Latin authors from Algeria

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. So far, I've found the following:

• Suetonius, born in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba), ca. 70 AD; historian
• Fronto, born in Cirta (modern Constantine), ca. 100 AD; grammarian
• Apuleius, born in Madaura (modern M'daourouch), ca. 124 AD; author of Metamorphoses, a comic-mystical proto-novel, along with various philosophical and rhetorical works.
• Lactantius, born perhaps in Cirta, ca. 250 AD; a Christian apologist
• Nonius Marcellus, born in Thubursicum (modern Teboursouk), perhaps late 200s AD; a lexicographer
• Augustine, born in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras), ca. 354 AD; a Christian saint notable especially for his autobiographical Confessions
• Martianus Capella, born in Madaura, late 300s AD; author of a formerly influential allegorical curriculum of the liberal arts, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii
• Cassius Felix, born in Cirta, late 300s AD; author of a medical handbook
• Priscian, born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell), late 400s AD; Latin grammarian

Conspicuously, all but one of them were born in the east, in what was then Numidia, and all but three date to the late Roman Empire, after Roman citizenship had been extended to all free men under Roman rule but before the Vandals' arrival. It is no doubt misleading to treat such authors separately from their (probably more numerous) counterparts born just across the modern border in Tunisia.

Literary works, of course, are just a small subset of what was written in Latin. For a wider selection of much shorter texts written in Algeria, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum covers the area in Volume VIII. Even the Albertini Tablets, a set of legal documents found near Tebessa and mostly dating to 493-496 AD, are online now.

No doubt I'm missing a few authors; who else belongs on the list above?

Being "upon the truth"

It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - salat, namaz, wudu, shahada, masjid... There are even a few such words that aren't borrowings from Arabic or Urdu: circumambulation comes to mind. It is much more difficult, at least for me, to think of characteristics of "Islamic English" that go beyond the lexicon.

I was recently struck, however, by the expression "upon the truth". Searching for "upon the truth" yields plenty of mainstream English examples like "hit upon the truth", "lay hold upon the truth", "an essay upon the truth of the Christian religion"... However, searching for "be upon the truth", "are upon the truth", "is upon the truth", etc. yields a very different picture. Suddenly almost every single search result is specifically Islamic:

• "a) Hindering from the path of Allah, b) and confusing the person into believing that he is upon the truth" (Anonymous, Mission Islam
• "Either all of them are upon the truth which is impossible since truth is not open to contradictory differences or one of them is upon the truth" (Shaykh Haytham Al-Haddad in Muslim Matters)
• "This is because ibn 'Arabee held that all pagans and idol-worshippers were upon the truth since Allah is in his view everything" (translated from Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Rabee Ibn Haadee Al-Madkhalee's The Reality of Sufism in Light of the Qur’aan and Sunnah)
• "who do I follow among all those who claim to be upon the truth?" (Zahra Anjum in the International Islamic Publishing House blog)

You get the idea. The rare exceptions, like "their ultimate dependence is upon the truth", reflect quite a different construction, as the inanimate subject shows. In English, referring to people or groups being "upon the truth" appears to be unique to Islamic discourse (perhaps even to some genres thereof; most of the hits seem to have a vaguely Salafi vibe).

While this construction uses only well-known English vocabulary, it literally translates the Arabic expression على الحق ʕalā l-ḥaqq "on the truth/right". Within Arabic, this expression has a bit of an archaic ring to it, but is familiar from a number of hadith, e.g:

فَجَاءَ عُمَرُ فَقَالَ أَلَسْنَا عَلَى الْحَقِّ وَهُمْ عَلَى الْبَاطِلِ
At that time `Umar came (to the Prophet) and said, "Aren't we on the right (path) and they (pagans) in the wrong?" (Bukhari 65.365)

Being "upon the truth" is thus a calque into Islamic English from Arabic. No doubt a wider investigation would reveal other such cases.

Chenoua and the rectification of names

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. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the speakers, who call their own language Haqḇayliṯ or Haqḇayləḵṯ - i.e. Kabyle. Chenoua is the name of one particular area, a mountain near Tipasa, and speakers from other areas are often entirely unfamiliar with the term; I recently learned of a first-language speaker who had reached her twenties without ever hearing of it.

This is not to say that they speak the same language in Tipasa as in Tizi-Ouzou! In fact, "Chenoua" is much more closely related to Chaoui than to what is usually called "Kabyle". But "Kabyle" is just an Anglicisation of Arabic qbayǝl - "tribes". It came to be applied to mountain-dwelling groups like this in the Ottoman period as a broad ethno-political category, not a linguistic one; around Jijel, communities who have spoken Arabic for many generations still call themselves Kabyle.

What should you call a language in a situation like this? "Chenoua" takes a part for the whole, and as such is confusing, as well as privileging one group of speakers over others. "Kabyle" matches speakers' traditional self-understanding, but misleads linguists, who are accustomed to using this for the much larger, not very closely related Berber variety spoken further west. "Western Algerian Berber" is potentially too broad; perhaps "Dahra Berber" is better, after the low-lying mountain range where most speakers live, but it presupposes a distinction from "Ouarsenis Berber" that is probably not linguistically justified.

But neither "Berber" nor the currently preferred term "Tamazight" correspond to traditional usage among speakers. "Berber" has never been used in any Berber variety; it has always been a term used by outsiders to label them, and in traditional coastal Algerian usage bǝṛbṛiyya actually referred to colloquial Arabic, not to Berber. And before the Amazigh identity movement gained ground in the late 20th century, most speakers in northern Algeria had never heard of "Tamazight".

In contexts like this, it makes no sense for a linguist to insist on using the name speakers use. Folk categories simply don't divide languages up at the same level as the one the linguists are interested in, nor for the same purposes. (In Bechar, šəlħa "Shilha" refers not only to several very different Berber varieties, but to the completely unrelated Songhay language Korandje). That doesn't mean denying the validity of folk categories; people can call whales "fish" if they want to. It does mean making sure not to get misled by them.

Nilotic father tongues

Back in the late 1990s as human genetic data started piling up, it became increasingly clear that there were a lot of language families where most speakers shared relatively recent common male-line ancestry, visible by looking at Y-haplogroups. George van Driem memorably turned this observation into the Father Tongue Hypothesis: that language expansions are typically male-led, with children often raised to speak their father's language rather than their mother's. Berber is one of the many families where this holds true; Afroasiatic, on the other hand, shows several quite different dominant Y-haplogroups depending on the subgroup, indicating a more complex story at an earlier stage. What about Nilotic?

Nilotic, the most geographically widespread family within the rather questionable "Nilo-Saharan" phylum, divides into three primary subgroups:

• West Nilotic was originally concentrated around the White Nile, in modern South Sudan, including such languages as Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk. Medieval-era expansions brought Luo speakers as far south as Kenya.
• East Nilotic languages are spread from southern South Sudan down to Tanzania, including such languages as Bari, Turkana, and Maasai.
• South Nilotic languages are concentrated in mountainous areas of Kenya and Tanzania, including languages like Nandi and Kipsigis.

It turns out that each of these subfamilies has a reasonable correlation with a Y-haplogroup. West Nilotic shows high rates of A1b1b2b-M13 (62% Dinka, 53% Shilluk, 50% Kenya Luo, 38% Nuer, 22% Alur). Its northern members also have a high frequency of B (54% Nuer, 27% Shilluk, 23% Dinka), which is nearly absent from the more southerly ones (6% Kenya Luo, 0% Alur). A1b1b2b-M13 is also frequent, to a lesser extent, in East Nilotic (33% Karimojong, 28% Maasai and Turkana, 17% Samburu - but 0% Camus), though significant rates of B are recorded only for Karimojong (33%). In South Nilotic, on the other hand, A1b1b2b-M13 is much less frequent (13% Pokot, 10% Marakwet, 8% Ogiek, and so on down to 2% Datog and 0% Sabaot), with B even rarer (11% Pokot), and the plurality of lineages usually belong to E1b1b1-M35 - a Y-haplogroup otherwise notably associated with Cushitic and Nubian speakers (50% Ogiek, 46% Datog, 45% Marakwet, 38% Sengwer...) - or to E2. E1b1b1-M35 is not unknown further north, but is far rarer (20% Shilluk, 15% Dinka, 8% Nuer).

None of this looks much like the result of a single male-led expansion. An obvious interpretation would be that South Nilotic primarily reflects communal language shift, probably from Cushitic judging by the well-studied stratum of Cushitic vocabulary in these languages. One might reasonably postulate a classical male-led expansion to explain the spread of West Nilotic within South Sudan; but, if so, one is led to the conclusion (already plausible on linguistic and historical grounds) that the Luo expansion southwards involved considerable assimilation of local men, notably Bantu-speaking (the Bantu-associated E1b1a1-M2 accounted for 33% of Kenya Luo sampled). Such assimilation also appears probable in East Nilotic, for which I unfortunately lack data from South Sudan.

In a broader perspective, A1b1b2b-M13 is frequent in several far-flung "Nilo-Saharan" groups along the southeastern fringes of the Sahara whose languages are only very distantly related, if at all, to Nilotic: Fur (31%), various Sudanese Maban (26%), and even Cameroon Kanuri (27%). It does not, however, seem to be frequent among Nubian speakers, much closer at hand.

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I won't attempt to exhaustively reference this post, which is basically open notes on work in progress, but key sources include Wood et al. 2005, Tishkoff et al. 2007, Hassan et al. 2008, Gomes et al. 2010, and Hirbo 2011. Note that I've combined different samples for Nuer and Dinka.

Feynman's Father's Fallacy

The first time I read this quote from Richard Feynman, I was quite convinced by it:

The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, "See that bird? What kind of bird is that?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is." He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you anything!" But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: "See that bird?" he says. "It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing-that's what counts." (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

And it would be true - in a world where no one else knows anything about birds. (That's probably not so far from the world you or I or Feynman grew up in as children.) If you don't know what nightingales are called, and neither does anyone else, then you can still learn about them - if you have the time and patience to go deep into the countryside to places where they live, and spend cold nights with a pair of infra-red goggles, or set clever traps deep in the countryside or something.

On the other hand, if you do know what a nightingale is called, you can find out enormous amounts about it by simply asking. You can scour Google Scholar for papers by people who did the hard part already; you can get birdwatchers talking about it; you can look it up in a reference manual; in short, you can benefit from the accumulated experience of many generations of observers, instead of having to reinvent the wheel yourself, only to have your knowledge perish with you in the end. If you know what it's called in other languages, you can find out what other communities of observers had to say about it - which, in some cases, may reflect much longer observation than English speakers have been able to undertake. Having found all this out, you can understand your own observations better. Maybe you've discovered something new! Or maybe you've misunderstood what you saw because you lacked a broader context. Either way, you'll know much more with the name than you're ever likely to be able to discover individually without it.

Two Bambara words in Gnawa songs of Meknes

Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and medical functions, usually called Gnawa in Morocco, Diwan in Algeria, and Stambeli in Tunisia. Aguadé's Die Lieder der Gnawa aus Meknes provides the lyrics of an extensive corpus of Gnawa songs from Meknes in northern Morocco. These songs are primarily in Arabic, but characteristically include a number of words with no plausible Arabic or Berber source, presumed to derive from languages of the Sahel. Their identification, however, is generally difficult, although Aguadé ventures a few suggestions drawn from Hausa. Anyone can comb dictionaries for sound-alikes, but similar forms may be found across unrelated languages of the Sahel with very different meanings. It would be much easier if the meanings were certain, but the singers do not necessarily know the meaning of such words, and the context often hardly narrows it down. Nevertheless, some cases can be identified more confidently than others.

Aguadé's song number 88, Lalla l-Batul "Lady Virgin" (pp. 128-129), is dedicated to a female genie whose song cycle corresponds to the colour yellow. Its refrain (accounting for 5 out of its 8 lines) is a lalla l-batul, saysay "Oh Lady Virgin, saysay". The word saysay has no meaning in Arabic or in Berber. In Bambara, however, sáyi means "yellow"; the refrain would then be "Oh Lady Virgin, yellow, yellow".

In his song number 90 (pp. 130-132), the refrain is fufu dənba ya sidi "fufu dənba, oh master" (repeated 14 times, including the opening line of the song). Bambara dénba means "mother". The first verse after the initial refrain is ma bɣatək kda ya sidi "she didn't want you like that, oh master"; no feminine singular subject to which this could refer appears anywhere in the Arabic text of the song, but the Bambara interpretation allows this line to be better understood. I'd like to relate the preceding fufu to Bambara fò "greet" and/or fɔ́ "say, speak" - "greet Mother" would seem contextually appropriate - but I can't quite see how the grammar would hang together.

Addendum: In song 5, Sidi Gangafu "Mr. Gangafu", almost every couplet ends in Bambaṛa or shortened ya Mbaṛa, so a Bambara etymology seems worth considering (although an allusion to Hausa is also found). As Aguadé notes, Ganga is simply a kind of drum used by the Gnawa, whose name is shared across most of the Sahel, so one would expect this name to mean something like "drum-player" or "drum-maker". In fact, Gangafu can readily be interpreted as Bambara gàngan-fɔ̀ "play the ganga-drum". "Drum-player" should properly be something like gàngan-fɔ̀-la, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to suppose that the Bambara used by slaves among themselves would have had some non-standard features, given that for many of them it would have been a second language to begin with.

Some Dellys manuscripts

(Not linguistics, just history - possibly self-indulgent at that.)

Quite a few years ago in Dellys, I was allowed to photograph a bundle of pages from different manuscripts grouped together in a single detached cover, labelled as belonging to my great-uncle (رحمه الله). (I wasn't very good with metadata at the time, so I apologise in case anything ended up in the resulting folder from a different source.) Both the internet and my ability to read premodern Arabic handwriting have advanced a lot since then, and I can now identify (more or less) six of the works which these were taken from:

• A commentary on al-Nawawī's Forty Ḥadīth - a selection of key sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)
• Muhammad Mayyāra's commentary on Ibn ʕĀshir's Guiding Helper - a condensed summary in verse of essential Mālikī fiqh (religious jurisprudence)
• Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī's Warning to the Neglectful, a book of religious exhortation
• Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī's Decipherment of the Symbols and Keys of the Treasures, explaining Sufi concepts and terms
• A linguistically focused commentary on al-Būṣīrī's Mantle - a poem in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad (SAWS)
• Ibn Mālik's Thousand-Liner - a condensed presentation of Arabic grammar in verse to facilitate memorisation
• A commentary on al-Abharī's Isagoge - an introduction to Aristotelian logic

Apart from these, there were a few pages of rhymed dua (supplication to God), which I can't find a source for online.

I still can't identify most of the commentators; it seems that plenty of commentaries have yet to be properly digitised. But the geographic spread of the authors is noteworthy, covering almost the whole span of the former territories of the Umayyad Caliphate: al-Samarqandī from Uzbekistan, al-Abharī from Iraq or Iran, al-Nawawī from Syria, Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī from Palestine, al-Būṣīrī from Egypt, Mayyāra and Ibn ʕĀshir from Morocco, Ibn Mālik from Spain. The chronological spread, on the other hand, is notably more concentrated: 10th c. (al-Samarqandī), 13th c. (al-Abharī, al-Nawawī, al-Būṣīrī, Ibn Mālik), 16th/17th c. (Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī, Ibn ʕĀshir). The 13th century doesn't necessarily spring to mind as a golden age of Islamic thought, but for the early 20th century curriculum this notebook presumably reflects, it was at least a golden age of school texts. (On the other side of the Mediterranean, it was also the age of Thomas Aquinas and Dante.) The absence of 19th century texts here might be accounted for by the rise of printing, but that cannot explain the paucity of texts from other recent centuries; even the 16th/17th century texts seem to be intended to open the door to understanding older works. The common purpose of these works should also be clear: all of them either relate directly to religion or are ancillary to the religious sciences.

The texts themselves accordingly therefore cast only a very indirect light on the context where they were being studied. A note carefully added in pencil on the inside cover sometime in the early/mid-20th century, however, is much more eloquent:

WARNING: The earth is a dark planet, lit by the moon at night and by the sun in the day. The earth is suspended in space by the power of Allah SWT; He made a gravitational power in the stars that attracts the earth towards them just as a magnet attracts iron. The earth is not carried on the horn of a bull, as claimed on p. 36 of this book in a ḥadīth of `Abd Allāh ibn Sallām when he asked the Messenger of Allāh SAWS about the earth "What was it created from?" and so on until he asked him "And what do these seven earths rest upon?" He replied "On a bull." He asked "And what is the bull like?" He said "A bull with 40,000 heads", etc. This ḥadīth has no basis, and has been deemed fabricated, and none of the learned have confirmed this ḥadīth - and Allah knows best.

This short comment feels like the entire modernist era in a nutshell - that late 19th/early 20th century moment of collision with the West, when this vast storehouse of traditional knowledge, stabilised over centuries by mnemonic verses and long insulated from external criticism, is suddenly confronted with an urgent need to sift out the grain from the chaff and go back to first principles, or risk losing intellectual as well as physical battles. We're still living through the aftermath; one result is a widespread suspicion of works formerly treated as unimpeachable, including some of those above.