No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic

7/23/2019 No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic

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No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic

ParLameen Souaglinguiste au Lacido (CNRS)Source : http://lughat.blogspot.fr/2009/03/no-berber-isnt-descended-from-arabic.html

A few days ago I got lent a copy of a recent book in Arabic by Othmane Saadi: Dictionaryof the Arabic Roots of Amazigh (Berber) Words ) ( (Tripoli: Academy of Arabic Language 2007.) My reaction, in brief, is that its unscientificjingoistic claptrap. But I happen to have friends (not linguists, of course) who take itseriously; and I am told that the author, a proud member of the Chaoui Berber Nememcha(Nmama) tribe, genuinely believes his own theory. I will therefore try to explain as simplyas possible where the book goes wrong.

His starting point is noting the existence of strong similarities between Arabic and Berber inthe vocabulary and grammar (p. C: 90% of Amazigh Berber words are pure or Arabised

Arabic, and the grammar of Berber agrees with the grammar of Arabic.) This issubstantially correct, and has been known for a long time (see, for example, IgorDiakonoffsAfrasian Languages, Moscow: Nauka 1988, or at a more basic level one of myfirst posts), except that 90% is a substantial exaggeration many of the comparisons heputs forward are at best questionable, as will be seen below. But he claims that theexplanation for these similarities is that Berber descends from Arabic. Not just Berbereither, as he says on p. B: The term Arabitic means the ancient Arabic languageswhich are wrongly called the Semitic languages and which branched out from the sourcelanguage Arabic thousands of years ago, such as Babylonian, and Assyrian, andAkkadian, and Phoenician Canaanite, and Aramaic, and Himyaritic, and Sabaean, andThamudic, and Lihyanite, and Mainic, and ancient Egyptian, and Berber, and others.

Linguists subscribe to a rather different explanation for the observed similarities: thatBerber and Arabic (and all the other languages he listed, and many he doesnt list such asHausa and Somali) are all descended from a single language, called for convenienceProto-Afroasiatic (Greenberg 1950), which was different (and probably about equallydifferent) from any of them.

How would you choose between these two hypotheses? Well, if the original language wasdifferent from Arabic, then you would expect some original forms to have been lost inArabic but kept in other languages. Oddly enough, Saadi himself gives evidence forexactly that: he links the Berberurnot to Akkadian ul(p. 12), and the Berber -astohim/her to Akkadian -u(p. 12), and the BerbernkkI to Ancient Egyptian inkand

Akkadian anku, none of which are attested in Arabic. Unless you believe that Akkadianand Berber each independently invented the same new forms, or that they are moreclosely related to each other than to Arabic which Saadi (correctly) does not claim youhave to conclude that the common ancestor of Arabic and Berber included words like ur/ulfor not, and ankufor I, and so on, and hence was different from what we know asArabic, just as it was different from Berber.

So maybe this common ancestor was Arabic in a different sense: Saadi argues that it wasoriginally spoken in Arabia, so Arabic would be the one language that stayed at home, andpresumably got less affected by foreign influence. Unfortunately, he doesnt have much ofa case. His first argument (p. 1) is frankly risible: Europe and North Africa were covered

with ice before [18000 BC], whereas the Arabian peninsula enjoyed a climate similar tothat of southern Europe now. The ice melted in the former and drought hit the latter, somankind left the Arabian peninsula and settled North Africa and southern Europe. The


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quote he cites on this actually says nothing about North Africa, and for good reason: evenat the last glacial maximum North Africa was never covered by ice (see map), and was ifanything more habitable before 18000 BC than it is now. He also notes (p. 2) that Berberprinces have long claimed Yemenite origins. Such claims are questionable for manyreasons (the desire for prestige, the originally matrilineal traditions of many Berber tribes,and no pre-Islamic attestations) but even if true, it would prove nothing about the

language: people change their language all the time without changing their ancestry, asany emigrant can tell you. The rest of his argument is a hotchpotch of miscellaneousquotes which at best claim that various early North African peoples or languages orcultures originated in the Middle East; in a particularly ludicrous case, he blithely quotesBousquet (1957) to the effect that the Berber language came fromAsia Minor [Turkey!]None of these quotes so much as mention the Arabian peninsula.

In fact, the linguistic evidence means that Proto-Semitic may well have been spoken inArabia and certainly was spoken in the Middle East, but the common ancestor of Berber,Egyptian, and Semitic was most likely located in Africa. You see, as noted above, thesethree language families are also quite closely related to Chadic(spoken mainly in Nigeria

and Chad) and Cushitic(spoken around the Horn of Africa) which means that 4 out of 5branches of this family are native to Africa. It is more likely that one branch left Africa thanthat 4 branches each separately followed the same narrow path across Sinai or crossedthe Red Sea. (For theoretical background, see Campbell 2004.)

In other words: whether the similarities this book gathers between Arabic and Berber arevalid or not, they dont do anything to support the authors claim that Berber descends fromArabic. Do they at least have the merit of being valid comparisons? Sometimes, but notwith any consistency. Many of his comparisons look rather far-fetched, eg on p. D:

tamu woman < Ar. mi menstruatorargaz man < Ar. rakza(tu l-usr)

pillar (of the family)ixf head < Ar. xf appear, because the head stands outtadat armpit < Ar. dadaah ticklingalm camel < Ar. lum the foam that comes out of camels mouths

Many others are clearly genuine loanwords, often featuring sounds that cannot bereconstructed for Proto-Berber, though I dont think many of these are original suggestions,eg:

(p. D) axrraz cobbler < Ar. xaraza to sew leather

(p. H) abrid road < Ar. bard

(confirmed by the Tuareg pronunciation of this word,abrid)(p. 38) lbl onion < Ar. baal (Siwi happens to preserve an older word for "onion":afllu)(p. 78) tazamt belt < Ar. izm

A couple are known Phoenician loanwords:

(p. 57) agadir, aadir "wall" - Ar. jidr

A few are well-known Afroasiatic cognates, and scattered among them may be other valid

cognates:

(p. 250) ils tongue - Ar. lisn


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(p. 110) iammn blood - Ar. dam(p. 292) tiqqad burning - Ar. wqd

But the book makes no attempt to distinguish between words taken from Arabiccomparatively recently and words inherited from the common ancestor of Berber andArabic, and seems to assume that any word found in both dialectal Arabic (Darja) and

Berber must automatically be originally Arabic, rather than possibly being a borrowing fromBerber into Arabic. There is a well-known technique for sorting out inherited cognates fromloanwords from coincidental similarities: sound correspondences. Sounds dont usuallychange at random: they change systematically, just as alljs in Egyptian Arabic become g.You establish which Berber sounds normally correspond to which Arabic ones under whatcircumstances, based on looking at what happens in the clearest cases; that gives you astandard by which to judge the doubtful ones. Saadi has made no effort to do this, and theunfortunate result is that in his comparisons the chaff far outweighs the wheat.

Berber and Arabic both descend from the same language, but that language was neitherBerber nor Arabic, and probably didnt come from Arabia - and if you want to know about

that common source, then youll learn more from the works of Diakonoff or Greenberg, oreven from more problematic sources like Orel and Stolbova 1999orMilitarevs onlinedatabase, than from Saadi 2007

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No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic