Lameen Souag

This Owen, the provincial governor, was apparently so cruel as to give his own superiors pause. Plagiarism seems to be the least of it.

books.google.co.uk/books?id=udS...

Looking through grammars of Bari (South Sudan), and disappointed to realise that Owen 1908 ("Bari Grammar and Vocabulary") is almost entirely plagiarised without acknowledgement from Mitteruntzner 1867 ("Die Sprache der Bari in Central-Afrika"). At least Owen calls himself "editor", not "author"...

According to a specialist consulted in 1915, the letters are largely Etruscan, but the language is not. M.J. Martha gave the following transcription of the text:

In Arabic, Algeria (al-jazā'ir) is grammatically plural - literally "the islands" (something of a misnomer).

The reasons Sudan is underreported on - language gap, hard to travel to, little impact on UK economy, few Brits identifying with any "side" - are the opposites of the reasons that any interested British person can hardly avoid learning plenty about US politics, from US media as well as from UK media

Strange to think that I've reviewed a grammar of the language spoken there - Lopit.

Interesting! This specific kind of assimilation is basically a Tunisian/Libyan thing

Old Kanembu:
<sāk>/<sāg> "descend"
<yirk-sāk> / <irgi-sāg> "send down"
<t-rg-sāk> "be sent down"

Modern Kanuri:
sáa- "lower, take down, bring down"
yir-sáa- "help lower, bring down for"

So <krtsāk> is basically the same as Arabic تنزيل tanzīl: a verbal noun of a causative of "go down"

tə- in modern Kanuri is a no longer productive causative prefix surviving in a few verbs, e.g. (Hutchison & Skinner)

ríndə-k-in "I get fed up with waiting"
tə-ríndə-k-in "I make someone wait"

It's also a productive passive prefix, e.g.

rú-k-ìn "I see"
tú-rú-k-ìn "I am seen"

That leaves <sāk>

kər- in modern Kanuri forms abstract nouns, e.g. (Cyffer & Hutchison):

kər-mə́sələm "Islam"
kər-mâi "kingship, rule" (mâi = king)

That leaves <tsāk>

Old Kanembu word of the day, from Dmitry Bondarev's draft dictionary:

krtsāk كْرْتْسَاكْه "revelation"

Let's break it down...

www.researchgate.net/profile/Dmit...

The really annoying bit of that essay (apart from the fact that Inuktitut does in fact have more than 2 roots for "snow", and that it makes more sense to count lexemes than roots) is the part where he explicitly dismisses variation in the lexicalization of semantic fields as unworthy of attention.

"bUt ThE GrEaT EsKiMo VoCaBuLaRy HoAx!"

To answer my own question - at least two others do:
- Murle (Surmic)
- Gaahmg (Eastern Jebel)

You may notice that all three cases are both probably distantly related and located in roughly the same area.

But surely there must be some language in the rest of the world that does this?

In Dellys (Souag 2005):

Some beautiful shared colexification in the Sahara...

(The verbal noun, tara / baaɣa / anara, means "to want"; the construction might be rendered literally as "I fix wanting")

YouTube video by Hamid Iw sliman azem ffegh ay ajrad tamurt-iw .wmv

in Korandje, tumạ [tsomɑ]
in Siwi, tṃəṛɣi

but in Kabyle, famously, ajṛad:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgmi...

Now available on Wordpress!

phdnix.wordpress.com

Correspondence

Meaning : Bad person , offender

#Tamajeq : Arkawedan

#Tadaksahak : Agarbora

#Tetserret : Agarfagan

Interesting that tadaksahak and tetserret have the same element Agar for 'bad'. Agar is also the most common form in other Amazigh languages.
The Tamajeq form is mysterious

"Implicit contempt for the party leadership"? More like "explicit contempt for the party membership".

I would say this document was an astonishing case study in self-demonisation, but, to be fair, there's no internal evidence in there to suggest that its writer was ever a member of Labour...

Taunting reduplication in Dholuo, according to Gregersen 1971

@tacitean.bsky.social

Just need to find a stalwart defender of Amun, who can SHRED Akhenaten's doctrines with FACTS and LOGIC

Correspondence

Meaning : How are you ?
Literally : What are your informations

#Tamajeq : Məni isalan-nawan

#Tadaksahak : Mana andin-isalan

#Tetserret : Mənkat nəšfaš-ənnetən

a Numidian stela from Tunisia with the term BNS in the left column. Photo by Gmihail wikimedia commons.

some incoherent thoughts about Numidian BNS.

in funerary inscriptions in the eastern script (the one we can read), the term BNS appears about 228 times, making it the most frequent word in the corpus.

The literature normally interprets it as BN-S "his/her stone" with the Amazigh 3S suffix -s.

In Algeria and Morocco, you find Miloud /mīlūd/ < mawlūd as a personal name - a slightly different kind of dissimilation - and jāmūʕa "Friday prayer" < jumuʕah.

Also šīkūla "chocolate" < chocolat, which shows that the process had some kind of productivity.

No it doesn't.

(Not Standard Persian, anyhow; perhaps there's some dialect that does this?)

Siwi vocab for the day:

əlbuṛj "pigeon tower" (pictured below)
abdir "male pigeon"
tabdərt "female pigeon"
ṭaʕṭaʕ "pigeon (in baby talk)"
arraf "nest"

Exactly; today, Tetserret is a small endangered language, while Tuareg is the regional lingua franca. The explanation seems to be that speakers of Tetserret (or something very much like it) shifted to Northern Songhay a few centuries ago, creating Tadaksahak in the process.

So Dinka has possessed-possessor word order for everything EXCEPT body parts; if the possessed is a body part (literal or metaphorical), the order is normally possessor-possessed. I.e.:

"father-my", "cow of John"
vs.
"my hand", "John's head"

Does any language outside West Nilotic do this?