A fetus in the belly!

Currently I'm working on my master Thesis which focuses on biradical nouns of the shape C(e)C¹ and CVC. One of the words I've looked into is the Kabyle word for fetus.

Kab. tadist (ta) pl. tidusin (td), tidusa (td)

The second plural formation is probably the original one, it's quite rare to see it. The first plural is very productive.

Now I've gone looking for cognates, and I have found some exclusively in Libyan Berber languages, but the meaning of these words struck me as odd.

Ghadamès tadist, tadiss pl. tədisēn  'belly', Aujila tedûšt 'id.', ElFoqaha tadîst 'belly'

I'm somewhat troubled by this difference in meaning. You'd have to assume that since a fetus is unborn, and still in your belly, you could refer to it as 'your belly'. That's a very playful way with words, so playful in fact, that I find it hard to believe that this would become the only meaning of the word.

It's a shame that it's specifically the Libyan dialects that have this word, especially Aujila and ElFoqaha are very badly described for obvious reasons. So badly in fact, that we're not even sure what Paradisi, the main source of both these languages, meant exactly with his rather exotic transcriptions. He has about 15 different ways to denote vowels, which is odd in a group of languages where, generally, there are vowel systems that range from usually 3/4 to about 7 in the most extreme cases.

It would be interesting to see if maybe the words in those languages have a double meaning. That would mean the development is particularly ancient which would give a bit more space for it to take place.

I'm curious if any of my readers have come in contact with such a development before in other languages.

 

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[Edit] I may not have access to Libyan situated Berber speakers, but I do have access to Kabyle speakers, so I contacted a friend with experience in Kabyle berber who asked an informant what they thought tadist meant.

The speaker says tadist means 'pregnancy' and he gave the following meanings example sentences.

aqlin s tadist 'I am pregant' (litt. I am with pregnancy)

tameṭṭut attsen s tadist 'The woman is pregnant' (She is with pregnancy)

This gives a nice parallel in Tamazight where adis (the masculine form) can mean both 'belly' and 'pregnancy'. That it's found in Tamazight (and Tarifit as Lameen points out in the comments) shows that it's not only Libyan. I wonder why adis slipped past me when I worked through Taifi when collecting the data. I did find it in Amaniss' digital dictionary though.

In fact the idiomatic nature of the sentences mentioned above would still work if the meaning was 'belly'

I am with a belly, the woman is with a belly = pregnant. Then, only when the word lost its use as belly (because it was replaced by taεbuṭṭ) the word came to mean pregnancy.

A semantic shift from 'having a belly' to 'pregnancy' is something I find absolutely acceptable. So did Dallet really mistake 'pregnancy' with 'fetus', I wonder how that happened.

Maarten Kossmann (p.c.):

Well, maybe it was a taboo term for foetus. I would in principle believe Dallet, who worked, among others, with Kabyle doctors.

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¹ I generally use e to transcribe the schwa, which often can be a dummy vowel.

 

Comments

[Glen Gordon]

A semantic shift from "fetus" to "belly" or vice versa does seem contrived to me. What doesn't seem as contrived is a foreigner reporting on a language and misunderstanding the meaning of the word uttered.

[PhoeniX]

I have considered the same thing.

The thing is, I trust Dallet on Kabyle, and I trust Lanfry on Ghadamès which are the two sources I've used. They are both very knowledgeable on their languages, so I'm curious how this would happen.

Paradisi, well it's hard to tell how good he was, since the data we have is so limited.

But it would be nice if I could go to Ghadamès to check, but that's currently not really an option, sadly.

[Lameen]

It's not just Libyan - cp. Tarifit aεeddis "belly".

Misunderstanding and semantic shift are basically two names for the same thing. If a foreigner could easily misunderstand X in "she is with X" as "fetus" instead of "belly", then so could a native speaker. The real test would be whether it is applied to the fetuses of animals whose bellies do not swell conspicuously when pregnant

[Glen Gordon]

Lameen: "Misunderstanding and semantic shift are basically two names for the same thing."

Not quite. While French-learning Anglophones will repeatedly make the mistake of saying Je suis chaud to translate word-for-word the phrase "I am warm", a native French speaker will hardly make such a mistake. Similarly, I can't fathom one single means by which a native speaker would mistake a word for 'belly' as 'fetus' instead.

Lameen: "If a foreigner could easily misunderstand X in 'she is with X' as 'fetus' instead of 'belly', then so could a native speaker."

And this explanation makes sense to you, does it? A general body term is mistaken for a highly specialized medical term by an average native speaker? You're joking.

[PhoeniX]

While French-learning Anglophones will repeatedly make the mistake of saying Je suis chaud to translate word-for-word the phrase "I am warm", a native French speaker will hardly make such a mistake.

Well, French clearly has a standard variant which cannot be said for Berber thus normalising tendencies are less strong, nevertheless, I see your point here.

A general body term is mistaken for a highly specialized medical term by an average native speaker?

But if you take into account that the meaning of 'belly' was already lost in Kabyle and only meant 'pregnancy', it becomes less unlikely. At least, it'd still make me raise an eyebrow, but I'd be able to live with that.

Nevertheless, I think M. Kossmann has the best explanation on this, though I'll replace the word "taboo" with "euphemism".
If you don't want to name a fetus directly as a doctor, it makes sense to me if he'd call a person's fetus 'her pregnancy'. I want to use this explanation because the meaning 'pregnancy' is still there in Kabyle as well. So clearly if a speaker would use tadist to mean 'fetus', first and foremost it will mean 'pregnancy' to the listener.

[Lameen]

tadist is no longer a body part term in Kabyle, and judging from Phoenix's data, it's not even a productive word any more: it's simply part of a fixed expression or two. Asking Kabyle speakers what it means is like asking English speakers what a "petard" is - unless you run into an etymology fan, your answer is unlikely to be historically correct. In particular, a doctor - ie a person who's spent much of his life being trained in a foreign language and a very non-traditional context - is if anything less likely to have come across the obsolete original meaning, and more likely to have to guess it from the sole context in which the word remains in normal use. Of course, such a misunderstanding could lead to the word getting used for the first time in other contexts to mean "fetus", just as English speakers who think "petard" is a kind of rope could start saying "I tied a petard for him"; but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that so far in either case.

Oddly enough, I came across a parallel in reverse in my Siwi fieldwork. There, older speakers are familiar with the expression jar ameqṛan for "pregnancy". Now jar is the normal word for belly in Siwi - but ameqṛan has not survived anywhere in Siwi except for this fixed expression, so there is no way for the speakers to tell whether it means "big" or "pregnant" or perhaps "full"! Working with a doctor won't help in such cases.

Incidentally, "je suis chaud" is neither a misunderstanding nor a semantic shift.

[Glen Gordon]

Lameen, you're confused about what I'm saying. A recap:

1. I reject tadist as _'fetus'_ outright.
2. I question the accuracy of the value 'pregnancy'.
3. I take the value 'belly' to be fully shown by the cognates.

I understand that 'fetus' is a dismissable value misinterpreted by a foreign speaker while 'pregnancy' is an *inaccurate* value by a competent native speaker. *Derived* expressions like aqlin s tadist 'I am with belly' do *not* prove that the value of tadist means 'pregnancy' because it is the expression, not the word, that alludes to that concept. The individual word still means 'belly' and need not be translated any other way. Parsimony is important.

So I should think that a competent lexicographer would translate tadist as 'belly' in all cases unless there is a relevant example showing a genuine secondary meaning of the individual word. As such, the "semantic shifts" that we're discussing are purely concocted out of a misinterpretation of the data. It's inane banter to try to justify a semantic shift that hasn't yet been shown to exist.

(But by all means, when there is relevant evidence, let us know of it so that I can learn otherwise.)

[Glen Gordon]

Perhaps I should also add to make clear that I don't consider a native speaker's report of 'I am with belly' as allegedly meaning 'I am with pregnancy' to be a genuine semantic shift. It cannot be said that the speaker is strictly using the **individual word** as 'pregnancy'.

Now if a speaker said something like 'Her pregnancy is difficult' using the word tadist then *this* would establish that this new meaning truly exists because then interpreting tadist traditionally as 'belly' in such a sentence would yield rather absurdly 'Her belly is difficult.'

[PhoeniX]

I guess this is an issue on what you expect from a dictionary, and what it should entail.

Obviously, if 'being with a belly' means pregnancy, this should be specified in a dictionary. But how do you do this? Do you mark it as secondary meaning? Well that's not exactly right, is it as it's not really a secondary meaning, but a secondary meaning by extension.

But 'She is with a belly' does not necessarily mean 'she is pregnant', so it should at least be specified somehow. Should there be a special tag for something like this?

Or should there simply be an example sentence? (I feel that a dictionary without example sentences is flawed per definition). It's interesting questions to ask.

Anyway, in Tamazight I can't find any evidence where adis needs to be translated as 'pregnancy'. I'll check out the Kabyle dictionary in the university tomorrow to see if such a translation is necessary there.

[Glen Gordon]

My solution is to keep tadist as 'belly'. A secondary expression s tadist would then be listed under that entry as 'with belly; pregnant'. If it means something more than merely pregnant, this would also be included there in the phrasal sub-entry rather than the main entry for the word.

I'm glad I produced my own Etruscan dictionary because I really began to appreciate the many details necessary in compiling such a thing and how to define and organize words. I shudder to imagine how much work it was without computers. It boggles my mind. Noah Webster, my hero.