I ran across a reference to Mandelstam’s 1922 essay Конец романа [The end of the novel] and wound up rereading it; it’s a short and fairly boring analysis of how the novel, which flourished in the 19th century with its focus on individual psychology, was now passé because individual psychology was no longer important. In the first place, that’s a silly way to look at literature; in the second place, most of the essay is written in a formulaic style barely recognizable as Mandelstam’s prose; and in the third place, the novel never died, so the whole idea is moot. (He says the swan song of the classic European novel was Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, which was wildly popular a century ago; anybody know if it’s still worth reading?) However, it comes alive at the very end:
Очевидно, силою вещей современный прозаик становится летописцем, и роман возвращается к своим истокам, к “Слову о полку Игореве”, к летописи, к агиографии, к “Четьи Минеи”. Снова мысль прозаика векшей растекается по древу истории, и не нам заманить эту векшу в ручную клетку.
Clearly, by the force of circumstance the contemporary prose writer has become a chronicler, and the novel is returning to its sources, to the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, to chronicles, to hagiography, to the Chet’i Minei. Once more the thought of the prose writer hastens like a squirrel over the tree of history, and it is not for us to lure this squirrel into a cage.
The last line refers to a very famous passage from the opening of the Lay of Igor’s Campaign:
Боянъ бо вѣщій, аще кому
хотяше пѣснь творити,
то растекашется мыслію по древу,
сѣрымъ волкомъ по земли,
шизымъ орломъ подъ облакыFor the vatic Boyan, when he wished to make a song for anyone, hastened in his thought over the trees, like a grey wolf over the earth, like a dusky eagle beneath the clouds.
We discussed this passage back in 2011, and there is much back-and-forth in the comment thread about a common but unfounded suggestion that мыслію ‘in thought’ is an error for мысью ‘like a squirrel,’ and Mandelstam is clearly working from that reading — except that he replaces мыс(л)ью with векшей, where векша [veksha] is a dialect word for ‘squirrel.’ He must have liked that word, because he also uses it in the last stanza of a 1937 poem:
И век бы падал векши легче,
И легче векши к мягкой речке —
Полнеба в валенках, в ногах…The age could fall lighter than a squirrel,
lighter than a squirrel to the soft stream.
Half of the sky is wearing winter boots.
(Translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane.)
So my question for Russian-speakers is: how does the word векша sound to you (if it’s familiar at all)? Is it rustic, amusing, quaint, what? And my question for English-speakers is: are there any English dialect words for ‘squirrel’? You’d think there would be, but I haven’t turned up any. (We discussed the older word aquerne, from Old English acweorna, here.)
(I assure you, it is pure coincidence that there are two squirrel posts in a row. I once had three Latin-titled posts in a row, equally unpremeditated.)
Red squirrels are called “boomers” in the Appalachian mountains. I’m surprised there aren’t more words for such common little animals.
45 years ago I attempted to read Jean-Christophe in English translation several times, and abandoned it each time. I haven’t looked at it since. I assume that it belonged to my mother.
In Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” (1975), she restates this view thus:
Well, of course Le Guin does.
I think векша was the name of the smallest coin in ancient Russia. Didn’t know it actually meant a squirrel.
I don’t know whether the New England Transcendentalists count as dialect, but Thoreau told us that the red squirrel was also called chickaree and Emerson’s “Fable” about the mountain and the squirrel gave the latter protagonist as bun (the non-diminutive of bunny, I suppose).
And my question for English-speakers is: are there any English dialect words for ‘squirrel’? You’d think there would be, but I haven’t turned up any.
I’m not really an English speaker, but a Google search attempt turned up scug or skug (supposedly “Hants.” – whatever that means – according to an 1840 dictionary; shows up in many other places), con (said to be “Cumbrian” on one website, but I was unable to find more references – it didn’t help that the word is very common in other meanings), and chickaree (apparently a common term, of onomatopoeic origin, for some North American squirrel species; might not really count as “dialectal word for ‘squirrel'” as such because it appears to be limited to those two or three species).
Oh, and apparently bun used to refer to squirrels as well as rabbits (as also noted by the commenter above).
There are apparently also surprisingly many dialectal and otherwise local terms for assorted “ground squirrels” (Marmotini) – which might or might not be included in your “squirrel” category.
EDIT:
I think векша was the name of the smallest coin in ancient Russia. Didn’t know it actually meant a squirrel.
I wondered why that word seemed familiar! IIRC, веверица is another contemporary synonym (i.e. an even more archaic Russian word for “squirrel” that also referred to a small trade value).
To clarify, both terms comes from the period where coins, as such, were not minted in Russia (or, at least, not in any significant quantities), and foreign coins and assorted other objects were used for trade; so far as I understand, there is some considerable debate whether the low-value trade objects denoted by векша and веверица were actual squirrel skins or not (IIRC, modern opinion is on the “not literally squirrels” side).
Hants. is Hampshire.
The OED historical thesaurus includes cat-squirrel (grey s.), picket-pin (ground s.), mountain boomer (American red s.) and the obsolete calaber (originally the fur, ultimately named after Calabria).
Hants. is Hampshire.
That’s what I thought it was, but I wasn’t sure enough to say it definitely.
Native Russian speaker here, Leningrad/SPb born (1969) and bred. To me, векша feels archaic or dialectal (Siberian?), something one may stumble upon in Dal’s dictionary for instance; definitely not a part of one’s active vocabulary. Then again, there exists a surname Векшин (if memory serves it was used in the hugely popular miniseries “Место встречи изменить нельзя”), so there.
To me, векша feels respectably old-fashioned, archaic perhaps; if dialectal, then Northern, from the woods rather than from the steppes. It’s more or less obvious (although possibly wrong) that белка used to denote some other furry animal – squirrels are seldom if ever white.
I suspect that I learned веверица from Nabokov, who hypothesized its affinity with “vair” (which I had only seen in a poem by Edith Sitwell).
The equation “small coin” = “squirrel hide” is very old. There’s an ancient Germanic borrowing in Finnish that shows this brilliantly
(No references or further details. It’s Christmas Eve and I’m cooking.)
To me, векша feels archaic or dialectal (Siberian?), something one may stumble upon in Dal’s dictionary for instance; definitely not a part of one’s active vocabulary.
To me, векша feels respectably old-fashioned, archaic perhaps; if dialectal, then Northern, from the woods rather than from the steppes.
Thanks, that gives me a good sense of it! And thanks to those who supplied English dialect words; the problem with them is that all of them are meaningless except to speakers of the dialect, whereas векша, though archaic/dialectal/old-fashioned, is apparently well enough known to Russian-speakers to be usable in literature. I was hoping for some way to translate it without using “squirrel,” but apparently not.
It’s Christmas Eve and I’m cooking.
What are you making?
You also hear “tree-rat” sometimes. I don’t know if that helps.
What are you making
I’m afraid I must disappoint the Norwegian-American. We eat turkey on Christmas Eve. With rødkål, peas, prunes, and potatoes — and my wife’s waldorf salad. But we’ll have ribbe tomorrow.
Merry Christmas to all!
Thanks, and god jul to you all!
I thought I’d look into the question of English dialect words for ‘squirrel’. Unfortunately, the EDD Online is now the EDD Offline, and the versions at the Internet Archive are hard to use. I found that Amazon is selling the whole work as an e-book for two bucks, but it’s not searchable. So no luck.
A sad off-topic: it was announced today that Andrei Zaliznyak (Андрей Зализняк) died aged 82. He was a wonderful linguist (who proved inter alia that the abovementioned “Слово о полку Игореве” was a genuine 12th century text rather than a later forgery), and his yearly reports on newly found and deciphered birch bark manuscripts, fortunately still available on YouTube, are a delight to watch.
The equation “small coin” = “squirrel hide” is very old.
So I guess a hundred squirrel hides are worth a deer hide, or buck.
E. M. Forster wrote an appreciation of the recently deceased Romain Rolland for The Listener. Forster aims to explain why Rolland had been forgotten since just before the first world-war. (What he has to say about Germany and heroes is no doubt colored by this being written in March ’45, in the midst of the second.)
At one point, DARE queried its respondents about the word “squirrel,” but the results suggest that for the more part a squirrel is a squirrel is a squirrel. http://dare.wisc.edu/survey-results/1965-1970/fishing-hunting-wildlife/p27
January: chickaree (apparently a common term, of onomatopoeic origin, for some North American squirrel species
“Onomatopoeic origin” is often blamed for the lack of possible cognates. I think it is more likely that the word is of American Indian origin. Onomatopoeia, an imitation of a sound or sound sequence is common for names of birds with distinctive cries, but not so much for mammals, even small ones.
A sad off-topic: it was announced today that Andrei Zaliznyak (Андрей Зализняк) died aged 82.
Damn, I’m sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing the news.
So I guess a hundred squirrel hides are worth a deer hide, or buck.
Ouch!
The Comparative Siouan Dictionary shows various Siouan languages with ‘squirrel’ words such as Omaha-Ponca sį́ga, and warns, “it looks as if this is a diffused form more than a collection of cognates. Look-alikes in Tunica and Keresan would tend to confirm this latter analysis.”
“Flickertail” is a name for the Richardson’s Ground Squirrel, and North Dakota is called the Flickertail State.
And California Ground Squirrels are sometimes known as “beach squirrels,” at least in coastal San Diego, due to their dwelling on and in the coastal cliffs.
Thanks, I can see using “flickertail” even if it’s not known to many readers as a word, because it’s transparent enough to give a general idea!
Damn, I’m sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing the news.
Me too. I just barely missed his annual lecture a few years back, and wanted to visit one eventually.
I think I got to meet him in person at least once, but I’m not even sure of that…
I think it is more likely that the word is of American Indian origin.
This is effectively my default conjecture for weird words limited to North America, but all the sources I consulted said “onomatopoeic”, so I went with that.
(Mind you, there are plenty of other sources for weird North American terms – both bison and grizzly have perfectly fine European etymologies…)
The one thing about chickaree is that it’s attested as early as 1829 (Fauna boreali-americana, or, The zoology of the northern parts of British America: containing descriptions of the objects of natural history collected on the late northern land expeditions, under command of Captain Sir John Franklin, R.N.). That limits the languages from which the word could have come. That book considers the word an onomatopoeia, based on the squirrel’s call, and lists two native words, neither of which resembles chickaree (“Aroussen. Hurons” and “Annekcootchas. Cree Indians.”)
Anatoly Vorobey’s memorial post on Zaliznyak.
January: Mind you, there are plenty of other sources for weird North American terms – both bison and grizzly have perfectly fine European etymologies…
These two are not what I would call weird: le bison is a French word with nothing odd about it, of Germanic origin according to the TLFI; and grizzly is probably based on grizzled, referring to the silvery tips of some grizzlies’ fur.
Y: the squirrel’s call
I will have to bow to the opinion of persons who have heard a squirrel, I haven’t, although I have seen many.
Chickaree is very similar to chickadee, the onomatopoetic name of a bird.
Grizzly, at least, is perfectly transparent in English.
Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid.
(Ten times fast.)
Called -kohl in the north and -kraut in the south, and Rot- or Blau- in a bewildering patchwork depending on how much acid is involved in the traditional local way of preparing it. If you add apples, as they do in Vienna for example, it turns a redder shade of purple than otherwise.
We call it czerwona kapusta ‘red cabbage’ in most varieties of Polish, but here in Wielkopolska (“Greater Poland”, including the urban dialect of Poznań) it’s modra [mʷɜdrɔ] kapusta ‘blue cabbage’.
Also in (Upper) Silesia modro kapusta.
My boyfriend’s family (from the West Coast, with roots in Utah and Oklahoma) says “squinny” for the striped ground squireel.
It seems they’ve got squinnies (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) in Des Moines, too.
A great word — I have to admit I’d be tempted to use it to translate векша!
Wikipedia has squinney for the singular.
Russian Wikipedia gives векша as a synonym of белка обыкновенная (Sciurus vulgaris). Strangely, it indicates final stress in this word (векша́), which I’m pretty sure is a mistake, perhaps showing that whoever put it there was not really familiar with its pronunciation.
In Poland we have four species of sciurid rodents: the alpine marmot or świstak (Marmota marmota), found only at high elevations in the Tatra Mountains, two rare and critically endangered ground squirrels (sousliks) of the genus Spermophilus (Pol. suseł, Russ. суслик), and the Eurasian red squirrel or wiewiórka (= белка обыкновенная). The last one, being common, eminently cute and synanthropic, is one of those wild animals that practically every child has seen. I don’t know of any dialectal synonyms (the Old Polish variant wiewierzyca originally referred to the squirrel itself but survived longest in the sense ‘squirrel skin’). The word has been covered here on LH.
Strangely, it indicates final stress in this word (векша́), which I’m pretty sure is a mistake
This dictionary says you’re right.
I’ve been bold and fixed it. (It still has to be approved.) I had to cite this page, though, because academic.ru is blacklisted as spam…!
I had a vague feeling that I had seen something similar somewhere. As it turns out, it was an inscription saying “Towarzystwo Akcyjne Warszawskiej Fabryki wyrobów Metalowych – Marcin Weszicki” on an old mess tin. (Well, the original inscription is in Russian, which the software won’t let through).
And now back to linguistics:
http://lexiquepro.com/library.htm
Here are some of the lexicons people are making available to be viewed online or downloaded.
Please let us know when you put your lexicon online or if you know of others that exist by emailing support1@lexiquepro.com.
My grandma called вЕкша my little step sister when she behave bad.
and his yearly reports on newly found and deciphered birch bark manuscripts, fortunately still available on YouTube, are a delight to watch
Finally got around to watching them this week, and yes, they’re a delight!
(Though I only seriously considered posting about that on LH when I happened to notice him, in the 2017 report, giving “Slavomir” as an example of a pre-Christian name [31:31 on the video, phrase starts a few seconds earlier], and found it a sufficiently interesting coincidence to be worth posting here.)
The equation “small coin” = “squirrel hide” is very old.
History and Etymology for tiyn
Kazakh tiɨn, tɨyɨn kopeck, literally, squirrel, squirrel skin (formerly used as currency)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tiyn
Uyghur
Etymology
From Proto-Turkic *dEgiŋ (“squirrel”).
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /tijin/
Noun
تىيىن • (tiyin)
1. squirrel (mammal)
2. kopeck (one-hundredth of a ruble)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AA%D9%89%D9%8A%D9%89%D9%86
The equation “small coin” = “squirrel hide” is very old
Similarly with cowries in West Africa:
https://www.culturesofwestafrica.com/cowrie-shell-monetary-symbolic-value/
In many languages “cowries” remains the ordinary word for “money” (e.g. Kusaal la’af “cowrie”, ligidi “cowries, money.”) Yoruba has a whole series of numbers for counting money based on owó “cowrie.”
The conversion rate when cowries ceased to be legal tender was 20,000 cowries to five shillings. According to Teach Yourself Yoruba, older people (as of 1969) still used ẹgbàá “2000 cowries” for “sixpence”, and ọkẹ kan “one sack” for “five shillings.”
Presumably by inflation, Kusaal yɔlʋg and Hausa jaka “sack” mean “£100” (or 100 Ghanaian cedis, which was very much less than £100 by the time I lived in Ghana.)
Kusaal la’af “cowrie”, ligidi “cowries, money.”
I’m almost afraid to ask, but are those related?
Oh, yes. I’m glad you asked! So glad!
The whole noun class is moribund in Kusaal, but still pretty robust in some other Oti-Volta languages. The umlaut of /a/ to /i/ before pl -i is regular, at least insofar as it makes sense to call any member of such a small class regular; so also naaf “cow”, pl niigi, waaf “snake”, pl wiigi. In some words the pl vowel has been backported into the sg, eg miinf “okra seed”, pl miini beside ma’an “okra plant”, pl ma’ana.
The sg la’af “cowrie” (which can also mean “very small coin”) is the regular outcome of *lagfʊ by rules which delete *g after low vowels, with laryngealisation of the vowel if it is short; these rules are still synchonically active.
The -d- of the pl ligidi actually is exceptional, but not unparalleled (cf wief “horse”, pl widi; insertion of d turns up within a number of noun paradigms, sometimes as a repair strategy when a stem ending in a vowel adds a flexion beginning with a vowel.
The prehistory of the noun class plural ending -i in Oti-Volta is unclear; like the much commoner pl ending -a, it has almost certainly lost an original initial consonant, but it’s not clear what that consonant originally was, or even what its position of articulation was. The various different Oti-Volta branches have adopted different strategies for the case where these endings are added to stems ending in vowels. There’s evidently been a whole lot of levelling and analogy.
I love that stuff, so I’m glad I bit the bullet and asked!
There should be a map dividing the world into pre-monetary currency areas.
How and when did Cowrie money spread to West Africa?
Synchronity: Also, how do commodity money fint into Graeber’s accounr of the money/barter dichotomy?
This paper, linked form the one I linked above, is quite forthcoming:
http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/m-saul/documents/SaulMoneyinColonialAA.pdf
It’s an interesting question what the various West African words for “cowrie” meant before there were cowries for them to refer to. (I never thought about this before.)
The *lag- etymon which shows up in Kusaal must surely itself be old*. Its flexion is certainly of an ancient type, and AFAIK there isn’t any other obvious candidate with the same sg/pl patterning that might have served as a template for analogical remodelling of a loanword (a thing which is in general pretty widespread: elsewhere I’ve mentioned the highly irregular Kusaal lɔr “lorry”, plural lɔɔm; motor cars were probably not a feature of early Oti-Volta culture, nevertheless.)
Moreover, the same etymon is extremely widespread within all of Oti-Volta, and the forms look as if they were all inherited from the protolanguage. Still, even before this particular question occurred to me, I noticed some oddities: for example, Waama, which is about as remote as can be from Kusaal within Oti-Volta, has díkítífā sg “cowrie.” This looks obviously remodelled from the plural: but Waama doesn’t have umlaut before the plural noun class suffix -i, so this suggests that the word is actually borrowed from Western Oti-Volta (cf Kusaal ligidi: the initial d for l and devoicing of the stops are areal features of the Atakora département of Benin where Waama is spoken.)
Word for “money” are obviously good candidates for borrowing on first principles, after all.
*It is homophonous (including tone) with the stem that turns up in Kusaal as lauk “item of goods”, pl la’ad “goods, merchandise”; as one of the two semantic fields associated with the noun class that la’af ~ ligidi belongs to is “small round things that usually come in large numbers”, I suppose that it’s conceivable that the primary meaning might have just been “seed-like things used in commerce.”
David E.: This paper, linked form the one I linked above, is quite forthcoming:
Whoops, I missed your link, so thanks! Very interesting.
It’s a very interesting account both in economic and human terms. There are also numerous passages which appeal to my vicarious pride in the independent and enterprising spirit of the vigorous peoples of French West Africa, e.g.
An additional influence can be discerned in the administrators’ reactions to the rejection of the franc. Reading the periodic reports of the province, one cannot avoid the impression that, for the administrators, the stubborn refusal of the local population to abandon the shells was an affront to their vision of the world, to their authority,and even to their male ego. For many second-generation administrators of colonial West Africa, the cowry was a symbol of a primitive life style. How could such an insignificant shell stand in the way of their desire to steer the “big children” under their care toward the course of better existence? The preference for the cowry was an unambiguous contradiction of their understanding of civilizing mission, which threatened the wished-for meaning of the colonial conquest. Finally French suspicion of gender insubordination may have also arisen. The fact that women vendors refused to accept in the marketplace the French coins brought by their subordinates to buy food may have wounded their pride as Frenchmen.
And
The population found this piece and the similar two-centime piece too light. The centime pieces that had been distributed immediately returned, because the people of the province made all the payments to the administration in them, to rid themselves of the coins. In response, in 1908 the administration declared that it would not accept the centime coins back, except as a small proportion of payments that were made mostly with larger denomination coins. Thus, the centime piece turned from being special-purpose money to having almost no purpose at all. Realizing that this economic policy did not inspire confidence, in 1909 the administration reversed its decision and declared that it would take all the centime pieces without limit. This time it ended up quickly with a much larger number of centime pieces than it had issued.
Interesting about how the five-franc piece, specifically, was eventually successful. To this day, people in Burkina Faso and Togo count francs in fives, so that (for example) in Mooré a hundred-franc piece is called a pisi “twenty.”
one of the two semantic fields associated with the noun class that la’af ~ ligidi belongs to is “small round things that usually come in large numbers”, I suppose that it’s conceivable that the primary meaning might have just been “seed-like things used in commerce.”
What’s the other semantic field ? “Large non-round things that usually come in small numbers” ? Or perhaps “any kind of serrated leaf” ?
What would be an analogy in English ? Let’s take the class of nouns that have only one form for singular and plural (ie have neither a singular nor a plural). Does this class have more than one “semantic field” associated with it ? What advantages derive from thinking about word forms and meanings in this way ?
What would be an analogy in English ? Let’s take the class of nouns that have only one form for singular and plural (ie have neither a singular nor a plural). Does this class have more than one “semantic field” associated with it ?
Well, if it’s the class I think it is, it does have at least one semantic field, as witnessed by the relatively recent (Algonquian) loanword moose being placed into that class precisely because it fell into an appropriate semantic field (as discussed previously on LH).
That said, African noun classes are usually treated as if they were genders rather than declensions; I’m not sure to what extent this is an appropriate way of thinking about them in (what I understand to be) a typical West African situation where there’s about a dozen (or more) different ones and none of them really correspond all that well to what we think of as noun gender.
On squirrelskins (above): Susan Sontag’s birth father, Jack Rosenblatt, dealt in furs in Inner Mongolia but died there in on 1938!when she was 5. Since I’ve known that I’ve thought that the world would be a better place if she had spent a couple of her teen years in Mongolia helping out, but fate would not have that.
What’s the other semantic field ?
Large animals.
There have been spirited attempts to bring this together with “small round things usually seen in large numbers”, which boil down to making the singular suffix “singulative” and proposing that the animals are of sorts normally seen in flocks/herds, but frankly that doesn’t really work (e.g. “cow”, sure, but not “horse” for example.)
It seems much more likely that two originally distinct classes have simply fallen together formally, a process which has demonstrably happened elsewhere in Oti-Volta.
As January says, Niger-Congo noun classes are basically genders, except that there are normally many more of them than three, and sex is the one thing that they don’t mark. Like grammatical genders, noun classes correlate with semantics but very imperfectly, to the degree that the meaning of a noun only predicts its class accurately in relatively marginal cases. It works a bit better the other way round with two of the classes in Oti-Volta, one of which has exclusively human membership, and another of which is nearly all liquids, substances, and abstractions. Otherwise, the bigger the class, the less correlation with meaning (though there is always some correlation.)
Kusaal, like most of Western Oti-Volta, has given up grammatical agreement, so the classes no longer function like grammatical genders; but they’re still a thing for noun morphology.
The correlation of noun class with meaning is robust enough that it is exploited in noun derivation, as, for example, siinf “bee” beside siind “honey”, or Kʋsaas “Kusaasi people” beside Kʋsaal “Kusaal language.”
So specialisation of the stem *lag- “item for trade” into “small round item for trade, usually seen in large numbers” by inflecting it with the fu/i class suffixes, is in accordance with how these languages work.
It would imply that all the Oti-Volta languages other than the Western group have actually borrowed the word for “cowrie” from Western Oti-Volta (because of the umlaut thing), but that is historically quite plausible in view of the fact that the dominant precolonial kingdoms in that area used Western Oti-Volta languages.
The paper I linked above also points out that the cowrie performed much better in the end with respect to inflation than either the French franc or (even) gold. Anybody who changed all their francs into cowries and held their nerve up until the final demonetisation of the cowrie* would have made a huge financial killing. Bitcoin, nothing.
*And beyond: they are so valuable now that it would be (as the author says) it would probably be worthwhile for some entrepreneur to reestablish the import trade in cowries to West Africa.
Fascinating!
Grizzly, at least, is perfectly transparent in English.
So much so that I have seen it in edited print for grisly (a grizzly horror is not one caused by the sight of a bear) and in Dhalgren for gristle-ly, where it is used to describe the tactile quality of a human clitoris.
at least insofar as it makes sense to call any member of such a small class regular
Come, come: most of the surviving members of the n-declension in Modern English has perfectly regular plurals: ox:oxen, box:boxen ‘generic computer’, VAX:VAXen, Macintosh:Macintoshen. It’s true that child:children is a double plural, and fox:vixen, well, ….
I like to joke that “chicken” is actually the plural – the singular being “chick”.
Bitcoin, nothing.
The point with bitcoin, as I understand it, is that it had a microscopically low value for a while; anyone who bought bitcoins in 2010 and still has them would be ludicrously wealthy now, because at the time they were routinely traded in hundreds and thousands for nominal amounts in regular currency.
surviving members of the n-declension in Modern English
A couple of centuries ago, when cowries first came on the scene in West Africa, the fu~i noun class and its umlauting plural were very likely fully productive in Western Oti-Volta languages. Even now, in the two Western Oti-Volta languages which still have the whole system of grammatical agreement by noun class, Farefare and Boulba, the class keeps its own separate 3rd person pronouns and so on. So, historically, it’s much less of a relic than the “ox(en)” type in English. Even in Kusaal, there are at least a couple of dozen words which always or sometimes show endings from this class (including malif “gun”, loaned ultimately from the Arabic midfaʕ, which has got assimilated to the pattern of mɔlif “gazelle” and makes its plural as mali, though sadly not *mili. The equivalent of “boxen”, I guess.)
The noun classes of those African languages reminds me of the differences in classifiers/measures in Chinese. Sometimes the Chinese is similar to the English, as when you say “a pound of beans” or “ a quart of water”. And in general you use the empty classifier “ge” which just is grammatical :” yige dongxi “ = “one thing”. But many classes of nouns have designated classifiers, so you say “yizhi yu” which means “a length of fish”, like “a length of rope”, since most fish are sort of long. There are quite a number of such classes with designated classifiers, and usually they’re hard to make real sense of. Unfortunately, it’s been 35+ years and that’s all I remember; Classical Chinese, which I mostly study, doesn’t use classifiers.
The jokes come easily, though I doubt that the Chinese find them very funny. I once showed my class a picture of a flat fish and asked if it would be called “yizhang yu”, with the measure for flat things. They liked me and were polite, and they would have been polite anyway because I was The Teacher, but I had the idea that they thought that it was a dumb joke, and that if they laughed they were just humoring me.
The jok
The noun classes of those African languages reminds me of the differences in classifiers/measures in Chinese.
I wanted to mention East Asian classifiers as a comparison, but didn’t recall the correct term for those and wasn’t sure if “count words” would be understood correctly.
It’s true that child:children is a double plural
It’s just occurred to me that the mysterious -d- in ligidi “cowries” and its Western Oti-Volta cognates is also very likely to go back to a double plural (the analogy I drew with wief “horse” pl widi above doesn’t really work, because the -d- there is stem-final, and has been lost in the sg via a consonant cluster assimilation rule df -> ff.) The first pl suffix is the dɪ of the gʊ/dɪ class to which Kusaal lauk “piece of goods”, la’ad “goods” belongs, and the fʊ/i plural suffix has been added after that.
This is actually not at all farfetched for Oti-Volta; there are a good many examples within the family of stem-plus-class-suffix combinations being reinterpreted as bare stems, with further suffixes being superadded; it’s a fairly natural consequence of the way that bare noun stems constantly occur as complete (though right-bound) words before adjectives and demonstratives. Furthermore, vowel-initial flexional suffixes get reinterpreted by taking stem-final consonants as part of the flexion, consonant-initial flexions get reinterpreted as vowel-initial by resegmenting the consonant as belonging to the stem, and hilarity ensues.
@JE, JFoM:
Greenberg himself hypothesised that Niger-Congo noun class systems originated from something like a classifier system, and there are indeed a lot of analogies even synchronically, though NC noun classes are much closer to grammatical gender in terms of apparent arbitrariness.
There’s quite a literature about the whole grammatical-gender/noun-class/classifier thing; Alexandra Aikhenvald, in particular, has written whole books about it.
From an Anglophone standpoint (though not so much from the Welsh) it’s remarkable just how very popular more or less arbitrary grammatical gender systems are among the languages of the world. Must fulfil some basic human need …
@de
Clearly you did not absorb enough vitalist/animist principles whilst in Africa and remain an unrepentant Calvinist, hardened against the syllogism:
—
All things have life.
Living things are not eternal.
Since there is life, life must be maintained by reproduction or spontaneous generation.
There is evidence for reproduction but no clear evidence for spontaneous generation.
Therefore most things we observe result from reproduction.
Reproduction is most commonly sexual.
Therefore most things have sexes.
–.
And yet, in Ghana, nothing has a sex, including people (linguistically.) Even the Hausa have abandoned their beloved masculine/feminine grammatical gender, inherited from the legendary Proto-Afroasiatics, the People Without Vowels.
These are deep waters.
“God” is one of the very few Maasai nouns which is always feminine gender (along with “meat”, “milk” and “fire.”) They do these things differently in East Africa.
https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/elanguage/sal/article/download/1327/1327-2126-1-PB.pdf
That’s just vowel reduction gone a little bit too far: it corresponds precisely to Fuchs : Füchsin. …OK, there’s also a Northwest Germanic u/o mess in there.
No, zhī is the one used for land animals; the one for “elongate objects like ‘street’, ‘fish’, ‘pants'” is tiáo.
Looks like it’s a surprisingly stable sink for various entropic processes.
Does remind me of “women, fire, and dangerous things”.
Does remind me of “women, fire, and dangerous things”.
Exactly what I thought of.
Thank you David. I had forgotten and was too lazy to look it up.
Unfortunately, the EDD Online is now the EDD Offline
It appears to be online again and searchable.
The dialect words included for squirrel are:
Cat-swirrel; Coggy; Con (also conn); Pug; Puggy; Scopperil (also scopperel, scopperill, scawprel, scop-a-diddle, scoperal, scoperel, scoperell, scoperil, scopper, scopperalt, scopperdil, scoppril, scoprel, scopril, skoperil, skopperdiddle, skopril); Scropel; Scrug; Scug; Squib; Squog; Swirrel; Vair
OK, there’s also a Northwest Germanic u/o mess in there.
Well, that gets us to OE fox:fyxen, but then when /y/ changed at the end of the OE period, the feminine form became /vɪksən/ in West Midlands ME, but /fʊksɘn > fʌksən/ in East Midlands.
Perhaps the objection to fuxen was that it sounded too much like a ME infinitive.
One of Larry Niven’s intelligent species are the fuxes, where the allusion is plainly deliberate. Their lifecycle is “virgin female with six legs” > mother with four legs > male with two legs”, with the two litters of eggs gestated in the dropped hindquarters.
Just happened to be looking at the Kusaal malif “gun” (ultimately from Arabic, as I said above) when it occurred to me to wonder why such a recent invention has such a nice short word for it in English; and discovered that it seems to be from the girl’s name “Gunnhild”:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gun#Etymology_1
Who knew? (Well, not me, obviously.) Like “Big Bertha” avant la lettre.
What is it with artillerymen and girls?
Well, a girl with an unusually fitting name, very much unlike Bertha (*Berhta).
It is rude to tell a lady she’s a pleonasm.
True. The young lexicographers of today have no manners.
At least it’s better than being called a nonce form.
You shouldn’t discuss a lady’s forms at all, let alone the compounding elements.
Since cowrie money was discussed above, possibly this is the right place to consider aggry beads as a medium of exchange as well. Their origin is much debated. Language Hat commented on another thread in 2006:
The shoebox etymology in Merriam-Webster’s Third Unabridged was:
… which was so unconvincing that the entry at m-w.com has been changed to “of unknown origin”. Merriam-Webster’s definition needs work, too: “a variegated glass bead found buried in the earth in Ghana and in England”. England??? Probably a misreading of the OED’s old definition from 1884: “coloured and variegated glass beads of ancient manufacture, found buried in the ground in Africa; they closely resemble the glain neidyr or adder stone of the Britons.” That resemblance was the fancy of Edward Bowdich (Mission to Ashantee, 1819), a colonial writer of the sort who liked to draw correspondences everywhere, as if towards some theory of Universal Folkloristics.
OED revised aggry in 2012, still unable to find a source, but listing parallel words in other colonial languages:
There had been a claim in the meantime from M.D.W. Jeffreys, a British colonial administrator and anthropologist, that “My own researches show that when beads displaced the cowrie shell as currency, the local names for the cowrie shell — kori, akori, aggrey — were transferred to the displacing bead” (South African Archaeological Bulletin, 1959). Jeffreys included this in a seven-page list of “Words and Etymologies for the Oxford English Dictionary” collected from colonial sources, published in 1963; it appears that the OED did put this on file and use it, since several of his suggested quotations appeared in OED2, and a few more so far in OED3. So presumably they looked at his proposed aggry < cowrie but rejected it as not even worth mentioning.
In this day and age, though, it’s not enough to throw out bad etymologies, since there’s always somebody eager to dig them out of the rubbish heap and insert them on Wiktionary, which now proclaims that aggry is from Hindi kauṛī, source of cowrie. You have to explain why they’re wrong. Is there enough known about the history of cowrie money to disprove this origin? David E?
Above, DE asked:
Also, the converse: why wasn’t the name cowrie imported along with the thing, when they were first introduced to West Africa?
The Hausa for “cowry” is in fact wuri, though guri does seem to occur as a variant. Mysteriously, the plural is kuɗi (usually = “money”); Western Hausa dialects have kurɗi, which is marginally less weird.
The peculiar initial mutation looks like something from Fulfulde, but the k/w alternation is not a Fulfulde one, and anyway the Fulfulde word is seerre (plural ceede.) Dunno. It looks like a loan from somewhere.
Gude means “trinket, jewel” in Twi. Given that aggrey beads seem to be associated with Ghana, Twi may be a better bet anyway. “Cowries” itself in Twi is ntrama or serewa.
Robinson’s dictionary speculates that Hausa wuri might be from Songhay, and says that ibn Battuta says that the Songhay used cowries as money in the fourteenth century.
It doesn’t look much like the only word for “cowry” I can find in a Songhay language, though (Humburi Senni nò:rò.) Lameen will know …
Could Arabic كودة kawda or kūda ‘cowries’, altered by passage through mediating languages, be the source of Hausa kuɗī, kur̃ɗī ? And could Arabic ودع wadaʿ, wadʿ, ‘seashells, cowries’ (colloquially also wudaʿ ?) similarly be the ultimate source of Hausa wurī̀ ?
Note the remarks on the names of cowries in Egypt by the medieval Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) in his work كتاب إغاثة الأمة بكشف الغمة Kitābu ʾiġāṯati l-ʾummati bi-kašfi l-ġummati (‘Book of the Relief of the Community through Uncovering of the Grief’). Yule translates these remarks in Hobson-Jobson here:
Text for the curious:
And de Sacy’s comments on the text are on page 253 here, including a mention of continued use of kūda in Egyptian Arabic in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Kazimirski, vol. ii, page 942, near the top of the left column, also gives the word as كوذة kawḏa.)
Ibn Battuta however uses the word ودع wadaʿ for ‘cowries’ in his description of commerce in the Mali Empire here during his visit to West Africa (1352–1354). Evidently these cowries were brought to West Africa over land through Egypt from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Ibn Battuta uses the same word ودع wadaʿ in his description of the Maldives, apparently the main source of money cowries in later medieval times.
Most sources agree that Egyptian Arabic كودة is a loanword from South Asia. Compare Hindi-Urdu कौड़ी کوڑی kauṛī ‘cowrie’, noted in previous comments in this thread. This descends from Old Indic kaparda-, kapardikā, which in turn is possibly of Dravidian origin. Interestingly, although the Maldives were the main source of money cowries, the usual Dhivehi word used for cowries is apparently ބޮލި boli (actually, ‘mollusc shell’, in general?).
Thomas Burrow proposed the ultimate Dravidian origin of Sanskrit kaparda- in ‘Dravidian Studies VII’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies vol. 12, no. 2 (1948), pp. 365–396 (some abbreviations silently expanded):
I am not sure if Burrow still upheld this in later years.
As an aside, the Modern Hebrew word for ‘cowrie’ is פִּי הַכּוּשִׁי pi hakushi, lit. ‘negro’s mouth’. kushi is now derogatory, having at some point switched pragmatic positions with שָׁחוֹר shakhor ‘black’. As far as I can tell, pi hakushi is still the official zoological term, and it appears without embarrassed comment at the Hebrew Academy’s website.
@Xerîb:
Very interesting thoughts!
According to Newman’s History of the Hausa Language, Chadic non-initial *r became Hausa y or i, which would mean that the “cowry/money” words would pretty much have to be loans from somewhere, but (a) there seem to be an awful lot of exceptions to this presumed law in inherited Chadic vocabulary and (b) the weird flexion looks like pretty good evidence of loanword status anyway.
Given some of the transmogrifications that originally Arabic words have sometimes gone through on their way to Hausa via Berber, Kanuri and whatever, both your proposed origins look within the bounds of possibility to me.
My favourite (possible) example of a strangely transmuted Arabic word is the Arabic حَتَّى, which has been suggested as the origin both of Spanish hasta and of the extremely widespread West African Wanderwort which turns up as e.g. Hausa har and Kusaal hali “as far as, until.”
The latter is Jeffrey Heath’s suggestion; for the former
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hasta#Spanish
I must say that both look pretty farfetched to me, but stranger things have happened …
“Money” words must be prime candidates for borrowing on first principles. The Oti-Volta words for “money’ nearly all look related on the face of it, but they show an umlaut of the root vowel which only really makes sense language-internally in Western Oti-Volta, so most are probably really intra-Oti-Volta loans. Given the power of the (Western-Oti-Volta-speaking) Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms in that area in precolonial times that seems quite plausible.
The cowrie words are mysterious to me too; proto-Songhay is *nogru, which I guess might be connected somehow but can hardly be the source for the Hausa form.
The hasta etymology for Spanish looks okay to me, though not compelling, but the har/hal etymology is wrong; that whole complex of West African forms comes from Berber *har, which definitely does not come from Arabic ḥattā.
Actually, I can make a stab at connecting proto-Songhay *nogru with the Oti-Volta forms.
Although the Oti-Volta words look reconstructable to POV, I think there is good reason to think that this is an illusion, and that in reality the “cognates” outside Western Oti-Volta are borrowed from WOV.
The proto-WOV root would be *làg-. The n/l correspondence is not insuperable: at some stage, perhaps prior to POV itself, *l and *n were actually in complementary distribution, and in fact in WOV this is still the case for initial l/n: a following vowel is always nasalised after /n/, but never nasalised after /l/.
There is also good evidence for a stem-final alveolar suffix of some kind after the root: cf e.g. Kusaal ligidi “money.” The /i/ for /a/ is an expected thing in Western Oti-Volta, where the plural class suffix -i causes umlaut: Kusaal waaf “snake”, wiigi “snakes,” The Kusaal singular of ligidi is in fact la’af *lagfu “cowry.”
There is also a proto-WOV *làg-. “item of goods”, which I have always assumed has the same root as in the “cowry/money” word, but it’s not an obvious match semantically, after all, and it might even have provided a basis for remodelling of a Songhay loanword.
It’s all a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but I don’t think it’s completely off the wall.
The time-depth of proto-WOV, is, as ever, guesswork: the WOV languages are about as diverse as the Romance languages, which suggests something like 1500 YBP, but it seems difficult to believe that their current wide spread is unconnected with the rise of the Mamprussi kingdom and its offshoots in about the thirteenth century.
And anyway, if we’re talking about a loanword, it could easily have spread from one WOV language to another: at the very least, the WOV languages must still all have been very similar to one another in the thirteenth century.
ḥattā seems to be more borrowable than its European translations, same must be true for har… for whatever pragmatical reason. But I don’t understand how they are going to obtain har from it. And Heath couldn’t miss Berber har(~ar~al).
Heath actually floats this suggestion in the context of Songhay: I got it from his book on Tondi Songway Kiini. He only makes it very tentatively.
The har word is all over in the savanna/Sahel bits of West Africa. Its manifestation hali is actually the best reason for claiming that Kusaal has a /h/ phoneme at all: most [h] is either just an allophone of /s/ or turns up only in “aha!” “hmph” type words, but hali is not only a very common word, but nobody seems to have any trouble at all pronouncing the initial consomant.
On borrowabilty: most words in Kusaal (and its relatives) which translate as English conjunctions or prepositions are either outright loans or calques. What seems to have happened is that the whole syntactic category has been borrowed. You can actually express the same meanings perfectly well using other constructions, and presumably that was once the only way of doing it. But people just decided they wanted some of that sweet conjunction/preposition action for themselves. Why should Berbers have all the fun?
If it comes to that, the Romance languages separated 1500 years ago, but their current wide expanse (i.e. the New World) is only a third as old, and New World French, Spanish, and Portuguese remain very close to their Old World co-dialects compared to the differences between the Old World languages. Other than creoles, no new Romance languages have appeared in the New World.
But I don’t understand how they are going to obtain har from it
I should say that in Hausa, at least, deriving har from something like ḥattā seems entirely natural: syllable-closing /t/ in Hausa regularly turns into /r/. If Hausa had been the only language involved, I think Heath’s idea would look pretty reasonable,
Lots of Oti-Volta languages make no distinction between d/r except word-initially, too. (In fact it’s easier to list the few that do make such a distinction.)
So it’s not as far-fetched phonologically as you might think.
the Romance languages separated 1500 years ago, but their current wide expanse (i.e. the New World) is only a third as old
Quite possibly a very good analogy. I think I’ve tended to operate with a rather simplistic Stammbaum mental model of Western Oti-Volta. The WOV homeland must have been pretty much where Kusaal is now, and perhaps not hugely more extensive, but there may very well have been a good bit of language differentiation already there in situ before the Mossi-Dagomba imperial expansions, but with the languages still in geographical contact and with diffusion of features between the languages still very possible.
Dagaare is a good example. Traditional history suggests that the Dagaaba have only been in their current position, geographically well isolated from the rest of WOV, for a two or three centuries; on the other hand, Dagaare is much more different from what would presumably have been its neighbours, Farefare and Mampruli, than a couple of hundred years would account for. So it must already have been well differentiated from its neighbours before the Dagaaba got fed up with Dagomba suzerainty and set out to conquer the West for themselves.
Dagaare is a good example.
So I thought I would look at the WP article, as I generally do in order to get a quick overview, until I fell over the third sentence: “Dagaare language varies in dialect stemming from other family languages including: Dagbane, Waale, Mabia, Gurene, Mampruli, Kusaal, Buli, Niger-Congo, and many other sub languages resulting in around 3 million Dagaare speakers.” That is Not Even Wrong.
But could it be that the reason Dagaare is so different from the rest of WOV is simply that it has been mugged by its immediate neighbors (like the Philadelphian theory of Germanic as originally Balto-Slavic-adjacent but with most of its vocabulary replaced by Italo-Celtic stuff)?
Yes, the WP article seems to have been rendered out the the original Gibberish by Google Translate.
It’s trying to say that Dagaare is a dialect continuum, that the French call it Dagara, and that Wali is part of the continuum linguistically though the Wali themselves tend to regard it as a different language.
Actually, Dagaare is not that different (that wasn’t what I had in mind in wittering about Stambaums.) If it were still geographically adjacent to the rest of WOV it wouldn’t stand out especially.
It looks rather different, but it’s pretty much all phonology: it’s got more lenition of word-internal stops than most WOV languages, and also rhotacism (of the Latin kind), e.g. bie “child”, plural biiri, corresponding to e.g. Mooré biiga, pl biisi, Kusaal biig, pl biis. This has led to some remodelling of noun flexion (I once came across an exceptionally silly article about how significant it was psycholinguistically that one noun class in Dagaare has a plural suffix which is the same as the singular suffix of another class: not a glimmering of recognition that this was simply the outcome of a sound change regular enough to please any good Neogrammarian. People really ought to be made to study comparative linguistics before they are allowed to write linguistics articles.)
Traditionally, WOV is divided into Southwestern and Northwestern, but one of the slightly unexpected things I discovered in looking into it is that although Southwestern is real, there isn’t a corresponding Northwestern group: its supposed members, Dagaare, Farefare, Mooré and Boulba are as different from one another as each is from Southwestern. In a nutshell, Dagaare is not really more aberrant than Farefare or Mooré.
What I did have in mind was Boulba, the other WOV stray, way off in Benin. Boulba is aberrant, and probably does represent its own primary WOV branch, but again it’s not that aberrant. The other WOV languages share a notable sound change which Boulba lacks (POV *c *ɟ -> s z) and a morphological change (the peaceful winding up of the original “tree” noun class), but if the non-Boulba WOV languages were all adjacent to one another until fairly recently, as seems to be the case, those changes may actually have been areal, and not a common innovation. (The neighbouring Gurma language, Moba, also shares the “tree” thing.) Much of the rest of Boulba oddness can be plausibly ascribed to it having wandered into the Atakora Sparchbund, where they don’t like voiced plosives, and the fact that all the speakers seem to be bilingual in Byali.
Mind you, in some ways this is a bit of a distinction without a difference: the non-Boulba WOV languages do share some non-trivial common innovations: the only question is to what extent those languages were already distinct from one another when those changes happened, and that isn’t a question that even necessarily has a neat answer (what is a “dialect”? what is a “language”?)
I should expand my treatment of WOV a bit in my magnum opus, and spell out these issues a bit better. I’ve tended to scoot over questions of the internal relationships within WOV, as the WOV languages are all rather boringly similar anyway, so that the differences aren’t very important in reconstructing proto-Oti-Volta. But they raise some interesting theoretical points (and there is some potentially relevant material from traditional history which bears on them too.)
(that wasn’t what I had in mind in wittering about Stambaums.)
Stammbaums. The rustic plural is no biggy, but single eyebrows may be raised.
Witter, but witter with care!
Sorry. That should, of course, have read starmbormen.
Google search throws up its hands in despair at starmbormen. There is, however, a Dutch word which goes by the name of stamboom. By coincidence (I hesitate to make a stronger claim) it means the same as Ger. Stammbaum. I am not sure of the significance of the capital S.
The capital S is just the Neogrammarians showing off.
@DE, tt>r can’t be uncommon, because it happens the most common langauge, the English langauge!
Actually, I misspoke on this above: hardly any Oti-Volta language makes a distinction between d and r in initial position either: Nawdm is the only one. The only ones that make this distinction anywhere at all are Mooré, Agolle Kusaal (but not Toende Kusaal) and Nawdm.
The details of just how the distinction has got lost vary quite a bit from language to language, so I suppose it’s some sort of areal thing. Hausa doesn’t participate though: not content with one distinct rhotic consonant, it’s got two, a flap and a trill. Oddly (it seems to me) it’s the trill that represents original syllable-final t, not the flap. I’d have expected it to be other way round. (The trill has got promoted to contrastive status because it also turns up in loanwords, of which Hausa has plenty.)
The capital S is just the Neogrammarians showing off.
They were overreacting to the grimms and their kleinschreibung.
tt>r can’t be uncommon, because it happens the most common langauge, the English langauge!
It’s quite remarkable how often linguists overlook English, perhaps because it is their metalanguage and therefore backgrounded. At Academia I often find myself saying “Y’know, your exotic feature is in English too”, and there is a colorable argument that English is of all things a mixed language, or at least only quantitatively different from one (half a million words, just 1800 native roots).
T-flapping never goes all the way to a merger with /r/, except in porridge (apparently from pottage). But it gets close.
@DE it seems nearly everyone (everyone I cheched) who writes about this word mentions the Arabic etymology, not just Heath. Except I think Kossmann (“Berber loanwords in Hausa” does not look like a title that will deal with Arabic loanwords in Hausa…)
As for t → r̃ , my impression from a few google snippets of Paul Newman (2004). Klingenheben’s Law in Hausa. (Chadic Linguistics 2.) Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Pp. ix+103. and a review [sci-hub link] of it is that everything is complicated.
Your “review” link is missing a URL.
[The review says that] Newman says Klingenheben’s Law is not applicable to geminates and that all words were -V back then, so not before the word boundary. Then [the review says that it says] in Eastern Hausa it works for coronals before the word boundary. It also says [this time a google snippet] that before coronals and again the word boundary (“where it mostly occurs in loanwords“) r is always a trill.
Yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the details.
Oh, it seems in Riffian there is a polyploid ḥtalami~ḥtarami (with Arabic ḥta and Berber al/ar)
And also there seems to be a hatta in Dagbani.
Function Words of Arabic Origin in Hausa, Patryk Zając (sci-hub)
(I mostly quote it because of Dagbani and 26 languages) Ammā sounds like a good argument for massive borrowing of this sort of vocabulary from Arabic specifically.
Ammā is actually rather an odd one: it means “but” in all the languages I know of, including Hausa and e.g. Kusaal (amaa.) But in Arabic it means “as for …” Maybe it’s a regional Arabic thing (at least two Hatters will actually know.)
Not all of these very-widespread words are from Arabic by any means. There’s also, for example Hausa sai, Kusaal asɛɛ “unless, except”, which also turns up all over. (For example, the endonym of the biggest Dogon language, Jamsay, contains it: neither part of this name is actually of Dogon origin, the first bit being Fulfulde jam “health.” The language name is taken from a common greeting – as with “Farefare”, too, incidentally. It’s like calling Cockney “Wotcha.”)
Paradoxically, I think words like amma are actually not a good argument for massive borrowing from Arabic, at least in Oti-Volta, because the actual construction they appear in is actually an innovation. In Kusaal, for example, amaa is not a clause-linking particle in the sense that ka “and” and ye “that” are: formally, it’s a sentence-modifying adverb and it can actually co-occur with the “real” clause-linking particles:
amaa ka ba pʋ siak o nɔɔrɛ
but and they not agree his mouth.NEGATIVE
“but they didn’t obey him.”
And unlike the real clause-linking particles, amaa and asɛɛ don’t alter the tone of the following main verb.
So these words haven’t been borrowed into an existing niche and displaced indigenous words. In fact, the inherited ways of expressing the concepts still exist alongside them (“but” can be expressed by the particle lɛɛ, which follows the subject, instead of preceding it. Oti-Volta languages do that a lot.)
There’s also the problem that the “as far as” word often has /l/, not /r/, as with Kusaal hali. That’s not something you can explain by flapping of /t/.
Incidentally, no Dagbani *hatta appears in the very extensive SIL dictionary: the particle in fact appears there as hal or hali.
Tony Naden’s Mampruli dictionary, under the corresponding word halli, actually cites the presumably very same S Baldi as suggesting an origin “from Tamasheq ar“, alongside Naden’s own suggestion, which is the Arabic one again.)
All the WOV languages have l in this word, as do Moba and Gulmancema. And NAwdm.
In the rest of Oti-Volta, non-initial l has fallen together with d and r anyway, so you can’t tell what it started out as. Mbelime has hadi (though that is in fact pronounced [halɪ] for what little it’s worth.)
Despite the word being found throughout Oti-Volta, even if you didn’t know that it was found all over the languages outside the group as well, you’d have to conclude that it couldn’t go back to POV because the sound correspondences don’t work, even if you posited an otherwise unknown POV *h for the initial. In principle it could be reconstructed for proto-Western, and that might even be historically possible if you assume it’s from Songhay or something rather than Hausa. It seems an unnecessary hypothesis given the highly infective nature of the word, though.
Sorry. That should, of course, have read starmbormen.
שטומבײמער?
I’m afraid that the word is not to be found in any Human language, rozele (as Stu has rightly noted.)
The various WOV dictionaries mostly seem to flag up Hausa as the immediate source of the hali “up to/as far as” word, but that looks unlikely to me. In Kano Hausa it’s har and in Western Hausa it’s either har again or ha with gemination of a following consonant; neither looks at all likely to have got borrowed as hali. I think the word must have got to the WOV languages by some other route(s).
I think Hausa often gets tagged as the source of loans just because it’s so well documented.
(Niggli’s dictionary of Toende Kusaal actually says that kut “iron” is a Hausa loanword. No idea why. The word has an impeccable Oti-Volta etymology and isn’t really at all similar to Hausa ƙarfe “iron.”)
Older Hausa dictionaries (like Bargery’s) similarly tend to foist Arabic origins on to Hausa words even when the evidence is really very thin. Arabic rather lends itself to hopeful word-origin-hunters, what with its enormous vocabulary and cool dialects. And it’s rather better documented than … well, pretty much any (other) West African language.
Looking at Heath’s grammar, I see that the Tamasheq “as far as” in in fact hɑr, not ɑr as cited in Naden’s Mampruli dictionary; there is also an ɑr, but that one means “except.”
So the Tamasheq form is identical to the Hausa, basically. (And neither sheds any light on the Oti-Volta hali type.)
However, Timbuktu Songhay has hal and Tondi Songway Kiini has hali. Gao Songhay, awesomely, has hala, hali, hara, har, hal, kala and kal. Talk about covering all your bases …
(Heath at that point reiterates his Arabic-origin idea, but once again, only tentatively.)
“That’s not something you can explain by flapping of /t/.”
As I understand, in Western Hausa it becomes /l/ before consonants and remains /t/ otherwise (biyar~biyat).
“and in Western Hausa it’s either har again or ha with gemination of a following consonant;”
Seriously? Oh.
It seems, descriptions of Hausa dialects are only published (and read) in Nigeria:(
There’s a good grammar of the Hausa of Ader by Bernard Caron.
(It has the TOC at the front, despite being in French, presumably because it is part of the series Sprache und Oralität in Afrika of the Frankfurter Studien zur Afrikanistik.)
But there are indeed quite a few studies of Hausa dialects out there. Hausaists are spoilt. (It’s not even as if the dialects are all that different: to say how large an area Hausa is spoken over, it’s surprisingly uniform. Relatively-recent-expansion thing, presumably. I once travelled from Ghana to Kano overland with a Hausa-speaking driver from the Kumaasi zongo in the south of Ghana, and he had no trouble communicating with local Hausaphones at any point on the trip.)
‘there is also an ɑr, but that one means “except.”’
Yes,
“For dialects with ɑr, this ‘until, all the way to’ conjunction is homophonous with the ‘except’ particle (§11.3.1). However, T-ka distinguishes hɑr ‘until, all the way to’ from ɑr ‘except’.”
Christiansen-Bolli gives the same translation for har in Tadaksahak:
“4.8.4.5 ….
har ‘until’ is identical with the particle translatable as ‘except’ (see 4.6.3). “
It is odd how all these languages, belonging to quite unrelated families and often structurally very different, have nevertheless ended up sharing this little subset of function words.
As I said above, in Kusaal (and probably elsewhere in Oti-Volta, though I don’t know the syntax of any other languages well enough to be sure) words like hali “until” and asɛɛ “except”, for all that they are very common and everyday words, have been shoehorned into the grammar (as it were): they’re not quite fully naturalised syntactically. For example, when linking sentences, semantically, they are actually construed syntactically like adverbs. In some ways that seems to make the phenomenon even weirder. Why would you even do that? (The language is quite able to express the same concepts in other ways.)
I suppose I’m overthinking it really. As often, the answer to “Why would you even do that?” is probably just “Because I can. Wouldn’t you?”
Come to think of it, all this is not a million miles away from the Japanese za that we were discussing the other day: borrowing of a whole grammatical construction along with its characteristic marker particle(s), and adapting it into something new along the way.
@DE:
in my experience, many trees are shtum. but it is true that the metaphorical ones are pretty damn talkative.
@DE, if in WH har̃ is har, -tC- → -lC- and no change to -t in WH (and also that Klingenheben does not affect geminates in any Hausa) do not really support ḥattā > har̃. But I don’t understand where I’m supposed to look if I want to learn about Western Hausa:(
As far as printed books go, the Caron book is the most detailed account. It’s a full-dress reference grammar with texts and a vocabulary.
As I say, though, the differences from “Standard” (i.e. Kano) Hausa are not huge (much less than Agolle versus Toende Kusaal, for example.)
There’s a nice sketch (also by Caron) of Zaria Hausa here
https://shs.hal.science/docs/00/64/75/33/PDF/Caron2011_Hausa_Grammar.pdf
but I’m afraid that’s another Eastern dialect. (Its main peculiarity is that it hasn’t got grammatical gender, which is usual for L2 Hausa but not for L1 Hausa.)
There’s a lot of published stuff on Hausa dialects, but I’m not sure how much is online. But I expect your Google-fu is greater than mine anyhow. Sokoto dialect would be the thing to look for.
Ekkehard Wolff’s Referenzgrammatik des Hausa has a nice chart of the major dialect isoglosses in the introduction, but the grammar itself only makes occasional references to non-Kano dialects.
I have seen it! Introduced thusly:
Hausa Grammatical Sketch – HAL-SHS
hal.science
https://shs.hal.science › index › docid › filename
PDF
Автор: G Sketch — The conjunction har means ‘as far as; up to, until, even, etc.’ and denotes the continuation of an action until a qualitative degree is reached, …
🙂
(Автор “Author”)
@DE, thank you.
It seems the book is not immediately accessible, but maybe I’ll find something by the same author and I’ll keep it in mind.
Thus far I only find “unpublished theses”. Titles in Hausa are particularly intriguing. If someone told “I’m a comparative Hausa grammar in Hausa” I’d read her, it’s an easy language. But they too are in libraries in Nigeria.
Probably the single commonest use of hali in Kusaal As She Is Spoke is actually just to mean “very, lots”, e.g.
Li tɔe hali.
it be.bitter as.far.as
“It’s really hard.”
Fʋ tʋm hali.
you work as.far.as
“You’ve really made an effort.”
Titles in Hausa are particularly intriguing.
There’s quite a tradition of modern Hausa grammatical study by L1 speakers, including stuff actually in Hausa, as you say. You can do degree-level work in Hausa in Nigerian universities, It probably helps that you can freely nick technical terminology from Arabic without it doing violence to the spirit of the language at all.
Unfortunately it is indeed not easy to obtain works in West African languages from abroad. Almost all of what I’ve got in Kusaal or Mooré I got when I was in Ghana or Burkina Faso myself.
There is Russian ot i do.
ot (do) mean from (to) limits of something as opposed to iz (v) “from (to) inside”, iz-za (za) “from (to) behind”, ot (k) “from (to) vicinity of something”.
Do is contrasted to k in that it points at limits, while k can be used with persons (I went k Masha, to Masha’s place), in the sense of “towards” with places etc. It can be a prefix: chitat’ “to read, dochitat’ “to complete reading [what you began reading]”.
So ot i do means thoroughly.
“Unfortunately it is indeed not easy to obtain works in West African languages from abroad.”
I see some titles on Academia (Hausa. I doubt they have Kusaal) but without knowing what they are about, I’m not ready to start deciphering (and thus start my practical aquaitance with the langauge there too):-) Yet they are promicing.
That’s what I think: a construction that can’t be calqued, so it can only be borrowed if its marker is borrowed along with it.
If you borrow the concept of articles, for example, you can probably always find a demonstrative pronoun or a relative pronoun or some kind of singulative/individuating derivational ending or whatever to use for that. Not so, it seems, in these cases (the Japanese za isn’t “an article”, it’s much more specific than that).
I’m sure it does!
@drasvi:
I think Google Translate does a fair job with Hausa, but I’ve never actually tried. Technical linguistics papers might be too much for its tiny non-brain, too.
I’m not sure that I would agree that Hausa is easy, exactly, though I think that (like English) it’s comparatively easy to pick up enough to be of some practical use. And people are used to hearing and deciphering bad Hausa, so you don’t have to sound like a L1 speaker before people can make out what you’re trying to say.
A name that immediately makes you think “that man is meant seriously”.
Yes. It’s an excellent name.
You instinctively don’t want to mess with an Ekkehard Wolff.
I wouldn’t have the personality to carry it off, myself.
I don’t know. “hard” without geminates….
@DE, easy:
There is a strategy that let’s you feel you’re playing wiht it rather taking an effort and yet keep feeling like you are learning a lot.
But it also may depend on who I am, what language I speak (trivially, like “unrelated” and not so trivially) and of course depends on my approach. And all of this is only true for your first steps in Hausa, I’m not sure it will be also true for advanced Hausa – though being a person mostly interested in reading/listening* to I’m spared of many difficulties encountered by people who strive for accuracy.
Also “there is a strategy” means: a natural strategy, that is, the strategy you try. Which of course depends on who I am: the girl who said “Russian is easy” has no previous experience with languages and approached Russian differently from those experienced learners who say it is a nightmare.
*Actually what I want is to feel how native speakers feel, but this is not about easy/hard. It is about associations with words…)
Depending on where he’s from, he likely comes with aspiration or a geminate. Definitely not both, though.
And with the harder grammatical subtleties, like aspect.
“And with the harder grammatical subtleties, like aspect.”
Those too. My main source of frustration with langauges like English (that’s the languages I know the best but mostly from reading) is that in Russian I remember when I learned what and feel things. In English it is like walking in rubber boots across a grassy field as opposed to being a tiny bug in that grass. I still get from A to B, and that’s all.
As for accuracy… I mostly read. When I need, I can make myself understood. Yes, maybe native speakers would be more comfortable if my English (or other L2) were less sloppy, but specifically with English it’s an experiment. I consciously avoid serious efforts* because seeing how my English reacts at change in input is too exciting (I think i mentioned how I once learned to understand spoken TV English – for I could not udnerstand even that before while being a very fluent reader – “overnight” with literal meaning of “overnight”. It was exactly “woke up and discovered that I can understand it”).
So it grows like a tree, even though these 2-3-4 years it seems to “deteriorate” (my brain used to thinking in broken English began developing drasvish out of it. Quotemarks because maybe it becomes better drasvish…).
___
* actually, I’m extremely curious about teaching methods and do like the idea of hiring a teacher (online) just to learn how she teaches. But yet. And I think I could do many think about it without teachers. With other langauges I don’t avoid it, but still English is my best foreign langauge.
There was a song (by a group who writes lyrics by somewhat surrealist methods, I mean authomatic writing) clearly inspired by a foreign name that sounds brutal for Russian ear, Rogan Born. Contains many short words with r. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2JrBKvdtvU
(not a song I like, just spotted it somewhere. Even though I sympathise to the group, I hardly know 1/100th of their songs).
I expected something similar to RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRammstein, but that’s not at all the effect they’re going for. Their Rs are hard to hear (especially against the background) – they’re uvular, some are probably one-contact trills, the others are probably approximants.
It’s an excellent name.
You can’t judge. Someone noted that without prejudice, “Arnold Schwarzenegger” could be the name of the kid in high school who timidly asks you if you want to join the math club.
True.
Still, “Ekkehard Wolff” sounds like a Bond villain.
You don’t get more badass names than that. I can just picture his Supervillain Lair.
I immediately thought that it would be a better name for Curd Jürgens’ character in The Spy Who Loved Me. However, a minute’s upon further reflection, I realized Wolff wouldn’t be right for Jürgens’ web-fingered, ocean-obsessed maniac. It would have been better for Hugo Drax in the next movie, but they wanted him to be French….
@DM, yes.
The first verse, bold for hard /r/, italics for soft /r’/ (next verses don’t have that many rs).
Тень Рогана Борна, нет / Выбери небо мне / Не говори не так / Передо мною ночь / Сине-зе
лёная / Выбери утро мне / Волосы белые / Волосы чёрные / Волосы белые / Волосы чёрные(I also marked
l‘s. And I think I should have marked n’s and rn’s but…)The problem is that the singer mispronounces both r’s:) I do, I have a flap for the soft r (common for Russians) and an uvular trill for hard r (it is not very noticeable, if it were an uvular trill for the soft r, my accent would sound much thickier to others).
But here (2:44, concert – I’m less sure abotu the recording posted above) in rogana borna I hear just approximants.
So all the brrrrutality that he and others hear in the name is imaginary.
“Hausa of Ader by Bernard Caron. ”
Apparently based on his thesis (Description d’un parler haoussa de l’Ader (république du Niger), doctorat d’État, université Paris 7 (directeur : Antoine Culioli)). 745 p. – either it is thickier or less dencely printed.
Sigh.
At least he published “A Linguist’s Field Notes” (online for free).
It’s pretty good.
He adopts a slightly different approach to describing the language’s verb morphology from what seems now to be the standard (Newman) line, which is interesting. He takes the actual verbal noun as basic rather than some sort of abstract stem.
Not really worth taking the trouble to get hold of unless you have a particular interest in the language, though, especially given the fact that it doesn’t differ all that much from Kano Hausa, which must easily be the most thoroughly documented of all African languages (unless you count Arabic.)
flap for the soft r
I was actually taught flap+/j/.