A few articles about Eastern Berber are out. One concerns Abû Ghânim's Mudawwana, an Ibadi work, so-far unpublished. He was a Khurasani so, one expects, the original was Arabic. But, after "Buɣanem"'s death AD 820, the Imazighen of Tunis/Kairawan and points-east adopted this text and translated it, with native commentary.
These East-Berber languages are not doing nearly as well as the great mainline dialects of the Moroccan Rif. The dialect of the Augila-now-Awjila (no j) oasis is down to its last dozen thousand, if that. Marijn van Putten and Adam Benkato are on that case.
Maltese is, famously, the last gasp of old mediaeval Tunisian-Sicilian Arabic; these precede the present "Hilali" dialects, swapping out panSemitic Q for "G". The Awjila's corpus of loans are, like Maltese, NOT in the Hilali family. Awjili took from an earlier strain, which still had Q; Awjili preserves these. This has allowed actual "G" to remain - and it is G here, not the "J" of Saudi tajwîd today.
The Augilic words for Friday and maybe even for the seven day week itself came from this clearly-Qâric Arabic. Several diurnal terms came from the religious schedule. Procopius tells us that they were still pagan until Justinian. If the Augila ever knew the Coptic or Punic Christ, their new Muslim overlords swapped out every hint of Him.
Whether this language is the same as was spoken by the classical Nasamones, must await posts dealing with the classical period.
No comments:
Post a Comment