Lameen Souag of the always interesting Jabal al-Lughat has turned up the blog Awal_nu_Shawi about the language Tashawit (or Tachawit):
Tashawit is a variety of the Berber language (a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family). It is spoken by Ishawiyen, the Berbers of Eastern Algeria. Our aim is to provide a free platform for the discussion and dissemination of ideas related to Tashawit. We seek to expose the beauty of shawi words and explore their creative dimensions in poetry, prose and music. We believe that AWAL, the word is the gate of cultural heritage, and that writing is the key to its permanence.It mainly posts song lyrics, occasionally with English translations, as in this lullaby:
sussemBut there's also a longish discussion of case markers in Shawi Berber. I wonder if there are other Berber blogs out there? Posted by languagehat at May 15, 2006 09:49 AMsussem sussem a 3alla memmi
ennig a3law i babak
babak iroH iba3dek
yewwi TarumiT ijja yemmek
sussem sussem a 3alla memmi
ennig a3law du qachabi
babak iroH ijja lwali.Hush
Hush hush 3alla, my son
Let us weave a burnous for your daddy
Your daddy who took off and left you
He left your mother for a French woman
Hush hush 3alla, my son
I am weaving a burnous and a qachabi
Your father abandoned his family.
Don't you think in translation burnous should also be given Berber name and italisized, like quachabi? For consistency?
Posted by: Tatyana at May 15, 2006 01:24 PMActually, at Awal_nu_Shawi it is italicized. I left the itals out because it's a perfectly good English word (it's in the dictionary between burnish and burnout), unlike qachabi, which is unequivocally a foreign word.
Posted by: language hat at May 15, 2006 03:18 PMI went in the other direction. What's a qachabi (besides something woven)? If that's Berber, does it have an Arabic name we might sometimes encounter? Burnous / burnoose / бурнус is naturalized. Orientalist rakes, including I think Napolean, wore them.
Posted by: MMcM at May 15, 2006 03:20 PMPosts crossed in mid-stream, sorry.
Did you notice that the dictionary says that the Arabic is from Latin via Greek?
Posted by: MMcM at May 15, 2006 03:26 PMDo you know if there's somewhere online where I could find more information about this form of transliteration? (where numbers and upper case letters stand for phonemes not accounted for in roman script, such as in '3alla') I've encountered it before, mainly used by Arabic speakers, but I've never found any English references.
Posted by: Ella at May 15, 2006 06:46 PMSlightly off tangent, but worth the detour ... one of my favourite songs, a lullaby in Tamazight, "A vava inouva" by Idir (extract on Amazon).
Posted by: Ria at May 15, 2006 10:22 PMThat's cool to read, especially since some of the words are the same as the dialect here - "TarumiT," for example, is the female form of "arumi"...which means "Roman." The man has taken off with a damned foreigner, but not necessarily a Frenchwoman.
Posted by: Liosliath at May 20, 2006 03:51 PMNeat -- thanks for explaining that!
Posted by: language hat at May 20, 2006 06:34 PM