fifth centuries. I have not seen a standard study of these, Jongeling. Karel; & Kerr, Robert M. (2005). Late Punic epigraphy: an introduction to the study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic inscriptions. In part two of this series I did quote excerpts from Kerr's doctoral dissertation on Late Punic. And keep Sirte in mind when we come to the evidence of Al-Bakri below.
There is no incontestable literary evidence for Punic after Augustine, but there is a very intriguing, though in a bizarre context, account in the historian Procopius' De Bello Vandalico, "Of the Vandal Wars," from the sixth century. In last month's post about the Nika Riots we talked about Justinian and his efforts to reclaim Italy and North Africa for the Eastern Roman Empire; Procopius is the great historian of the era of Justinian. He actually accompanied Justinian's great General Belisarius on some of his campaigns. In discussing the reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals, Procopius drops an intriguing aside into a story about the legendary settlement of North Africa by the Phoenicians. I take my quote from H. B. Dewing's older translation of Procopius' History of the Wars, because it is available online even on vacation in the Georgia mountains and is free of copyright:
And finding there no place sufficient for them to dwell in,
since there has been a great population in Aegypt from ancient times, they
proceeded to Libya. And they established numerous cities and took possession of
the whole of Libya as far as the Pillars of Heracles, and there they have lived even up to my time, using
the Phoenician tongue. They also built a fortress in Numidia, where now is the
city called Tigisis. In that place are two columns made of white stone near by
the great spring, having Phoenician letters cut in them which say in the
Phoenician tongue: "We are they who fled from before the face of Joshua,
the robber, the son of Nun."
Hardly surprising that this passage has often been dismissed; the columns near Tigisis mentioning Joshua of the Bible seem clearly a figment of legend. But it is not the incredible tale itself but the aside that matters: "and there they have lived even up to my time, using
the Phoenician tongue." Again quoting Fergus Millar on this text:
The passage of Procopius is set in the very dubious context of a legend about the settlement of N. Africa, supposedly referred to in an inscription of Phoenician language and lettering at Tigisis; Courtois has argued that the inscription could not have had its supposed contents, and consequently that the people did not understand it (and therefore that in this sentence Procopius refers to Berber). But the argument makes Procopius use '怷庣彖庣庥庣庥' in two different senses in the same passage, and proceeds too strictly from what we might presume but cannot know. The sentence is an addition by Procopius himself, who had been in Africa with Belisarius, and (especially when combined with Augustine's evidence) should be taken to mean what it says.
The problem is that the legendary story in which the aside occurs tends to make one dismiss Procopius' possible firsthand testimony that Phoenician (Punic) was still spoken in North Africa "even up to my time, using
the Phoenician tongue." Millar is right that in conjunction with Augustine's testimony, this could make a lot of sense.
Procopius, if we accept the testimony, brings us down to just a century before the Arab conquests. There is no mention of Punic, at least as such, in the early Arab histories of the conquest of the Maghreb. In fact there is only one other piece of evidence sometimes adduced to suggest a longer survival of Punic, and this is, intriguingly, quite late: the 11th century AD.
The Arab traveler and geographer Al-Bakri (Abu 尪Ubayd Abu 尪Abdullah ibn 尪Abd al-尪Aziz al-Bakri(c.1014-1094)was born in Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus) and wrote several works of which the most important is his Kitab al-Masalik wa'l-Mamalik (Book of the Roads and the Kingdoms), a general geography and description of key routes of the Muslim world. As an Andalusian, Bakri knew North Africa well and his work is particularly valuable as a description of it. There is a passage in Bakri that raises eyebrows: remember, we are talking here about the 11th century AD, some 650 years after Augustine. Let me quote Lameen Souag on Bakri's text:
The twist in this tale is that Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD! Al-Bakri (whom I've mentioned before) enigmatically says of the inhabitants of Sirt in Libya that:
塈 堭塈媟 堥 堻 堥媢堭堥 塈 媢堿 塈 堥堭堥堭 塈 堥媟 塈 媢堭 媞堭
They have a speech in which they jabber which is neither Arabic nor Ajami (by which he probably means Latin but might mean Persian) nor Berber nor Coptic, which no one but them knows.
The
location (in eastern Tripolitania) is about right for it to be Punic,
and if it were Greek you would expect him to know, considering he cites
(more or less correctly) the Greek etymology of 媟堭塈堥堻 (Tripoli) in the
next page. So was Punic still spoken in the 11th century? Your guess
is as good as mine, but it looks plausible.
Now for a couple of points: the latest epigraphic evidence of Punic we have is in triliteral Greek-Latin-Punic Christian catacombs in Sirte (Sirt), so we know Punic was still known there in the 4th century and maybe the 5th. So it's interesting Bakri found an unusual language in Sirt in the 11the century; he specifically says it isn't Berber or Coptic or 尪Ajami. One reason Lameen has crossed out "Persian" is that in Spain and North Africa, 尪Ajami, which in the East usually means Persian, was commonly used to refer to Latin or local Romance dialects or the Mediterranean lingua franca. As Millar notes, Bakri seems to have been able to recognize Greek as well, so what was this language? It may have been Punic. It isn't clear if Bakri had any familiarity with Hebrew, from the Jewish communities in Spain and North Africa; if he had, he should have noted the kinship if the language were indeed Punic. At best, the Bakri quote tantalizes and perhaps teases a bit. The Procopius and Bakri references both raise questions and I suspect the best we can do here is render a Scots verdict of "not proven." But if indeed Punic did survive, what are the historical and linguistic implications? Tune in tomorrow ...
I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've
prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural
interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There
will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on
current developments as required.
In Friday's post, we looked at the evidence for the survival of the Punic language from the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC down to the era of Augustine. Today we'll look at what Augustine has to say about the survival of Punic, and tomorrow look at the (much less solid) evidence of its survival until or beyond the arrival of Arabic.
Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), Doctor of the Christian Church, is a towering figure in the intellectual world of late antiquity; his Confessions and The City of God are still read today, and his literary output was huge; a great many of his letters, sermons, and other works survive, making him one of the most documented figures of the fourth and fifth centuries. He was also North African, born at Thagaste in Roman Africa (Souk Ahras, Algeria), studied at Madaurus, Numidia (M'Daourouch, Algeria)and at Carthage, the Roman city that arose on the site of Punic Carthage and is today a suburb of Tunis. After time in Rome and Milan he returned to North Africa and eventually became Bishop of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba in Algeria).
Ethnically, Augustine may have been of Berber origin; famously his father was a pagan and his mother, Monica, a Christian; he spent time as a Manichean before converting. Though he wrote in Latin, his writings frequently refer to another language spoken in the countryside, which he calls the lingua Punica. Some early biographers insisted he meant Berber, but it is clear from many of his references that he meant Punic, including citations of several words to be noted below. In fact, he also speaks of a "Libyan" language spoken beyond the Roman frontier, which probably refers to the "Libyco-Berber" language presumed ancestral to modern Tamazight; he did not speak this language, but apparently understood Punic. In fact, though Augustine did not know Hebrew, he explicates some Biblical names by reference to Punic. (Punic/Phoenician and Hebrew are very closely related Canaanite dialects with an almost identical lexicon.)
I have not seen one important work on this subject, W. M. Green, "Augustine's Use of Punic," University of California Studies in Semitic Philology XI (1951), but I think there is enough evidence available to demonstrate Augustine really did mean Punic. (Nor is he the only evidence for his era; his contemporary St. Jerome also refers to Punic, but for Augustine it is an everyday language, in fact, apparently the primary language of the countryside in Roman territory outside the major towns. (Whereas he seems to imply "Libyan," presumably Berber, was mainly spoken outside the Roman limes.) And he often speaks of the lingua Punica, and there are many references indicating that the Church struggled to find Punic-speaking clergy and that often translators were needed. The recent work by Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Violence in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 2011) deals with the Punic-Latin divide in some detail. And Fergus Millar, in the work quoted in the previous part of this series,
The two essential points from the evidence of Augustine are firstly that the 'lingua Punica' was a Semitic language related to Biblical Hebrew; and secondly that it was fairly widespread not only in rural bishoprics but among Augustine's own congregation in Hippo. On the other hand it is clear that it did not rival Latin as a language of culture.
Quae lingua si improbatur abs te, nega Punicis libris, ut a viris
doctissimis proditur, multa sapienter esse mandata memoriae. Poeniteat
te certe ibi natum, ubi huius linguae cunabula recalent.
And if the Punic language is rejected by you, you virtually deny what
has been admitted by most learned men, that many things have been wisely
preserved from oblivion in books written in the Punic tongue. Nay, you
ought even to be ashamed of having been born in the country in which the
cradle of this language is still warm. (Ep. xvii)
But the critical evidence that leaves little room for argument that when Augustine said lingua Punica he was referring to the language of Ancient Carthage is lexical. I have already noted that Augustine, who apparently knew no Hebrew, explicated some Biblical terms from his knowledge of Punic. But two other interesting pieces of vocabulary occur in Augustine's writings.
"When our rural peasants are asked what they are. they reply, in Punic, "Chanani."
By far the most conclusive statement of all is this one, from Augustine's Epistulae ad Romanos inchoata expositio (ed. J. Divjak 197, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesasticorum Latinorum Vol. 84, 162), Ep. 13:
Unde interrogati rustici nostri, quid sint, punice respondentes: "Chanani" -- corrupta scilicet, sicut in talibus solet, una littera, quid aliud respondent quam "Chananaei?"
When our rural peasants are asked what they are, they reply, in Punic, "Chanani," which is only a corruption by one letter, what else should they respond but "Chananaei?"
But Chanani is even better thanthe Latin Chananaei, Canaanites. "Phoenician" is a Greek name and "Punic" a Latinization of it. The Phoencians called their language Kan‘ani and their homeland Kan‘an, the same word the Bible uses for the land of Canaan and the Canaanites (蛁). In Isaiah 19:18 Hebrew itself is referred to as "the language of Canaan" (蚸ְׂ蚺ַ蛌 ְַּ蛁ַ); Hebrew, Phoenician and Canaanite (and Moabite) all form the Canaanite language subgroup of Northwest Semitic, and are extremely close to each other. And as late as five centuries and a half after the destruction of Carthage, Augustine tells us that when askedwhat they are (unde interrogati quid sint) "our rustics" responded that they were Kan‘ani! And clearly, the language in which they replied was also Kan‘ani.
That particular anecdote, along with many other mentions in Augustine's works of people in the countryside speaking Punic, has convinced most scholars today; those who used to claim he must have meant Berber have no comparable evidence or, actually. any.
But there's another piece of lexical evidence as well.
Salus = Tria
In the same epistle quoted above, Augustine tells a story about his predecessor as Bishop of Hippo, one Valerius. Valerius was Greekand is said to have spoken Latin poorly and Punic not at all. One day he is said to have been listening to the locals speaking in Punic and he heard a word which he thought sounded similar to the Latin salus (safety or, to a churchman like Valerius, salvation). Valerius asked those with him (Augustine may have been present himself as he tells the tale) what this Punic word that sounded like salus meant in Latin, and he was told "tria", three.
So in what sort of language would the word for "three" remind a Latin speaker of salus. "Three" in Phoenician was shalush (compare Hebrew shalosh, 蚸ָֹׁ蚸ׁ, Arabic thalatha). Perhaps to a Latin ear the sh sound was indistinguishable from the ssound, or perhaps the local dialect of Late Punic did not make the distinction; in early Canaanite, early Hebrew and Phoenician the shin and sin were not distinguished in writing (though later Hebrew added a dot to make the distinction); and remember the story in Chapter 12 of Judges, in which the men of Ephraim were distinguished from the men of Gilead by using the word shibboleth as a password, since the Ephraimites couldn't pronounce the shin. (On a related point, our name "Judges" translates the Hebrew Shoftim, which implied more than just a judicial function; and the civil government officials of Ancient Carthage were known in Punic as shofetim, the same word but camouflaged via Latin into the English term suffetes, which you may or may not have encountered depending on how classical your education is.)
So, salus = shalush = tria = three. And Valerius is said to have preached a sermon on how Latin salus, salvation, could be achieved through the Punic meaning of the word, "three": that is, through the Trinity. A bit of a reach, and perhaps why Valerius' successor as Bishop of Hippo is much better remembered.
Augustine's evidence leaves little real doubt that in the provinces of North Africa he knew (Numidia and Africa Proconsularis, roughly Algeria and Tunisia), spoken Punic was a going concern in his era (he died in 430). Latin-Punic tomb inscriptions from Tripoli and Sirte in Libya suggest it still survived there as well.
But 430 is still over 200 years before the Arab conquest, and the argument that Arabic spread quickly because another Semitic language was already spoken there requires Punic to have survived for those centuries. The evidence trail gets much colder after Augustine, but it does not disappear entirely. Tomorrow, Procopius and al-Bakri, two very curious and arguable testimonies.
I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've
prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural
interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There
will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on
current developments as required.
Delenda est Carthago. (Also given as Carthago delenda est, and both are shortened versions; Cato used to end all his speeches, regardless of the subject he was speaking about, with something like Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam: roughly, "Oh, and did I mention yet: Carthage must be destroyed.") In 146 BC, Rome delendaed the bloody hell out of the place, razing all the buildings and sowing the ground with salt. Every schoolboy knows (or allegedly once knew) that. The end.
The evidence is slim and, as our Amazigh ("Berber") friends persist in reminding the rest of us, Arabic's triumph is still far from complete in the Maghreb. And the Arab conquest of the region around ancient Carthage,though it began in the 640s AD, was only complete in the 660s; Kairouan was founded in 670. From 146 BC to 670 AD is more than eight centuries, a long survival for a language that was a foreign transplant to begin with (from Phoenicia), competing with the local languages (so-called "Libyco-Berber," a presumed ancestor of modern Tamazight languages) and the official tongue, Latin, and with no surviving sponsoring polity to keep it alive.
Don't expect to be utterly persuaded by what we'll be discussing over the next few days. I'm not 100% convinced myself, but since I first heard of the idea (originally associated as far as I know with the writings of William and Georges Mar癟ais, though I think Ernest Renan may have raised the idea earlier; it's embraced by some modern Maghrebi scholars as well) I've thought it an intriguing but definitely unproven possibility. Don't expect me to prove it: hey, remember, I'm on vacation.
Punic is not a well-attested language. Most of what survives are brief inscriptions, often tombstones. Early Punic is virtually identical with Phoenician; there are some variants in later Punic.
For a useful listing of literary evidence of late Punic, as well as a discussion of other sources, see Fergus Millar's "Local Cultures in the Roman Empire: Libyan, Punic and Latin in Roman Africa," The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 58, Parts 1 and 2 (1968), pp. 126-134 (available online but only via paid download through JSTOR, from which I take an extended quote (pp. 130-131)(but do nor here include his footnotes):
The literary evidence other than that of Augustine stretches from the late first to the sixth century, and deserves to be set out in full, in chronological order by the writers:
(1) Statius, Silvae IV, 5, 45-6 (to Septimius Severus):
non sermo Poenus, non habitus tibi, / externa non mens, Italus, Italus.
(2) Apuleius, Apologia 98, 8-9 (on his step-son and opponent Sicinius Pudens):
loquitur numquam nisi Punice et si quid adhuc a matre graecissat; enim Latine
loqui neque vult neque potest. Audisti, Maxime, paulo ante, pro nefas, privignum
meum, fratrem Pontiani, diserti iuvenis, vix singulas syllabas fringultientem.
(3) Ulpian, Lib. 2. fideicommissorum (Dig. xxxii. i i. pr.) :
fideicommissa quocumque sermone relinqui possunt, non solum Latina vel
Graeca, sed etiam Punica vel Gallicana vel alterius cuiusque gentis.
(4) Ulpian, Lib. 48 ad Sabinum (Dig. XLV. i. i. 6):
proinde si quis Latine interrogaverit, respondeatur ei Graece, dummodo congruenter
respondeatur, obligatio constituta est: idem per contrarium. sed utrum
hoc usque ad Graecum sermonem tantum protrahimus an vero et ad alium,
Poenum forte vel Assyrium vel cuius alterius linguae, dubitari potest.
(5) Epit. de Caes.20,8:
(Septimius Severus) Latinis litteris sufficienter instructus, Graecis sermonibus
eruditus, Punica eloquentia promptior, quippe genitus apud Leptim provinciae
Africae.
(6) Historia Augusta, vita Sept. Sev. I5, 7:
cum soror sua Leptitana ad eum venisset vix Latine loquens, ac de illa multum
imperator erubesceret ... redire mulierem in patriam praecepit.
(7) Jerome, Com. ep. Gal. II (Migne, PL XXVI, 357):
Antiquae stultitiae usque hodie manent vestigia. Unum est quod inferimus, et
promissum in exordio reddimus, Galatas excepto sermone Graeco, quo omnis Oriens
loquitur, propriam linguam eandem habere quam Treviros, nec referre, si aliqua
exinde corruperint, cum et Afri Phoenicam linguam nonnulla ex parte mutaverint.
(8) Procopius, de bello Vandalico ii, IO, 20:
[Greek text: I'll be giving a translation of this Procopius passage in a later part of this series—MCD
These texts are of course of very uneven value. Apuleius is trying to discredit his stepson, and the proof that he spoke only Punic is supposed to be his speaking Latin haltingly; and the late biographical passages on Severus have little or no weight in themselves. But the two passages of Ulpian are quite another matter. He is speaking about what is legally permissible in the first passage, and envisaging an exchange of a dubiously binding nature in the second. He is, in other words, talking about the real contemporary world, and it is not an accident that the three languages used as examples are Punic (in both cases), Celtic, and Aramaic or Syriac. It ought to follow, unless Ulpian is making a wild error, that Punic was still used by persons of something more than the lowest social standing and, from the first passage, that it was written-though not necessarily (see below) in Semitic script. Jerome compares with those in Punic changes that have occurred in another living language, Galatian. The passage of Procopius is set in the very dubious context of a legend about the settlement of N. Africa, supposedly referred to in an inscription of Phoenician language and lettering at Tigisis; Courtois has argued that the inscription could not have had its supposed contents, and consequently that the people did not understand it (and therefore that in this sentence Procopius refers to Berber). But the argument makes Procopius use 怷庣彖庣庥庣庥 in two different senses in the same passage, and proceeds too strictly from what we might presume but cannot know. The sentence is an addition by Procopius himself, who had been in Africa with Belisarius, and (especially when combined with Augustine's evidence) should be taken to mean what it says.
Millar also spells out the epigraphic evidence:
The literary evidence may thus provide a framework against which to set the documentary evidence, from coins and inscriptions. The coin evidence is very limited: Punic lettering appears on the coins of a few civitates liberae of the early Empire, but disappears in the first half of the first century.The very numerous Punic (or rather neo-Punic) inscriptions of Roman Africa, many with parallel Latin texts, are effectively impossible to survey with confidence, for they have never been assembled in any modern collection. Furthermore, not only in CIL viii but also in the otherwise excellent Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (I952) the Punic parallel texts of Latin inscriptions are mentioned but not given. It may be sufficient therefore to start from the conclusion of G. Charles-Picard in his illuminating discussion of the civilization of Roman Africa: extended Punic inscriptions appear roughly up to the beginning of the second century, and brief formulae up to the beginning of the third. This view is based to a large extent on Charles-Picard's own invaluable work at Mactar, where nearly 130 Punic inscriptions have been found, though far from all published. Among them the latest extended texts have until recently been thought to be the three inscriptions,probably of the first century A.D., on the temple of Hathor Miskar (or Hoter Miscar); thev dedicatory inscription on the frieze of the temple runs to forty-seven lines in ten columns.A subsequent discovery, however, has produced two further inscriptions from the temple, one of a mere two lines, but another of eleven columns of three, five or six lines each. It records the repair of the temple, with the names of thirty-six contributors ; eighteen of them appear to have transliterated Latin names. It is suggested by the editors that the occasion cannot have been earlier than the early second century, and may well have been considerably later.
A thesis on the subject was recently defended by Robert Kerr of Universiteit Leiden (summary in pdf). Punic written in Latin script is of course nothing new: act V, scene 1 of Plautus' Poenulus, for example, contains an entire monologue in Punic (look here for an analysis taken from Rosenberg's Ph繹nikische Sprachlehre und Epigraphik).
Yet I had no idea that the Latino-Punic corpus was so extensive (Dr.
Kerr mentions 69 inscriptions, "mostly epitaphs"), nor that Punic
apparently remained a living "functioning North-West Semitic language"
for much longer than previously thought. Dr. Kerr believes Punic was
spoken as late as the 7th century AD and offers the following insight (NL) into the Punic-Roman relations after the Third Punic War (again, please excuse the poor translation):
It was long believed that the Punic culture was
done for once Carthage was destroyed and "Africa" became a province of
the Roman Empire. But the culture in Tripolitania actually only came to
bloom. The region went its own way. Rome didn't really bother itself
with it and the Carthagian influence was already diminished after the
Second Punic War when the region broke away from the Carthagian sphere
of influence. We are inclined to think of that period in terms of
Roman-Carthagian dichotomy. But not every Punic speaker in North Africa
had posters on their wall celebrating Hannibal as a liberator.
The earliest inscriptions in the Latino-Punic corpus are from 1st and 2nd centuries AD and were found in Leptis Magna.
Later specimens were found deeper inland at the edge of the desert and
date back to the 3rd and 4th and perhaps even 5th century AD. According
to Dr. Kerr,
...
in the pre-desert part of Tripolitania, Punic inscriptions far
outnumbered the Latin ones. In fact, almost no Latin inscriptions were
found there.
No surprise there since apparently Punic
was spoken by the mixed population which came about when Punic men
married Libyan women. Punic men
[Dutch text omitted from quote]
... were settled in
the border areas by the Romans. They had been in the army and were now
employed to man defendable border outposts for a good pay. They were
afforded a lot of freedom. In Roman sources, speakers of Punic were
famous for being able to successfully cultivate the land in dry areas.
Unfortunately,
[Dutch text omitted from quote]
The system of defendable outposts and water retrieval
was fragile and maintenance intensive and did not survive Berber raids
beginning in the 6th century and the Islamic conquest in the 7th
century.
As for the actual language of the inscriptions, there is still some controversy as to what it actually is:
[Dutch text omitted from quote]
Some
berberologists and africanists still wanted to believe that while poor
leaseholders still spoke Punic, the elite did not and switched
completely to Latin. But the inscriptions are a first-hand proof that
Punic was still spoken by the upper class on the coast as late as the
3rd century AD, as is also evident from the tradition surrounding the
Emperor Septimius Severus who was born in Leptis Magna.
I
found Dr. Kerr's findings concerning the phonology of the inscriptions
utterly fascinating. He compared the writing conventions used in both
Latin and Punic inscriptions of North Africa and found that the latter
must be derived from the former. This lead him to the conclusion that
the pronunciation of North African vulgar Latin must have strongly
resembled that of Punic. In both languages, for example, ellision of
unstressed vowels is a rule. Dr. Kerr believes that the phonology of
both vulgar Latin and Punic in North Africa must have been influenced by
a substrate language which he terms Berbero-Libyan. In his own words:
[Dutch text omitted from quote]
Compare
that with the similarities in pronunciation of Afrikaans and South
African English, or Irish and Irish English. The language is different,
but the accent is immediately recognizable.
And finally, even the good old St. Augustine (who was born in Roman North Africa) comes into play here:
[Dutch text omitted from quote]
It is often assumed that
Augustine actually meant "Berber" when he spoke of Punic. But he was
very well aware of the difference between Punic and Libyco-Berber. Of
the latter he only knew that it existed, but he did not speak it.
Augustine for example recognized Hebraisms in the Old Latin translation
of the Bible because he spoke Punic. He did not speak any Hebrew.
In eastern Libya, as it happens, Punic continued to be written even
after the Phoenician alphabet was forgotten; this body of inscriptions,
using the Latin alphabet to write Punic, is called (logically enough)
Latino-Punic, and a comprehensive database of such inscriptions is available from Leiden.
Unfortunately that link today brings up what appears to be a 404 error in Dutch and I'm not finding it through other searches. Lameen also mentions Saint Augustine and the 11th century text of al-Bakri, which may hint at a very late survival, but we'll be discussing them and other evidence in later parts of this series.
All these authors have referred to the evidence of Augustine. He is the last certain point in this exploration; later evidence such as that of Procopius and al-Bakri is highly uncertain. We'll discuss Augustine on Monday; enjoy your weekend.
I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.
Unless you're familiar with some of the French literature on North African history you may never even have heard of the question I want to explore over the next few days: how long did Punic, the language of Ancient Carthage, survive as a spoken language? If that seems rather obscure, consider this aspect: some have argued that Punic was still spoken in some parts of north Africa at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century, AD. And, it has been argued, the presence of a closely related Semitic language eased the adoption of the Arabic language. A modern Tunisian linguist has gone so far as to argue that Punic underlies the modern spoken dialects (darija) of North Africa. Most would not go that far. But it's an intriguing, if unproven, assertion.
Carthage, of course, was destroyed by Rome in the wake of the Third Punic War in 146 BC. Rome destroyed the city, and also much of whatever literature and history in Punic existed. But the language did not disappear: Saint Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-450) refers to it on several occasions and apparently understood it. Some skeptics have suggested that when Augustine says "Punic," he means Berber, but he gives examples which support that it was indeed Punic, including noting that its speakers referred to it as "Chenani": clearly kan‘ani, "Canaanite," as Phoenician speakers referred to their own language. So the survival of Punic into the fourth century seems pretty reasonable. Other authors before Augustine also make occasional reference to Punic, as does a contemporary, St. Jerome.
A few inscriptions exist in "Neo-Punic," a late form of Punic, into the Common Era, and there are "Latino-Punic" inscriptions as well; there is more dispute about certain texts in the "Libyan" alphabet (ancestor of the Tifinagh used for today's Berber), buy which may include some in Punic, especially in Tripolitania.
After Augustine the trail becomes a lot more unclear; there's a passage in Procopius' account of the Vandalic War in the sixth century that speaks of Punic, but it is in a confused and rather dubious context; there's a passage in the 11th century Arab geographer al-Bakri about a language that is neither Arabic nor Berber, but it's otherwise not clear what he means.
Over the several parts of this vacation post, I'll be talking about many of these clues in greater detail.
Let me add a couple of caveats up front, though: first, other than Augustine, all the evidence is at best suggestive and not proven; getting from Augustine to the Arab conquest requires spanning three centuries. Second: epigraphical evidence is scant, and proving what languages were spoken in antiquity is difficult; even the assumption that modern Berber languages descend from ancient Libyan or "Libyco-Berber" is mostly inference and common sense, not provable. And third: we really have very little evidence of Punic as distinct from Phoenician: some tombstones and other finds in Carthage and elsewhere in North Africa and Spain, and some inscriptions in Malta that seem more Punic than Phoenician, but the maternal country's language (Phoenician) and the colonial language (Punic) seem to be more closely linked than British and American English.
Dr. Arthur Chris Eccel's Sembase Project is a highly ambitious database effort undertaken over some decades now by one of my oldest friends. I haven't mentioned it before because it's unfinished and the material available online is still limited, but the Ancient World Online website linked to it a few weeks ago, so even if it isn't quite ready for prime time, I thought I would link too. This is about an old friend, so I'm hardly an unbiased observer here.
Chris' Ph.D. is in sociology, and he's a former Professor at AUB, but his education is much more eclectic than that. He has quite a command of ancient and modern Middle Eastern languages. He gives his c.v. here; you'll note that he completed doctoral coursework for a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at Harvard, specializing in Arabic and Hebrew ("Taught myself Geez and Aramaic during this period," he notes), before going on to a doctorate in sociology at Chicago. (The year in law school at UCLA doesn't count, but the undergraduate majors in Greek and Arabic and minors in Latin and Hebrew and at least two MAs probably do.) Back in the days before the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was available online, and before it was complete, you could find a set on his shelves. And it would be dog-eared.
After his time at AUB Chris (fluent in several varieties of Arabic)
served as Public Affairs Officer at several US embassies in the Arab
world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia [Jidda consulate], Bahrain, Yemen, and Algeria among them). His last posting was Damascus.
To say that Chris is an interesting conversationalist is an understatement. People meeting him for the first time tend to either consider him utterly mad or a total genius. Like some madmen and all geniuses, he's a bit of both.
Now retired and living in Hawaii, he continues to pursue a hugely ambitious project he's dabbled with for decades: a database of all the roots for all the Semitic languages, for comparative purposes.
In Cairo
in the seventies and eighties, students, professors and researchers met
in each other's apartments without notice, scouted out Egyptian bars
prized for the fact that no tourists would ever be found there
(including an interesting bouza dive), and broke the crust
together at various restaurants, often the old Cafe Riche (the Filfila
being then only a few tables in an alleyway). Sipping Stella beer, our
conversation ranged from politics to our research, to the gossip of the
academic expat community. It was then that I began calling to my
friends' attention various Arabic roots that seemed related. The Stella
encouraged some creativity in drawing these "relationships." At some
point a friend asked if I was recording my observations. I was not.
Another objected that with no controls, one can make anything into
anything. This stimulus, and a bit more Stella, prompted the ultimate
fantasy: what if there were a tool that would quickly search all
essential lexical sources of all Semitic languages and display all
information that might be relevant to evaluating a proposed
relationship?
[Full disclosure: I was usually one of those friends at the table, including the "interesting bouza dive," which was behind the fire station in Midan ‘Ataba.] Also, that may not be everyone's definition of an "ultimate fantasy." He continues:
On a trip
to Kharga Oasis, I took with me pages of typing paper cut into fourths
and began recording "xliterals" (triliterals, biliterals, etc.) by
assigning them to semantic categories. It occurred to me that although
not all roots in a category would be related (far from it), the roots
that are related should fall within the same semantic category. By
recording only roots, and using sufficiently broad categories, I hoped
to arrive at groups that would be amenable to human inspection, to
facilitate the identification of root pairs or groups that might be
related. Eventually, I went through several Arabic dictionaries, and
arrived at about 34,000 records. Then I began doing the same for Hebrew.
So where is he now? As he notes:
Although the basic structure of the
database is in place, it will need some editing. Since its inception,
the 340 major semantic categories have been reduced to only around 135,
and the subcategories are approaching 2,000. Even the fields for sorting
are not final; I will modify the sort orders (alphabetical and
phonological) when I have more languages in the table, to profit from
what I have learned. At present, it has all of Biblical Hebrew and Geez.
It has an aleph-through-ya' data set from several principal Arabic
dictionaries, but Arabic will be comprehensively revisited when all
other target languages are done. At that time, a protocol will be
followed to glean from currently spoken dialects, with an emphasis on
those in areas where a Semitic language was spoken at the time of the
rise of Islam (the Arab conquests). The modern Semitic languages of
Ethiopia will be done only as found useful. Note that the entries
summarized below do not just represent the number of roots and words.
Any given root or word can be entered into more than one semantic
category, depending on its semantic extension.
For the detailed current status, see here. I'm pretty well-informed on languages (or so I tell myself), and while I was familiar with Harari and Mehri (well, I've at least heard of them), I had to look up Gurage. It's an Ethiopian language.
It is, to say the least, an ambitious project. I wish we could tap into his database online, but hopefully that day will come.
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