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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 1d

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...

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 1d

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"...

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Reposted by Lameen Souag

Maarten Kossmann @maartenkossmann.bsky.social · 2d

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:

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 2d

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

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 2d

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

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 4d

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

Charles Onyango-Obbo @cobbo3.bsky.social · 5d

After three consecutive drought years, villagers in South Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria accused rainmaker Solomon Oture of withholding rain through malicious spells. They buried him alive!

Death of a rainmaker: When drought means murder in South Sudan

For a group of people whose job means life, climate change can spell death.

www.aljazeera.com

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

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

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

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"

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

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>

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

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

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

That leaves <tsāk>

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

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...

www.researchgate.net

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 5d

"bUt ThE GrEaT EsKiMo VoCaBuLaRy HoAx!"

Arabic Poetry @arabicpoetry.bsky.social · 6d

Arabic has 348 words for "lion". Here is the cover of Ibn Khālawayh's (d. 980, Baghdad) book on the subject.

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 6d

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?

Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 12d

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?

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 6d

In Dellys (Souag 2005):

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 7d

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")

Intenudas @izmarasan.bsky.social · 7d

Correspondence

Meaning : i want so much

#Tamajeq : əkne tara

#Tadaksahak : aɣahinjin baaɣa

#Tetserret : ǝsiskarǝk anara

What is interesting is that the three verb aknu/hinjin/səskər mean the same thing 'to repaire' and they can be used to intensify the meaning of a verbal noun

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 8d

in Korandje, tumạ [tsomɑ]
in Siwi, tṃəṛɣi

but in Kabyle, famously, ajṛad:

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

sliman azem ffegh ay ajrad tamurt-iw .wmv

YouTube video by Hamid Iw

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Lameen Souag

Marijn van Putten @phdnix.bsky.social · 8d

Now available on Wordpress!

phdnix.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Lameen Souag

Intenudas @izmarasan.bsky.social · 8d

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

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 9d

"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...

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 9d

Taunting reduplication in Dholuo, according to Gregersen 1971

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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 10d

@tacitean.bsky.social

Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 10d

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

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Reposted by Lameen Souag

Intenudas @izmarasan.bsky.social · 11d

Correspondence

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

#Tamajeq : Məni isalan-nawan

#Tadaksahak : Mana andin-isalan

#Tetserret : Mənkat nəšfaš-ənnetən

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Reposted by Lameen Souag

Maarten Kossmann @maartenkossmann.bsky.social · 11d

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.

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

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