PhDniX's blog

Varina?

Whenever I see the word for 'flour' in Berber, I wonder whether it is a loan from Latins farina 'id.'.

In most languages such a correspondence is not that obvious: Kabyle awrən 'flour', Tamazight awərn, aggʷərn 'flour' Riffian arn 'flour'.

But Ghadamès and Aujila make the correspondence look more likely: Ghadamès aβărn Aujila vrūn, ävrûn.

This leads to a Proto-Berber form *aβărn 

The correspondence between Latin f and Berber *β is remarkable. There is no clear reason why Proto-Berber wouldn't use *f. Berber *f often corresponds to Latin p e.g. afullus 'chicken' Vulgar Lat. pullus 'id.'. But we do also find Berber words with *f corresponding to Latin f e.g. afalku 'falcon' Lat. falco 'id.'.

Maybe in the earliest stage of loans *f was still *p in Berber, and thefore *β was used to represen f. But for now, we only have one example of *β corresponding with f, moreover, the final a seems to be missing in Berber.

The Latin and Berber word are probably not related at all. Nevertheless, the correspondence is striking.

 

The stringe thing with iwjili *i from Proto-Berber *a

I'm currently doing some research on Aujila, a highly unusual Berber language spoken in Lybia. Linguistically the languages seems most closely related to Ghadamès, another highly unusual Berber language spoken in Lybia on the Tunesian border.

Both languages retain the Proto-Berber *β almost perfectly, as β. These two languages are the main reason I reconstruct this sound as *β as almost every other language rather points to h.

Ghadamès is quite well doccumented by Lanfry, who has published a fantastic dictionary and texts. Aujila, not so much. The only form of lexicon we have was written by an Italian by the name of Umberto Paradisi who wrote a small Italian-Aujila wordlist in a highly idiosyncratic transcription. To this day, it is not completely clear what he means with a good part of his transcription. He emplys many many vowel signs, a quick count already pushed me over 20 vowel signs, which is surprising as most Berber languages have 3 (Tashelhiyt) to 7 vowels (Touareg). It seems that most of the diacritics he uses refer to vowel length, accent, and nasalisation.

Despite the problems with the transcription, it is clear enough to notice some striking differences in the vocalic quality of several common Berber words in Aujila. It happens quite often that the Proto-Berber *a is replaced by i.

PB *aman 'water' : Auj. îmin 'id.'

PB *taʔmart 'beard' : Auj: tamîrt 'id.' (this may be due to analogy of the plural which is *tiʔmiraʔ in Proto-Berber)

PB *asf 'day' : Auj. išf 'id.', but: ašfa 'today'

PB *tasa 'liver' : Auj. tísī 'id.'

Ghadamès asim 'ear' : Auj. isem 'id.'

PB *aβwal 'speech' : Auj. awîl 'id.'

Then we have several examples of the common plural pattern iCaC:ăn which is found as iCiC:ăn in Aujila:

PB *iʔfaddăn 'knees' : Auj. fíddẹn 'id.'

PB *ifaʔssăn 'hands' : Auj. físsen 'id.'

PB *idammăn 'blood' : Auj. dímmen 'id.'

Another plural that doesn't belong to this type, and probably is not Proto-Berber is the plural of the word for goat:

Auj. tγåṭ pl. tγåṭṭen, tγíṭṭän

So what can deduce from this? Not that much. An ad-hoc explanation would be that PB *a > Auj. i before liquids and *s this would cover most instances, but not the word fíddẹn. Moreover we have one counter example in ašfa that shows that *a doesn't always shift to i.

Having collected only positive example, and with a phonetic rule that may or may not hold up, it is now time to look into Aujila words that lack a shift to i and see if the phonetic environment indeed is not what I just formulated.