TURAN IN WEST AFRICA.

This Language Log post (by Mark Liberman) contains a bit of information in the Update that made me sit up and take notice. David Eddyshaw is quoted as writing: “The actual words for ‘white man’ [in West Africa] are interesting… In Hausa, it’s Batuure, apparently via a long chain of subtle shifts of meaning from Turan ‘not-Iran’.” (I’ve changed his quotes to itals for clarity.) Years ago, when I was delving into African history and culture, I picked up a book called Munyakare: African Civilization Before the Batuuree, by Richard W. Hull. For a long time I wondered what that “Batuuree” was; eventually I learned it was Hausa (singular Batūrē, high pitch on the -tū-; plural Tūrāwā, high pitch on the -wā), but I still wondered about the etymology. Now, assuming Eddyshaw is correct (anybody know anything about this etymology?), I know, and it’s quite astonishing.

Turan is an ancient Iranian term that has had various overlapping and occasionally contradictory senses (inhabitants of Central Asia, Turks, enemies of the Iranians, etc.); C. E. Bosworth says, in his section of the Encyclopædia Iranica article on Central Asia, “In early Islamic times Persians tended to identify all the lands to the northeast of Khorasan and lying beyond the Oxus with the region of Turan… The denizens of Turan were held to include the Turks…, and behind them the Chinese… Turan thus became both an ethnic and a geographical term, but always containing ambiguities and contradictions, arising from the fact that all through Islamic times the lands immediately beyond the Oxus and along its lower reaches were the homes not of Turks but of Iranian peoples, such as the Sogdians and Khwarezmians.” I don’t know how it got to West Africa and Hausa—there can’t have been many Persian speakers in the area—but it’s an impressive peregrination.

(This post should bring a smile to John Emerson, great aficionado of farflung cultural connections that he is.)

Comments

  1. Leo Caesius says

    I have to say I’m suspicious. Ibn Battuta mentions a similar name in his travels: “After a distance of ten days’ travel from Iwalatan, we arrived at the village of Zaghari, which is a big place with black merchants living in it. They are called Wanjarata, and there live with them a group of white men who follow the sect of the Ibadi from amongst the Kharijites. They are called Saghanagu. The Sunni maliki among the white men in that country are called Turi.” One of the leading clans on the middle Niger is also named Touré (a common surname in West Africa), and apparently they’re of Berber or Arab origin.
    I note that Henry Barth seems to think it comes from Fulfulde tura “to pray,” on the basis of this passage. That seems a bit of a stretch. But Turan? It seems really farfetched to me. Then again, the Arabic term Majūs – or Magian, after the celebrated Magi of Iran – eventually became a generic term for any pagan tribe whom the Muslims encountered, from the Vikings to subsaharan Africans. This term survives even today in the name of the Maguzawa in northern Nigeria.

  2. WEST Africa, yeah, seems like it could be a stretch. But there is a lot of Persian in Swahili–any possibility of borrowing/shift-of-meaning from there?

  3. This term survives even today in the name of the Maguzawa in northern Nigeria.
    True, but there are actual speakers of Arabic in Nigeria, so the connection is not that farfetched. Whereas, as languagehat points out, there are not that many Persian speakers in West Africa.

  4. John Emerson says

    I sit with bated breath, but cannot help.
    I can only note, off-topic except that Ibn Battuta was mentioned, that when he speaks of Arabs in what I’ve read in Gibbs translation, he’s always (IIRC: usually? often?) speaking of bandits.
    And then there’s “Tajik”….

  5. I think I’ve also seen طورى ‘wild’ (Lane) proposed.

  6. Oh, and here‘s the passage where Ibn-Battuta mentions the تورى and here‘s the note in Barth that Leo Caesius mentions above citing it.

  7. As you know, “Turanian” movements and rhetoric were rarely taken very seriously as a political view except among some very rabid Magyar right wingers and similarly quackoid Turkish nationalists. The hieght of the Turanian movement was during the 1930s, although the ideas were revived in Hungary by right-wing publications after 1990 and continue today.
    As far as Hausa having a long history of awareness of the European world, remember that the Sahara wasn’t always a giant sea of sand, and that Rome used to extend deep into to a very fertile Libya. The Hausa word for paper is “kaarta”, which comes from Latin, probably from pre-Lingua Franca contact. At least that was what Doug Pulleyblank used to teach us in African linguistics seminars back in the 70s.

  8. I love the word “quackoid” and will probably steal it.
    Also, sure there was lots of cross-Sahara contact, even after it became a sea of sand. But there aren’t Persian speakers on the other side of the Sahara, or in Europe either.
    I agree the Turan thing seems like a stretch, and if I’d seen it on WackyWords.com [I just made that up, and I’m not going to see if it’s real because I don’t want to know] I’d have ignored it. But I take seriously etymologies offered on the Log.

  9. John Emerson says

    Another unexpected borrowing is the Mongol word for “sutra”: nom (from the Greek nomos). The Mongols were Christians before they were Buddhists. Their Christianity probably traces back to Syrian Nestorians who took refuge in the Persian Empire after being excommunicated by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD., and then fled Persia after the Muslim conquest of Persia. The Mongol alphabet is traces to the Syriac alphabet via old Uighur script.
    It should be added that nom means not only “sutra”, but also “scripture” generally, and also simply “book”.

  10. Man, I love that stuff.

  11. John Emerson says

    Bonus: These Syrian Christians reached China in the seventh century and left an rather lengthy inscribed stele there. Their word for “God” was ilahu, cognate with Allah and Elohim. Christianity probably remained a foreign religion in China; in any case it did not survive the T’ang dynasty there (though it did in Central Asia).
    The same Persian diaspora brought the Manichaeans to China and central Asia, where they survived until the Mongol era; Marco Polo may have met some of them, but thought they were Christians. the Central Asian Manichaeans wrote in Persian, Sogdian, and Turkish.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorian_Stele
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorian_Stele
    Klimkeit: Gnosis on the Silk Road

  12. John Emerson says
  13. Zaelic:
    You learn something new every day. I had no idea Hausa contained early Latin loans. I’m a little puzzled though: I have some knowledge of early Latin loans in Berber, and cannot recall anything like Hausa KAARTA in Berber; I’m wondering whether it might have been replaced by an Arabic loan (there is indirect but suggestive evidence that many Arabic loans into Berber replaced earlier Latin loans), or whether KAARTA in Hausa was borrowed at a much later date (from early European travellers or missionaries perhaps?). Any other suspected early Latin loans in Hausa? And did Doug Pulleyblank ever publish anything on the topic?

  14. komfo,amonan says

    I find myself vexed. Eddyshaw gives neither source nor details for his farfetched etymology. Liberman seems to trust him. I tend to trust Liberman. But I find myself not trusting Eddyshaw. Also, does Turan really mean “not Iran”?

  15. Liberman seems to trust him. I tend to trust Liberman. But I find myself not trusting Eddyshaw.
    Yeah, I know what you mean.
    Also, does Turan really mean “not Iran”?
    Well, it’s complicated, but that’s one way it’s used. The Iran-versus-Turan theme is an old one in Persian literature.

  16. John Emerson says

    There were significant numbers of Christians among the Mongols, not “very few”, but before Buddhism the Mongols did not have an official or generally-practiced religion, and individual Mongols could dabble in more than one. Genghis Khan’s daughter was a devout scripture reading Christian who also led military units after she was widowed. One of Genghis’s descendants, George, was converted to Catholicism from Nestorianism by a missionary, but by and large the missionaries accomplished very little.

  17. John Emerson says

    There were significant numbers of Christians among the Mongols, not “very few”, but before Buddhism the Mongols did not have an official or generally-practiced religion, and individual Mongols could dabble in more than one. Genghis Khan’s daughter was a devout scripture reading Christian who also led military units after she was widowed. One of Genghis’s descendants, George, was converted to Catholicism from Nestorianism by a missionary, but by and large the missionaries accomplished very little.

  18. John Emerson says

    I haven’t studied Chinese much in 15-20 years and I often revert to Wade-Giles. But sometimes I use it when it’s completely unambiguous.

  19. John Emerson says

    I haven’t studied Chinese much in 15-20 years and I often revert to Wade-Giles. But sometimes I use it when it’s completely unambiguous.

  20. Leo Caesius says

    John Emerson: That’s very interesting, as I would have expected something closer to nāmōsā, which is the Syriac form of the Greek word nomos. The use of the same word to mean “the Law” (namely) “the Torah” is attested even in Judaean Aramaic (in which it takes the form nymwsʾ). I would imagine that’s how it was extended to encompass other books and scriptures as well. The Syriac word for God is actually ʾelāhā, which is directly cognate with the Arabic word ʾilāh-, “god” (used primarily in contrast to ʾAllāh, i.e. to denote false gods).
    komfo,amonan: In Pahlavi, at least, the term for not-Iran is actually Anērān, as in the phrase Ērān ud Anērān “Iran and Non-Iran,” part of the titulature of the Sasanid king.

  21. David Marjanović says

    Rome used to extend deep into to a very fertile Libya.

    “Very fertile” is a fairly big exaggeration, but yes, the Romans were aware that the world didn’t end right behind the coast.

    The Mongols were Christians before they were Buddhists.

    I bet that very few of them ever were.
    BTW, the Orkhon runes can probably be traced to the Sogdian alphabet.

    T’ang

    Do historians still use Wade-Giles?

  22. I’m studying numbers (in Austronesian) but also looking out for loans between other languages. We all know Swahili (East African lingua franca) borrowed number terms from Arabic, but I was surprised to learn that the Hausa did, too.
    All their numbers, over 10, come directly from Arabic – 20=àshìrin, 30=tàlàtin, 50=”hàmsin, etc but in the case of 50 some still use the basic ‘Nigerian’ gomiyà biyar (10 5s).
    Just shows how easy it is for ‘superior’ traders to set their own terms of trade.
    regards
    Richard
    .

  23. marie-lucie says

    The Syriac word for God is actually ʾelāhā, which is directly cognate with the Arabic word ʾilāh-, “god” (used primarily in contrast to ʾAllāh, i.e. to denote false gods)
    So that must be the cognate of Hebrew Elohim, the puzzling plural form for the single god.

  24. “So that must be the cognate of Hebrew Elohim, the puzzling plural form for the single god.”
    Is there no chance that it’s an editorial/royal plural, a plural of majesty along the lines of “we are not amused”?

  25. Early reference to David Eddyshaw before he established his current sky-hat HatCred.

  26. I still want to know where he got the Turan thing.

  27. I remember reading that Buganda kingdom surrendered to become Brutish protectorate because they were afraid of aggression of the Baturki (Turks) – the word which in Uganda originally meant army of the khedive of Egypt (who was technically speaking Ottoman vassal), but by 1890s came to mean Mahdists of Sudan (who were former subjects of the khedive and stretching a bit also former Ottoman subjects)

  28. Iphone typing mishap, honest!

  29. David Marjanović says

    John Emerson’s replies now appear long before my comments to which they refer.

  30. David Eddyshaw says

    Embarrassingly, I cannot trace where I did get the Turan/Bature thing. (I was young, I was foolish …)
    It wasn’t an invention of my own; like many such things, it stuck in my memory exactly because of its general weirdness. I suspect Greenberg, but I can’t find the word in any of his stuff now.

    Bàtūr̃ḕ is a regular formation from Tūr̃ai “Europe.” Borrowing from Persian itself would indeed be highly unlikely, so the question of general plausibility boils down to whether the Persian term was borrowed into local Arabic, and was sufficiently well established there to have been transmitted to Hausa. Although direct borrowing from Arabic accounts for a lot of Hausa vocabulary, there is also a fair bit transmitted indirectly via Kanuri, often with considerable distortion along the way (Hausa kā̀suwā “market” from Arabic su:q, for example.) The semantic shift itself, via “some specific group that isn’t us” to “generalised not-us” to “some other specific lot of remote aliens” can be paralleled elsewhere, at any rate; for example, Kusaal and many of its neighbours use variants of Nasaara for “European”, which is certainly ultimately from the Arabic “Christians.”

    The person who will Actually Know about all this is of course Lameen.

    This
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282281104_Awagana_Lohr_-_Loanwords_in_Hausa_Results_from_the_Loanword_typology_project_-_Papers_from_the_4th_Biennial_International_Colloquium_on_the_Chadic_Languages_Bayreuth_30-31_October_2007
    is a good overview ot loanwords in Hausa generally, though it doesn’t answer the actual question.
    Greenberg’s papers on this are easy to find via Google (won’t link, to avoid triggering multilink retribution.)

  31. David Eddyshaw says

    The tildes on the long u’s in Bature and Turai above are copy-and-paste artefacts of some sort, by the way, if anyone notices (or cares.)

  32. January First-of-May says

    The tildes on the long u’s in Bature and Turai above are copy-and-paste artefacts of some sort, by the way, if anyone notices (or cares.)

    …There are tildes on the long u’s? I see them on the r’s.

    (…While using Internet Explorer, admittedly. It’s probably a rendering thing.)

  33. David Eddyshaw says

    Ah. Yes. My stupidity. They actually belong on the r’s (showing that they represent trills and not flaps: the standard orthography doesn’t distinguish.) So Internet Explorer has it right.

  34. They’re correctly rendered in Firefox as well.

  35. January First-of-May says

    And in Google Chrome (at least in the version I currently use).

  36. David Eddyshaw says

    I’m actually using Firefox on my laptop. It’s a mystery.
    (It’s fine in Chrome, not only on my laptop but on my phone.)

  37. David Eddyshaw says

    I see that the Kanuri word for “European person” is in fact Nasárá; I don’t know what “Europe” is in Kanuri.

  38. sky-hat HatCred

    Anticipatory assimilation. That should have been “sky-high HatCred”.

    John Emerson’s replies now appear long before my comments to which they refer.

    An artefact of the conversion to WordPress, which sometimes scrambled comment order.

  39. January First-of-May says

    I’m actually using Firefox on my laptop. It’s a mystery.

    Does your laptop by any chance use Windows XP?

    I highly suspect that this is the same bug as the one reported on Language Log back in 2004; I commented in 2016, on a different Language Log article linking to this one, that the rendering was still wrong on my Windows XP laptop.

    (If you manage to find that latter article: the “Windows 10” I referred to later turned out to be Windows 8.1.)

  40. David Eddyshaw says

    Does your laptop by any chance use Windows XP?

    Perish the thought. I switched to Linux as soon as I found out how to do it back in the 1990’s.
    Time was I ran Yellow Dog Linux on a pre-Intel Mac. Those were the days …
    Boring Ubuntu nowadays. Haven’t compiled a kernel in years.

  41. Bàtūr̃ḕ is a regular formation from Tūr̃ai “Europe.”

    I am not qualified to evaluate his statements, but John N. Paden provides some further etymological background for Tūr̃ai in his book Religion and Political Culture in Kano of 1973. (The metadata for the title of this work in Google Books looks screwed up—I haven’t bothered to find out how.)

    On page 39, Paden says that Tūr̃āwā was originally a term for light-skinned Arabs from Tripoli (in Libya). This was apparently a trading community in the region—from Paden’s description (p. 150), it seems it was still used of a local Arab community in Kano at the time of his writing.

    Is Tūr̃ai for *Tūr̃awi because the sequence /wi/ is generally disallowed in Hausa? (Page 542 in Newman, ‘Hausa phonology’ (1997), chapter available here.) For the form of the Hausa words with respect to Arabic طرابلس Ṭarābulus ‘Tripoli’ (or طرابلسي Ṭarābulusī ‘Tripolitan’, probably in their colloquial pronunciations)—perhaps filtration through Kanuri or another mediating language? Don’t some varieties of Songhay and Berber have lenition of b to w ?

  42. As an addendum to the above, in light of Paden’s connection of Tūr̃āwā to Tripoli…

    I was wondering whether Tūr̃āwā could originally have been *‘Turkish’ (Arabic تركي turkī “Turkish” or ترك turk “Turks”, as filtered through Kanuri or another leniting mediating language) in reference Ottoman Tripolitania or Mameluke or Ottoman Egypt, and thus be akin to Turku, the name of the Arabic pigeon of Chad. However, the formation of Turku seems to be too late for a direct connection like this, so no. From Jonathan Owens ‘Arabic-based pidgins and creoles’ in Sarah G. Thomason, ed. (1997) Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective:

    §1.2… During the period of Egyptian rule, a significant number of Egyptian functionaries entered the southern Sudan (Kaye 1988:47), their number reaching perhaps 300-400. However, the greater number of government soldiers were locally recruited (see e.g. Stanley 1890:136). The anti-slavery efforts, and even more the encroachment of the Egyptian government, which from 1878 made a concerted effort to keep northern traders out of the South, were enough to antagonize many of the permanent traders, particularly those in the western areas, and some rebelled. The most serious revolt was that of Sulaiman, son of Zubeir Rahman, in 1877-79, and although the revolt was put down, one of Zubeir’s lieutenants, Rabeh, took a sizable group with him into the Chari-Logone river basin, eventually capturing the kingdom of Bornu. It is this group which Zeltner (1988:265) quite plausibly suggests was responsible for bringing Turku (see §§2.2, 4.2) to the Chari river basin…

    §2.2… Turku, as mentioned in §1.2 above, was brought to Chad and NE Nigeria by Rabeh’s soldiers ca. 1900. Writing of the colloquial Arabic spoken in the Lake Chad area, Lethem (1920:xiii) reports that words and phrases introduced by the followers of Rabeh “are generally known as ‘turuk’, this being the term applied in Bornu to Rabeh’s non-Arab Sudanese troops”. Even today the Kotoko in northern Cameroon refer to Rabeh’s troops as ‘turks’ (Zeltner & Tourneux 1986:11). Turku was thus a nonnative Arabic which had its origins in the same social milieu as did the [pidgin/creole] varieties of the Sudan.

  43. David Eddyshaw says

    That’s very interesting, Xerîb. Thanks!

    I like the “Tripoli” idea, but phonogically the “Turk” one looks easier.
    I wish I knew more about Kanuri, but apparently the tendency of that language to demolish word-internal velars is responsible for the incredible-but-true derivation of Hausa kasuwa “market” from (ultimately) Arabic su:q. So nothing would surprise me.

    Paden is right about Western Hausa calling Europeans Nasara rather than Turawa, incidentally, which inclines me to trust his statement that being called Turawa was actually a colonial Brit preference originally (though I can’t see why colonial Brits would have any actual interest in the question, and it’s not as if Nasara has any unfortunate associations, unless, I suppose, you’re actually a Muslim European.)

  44. Since Turawa apparently originally referred to an Arab population if we believe Paden, the correct etymology is doubtless the one already mentioned at the beginning of the thread by Leo Caesius, citing support in Ibn Battuta. Hausa Turawa would be from Arabic ṭūrī “wild; a stranger”. This same etymology is also given by Robinson in the entry for Hausa ture ‘Arab, European, stranger’ here. I wonder if Newman in his new History of the Hausa Language (which I don’t have access to at the moment) mentions Turawa.

    The entry in Lane for Arabic ṭūrī is here. As Lane notes, it looks like a nisba relational adjective to ṭūr “mountain”, as in الطور aṭ-ṭūr “Mt. Sinai” (“wild” &lt: *”of the mountain”). Arabic ṭūr is generally said to be a borrowiing from Aramaic ṭūrā, Syriac ṭurā (cf. Hebrew צוּר ṣūr, Central Semitic *ṯ̣ūr). So nothing to do with Persian توران tūrān “Turan” (“land beyond the Oxus, Turkistan”), an inherited Iranian word.

    As for the origin of the attempt to connect Turawa to Persian توران tūrān… I wonder if somebody was following up on Robinson by scouring dictionaries for the etymology of Turawa, and they found the mention (as in Lane) of the Arabic derivative طوراني ṭūrānī “wild” (seemingly a derivative of ṭūr or ṭūrī; cf. the modern colloquial denominative and deadjectival adjectival suffix -ānī for locatives, places of origin, negative characteristics, etc.?). And then they went from there. This Arabic ṭūrānī wouldn’t have anything to do (originally) with Persian tūrān “Turan”, although the concept of “Turan” (as in Turanism) is now apparently more often spelled طوران ṭūrān in Arabic—perhaps through folk-etymological influence as “the wild hinterland” as seen from the Near East?

  45. David Eddyshaw says

    That makes a lot of sense. It also avoids positing unusual sound changes mediated via an imaginary Kanuri form, which is a big plus. “Wild, stranger” works well semantically, too (much like Twi oburoni.) I like it.

    The only problem I have with it is that Arabic usually turns up as in ɗ in Hausa (e.g. ɗalibi “student”), but that seems easy enough to explain by transmission via some intermediary which didn’t separate it from /t/, and there are quite a few candidates there.

    (No sign of Bature/Turawa in the Newman book, unfortunately.)

    I hereby declare that my original suggestion was WRONG. (I wish I could remember where I found it …)

  46. “and thus be akin to Turku, the name of the Arabic pigeon of Chad.”

    Kaye connects “Turku” to this passage (or rather the usage described in there) from Ameri 1905 (English-Arabic vocabulary for the use of officials in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Comp. in the Intelligence department of the Egyptian army, by Captain H.F.S. Amery):

    At present a native of the Sudan who uses such Egyptian expressions as انا مش عارف ana mush aͨref (I don’t know), for ما بعرف ma biaͨrif; or بيت بتاعي beit bitāͨi (my house), for بيتي beiti, or pronounces the letter ق as a hamza, is likely to draw down upon himself some rebuke, such as: احّ انت ٺتركو عليَّ بس ihh ! ! enta tatarku aͨleia bas (Eh ! do you speak to me “a la Turka”).

    and a similar note by Lethem.

  47. “and a similar note by Lethem.”

    All right. We are discussing a different topic here, but this “note by Lethem” as quoted by Kaye contains the Most Memorable Place in the book: Kaye’s note 65. Or at least it is what I remember:)

    Kaye’s notes in brackets:

    ———————————————–
    2.14. Lethem continues with a discussion of Shuwa Arabic:

    Shuwa is a colloquial dialect and should not be considered from any other point of view, for in correspondence an Arabic more or less regular [52 Presumably he means “written Arabic”. See Kaye (1970: 386) for the term “graphemic Arabic”.] is almost always used. [53 This is not unusual.] On the other hand, owing to the isolation of the Chad countries and the exclusive life led by some of the pastoral tribes, Shuwa in a number of respects adheres more closely to the classical language than do the dialects of some more civilised countries, e.g., Syria and Egypt… , [54 This, in part, is the subject matter of chapter 5.] This is a feature which characterises in a greater or less degree all the Arabic dialects of the Sudan, of which Shuwa is the westernmost.
      Irregular and corrupt forms, pronunciations, and meanings, inevitable in the speech of a semi-literate people, are of course very common. [55 The prescriptivism of this statement is obvious (see Kaye 1970).] Further, while on the one hand there are in daily use in Shuwa words which would only be known to lettered persons, say, in Egypt or Syria, on the other a number of words have come in from Sudanese [56 See chapter 1, n. 2.] and negro tongues, a number which, how ever, is much more limited than would be expected. [57 This, of course, depends on many criteria.]
      These will be found to be mostly nouns, while it is the verb which is, perhaps more than in any language, the basis of Arabic, [58 This is subject to many linguistic assumptions, naturally, and is merely impressionistic.] and it is by means of the verb that the Shuwa wherever possible expresses himself. [59 This is reminiscent of Amery (1905: vii-viii); see the discussion in 1.69.] In the use of the verb by the Shuwa, Barth remarked in 1851 on the purity of the terminal vowels in the inflections; [60 This is discussed fully in n. 82.] while the use of the forms for the feminine plurals in the verb, which are quite ignored both in speech and in writing in most Arabic speaking countries, is characteristic of the speech of the Shuwa.
      Another trait natural to the dialect of people of simple life and manners is the simplicity of phrase and expression. [61 See n. 58.] Where in more developed countries novel and foreign terms are in use, in Shuwa a phrase or expression composed of common words will suffice — a fact which once grasped will greatly help the student. Grammatical construction, too, is greatly simplified. [62 This is true of all colloquiale as opposed to ill-defined systems of Arabic (see Kaye 1970: 383-386).]… . [63 At this point (p. xii) Lethem compares three common expressions: ‘come here !’, ‘what do you say?’, and ‘how are you?’ in the following colloquiale: Egyptian (Cairene — see Bloch 1971: 56, fn. 2), Syrian, North African (Maghribine), Yemenite, Hijazi (Saudi Arabia), SCA, and Chadian Arabic. There are many mistakes, e.g. Egyptian ‘come here!’ should be taʽāl hina rather than taʽāli hana; hene, or ‘what do you say?’ is bitiʔūl ē(h) for taqul ey (Lethem’s transcription).]
      Generally speaking, members of the Kwalme tribes living in the country, not in towns, [64 The reference is to the purity of bedouin as opposed to sedentary dialects; see Blau (1963) and Cadora (1970).] speak with much the best accent, idiom, and vocabulary. The speech of the large Salamat and kindred tribes which are more strongly represented in towns is much less pure.
      The conquest of Bornu by Rabeh, coming from the Egyptian Sudan in 1892, while it introduced a large number of Egyptian words and phrases and extended the general use of Arabic, has probably on the whole vulgarised the standard of Shuwa. [65 See n. 55.] Words and phrases from this origin are generally known as “turuk,” [66 Thus “tourkou” of Muraz (1932). See 1.20.] this being the term applied in Bornu to Rabeh’s non-Arab Sudanese troops, [67 See Decorse and Gaudefroy-Demombynes (1905).] but indicating further east in the Sudan the “Turkicisms” of Egyptian Arabic. [68 Interesting to note is that the term Urdu (one of the official and national languages of Pakistan, the other two being Bengali and English) is from the Turkish ordu ‘army camp’; see Alderson and Iz (1959: 259).]
      Another influence and one likely to have an increasingly rapid effect on Bornu Arabic is that due to the growing facilities of communication with the Eastern Sudan. [69 Time has proved Lethem absolutely correct on this point.] Jellaba merchants from Kordofan and natives of Darfur and Wadai are already common in Bornu towns and are likely to become numerous.
      The Wassili Arabs from Tripoli found in Dikwa, Maiduguri, Mongonu, and Geidam speak, of course, the Tripolitan dialect. Differences of pronunciation mark it out very distinctly from Bornu and Sudanese Arabic, but little practice renders the speakers of either reciprocally intelligible. [70 Again this depends on the meaning of “little”.]
      Lastly, there is a barrack and market jargon spoken by people of all sorts of races, especially in Fort-Lamy, Dikwa, and Maiduguri. [71
    For our purposes, this barrack and market jargon is not interesting. I can confirm Lethem’s observations for Fort-Lamy for 1970.]
      These differences in local dialects are interesting, but to label certain words and idioms as “not Shuwa” would smack of pedantry. The man who wants “to speak” must take things as he finds t h e m . . . , [72 There is still a lot of truth in this kind of “linguistic philosophy”.]

  48. David Eddyshaw says

    I had a colleague in Nigeria who had learnt Arabic in Saudi Arabia, where he had worked for many years. I watched him have a consultation in Arabic with some Shuwa Arabs; the comprehension on both sides seemed pretty good, as far as I could tell. (Shuwa is by no means a creole; it’s not like Turku or Kinubi or Juba Arabic.)

  49. I am still curious about the “barrack and market jargon” that Kaye observed in Fort-Lamy in 1970…

    Presumably there always were trade pidgins in Chad.

  50. David Eddyshaw says

    On Arabic in Hausa, I think the ɗ may be more associated with the later stratum drawn from literary Arabic

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1947.11659308

    One ṭ-word that Greenberg doesn’t mention is the interesting doublet ɗibbu/tsubbu “magic, charm”, which is presumably from Arabic ṭibb(un) “medicine.”

    Incidentally, Kusaal has borrowed this word too, though plainly from some other source than Hausa*: ti’eb “heal”, also “healer”, alongside tip “healer.” Kusaal p is the expected outcome of *-bb-; I think what’s going on here is that the existing indigenous verb ti’eb “make/get ready” has acquired the additional “heal” meaning from the similar-sounding Arabic word, without adopting its actual form (I’m not sure what to call this sort of loan.)

    * Probably Mooré in the first instance: cf Mooré tipa “healer, doctor, physician”, tipe “treat a disease” (versus tembe “get ready.”)

  51. John Cowan says

    Eh ! do you speak to me “a la Turka”

    Much like the condemnatory phrase of an Italian to someone who pretends not to understand them: “Parlò italiano, o turco ottomano?”

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