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, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh. Today, they may also be written in the Berber Latin alphabet or the Arabic script, with Latin being the most pervasive.
The Berber languages have a similar level of variety to the Romance languages, although they are sometimes referred to as a single collective language, often as "Berber", "Tamazight", or "Amazigh". The languages, with a few exceptions, form a dialect continuum. There is a debate as to how to best sub-categorize languages within the Berber branch. Berber languages typically follow verb–subject–object word order. Their phonological inventories are diverse.
Millions of people in Morocco and Algeria natively speak a Berber language, as do smaller populations of Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, western and northern Niger, northern Burkina Faso and Mauritania and the Siwa Oasis of Egypt. There are also likely a few million speakers of Berber languages in Western Europe. Tashlhiyt, Kabyle, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tarifit, and Shawiya are some of the most commonly spoken Berber languages. Exact numbers are impossible to ascertain as there are few modern North African censuses that include questions on language use, and what censuses do exist have known flaws.
Following independence in the 20th century, the Berber languages have been suppressed and suffered from low prestige in North Africa. Recognition of the Berber languages has been growing in the 21st century, with Morocco and Algeria adding Tamazight as an official language to their constitutions in 2011 and 2016 respectively.
Most Berber languages have a high percentage of borrowing and influence from the Arabic language, as well as from other languages. For example, Arabic loanwords represent 35% to 46% of the total vocabulary of the Kabyle language and represent 51.7% of the total vocabulary of Tarifit. Almost all Berber languages took from Arabic the pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/ and /ħ/, the (nongeminated) uvular stop /q/, and the voiceless pharyngealized consonant /ṣ/. Unlike the Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages of the Afro-Asiatic phylum, Berber languages are not tonal languages.
"Tamazight" and "Berber languages" are often used interchangeably. However, "Tamazight" is sometimes used to refer to a specific subset of Berber languages, such as Central Tashlhiyt. "Tamazight" can also be used to refer to Standard Moroccan Tamazight or Standard Algerian Tamazight, as in the Moroccan and Algerian constitutions respectively. In Morocco, besides referring to all Berber languages or to Standard Moroccan Tamazight, "Tamazight" is often used in contrast to Tashelhit and Tarifit to refer to Central Atlas Tamazight.
The use of Berber has been the subject of debate due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian." One group, the Linguasphere Observatory, has attempted to introduce the neologism "Tamazic languages" to refer to the Berber languages. Amazigh people typically use "Tamazight" when speaking English. Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example, the Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh.
(Wikipedia)
All things considered, my original conception of the "Berbers", i.e., the Amazigh, as being a noble people from the mountains was not so far off the mark after all.
As cited above, "The term Amazigh also has a cognate in the Tuareg 'Amajegh"', meaning noble".
P.S.: For those who are interested, Wikipedia has an even more detailed article on "Names of the Berber people". Selected reading
* "Berbers in Libya" (4/23/11)
* "African (il)literacy" (6/21/21) — has much of relevance to say about an ancient African script called Tifinagh
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (6/20/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24)
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Language Log
Berber, emic vs. etic
My mental image of Berbers is one of brave, noble people of the Maghreb (western and central North Africa, comprising Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia) who were there before the advent of the Arabs, whose migration into the region took place largely in the 7th and later centuries. As happened in Southeast Asia (including Taiwan) with the Han people from the north pushing the indigenes into the mountainous areas from the lowlands to become montagnards, the Berbers also substantially retreated into the mountains of northern Africa.
When my Uber driver told me last Sunday in Philadelphia that he was a Berber, I told him that he must be proud of his heritage, he responded, "Actually, we don't like that name. It was imposed on us by Arabs, and it means the same thing as 'barbarian'. We prefer to call ourselves 'Amazigh'."
I had barely heard of Amazigh before, and what the driver told me was so much at odds with my preconception of the name Berber that I had to look into the basis for the difference between what I had heard and believed about the Berbers since secondary school and what a Berber himself thought about that name.
The first and simplest etymology for "Berber" I turned to comes from Wiktionary:
From Arabic بَرْبَرِيّ (barbariyy, “Berber”), from Ancient Greek βάρβαρος (bárbaros, “non-Greek, foreign, barbarian”), apparently imitative of foreign speech. Cognate of English barbarian.
That seems pretty standard and is widely accepted, but I wanted to dig deeper, so I looked for more details.
First, who were the so-called Berbers? Berbers, or the Berber peoples, also called by their endonym Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs in the Arab migrations to the Maghreb. Their main connections are identified by their usage of Berber languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, which are part of the Afroasiatic language family. They are indigenous to the Maghreb region of North Africa, where they live in scattered communities across parts of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, Mauritania, northern Mali and northern Niger. Smaller Berber communities are also found in Burkina Faso and Egypt's Siwa Oasis.
Descended from Stone Age tribes of North Africa, accounts of the Imazighen were first mentioned in Ancient Egyptian writings. From about 2000 BCE, Berber languages spread westward from the Nile Valley across the northern Sahara into the Maghreb. A series of Berber peoples such as the Mauri, Masaesyli, Massyli, Musulamii, Gaetuli, and Garamantes gave rise to Berber kingdoms, such as Numidia and Mauretania. Other kingdoms appeared in late antiquity, such as Altava, Aurès, Ouarsenis, and Hodna. Berber kingdoms were eventually suppressed by the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries CE. This started a process of cultural and linguistic assimilation known as Arabization, which influenced the Berber population. Arabization involved the spread of Arabic language and Arab culture among the Berbers, leading to the adoption of Arabic as the primary language and conversion to Islam. Notably, the Arab migrations to the Maghreb from the 7th century to the 17th century accelerated this process. While local Arab dynasties came to rule parts of the Maghreb after the 7th century, Berber tribes remained powerful political forces and founded new ruling dynasties in the 10th and 11th centuries, such as the Zirids, Hammadids, various Zenata principalities in the western Maghreb, and several Taifa kingdoms in al-Andalus. Islam later provided the ideological stimulus for the rise of fresh Berber empires, the Almoravids and Almohads in the 11th to 13th centuries. Their Berber successors – the Marinids, the Zayyanids, and the Ha[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
top
a man who takes the active role in gay or homosexual sex
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Idiom of the Day
let it slip
To accidentally or inadvertently reveal a given secret or important piece of information. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
catch up on the original Beetlejuice with Tam before you see the sequel! #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice
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Language Log
China flavor
I’m still trying to figure out, in XJP rhetoric, when 中华 is used and when it’s 中国. How long has Zhongguo been used directly as an adjective this way, as opposed to 中国似的or 中国性？Is a 中国味different from a 中华味？Which smells better? pic.twitter.com/9CARnICZSu
— James Millward 米華健 (@JimMillward) September 4, 2024
For non-specialists to understand this tweet, a considerable amount of annotation and explication is necessary. Key terms
Zhōngguó 中國/国 — usually rendered as "China; Chinese", literally "central / middle kingdom"
Zhōnghuá 中華/华 — usually rendered as "China; Chinese", literally "central / middle florescence"
So named because the first ancient Chinese settlements were around the Yellow River, which was considered to be the center, and because the culture was considered to be magnificent and flourishing.
*
* In traditional East Asian thought, 華／华 (Huá) or 中華／中华 (Zhōnghuá), often translated as "Chinese", has a philosophical connotation of civilizedness and decorous behavior that transcends a strictly ethnic definition. This is in opposition to "foreigners" or "barbarians", 夷 (yí) or 夷狄 (yídí), whose cultures are uncivilized and lacking in proper morality. Therefore, in certain contexts, other nations of the East Asian cultural sphere could refer to themselves as 中華／中华 (Zhōnghuá) in the sense that they were civilized people following the classical traditions first established in Ancient China, without meaning that they saw themselves as Chinese in an ethnic sense.
* Although also used in the formal names of both the Republic and People's Republic of China, the term carries a somewhat broader sense than 中國／中国 (Zhōngguó, “state of China”) and connotes something like the "nation of the Chinese people" or "land of the Chinese culture".
(Wiktionary)
If we compare Zhōngguó 中國/国 and Zhōnghuá 中華/华, the former is more PRCish and the latter is more ROCish. However, both sides employ both designations at different times and for different purposes.
Other terms raised by James Millward are:
Zhōngguó shì de 中国似的 ("China-like")
Zhōngguó xìng 中国性 ("Chineseness; Chinese nature / character")
Zhōngguó wèi 中国味 ("Central Kingdom flavor")
Zhōnghuá wèi 中华味 ("Central Florescence flavor")
Here's the quotation from Xi Jinping printed against a blue background at the bottom of the tweet (with a few small modifications from online sources):
Wǒmen de jiàoyù… jué bùnéng péiyǎng chū yīxiē “zhǎngzhe Zhōngguó liǎn, bùshì Zhōngguó xīn, méiyǒu Zhòngguó qíng, quēshǎo “Zhōngguó wèi” de rén!
我们的教育…绝不能培养出一些“长着中国脸， 不是中国心，没有中国情，缺少中国味”的人！
"Our education… must not cultivate people who have "Chinese faces but not Chinese hearts, no Chinese feelings, and lack 'Chinese flavor'!"
Make of it what you will. For myself, I am savoring what Xi Jinping meant by his rather peculiar reference to a Chinese wèi 味 ("taste; flavor; smell; odor") as applied to people. Selected readings
* "Mee Tu flavor" (11/29/18)
* "Xi Jinping's faux classicism" (7/2/23) — with lengthy bibliography
P.S.: If you want to see the whole of Xi Jniping's smiling face, click on the X at the top right of the tweet.
[Thanks to Bruce Humes]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: bastion
This word has appeared in 214 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get back (1)
to return to a place
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Language Log
German linguist Möllendorff and the earliest recordings of Chinese
"UCSB Library Acquires Rare Chinese Language Audio Cylinder Recordings", UCSB Library Newsletter (September, 2024)
The UC Santa Barbara Library is excited to announce the recent acquisition of the Paul Georg von Möllendorff Chinese Cylinders, a collection of wax cylinders widely considered to be the first audio recordings from China. The cylinders, recorded in the late 1800s by linguist Möllendorff, contain sixteen recitations of a popular, celebrated poem "Returning Home"' by Tao Yuanming. Möllendorff recorded the poem in various Chinese dialects to document the differences in regional languages at the time. Today, the cylinders provide a rare glimpse into the history of Chinese language and include dialects that are considered critically endangered or extinct.
Like many late 19th-century diplomats and Sinologists, Möllendorff was an extraordinary scholar. I will spend the remainder of this post describing his aims, abilities, and achievements. Möllendorff (1847–1901) was a German linguist and renowned diplomat in East Asia. While serving as Commissioner of Customs at Ningbo, China, in the 1890s, Möllendorff undertook an ambitious project to document and classify Chinese languages for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. He asked speakers representing various Chinese languages to recite the same poem into a graphophone and then transcribed the results phonetically. Möllendorff sent the cylinders to Léon Azoulay, a prominent figure in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, to feature at the exposition as part of a "phonographic museum" where visitors could take an audio tour of cultures around the world. After the exposition, Azoulay published a full catalog of the contents of the phonographic museum, including the donated Chinese cylinders, which were explicitly identified with Möllendorff. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Paul_Georg_von_M%C3%B6llendorff_%281847-1901%29.jpg/220px-Paul_Georg_von_M%C3%B6llendorff_%281847-1901%29.jpg Möllendorff in official Korean dress
From Wikipedia:
Möllendorff is mostly known for his service as an adviser to the Korean king Gojong in the late nineteenth century and for his contributions to Sinology. In English-language publications, Möllendorff is often credited with having designed a system for romanizing the Manchu language, which was in fact the creation of his compatriot Hans Conon von der Gabelentz.
Since Wikipedia says that a citation is needed for that last sentence, and I've been hearing about this uncertainty for the last half-century, I'm hoping that some of the Manchu specialists who read Language Log will finally clarify the situation regarding the romanization of Manchu.
Half a century ago, I knew Möllendorff primarily as the author of A Manchu Grammar (Shanghai: Printed at the American Presbyterian mission press, 1892). In the course of preparation of this post, however, I've come to learn a great deal more about Möllendorff's accomplishments during the course of his life, such as learning Hebrew while still a young man, joining the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in Shanghai, becoming proficient in "Chinese", and joining the German consular service as interpreter and later vice-consul in Tianjin.
Something of great significance for me occurred during Möllendorff's service in the German consulate. Namely, he became a friend of the Qing scholar, Ma Jianzhong (1845-1900), who was an official in the secretariat of the powerful statesman, governor-general Li Hongzhang (1823-1901). What brought me to a standstill upon seeing the name of Ma Jianzhong was that he was the first Chinese to write a grammar of "Chinese", published in 1898.
Victor H. Mair (1997), "Ma Jianzhong and the Invention of Chinese Grammar", in Ch[...]
Word of the Day
hearth
Definition: (noun) The floor of a fireplace, usually extending into a room and paved with brick, flagstone, or cement.
Synonyms: fireside.
Usage: They sat on the hearth and warmed themselves before the fire.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Taylor gets it ❤️ @ATwinkandaRedhead #ThighClap #CreatorsForKamala #DNC2024
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: imminent
This word has appeared in 856 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
look into
If you look into something, you investigate it or you try to find out more about it.
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fsids – continued to rule until the 16th century. From the 16th century onward, the process continued in the absence of Berber dynasties; in Morocco, they were replaced by Arabs claiming descent from the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Berbers are divided into several diverse ethnic groups and Berber languages, such as Kabyles, Chaouis and Rifians. Historically, Berbers across the region did not see themselves as a single cultural or linguistic unit, nor was there a greater "Berber community", due to their differing cultures. They also did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to their own groups and communities. They started being referred to collectively as Berbers after the Arab conquests of the 7th century and this distinction was revived by French colonial administrators in the 19th century. Today, the term "Berber" is viewed as pejorative by many who prefer the term "Amazigh". Since the late 20th century, a trans-national movement – known as Berberism or the Berber Culture Movement – has emerged among various parts of the Berber populations of North Africa to promote a collective Amazigh ethnic identity and to militate for greater linguistic rights and cultural recognition.
The indigenous populations of the Maghreb region of North Africa are collectively known as Berbers or Amazigh in English.
Tribal titles such as Barabara and Beraberata appear in Egyptian inscriptions of 1700 and 1300 B.C, and the Berbers were probably intimately related with the Egyptians in very early times. Thus the true ethnical name may have become confused with Barbari, the designation naturally used by classical conquerors.
The plural form Imazighen is sometimes also used in English. While Berber is more widely known among English-speakers, its usage is a subject of debate, due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian". Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example, the Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh. Stéphane Gsell proposed the translation "noble/free" for the term Amazigh based on Leo Africanus's translation of "awal amazigh" as "noble language" referring to Berber languages, this definition remains disputed and is largely seen as an undue extrapolation. The term Amazigh also has a cognate in the Tuareg "Amajegh", meaning noble. "Mazigh" was used as a tribal surname in Roman Mauretania Caesariensis.
Abraham Isaac Laredo proposes that the term Amazigh could be derived from "Mezeg", which is the name of Dedan of Sheba in the Targum. Ibn Khaldun says the Berbers were descendants of Barbar, the son of Tamalla, son of Mazigh, son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah.
The Numidian, Mauri, and Libu populations of antiquity are typically understood to refer to approximately the same population as modern Berbers.
(Wikipedia)
When I was investigating the orthography and prehistory of the Berbers and the Tuaregs in the 70s and 80s as part my research on writing systems worldwide, I found evidence for their advanced civilization in North Africa dating as far back as twelve millennia ago in the cave paintings and rock inscriptions of the region, chiefly in the Atlas Mountains. Still today, the Atlas Mountains are home to various groups of Berbers. Among the Tuaregs, the idea of a noble class, especially noble warriors, figures prominently.
The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who are indigenous to North Africa. The languages are primarily spoken and not typically written. Historically, they have been written with the ancient Libyco-Berber script[...]
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
set up (2)
to put together or arrange the parts of something before using it
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Word of the Day
unsteady
Definition: (adjective) Not firm, solid, or securely in place; unstable.
Synonyms: unfirm.
Usage: He climbed carefully up the unsteady ladder and cleaned the leaves that had clogged the gutter around the house.
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justice for the Natasha Lyonne Beetlejuices #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice
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Language Log
Type-token plots in The Economist
From "The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles", The Economist 9/6/2024:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/EconomistTypeToken1.png
The Economist's article covers some other easily-quantifiable aspects of political rhetoric, but this afternoon I'll focus on the type-token plots, since this an an especially consistent aspect of Donald Trump in comparison to other politicians:
"Political vocabulary display", 9/10/2015
"Vocabulary display in the CNN debate", 9/18/2015
"R2D2", 3/27/106
"More political text analytics", 4/15/2016
As I've suggested in the past, the main cause is Trump's repetitive style. His shallow type-token graphs are probably not due to a penchant for "plain speaking" — at least, there are stereotypical exemplars of lower-class speech style with robustly-growing type-token graphs, as discussed in "Vicky Pollard's Revenge", 1/2/2007.
On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway's writing style exhibits slower type-token growth than any other English novelist I've tested: "Lexical display rates in novels", 4/18/2020. That's not because Hemingway writes in a repetitive style — it's an interesting question what causes it, and what it has something to do with his (false) reputation for short sentences (see "Death before syntax", 10/20/2014).
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Language Log
Where weave is from
In a comment on "Trump's rhetorical 'weave'", J.R. Brewer wrote:
This thread has had the side effect of causing me to learn (at least taking wiktionary at face value and not digging deeper into other reference sources) that the "weave" of "bob and weave" etc. is a homophone etymologically unrelated to the "weave" meaning "create fabric from fibers" rather than the former being, as I had naively supposed, a metaphorical extension of the latter that had somehow drifted semantically to the point that it was no longer particularly obvious.
Below, some etymological backup from the Oxford English Dictionary…
For the transitive verb weave, glossed as "To form or fabricate (a stuff or material) by interlacing yarns or other filaments of a particular substance in a continuous web; to manufacture in a loom by crossing the threads or yarns called respectively the warp and the weft", the OED give this etymology:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weave1.png
For the intransitive verb weave, glossed as "To move repeatedly from side to side; †to toss to and fro; to sway the body alternately to one side and the other; to pursue a devious course, thread one's way amid obstructions.", the OED indeed has a different source:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weave2.png
For that (obsolete) intransitive verb weve, the OED give this etymology:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weve.png
The full list of OED glosses for weve is
1. Of persons: To go from one place to another; to travel, wander, pass.
2. Of things: To go, pass, make way.
3. To move to and fro; to toss about.
4. To move or remove from one place to another; to convey or bring; to strike down.
5. To wave or brandish (a weapon). Also to beckon, make signals.
6. To toss about, trouble.
This cluster of concepts is arguably a better metaphor for Donald Trump's rhetorical "weave" than a weaver's loom is.
Beyond waive, there are also possible links to wave, whiff, waft, and waif — which associatively enrich the metaphor, even if the etymologies are uncertain.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
jerk
a stupid person
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aofen Sun, ed., Studies on the History of Chinese Syntax. Monograph Series Number 10 of Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 5-26.
I had always wondered why any Chinese — before the introduction of modern linguistics — would undertake the improbable task of writing a grammar of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic, even though Westerners had previously written grammars of vernacular Sinitic languages. Naturally, I had several times attempted to read Ma Jianzhong's Mǎ shì wéntōng 馬氏文通 (Ma's Literary Expositor [ironically rendered as "Basic principles for writing clearly and coherently by Mister Ma" here), but I always found it unintelligible, and I have never met anyone, Chinese or foreigner, who could render it into comprehensible English, French, German, Russian, etc.
When explained rigorously and analytically, as Harold Shadick did for his A first course in literary Chinese, 3 vols. (Cornell University Press, 1968), which I still use for my introduction to Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic course, it is possible to write a useful "grammar" of the language.
Cf. Aṣṭādhyāyī by Pāṇini पाणिनि (between 7th c. and 4th c. BC), the world's first grammar. At the University of Washington, all graduate students in linguistics used to be required to take a special course on Paninian grammar. I don't know if that's still the case.
Knowing that Ma Jianzhong was a close associate of Möllendorff makes me wonder whether it was the latter who put a grammar bee in the bonnet of the former.
We started this post with the earliest recordings of Sinitic dialects / topolects and ended with the first grammar of Literary Sinitic by a Chinese scholar, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff was right there at the heart of both these pathbreaking enterprises, and much else of great consequence besides — such as helping the formidable Li Hongzhang obtain munitions and warships from the German industrial firms Vulkan and Krupp, and then going head to head with Li over his attempts to gain greater independence for Korea from China — a formidable intellect and redoubtable personality that belies the wonky-nerdy appearance we see in some of his photographs. Selected readings
* "'In Pāṇini We Trust;" (12/15/22)
* "Implementing Pāṇini's grammar" (12/1/23)
* "A new grammar of Mandarin" (10/18/15)
[Thanks to Martin Schwartz]
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Idiom of the Day
let down (one's) guard
To become less guarded or vigilant; to stop being cautious about potential trouble or danger. Watch the video
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the gals love a giggle @ATwinkandaRedhead #IconicLaughter #NameAMoreIconicDuo #CreatorsForKamala
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oh, to be young & in congress 😎 #CreatorsForKamala #FocusOnDemocracy #DNC2024
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
cheesy | cheesey
of very low quality; not stylish or tasteful
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Idiom of the Day
let down (one's) hair
To cease acting formally or conservatively; to let go of one's inhibitions or reservations. Watch the video
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We can't believe JD said $#&@^ either. thank you @ATwinkandaRedhead for with us #creatorsforkamala
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