Boko.

I seem never to have mentioned the Nigerian anti-Western group Boko Haram here, and that’s a good thing, because if I had I would have spread the usual story that Hausa boko is from English book, and that turns out to be mistaken, according to “The Etymology of Hausa boko” (pdf) by Paul Newman, according to Wikipedia “the world’s leading authority on the Hausa language of Nigeria and on the Chadic language family.” Newman points out that:

1) If English book had been the source, it would have been adopted in Hausa as something like [búukùu] (he gives examples of such words).
2) The word boko “has a related morphological form marked by reduplication, short final vowels, and a set low-low-high-low tone pattern, namely bòokò-bóokò ‘deceptive, fraudulent’ … This pattern is found in Hausa with various other words… This reduplicated construction is unproductive and limited to a small set of words, many of which are now obsolete, thereby indicating that boko must be an old Hausa word with considerable ancestry in the language and not a recent loanword.”
3) It occurs with the word biri ‘monkey’ “as part of a fixed compound biri-boko (lit. monkey-fraud). … That biri-boko is found in Bargery’s dictionary… is a good indication that the compound is of considerable age in the language and hardly a recent creation…”
4) The order of definitions in old dictionaries suggests the original sense was ‘fraud.’
5) “It is perhaps worth pointing out that boko in the sense of something western or secular tended not to be used as an independent noun, like English book (as is now often done), but was almost always used as a modifier.”
6) Finally, “it would have been curious indeed for Hausa to have borrowed the English word book (in the form boko) and have it come to represent despised Western education. In the first place Hausa has long had its own word for book (littafi), which was borrowed at a very much earlier period from Arabic. This word was already well established and fully integrated in the language at a time considerably prior to the British takeover of northern Nigeria and the opening of colonial government schools in Kano at the beginning of the 20th century.”

His conclusion: “Hausa boko does not mean ‘book’ and it is not derived etymologically from the English word book. The phonetic and orthographic similarity between the two is purely coincidental. They are what the French call ‘faux amis’ (‘false friends’).” I was particularly impressed with this frank acceptance of responsibility for the error:

This is not a matter of an occasional reporter or amateur linguist going astray. This is a systematic error that we professional Hausa specialists have perpetuated over the years and thus we deserve real blame for having provided other scholars and the general public with misleading information.

(Thanks for the link, Paul!)

Comments

  1. The Tumbleweed Farm says

    Interesting. Now I wish he had also given the true etymology of Hausa “boko”!

    Incidentally, the existence of an earlier word for some concept in a given language does not necessarily prevent the appearance of a loanword from a Western language later on. For example, there are quite a few Western (English or Dutch) / Arabic doublets in Malay. Among them are “sekolah” (Western type school) along with “maktab” (Islamic school), as well as “buku” (book) along with “kitap” ([usually religious] book).

    Incidentally, in Malay reduplication is fully productive (this is how plurals are formed), thus “buku-buku” etc.

  2. Now I wish he had also given the true etymology of Hausa “boko”!

    He certainly would have if it were known. Alas, Chadic etymologies are not as thoroughly researched (or even researchable) as IE ones, for various reasons.

    Incidentally, the existence of an earlier word for some concept in a given language does not necessarily prevent the appearance of a loanword from a Western language later on

    No, of course not, which is why he doesn’t give that as a knock-down argument, just one of a number of suggestive factors.

  3. If the original meaning was “fraud,” and it was frequently use in compounds, it may still have gotten its current meaning as a punning denigration on the English word “book.”

  4. marie-lucie says

    the existence of an earlier word for some concept in a given language does not necessarily prevent the appearance of a loanword from a Western language later on

    This is not limited to indigenous-Western interaction. As an example, in French the generic word for ‘cake’ is gâteau, except for English-type fruit cake, which is known in France as cake (pronounced “kék”). What happened was that English cake, which is as generic as French gâteau, was borrowed to refer to a specific type of cake then unknown in France. Similarly, the examples given above for Indonesia (school, etc) show that the borrowed words do not replace indigenous ones for traditional things and concepts, but apply specifically to the new, imported Western-type ones.

  5. David Marjanović says

    I had the choice between going to bed (it’s 1:10 in the morning) and learning something.

    I learned something. 🙂

  6. The etymology of boko is certainly interesting in its own right, but as far as reportage of Boko Haram goes, a synchronous description is probably more important.

    So — do most Hausa speakers know enough English to know the word book, and if so, do they perceive boko to be a borrowing of it? I find Dr. Newman’s comment very suggestive, that whereas boko formerly “tended not to be used as an independent noun, like English book“, it now often is. Is this just another coincidence, or does it imply influence from book?

  7. As I said to Hat previously on this subject:

    In fact I got rather sidetracked by the linguistics of the word. What I wanted to know was how the one word boko could mean “western education”, which [Newman] makes clear in the abstract:

    Rather, boko is an indigenous Hausa word originally connoting sham, fraud, deceit, or lack of authenticity. When the British colonial government imposed secular schools in northern Nigeria at the beginning of the 20th century, boko was applied in a pejorative sense to this new system. By semantic extension, boko came to acquire its current meaning of Hausa written in Roman script and Western education in general.

    Hat enlightened me that Hausa was originally written in Arabic script.

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    I used to live in Northern Nigeria and can at least say that most people even in the big cities, let alone the countryside, have too little English to maintain a conversation in the language, at most; this doesn’t altogether answer the question though. Compare the fact that most Westerners effectively know no Japanese at all but are still well aware of the source of words like kimono, sushi, harakiri …

    However I’ve always felt that the supposed equation of “book = Western education” was peculiar, given that literacy in both Arabic and Hausa was well established centuries before that great bad man Lugard conquered the Sultanate of Sokoto (so recently, after all, that when I lived in West Africa there were still people alive who were born before the conquest.)

    There is no sense in which “book” itself could be a negative word for Muslims of any sort. I suppose there could have been a contrast between a “littafi” (Muslim book) and an infidel Western “book”, a bit like the Yiddish distinction between a “seyfer” and a “bikh.” Only trouble with this theory is that in fact there isn’t any such distinction in Hausa.

  9. David Eddyshaw says

    Having said that, one of the dreadful legacies that my fellow-countrymen left in Northern Nigeria was that they agreed with the emirs who were left in place under Lugard’s pet scheme of indirect rule (he destroyed the career of a junior who had the temerity to question this policy, by the way) that Christian missions were not to be permitted in their fiefdoms. As mission schools were then about the only way for a Nigerian to acquire a modern technical or clerical education, this meant that the North lagged grievously in these areas when it came to providing African civil servants at independence; the posts even in the North were frequently filled by Southerners, especially Igbo, and this was a major factor in the lethal sequence of event that lead up to the Biafra war.

    There is a lot of back story in the Nigerian context to this idea that Western education is intrinsically anti-Muslim.

  10. Very interesting; thanks for adding that perspective!

  11. CuConnacht says

    Similar to French “cake” is French “dogue”, which specifically means a mastiff, not any old chien.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    Likewise, Inuit “iglu” means “house” rather than “snow house”; the Algonquian original of “wigwam” also meant “house” in general, and certainly not a tepee; and the Japanese word for “kimono” is not “kimono.”

    There ought to be a name for this process whereby a word with a broad meaning in the original language gets associated with a narrower meaning in a borrowing language based on real or mistaken notions about the original speakers. Maybe there is, but I can’t think of it …

  13. …and “salsa” and “sombrero” and sometimes “canoe”.
    There should be a name for it, indeed. How about ‘exoticization’? It kind of works, but it’s somewhat pejorative, and looks stuffy.

  14. And also misleading, since nobody’s trying to exoticize anything: people are just taking a word and using it for the object at hand rather than in the full semantic range of the original language. But I agree, it’s a common phenomenon that should have a name.

  15. Well, aren’t ‘an odd kind of house which the Inuit use’ or ‘a funny Mexican hat’ exoticizing? Or ‘canoe’, which can mean the particular Canadian kind, or in general ‘any kind of traditional-style boat, made by people not well-known by Europeans before 1500 or so’.

  16. Unlike the other examples, dogue is not a case of semantic narrowing in the borrowing language, but of semantic widening in the source language.

    Exoticizing is used in cultural studies for the process by which culture A is seen by culture B through a filter that hides everything except what is extremely unusual about A by the standards of B. Orientalism in the sense of Said is a special case of exoticizing.

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    Reverting to the orginal topic, it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that a preexisting Hausa “boko” basically meaning “bogus” could get associated with the English word “book” as a cross-linguistic joke at the expense of Western-style education in the first instance. That sort of linguistic play is pretty common in West Africa – hardly odd in an area where knowing several languages well is the norm rather than the exception.

  18. The usual BrE definition of “canoe” falls between Y’s suggested senses. It encompasses the AmE canoe (“Indian” or “Canadian canoe”), kayaks, and outriggers, but not coracles or dugouts.

  19. Jonathan D says

    The French gâteau-cake example is mirrored in British English, where gateau refers to a subset of cakes. I can’t say I have a firm grasp on which subset this is, but I feel they generally involve several layers and cream, and a Black Forest Cake is definitely included.

    I was familiar with the generic French meaning (used in English by family members with some knowledge of French, probably at first to achieve avoid children’s comprehension, not that that worked for long) and not the British meaning until I lived in London. Somehow this particular word took more getting used to than most other particularly British vocabulary, and I was quite gratified when I witnessed an entertainingly lively conversation between an Englishman and similarly surprised Mauritian, focusing not only on the meaning, but also the pronunciation /ɡætəʊ/.

  20. marie-lucie says

    JD: gateau refers to a subset of cakes. …they generally involve several layers and cream, and a Black Forest Cake is definitely included.

    Although such cakes would be called by the generic gâteau, these are by no means typical of French cakes! At least French cake does refer to an English type of cake.

  21. Interesting to learn the true etymology of “boko”, as I had shared the “book” hypothesis with several friends, including fellow linguists. Although now I’m disappointed that I won’t get to open my Barnes & Noble-style bookstore chain in Nigeria, “Book Harem” 😉

  22. mollymooly, in older books at least, any boat of the Pacific or of South America may be called a canoe, from small river dugouts to enormous Polynesian sailboats.
    The OED says “Extended to those of other societies and other construction, and used generally for any roughly-made craft used by American Indians, Malayo-Polynesians, etc.; most of these use paddles instead of oars, whence ‘canoe’ is sometimes understood to be any vessel propelled by paddles.” But I don’t think it goes far enough.

  23. I would certainly call a dugout a canoe; indeed, I would call it a dugout canoe unless context made it very clear it wasn’t a shelter.

  24. As an example, in French the generic word for ‘cake’ is gâteau, except for English-type fruit cake, which is known in France as cake (pronounced “kék”). What happened was that English cake, which is as generic as French gâteau, was borrowed to refer to a specific type of cake then unknown in France.

    A rare example of linguistic cookery-borrowing going south across the Channel. Normally it’s the other way round.

    Another one that comes to mind is Panzer; in German, a tank; in English, a German tank, almost exclusively a German WW2 tank. In fact, I should think that there are numerous examples from the military sphere; impi is a Zulu word that just means “military unit” but in English it means “a military unit made up of Zulus” for example. Similarly there are no doubt lots of words that in language X just mean “Y” but in English mean “the specific sort of Y used by speakers of language X”.

  25. Sombrero is my favorite example of this type.

    “What do you ask for in a Yanqui restaurant if you’re hungry?”

    Sombrero y botas [lit. ‘hat and boots’].”

  26. What would you say of the opposite? Like Greek “feta” being used in English for any kind of Balkan white brine cheese. Although some use “sirene” in English to differentiate the kinds of textures. But sirene can be a lot softer when fresh, and is a generic word for cheese in Bulgarian, so I guess this is partly the thing the blog post talks about.

  27. I wonder why сирене (sirene, stress on the first syllable) has that -ne extension? All the other Slavic languages have straightforward descendants of Proto-Slavic *surъ.

  28. I would point out that a borrowing need not result in a narrowing of meaning. It can also be a broadening. Example: Egyptian Arabic ‘tust’ (< toast) is sliced western-style bread.

  29. David Marjanović says

    German As I Know It: Toast “toast”, Toastbrot “bad white bread specifically made for toasting”.

  30. @David Marjanović: Egyptian ‘tust’ need not be toasted. In fact, I don’t think it normally would be. I think it is mostly used to make sandwiches (and maybe display Western sophistication).

  31. marie-lucie says

    GW: sliced western-style bread

    I think that by “western” you mean English/American, not the traditional bread of other countries. In France the pre-sliced, square-section bread, made to be toasted, is available as “pain américain”.

  32. marie-lucie: Yes, I am referring to American/English sliced bread. I said ‘Western’ so as to not inadvertently omit any other countries.

  33. (Dutch bread is mostly sold sliced. At the actual baker they keep whole loaves on the shelves and run them through the slicer and bag them as you order them, which is particularly cool.)

  34. marie-lucie says

    des, in France too you can have your loaf sliced if you ask for it, but it is not sold pre-sliced.

  35. Stefan Holm says

    Names on bread is a jungle. In my country we love a bread called pain riche and think it is the most French of all breads. And it is – but noone there knows what it is, they simply call it baguette.

    Another one is wienerbröd (the same in the other Nordic countries, “Viennese bread”). But in Vienna itself it’s called Kopenhagener Gebäck and in English usually Danish pastry. The explanation seems to be, that the dough/paste itself has its origin in Vienna but the actual bread in Copenhagen. We northeners feel comfortable though in knowing, that the masters of cuisine, the French, call it Viennoiserie.

  36. marie-lucie says

    I wouldn’t call viennoiserie a type of ‘bread’ (pain), since it is sweet, made with pastry flour rather than the heavier bread flour.

  37. Stefan Holm says

    Hey, Marie-Lucie, the flour (wheat) is essentially the same in a baguette as in a Danish pastry. It’s all about the amount of sugar and butter. When it comes to flour we way up north from climate reasons historically had to rely in rye, barley and oats for baking. (Still Scandinavia is north of the climate border for growing wheat. We need to use straw shorterners and should really leave it to others in more favourable climate conditions).

  38. Lars (the original one) says

    This is the second time I encounter French cake in the Hattery this weekend, so here goes: the (plural of the) English word was also borrowed in Danish as kiks = (BrE) ‘biscuit,’ kex /kɛks/ or /ʃɛks/ in Swedish. (The Danish spelling is analogical: at the time of borrowing the normal pronunciation of old /i/ (so spelled) was mid-open (or so) but has since become closer under the influence of the spelling, pulling this word along).

    While of course F biscuit ended up as Danish beskøjt = ‘hardtack’ (via Dutch).

  39. I was looking into biscuits today in an attempt to explain what an American biscuit is in UK terms (if you want to know, it is a unflavored savory scone, or at most flavored with butter or buttermilk, and rather larger than an English scone; it is fluffy rather than crumbly), and as a byproduct I found out that biscuit is etymologically ‘twice-cooked’, like many other bread varieties, and originally applied to hardtack-like foods in the Anglosphere as well. It only shifted to ‘cookie’ and the thing I was just describing fairly recently.

  40. Norw. kjeks [ç] is strange in rendering English [k] as [ç]. Not sure if it came by nativization from Danish kiks or because initial [ke] was phonotactically unheard of at the time of borrowing. Borrowing [ei̯] as [e] is also unusual. [e:] used to be common, but I think it may have been shortened by the long coda [ks]. These days we have fewer qualms and would have borrowed it as keiks [kæi̯ks]

  41. I wonder why сирене (sirene, stress on the first syllable) has that -ne extension? All the other Slavic languages have straightforward descendants of Proto-Slavic *surъ.

    To answer my own question from some years ago:

    Etymology
    From Proto-Slavic *syřenьje (“curdling”), a fossilized verbal noun of Proto-Slavic *syriti (“to congeal”) (whence Bulgarian съси́ря се (sǎsírja se, “to clot (for blood)”)). Cognate with Macedonian сирење (sirenje).

  42. As I understand, Boko Haram is an exonym.

    And I have no slightest idea who and when called them so (and who does call them so today*). Do you?

    They are based in Bornu Emirate, not in Sokoto:-/ Both countries exist, but Bornu independence was ended by Rabih az-Zubayr (Rabih_az-Zubayr,_decapitated_head.jpg).

    —-
    *In Nigeria if for some reason you want to consider Nigerian multi-lingual history of the term “history” and be descriptive here, while being prescriptive about the multi-lingual history outside of Nigeria :/ But it is arbitrary.

  43. This all is a bit crazy: I do not understand even what langauge Boko Haram is.

    Borno is a Kanuri-speaking area, and I guess pretty much every langauge there has both “boko” and “haram”.

  44. A comment from langaugelog:

    Nejeeb Bello said,

    August 14, 2009 @ 11:46 am

    Having lived in Northern Nigeria myself, I’ll make clear that there are two types of schools (makaranta) in that part of the world, depending on the medium with which learning is inscribed by students.

    “Makarantan Allo” is the school in which students write on a wooden slate (Allo) with a quill inserted in charcoal ink. They education obtained is basically Quranic. The school is most commonly a tree shed or some other makeshift structure in open air.

    “Makarantan Boko” is school in which the students write on books. The word Boko was a corruption of book as pronounced to them by the British colonialists. The system of education is basically of the british style.

    Book itself is translated in Hausa as Litafi, but the word Boko was not gotten from that. It was gotten from a mispronunciation of the British word book during the early days of colonization.

    Haram is an Arabic word which according to the Quran is ‘abomination’ or a thing that is forbidden. Eating pork, drinking beer, fornication and the like are all Haram.

    So Boko Haram should translate to “Book School an Abomination” or “Western Education Forbidden”.

    link

    Which answers Ran’s question above. Najeeb Bello is clearly a Nigerian.

  45. David Eddyshaw says

    “Bello” is specifically a Fulani name.

    Apparently Hausa boko is not from the English “book” after all. I can’t find a working link to Paul Newman*’s paper, but it’s cited here:

    https://sahelblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/boko-haram-whats-in-a-name/

    Hausa boko does not mean ‘book’ and it is not derived etymologically from the English word book. The phonetic and orthographic similarity between the two is purely coincidental. They are what the French call “faux amis” (“false friends”). The accidental similarity in spelling between the two words has no historical significance other than having served to lead us astray, where “us” includes political and social commentators with a modicum of knowledge about the Hausa language, as well as a host of well-regarded Hausa linguistic experts. We were all hoodwinked. Whereas the idea that boko came from book looked plausible from the outside, it was really shallow on the inside. In other words, we were all victims of biri-boko (‘monkey-fraud’)! Despite the many assertions regarding the etymology of Hausa boko reported above, the fact is that boko is a native Hausa word, originally meaning sham, fraud, inauthenticity, and such which came to represent western education and learning, and NOT a loanword coming from English book.

    *The doyen of Hausa language studies.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Newman_(linguist)

  46. David Eddyshaw says

    Oops. It’s right up there in Hat’s original post. That’ll larn me.

  47. Oops. It’s right up there in Hat’s original post.

    Heh. I was starting to mutter “Doesn’t anybody read the damn posts?” as I worked my way through your comment.

  48. David, originaly yes, but (“How ‘Bello’ became Nigeria’s most ecumenical name”).

    Boko could be phono-semantic mismatching from the start. Pun intended. I mean, Hausa pun, not mine.

    IF it was borrowed to Hausa first and not to Fulfulde or Kanuri or anything else and then Hausa.

  49. Borno is a Kanuri-speaking area, and I guess pretty much every langauge there has both “boko” and “haram”.
    (drasvi)

    I am in no position to evaluate Newman’s claims, but I do find it interesting that Cyffer and Hutchison (1990) Dictionary of the Kanuri Language, p. 20, has the following entry:

    bókko 1. school 2. Western education

    This would be a loanword from Hausa, I suppose, in Newman’s view. I have no idea how likely this is, given the form of the Kanuri word.

  50. “How ‘Bello’ became Nigeria’s most ecumenical name”

    A very interesting article, thanks. I’ll quote part of it here in case the original disappears:

    Bello is a Nigerian Fulani name that has, over the years, lost its ethnic rootedness. It is the only name that is borne either as a first name ora last name in all Nigerian geo-cultural groups, except in the former Eastern Region, that is, Igboland and southern minorities, minus Edo State (who doesn’t know the Bello-Osagie family?).

    If we go by Nigeria’s contemporary geo-political categories, it’s only in the southeastand in the south-south (with the exception of Edo) that you may not find a native Bello. (There are three Bellos among Nigeria’s current governors, and at least one of them has no drop of Fulani blood in him). Essentially, of Nigeria’s 36 states, only 10 states don’t have a native Bello. No other “ethnic” name even comes close to this onomastic cosmopolitanism. […]

    Although it’s an ethnic Fulani name, it’s now impossible to accurately guess the ethnic origins of the bearers of the name. If someone tells me his name is Tanko or Danjuma, for instance, I can guess that he is either ethnically Hausa or culturally Hausa. If someone tells me they are Toyin, I can guess that they are either Yoruba or from one of the Yoruba-influenced cultures in Edo. An Okoro is most definitely either Igbo or from the immediate cultural environs of the Igbo. An Onoja is either Idoma or Igala, etc.

    Not so for Bello. […] So what does “Bello” mean and why has it become Nigeria’s most universal ethnic name? I asked several of my Fulani friends, and they are all united in saying that “Bello” is derived from the Fulfulde word for “helper.” The actual Fulfulde word is “ballo,” but it got corrupted to “Bello” over time, possibly first by Hausa speakers. Usman Dan Fodio famously named his son, who is the first (or second, if you consider Usman Dan Fodio as the first) Sultan of Sokoto “Ballo,” which later became “Bello.”

    Interestingly, non-Nigerian Fulani people (such as the Fulanis is Guinea, the only country where Fulanis enjoy a numerical majority) don’t recognize “Bello” as an authentic Fulani name. A Malian Fulani I met here in the US told me he didn’t know any Fulani in his country who bore that name. This didn’t surprise me because, as I stated earlier, “Bello” is the corruption of “Ballo.”

    That’s why non-Nigerian Fulanis, particularly in Mali, bear Ballo instead of Bello. There is, for instance, a young Malian basketballer by the name of Oumar Ballo who attracted the attention of the NBA because of his unusual height and frame. There is also a French footballer by the name of Fodé Ballo-Touré, who is obviously at least part Fulani.

  51. David Eddyshaw says

    Interesting indeed.

    Well, no dispute but that you can certainly bear a Fulfulde name without being an actual Pullo, though I would guess that the great majority of bearers would at least be Muslims. It may or may not be relevant that most Nigerian ethnic Fulɓe speak Hausa rather than Fulfulde, as do the majority of other Nigerian Muslims.

    Nitpick: it doesn’t seem likely that “Ballo” (which does indeed mean “aide” in Fulfulde) would be changed to “Bello” by Hausa speakers: Hausa changes e to a in closed syllables, so if anything, you’d expect the opposite. Moreover, the personal name is consistently “Bello” in all my Fulfulde linguistic sources, in which it figures constantly as the archetypal default male given name, like “Tom” “Dick” or “Harry.”

    The interesting section on personal names at the back of the irritating-yet-indispensible Language of the Hausa People of R C Abraham says that someone with the personal name “Ballo” (sic) may carry the nickname Mai Sudan “Lord of the Blacks”, referencing indeed the second Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Bello.

  52. David Eddyshaw says

    @Xerîb:

    Newman doesn’t dispute that boko means “Western-style education”, only that it originated as a loan from the English “book”; instead, that meaning has developed secondarily from the primary (native Hausa) meaning “bogosity.” He makes a pretty convincing argument in the article.

    It’s not at all unlikely that Kanuri bókko would be borrowed from Hausa; many Kanuri words are*. Indeed, the Kanuri language itself in Nigeria is now steadily losing ground to Hausa.

    Kanuri doesn’t have contrastive vowel length, so the -kk- would make sense as matching the weight of the initial heavy syllable of the Hausa bōkṑ.

    *Returning the favour, in the sense that Hausa (a magpie language) has borrowed quite a few words from Kanuri historically.

  53. David Eddyshaw says

    This

    https://org.uib.no/smi/sa/15/15Philips.pdf

    is good on the background to the hostility to Western-style education (though it repeats the false etymology.)
    Basically, Nigerian Muslims were not being paranoid in seeing in the introduction of Romanisation (boko) a colonial agenda specifically aimed at undermining their culture.

  54. David Eddyshaw says

    Apropos of nothing at all, I just noticed (in the process of looking up bokko) that there is a Kanuri word bóká “fetishist” (whatever they mean by that.) It looks suspiciously similar to Waama boko “diviner”, which comes from a root reconstructable all the way back to Proto-Oti-Volta (the Kusaal reflex is ba’a.) Well, coincidence is always possible; still …

    Lameen had a post on his site ages ago about words for “shoe” in Songhay and West Chadic, in which he concludes that the two language families must have been affecting each other for a long time. It caught my eye because this “shoe” etymon turns up in Oti-Volta too, where it looks not only ancient but as if it has a plausible origin within the group itself.

    https://lughat.blogspot.com/2017/10/shoes-in-songhay-and-west-chadic.html

    I’m so used to thinking of Oti-Volta languages as basically living in a cultural backwater, borrowing words from more cosmopolitan neighbours, that it’s interesting to reflect that there’s no reason to suppose that it was always thus. Be that as it may, it’s fascinating to see this lexical diffusion across quite unrelated languages.

  55. “Usman Bello” is the name of boogeyman in the Igbo sub-culture of 419 scammers. He is said to steal promising mugus from other hardworking guymen and to threaten anyone who, conversely, interferes with his gang’s levels.

  56. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s a badass alpha-male sort of name to adopt if you’re really a 419-crime nerd. Like calling yourself The Mighty Caesar. One can see the attraction. (“Usman” will be for Usman ɗan Fodiyo. I can see that. Intellectual bookworm cleric turned fearsome warlord in his fifties … nerd-bait if ever there was. “Breaking Bad”, nothing. Moreover, on the side of Truth, Justice and the American Way. Well, perhaps not American, so much.)

  57. J.W. Brewer says

    I’m pretty sure I first encountered the name “Bello” as given to a character in a Bob Dylan song. (An actual person named Alfred Bello was an actual character in the actual history of the crime/investigation/trial/etc. that “Hurricane” is based on, but the song may not be the most accurate account of the actual history.)

  58. @J.W. Brewer: The Dylan song is a bit confusing as to what happened, but the portrayal (by Vincent Pastore) of Bello’s role in the movie The Hurricane is basically accurate. Bello was the lookout for another robbery that was planned for nearby and witnessed, from a distance, the killers leaving the Lafayette Bar and Grill after the shooting. He went to investigate and, apparently on the basic principle that he was a thief and the restaurant’s register was left unguarded, started to empty it, which the police later used as part of their leverage against him.

    Bello [Nock] is also the name of probably the last great American circus clown. Bello combined the clown and daredevil roles in his circus act, and he was truly impressive as one of the leading performers in the last years of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

  59. David Eddyshaw says

    The name “Bello” in a European context always reminds me of Ulysses. Perhaps best not to go there …

  60. but I do find it interesting that Cyffer and Hutchison (1990) Dictionary of the Kanuri Language, p. 20, has the following entry:

    Interestingly, for sangáya they give the following: “place where people live together for Koranic studies”.

  61. Question:

    I was really delighted by the àllō in Hausa makar̃antār̃ àllō “elementary Qur’anic recitation school; Islamic education”, from اللوح al-lawḥ “the tablet, writing board”. So I wondered about the makar̃antā.

    In makar̃antā, the ultimate source of the -kar̃antā is obviously an Arabic word derived from the root q-r-ʔ “recite, read”, possibly the simply the form 1 verb قرأ qaraʾa or perhaps the noun قراءة qirāʾa, “recitation, reading”. The ma- looks like the Hausa prefix forming nouns of location, and kar̃àntā, is “to read, study”. I presume that -ntā at the end of the verb is the suffix that Newman calls a verbalizer.

    Manding languages evidently have forms like Bambara and Maninka kalanta for “school (vel sim.)”. Bambara kàlan “reading, study” and “to read, learn” (to exemplify the Manding forms) is said to be from Arabic qaraʾa. Is the Manding -ta then a debitative suffix—“what is to be recited”? In this way, is the resemblance between the Manding and Hausa forms just coincidental?

  62. the -kk- would make sense as matching the weight of the initial heavy syllable of the Hausa bōkṑ
    (David Eddyshaw)

    Out of curiosity, did you come across any other examples of such a strategy of loanword adoption while going through the Kanuri dictionary?

  63. I was delighted as well and was in a middle of writting about this allo:)

    And I just have seen an article by Greenberg where he lists rubutu and karatu as Kanuri p. 210, with a Kanuri verbal noun suffix (Linguistic Evidence for the Influence of the kanuri on the Hausa. The Journal of African History, 1(02), 205.).

    P,S. Rùbù:tú:, kàRà:tú: “writing” and “reading”. I know nothing about the region and its langauges, though, and have no idea about Manding.
    As I understand, tsangaya is also Kanuri.

  64. David Eddyshaw says

    Jaggar’s Hausa grammar derives karanta “read” from the noun karatu “reading” Hausa-internally, and -nta is indeed a suffix which makes verbs from nouns, so I guess that the resemblance of the endings is indeed coincidental. That layer of Islamic words in Hausa is often taken from Kanuri, as drasvi says.

    The root form is widespread: Kusaal has karim “read”, where the -r- shows that the word must be a loanword even if that weren’t already clear from extraneous considerations; comparison with the rest of Oti-Volta shows it must postdate the time when Songhay loans began to spread in the area.

  65. David Eddyshaw says

    Is the Manding -ta then a debitative suffix

    Yes (-taa.)

  66. David Eddyshaw says

    On the other hand, “things to be read” doesn’t match the meaning “traditional Koranic school” all that well. I can’t find a Mandinka deverbal -ta suffix meaning “place of X-ing”, but my knowledge of these languages is pretty sketchy.

    There are Hausa loans even as far afield as Mande (I can’t think of any offhand, here at work, but I remember being surprised at discovering some unequivocal cases.) However, an Islamic loan of that presumed vintage in Mande would be more likely to come via Berber or Soninke, I think. Lameen’s territory … (as indeed is this whole area of loanwords in West Africa.)

  67. Aha. There was an intra-Salafi debate.
    Yusuf was saying that karatun boko da aikin gwamnati haram. His opponents, including Jafar Mahmud Adam, were saying that karatun boko da aikin gwamnati ba haram ba ne.

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    That would make sense. It would make the name Boko Haram rather like “Provo” or “Bolshevik.”
    The Gresham’s Law of politics …

    Have you got a link for that, drasvi?

  69. karatun boko da aikin gwamnati ba haram ba ne.

    For non-Hausa-speakers, that means “Western education and work for the government are not forbidden” according to Roman Loimeier, “Boko Haram: The Development of a Militant Religious Movement in Nigeria,” Africa Spectrum 47:2-3 (2012); the quote is on p. 149. (Note the plaintive footnote 4, where he complains about “the publisher’s rules regarding transliteration.”)

  70. Is gwamnati a loan from English meaning “government”?

  71. David Eddyshaw says

    Yes.

  72. David Eddyshaw says

    Very interesting article: thanks, Hat!

  73. Yes, I wanted to give a translation for “aiki” and let everyone guess what “gwamnati” and “ba … ba ne” are:-)

    Hausa is as easy as a contact/creole language. If my impression is true, I wonder if it is

    1) result of its use in colonial times or
    2) something that happened before colonial times or
    3) a “simplified” version used as lingua franca alongside with normal dialects before colonization served as a basis for colonial koine.

  74. David Eddyshaw says

    Hausa is as easy as a contact/creole language. If my impression is true, I wonder if it is

    No. It really isn’t. With a bit of googling you can find Jaggar’s grammar online. Have a look.

    (But the plus side is that really bad Hausa can get you quite far. As with English.)

  75. David Eddyshaw says

    (For example, your rendering of “Western education and work for the government are forbidden” is incorrect, though perfectly understandable.)

  76. Do you always look a language in the grammar on the first date? When I was googling for the source of “Boko haram” I came across a number of phrases in Hausa. Some were translated. Some words I looked up in a dictionary (silly online dictionary), some I guess from the context.

    The process is totally enjoyable and easy. This is why I suspected extensive contact. And this is why I do not hurry up with, you know, G-word. We have already watched one short movie together, and maybe I’m going to meet her parents.

  77. David Eddyshaw says

    There actually are Hausa creoles, though: a venerable one is Gwandara:

    http://languagehat.com/not-how-kids-speak/#comment-3631742

  78. For example, your rendering of “Western education and work for the government are forbidden” is incorrect, though perfectly understandable.

    Thank you! I think, I combined:

    Boko haram da aïki’n gomenati haram
    and
    Boko da aikin gwamnati ba haramun ba ne

    I just wanted to style it as indirect speech, so it would not look like a precise quotation.

    I wanted to give the sources and I did not, because I am STILL jumping from a “source” to a source, trying to find what comes from where. That evening I finally swore badly and went to bed, in hope that someone will correct my Hausa if there are any mistakes.

  79. Gérard Chouin, Manuel Reinert & Elodie Apard, Body count and religion in the Boko Haram crisis: Evidence from the Nigeria Watch database in a bookBoko Haram: Islamism, politics, security and the state in Nigeria, 2014.

    In his preaching, Yusuf used to repeat that “Boko haram da aïki’n gomenati haram”, which means that receiving a secular education, as well as working for the government, was forbidden for Muslims – hence the nickname Boko Haram given to the movement by outsiders.*3

    *3 From 2005 onwards, the popularity of Mohammed Yusuf began to grow in the Republic of Niger, where his sermons recorded on DVDs were widely disseminated. The Nigerien version of his name was Mahamadou Issoufou, and he was known for the numerous references to the concept of boko in his preaching; thus, people began to call him Mahamadou Issoufou ‘Boko Haram’ (interviews with DVDs sellers in Niamey, Maradi and Zinder, 2012–2013).

  80. David Eddyshaw says

    Boko haram da aïki’n gomenati haram

    I think this must have got garbled along the way:

    It isn’t in normal Nigerian (or Nigerien) orthography (which probably doesn’t mean much; the author is presumably depending on French sources.)
    Gomenati is certainly wrong: both o and e in open syllables are always long in Hausa (and when written in short syllable they are usually just written by analogy for the actual /a/, which is what usually happens to /o:/ and /e:/ when the syllable becomes closed.)
    Hausa doesn’t do nominal sentences by simply juxtaposing subject and predicate in the way that Arabic and Russian do: you need a copula (ne masculine, ce feminine.)
    Da (basically “with”) can only be used for “and” between nominal phrases, not as a clause linker.
    If the sense is rather a compound nominal phrase “forbidden boko and forbidden government work” it’s ungrammatical for a different reason: you’d need a linker (masculine n/feminine r) between head and modifier, you can’t just juxtapose them.

    On the other hand, Muhammad Yusuf may simply have transcended grammar …*

    [Haramun looks like it’s been carried over from the Classical Arabic form. The case endings are not normally kept in Arabic loans in Hausa.]

    *I wouldn’t have argued the point with him face to face.

  81. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s just occurred to me that in the very nature of the case, Muhammad Yusuf’s dicta would not have been written down in the standard (Boko!) orthography. Maybe some of the mangling is the result of inaccurate transcription from Ajami*, or from transcriptions of his actual speech by Hausa-speakers ideologically hostile to the standard into an ad hoc Romanisation.

    On top of this there may have been a sort of Chinese-whispers transmission via writers writing in English or French who don’t know Hausa (like Manfredi, I think.)

    *Which might account for the unexpected appearance of a Classical Arabic form in a Hausa text, too.

  82. This is why I dropped -un. I do not see such a suffix in Hausa and I decided that it is just Arabic nominative. What it is doing here I do not understand:-/ It is a good question.

    like Manfredi

    He is quoting Chouin, et al.

  83. David Eddyshaw says

    Gomenati might actually be the result of a Francophone unfamiliar with Boko trying to write gwamnati.

    Manfredi’s paper (which strikes me as pretty unconvincing) did get me thinking about the actual expression Boko haram; what language is it? His assertion that it contains “”no etymologically Hausa word” is unhelpful even if it were true; you might as well say that “very interesting” contains “no etymologically English word.” However, the construction is worth thinking about. (No idea what he means by saying In Footnote 6 that Allah ya tsine “God damn [it]!” is ungrammatical; he must have misunderstood his source.)

    Belately consulting an actual grammar (Jaggar’s, pp460ff) I find that omitting the copula in nominal sentences is actually grammatical (though not mandatory) in describing inalienable possession or personal details (Sunana Bala “My name is Bala”), with times of day and numbers (Matana huɗu “My wives are four in number”), with interrogative pronouns, in proverbs [as I should have remembered] (Haƙuri maganin zaman duniya “Patience is the cure for living in the world”) and in some exclamations (Allah Sarki “God is King”, i.e. “Good Lord!)

    So I guess Boko haram is perfectly cromulent Hausa considered as a slogan, without all the stuff about Pidgin that Manfredi cites. This also accounts for why in denying it, Ja‘far Mahmud does use the copula.

    Looking at the BBC Hausa service, I see that “Boko Haram” is treated as a (feminine) noun:
    Boko Haram ta kashe “Boko Haram has killed …”

  84. did get me thinking about the actual expression Boko haram; what language is it

    This is what I am speaking about, from the beginning.

    This all is a bit crazy: I do not understand even what langauge Boko Haram is.

    Borno is a Kanuri-speaking area, and I guess pretty much every langauge there has both “boko” and “haram”.

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    This also means that I may have falsely accused the late Muhammad Yusuf of ungrammaticality: he may have been construing each of the two slogans boko haram and aikin gwamnati haram as nouns, and linking them perfectly grammatically with da.

    So it’s as well I didn’t confront him with it, really. I’d have looked pretty silly.

    Given that the sermons which gave rise to the name were in Hausa, and that it is grammatical in Hausa if construed as a slogan, it seems reasonable to call the expression Boko Haram itself “Hausa.” (Especially as Manfredi is, like, wrong.)

  86. It’s worthwhile to be careful out there, on the plains of Timbuctoo.

  87. David Eddyshaw says

    There is indeed always the risk of encountering a member of the Ahlu-l Qasawari. This is a particular threat to Christian missionary organisations.

  88. Who are “Qasawari”?

  89. And does it matter at all, which of the two papers is “convincing”?

    I want to know where boko came from.

  90. Who are “Qasawari”?

    He made a joke, going back to that doggerel in the Dundalk thread which I keep bringing up.

  91. David Eddyshaw says

    It should really be Kasawari, drasvi. I just felt “Qasawari” was more badass.

  92. It is badass. Like “Quail”.

  93. Jama’at nusrat al-imaala wa l-i’raab.

  94. Thank you:) After gomenati (why not goimnati?) I was overthinking it:)

    I am still trying to make some sense of the history of Boko Haram (the phenomenon – I am not sure it is an “armed group”: recently 300 schoolboys were kidnapped by “either Boko Haram or just Fula”) and “Boko Haram” the term. It is time consuming, so I try not to follow to many threads:)

    History of “boko” is actually… less disgusting. But it is harder to follow.

  95. David Eddyshaw says

    Jama’at nusrat al-imaala wa l-i’raab.

    Militant prescriptivists.

  96. When I firsl learned that Arabic has cases, my instinctive reaction was

    1. wow, now I don’t have to stick with rigid word order!!!!!!!!! Hurrah!!!!!!!
    2. just 3:(

    This order. Thus, no. Expressive power and freedom of expression:)

  97. David Eddyshaw says

    Even the threefold case endings have a very low functional load in Classical Arabic. They’re just there to cause grief to Arab schoolchildren and to impress foreign learners.

  98. David Eddyshaw says

    why not goimnati?

    The orthography is a bit misleading: gwamnati really represents something like [gʷɐmnati] rather than [gwamnati]. The gw is a labialised velar; Kusaal represents the corresponding voiceless sound by /k͡p/ in bakpae “week”, loaned from Hausa bakwai “seven.” (I can’t think of a Kusaal word loaned from a Hausa form with gw.)

  99. There is indeed always the risk of encountering a member of the Ahlu-l Qasawari

    The ʾahlu l-qaswarati, on the other hand, is almost extinct in West Africa…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR2qusUaglE&t=853s&ab_channel=QURANHD

    ‏كَأَنَّهُمْ حُمُرٌ مُّسْتَنْفِرَةٌ / فَرَّتْ مِنْ قَسْوَرَةٍ‎‎
    kaʾannahum ḥumurun mustanfiratun / farrat min qaswaratin
    “As though they were startled asses fleeing from a lion”

  100. David Eddyshaw says

    (Sura 74)

    An interesting word:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%82%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A9

    (Wiktionary is seriously impressive sometimes.)

  101. Yes, I found it too, when I was trying to understand this qasawari.

    I tried ص, I tried س, I tried qasara[wi], everything:) But this word is interesting.

  102. gomenati: I suspected a labio-velar here.

    But when we so conmfortably represent them with gwa or (which is the same) gʷa, why not goi?
    Maybe o is /ʷa/? I need to take a look at how they transcribe Kabyle.

  103. There is more discussion on the etymology of the word from Ahmad Al-Jallad here, with a link to Lameen’s blogpost on the word:

    https://twitter.com/AENJournal/status/974657315046641664

  104. David Eddyshaw says

    Evidently the “cassowary” of Y’s poem is a corruption of the original “lion”, the rare word having been naturally enough misunderstood by non-Muslim copyists unfamiliar with the Qur’an.

    It all makes perfect sense now.

  105. David, with that many L2 speakers there of course must emerge “simplified” Hausa, “regional” Hausas and “authentic” Hausas. “Simplified” is intentionally vague: I do not want to specify its function. The point is that these variants will compete for, let’s call it “power”. The degenerate cases are when authentic Hausa with time consumes others, or when others consume it, but likely we have something else.

    As long as “authentic” variant still exists, your grammar will describe this variant. But an online dictionary defines “ne” as: “(emphasis) used in a questions, negative sentence, listing a list of items and in affirmation sentence for emphasis“. Apparently it describes a different variety.

    Yusuf, in turn, must have some regional accent, especially in semantics.

    Ran wrote above:

    The etymology of boko is certainly interesting in its own right, but as far as reportage of Boko Haram goes, a synchronous description is probably more important.

    So — do most Hausa speakers know enough English to know the word book, and if so, do they perceive boko to be a borrowing of it? I find Dr. Newman’s comment very suggestive, that whereas boko formerly “tended not to be used as an independent noun, like English book“, it now often is. Is this just another coincidence, or does it imply influence from book?

    Irrespectively of what direction the word went: Kanuri-to Hausa or Hausa-to Kanuri, now in Kanuri dictionary we have:

    bókko n 1 school. 2. Western education.

    In the Languagelog thread SG says: “I was quite surprised about the meanings given for ‘boko’ as in Fulfulde, which borrows it from Hausa, it means school.


    P.S.
    In the quotation from Ran I mean specifically: “I find Dr. Newman’s comment very suggestive, that whereas boko formerly “tended not to be used as an independent noun, like English book“, it now often is. “> This usage may have to do with usage in languages other than Hausa.

    Note, that “western school [a place]” wants to be named. It is a totally important and exotic thing. Totally unlike tsangaya.

  106. And can anyone explain, WHY dictionaries use a word “emphasis” in the sense “I have no idea what it is”?

    Sometimes it is really annoying.

    Just do not tell me that they do not mean “I have no idea” but add this word for emphasis.

  107. David Eddyshaw says

    But an online dictionary defines “ne” as: “(emphasis) used in a questions, negative sentence, listing a list of items and in affirmation sentence for emphasis“.

    No, that’s just wrong. Bizarrely wrong, in fact. It’s like describing English “be” as a question particle.

    Hausa is actually remarkably uniform considering its wide geographical extent. It shows much less internal variation than Kusaal, spoken in just one small corner of Ghana.

    I’m familiar with Hausa as an L1 in Nigeria and as L2 in Nigeria and in northern Ghana. The simplifications in the Ghanaian L2 are mostly phonological, along with loss of grammatical gender (which is also a feature of some L1 dialects.) All these versions are readily mutually intelligible (I’ve seen with my own eyes a Ghanaian Hausa speaker from Kumaasi communicate without any difficulty all the way from Ghana through Niger to Kano.) All use the copula in the same way (apart from the collapse of gender.)

    There is a very good grammar of the dialect of Ader in western Niger by Bernard Carron; that’s about as far as you can get from Kano Hausa as an L1. The differences from Kano Hausa are nevertheless minor.

    Hausa is almost certainly the best documented indigenous language of Africa, both of the “standard” Kano version, dialects, and L2 forms. There’s a huge literature on it. The online dictionary is just wrong on this point. (Even very good and very large dictionaries tend to flounder when it comes to function words. You need a grammar to understand them. Think of English “the” …)

  108. Even very good and very large dictionaries tend to flounder when it comes to function words.
    Very true. “Emphasis” captures the issue well:(

    You need a grammar to understand them.
    Happily, it is underexplored. “Happily” because we can expore it:)

    Think of English “the” …)

    But it is not like English the. It is whether absence of copular is grammatical or not! The compiler clearly has many examples without copula in her corpus, is unable to understand why AND comfortable with calling a copula “a word added for emphasis”:-/

  109. David Eddyshaw says

    I suspect that what the online dictionary people are interpreting as an “emphasis” meaning of ne is cases like

    Mijina ne ke zuwa (ba tsohona ba.)
    “It’s my husband who’s coming (not my father.)”

    (stolen from Jaggar, p495)
    This expresses contrastive focus by clefting – actually in very much the same way as the English translation.

    Ne is used as a sentence-final question particle, though Jaggar still identifies this ne with the copula (p524):

    Ba ka cin goro ne?
    “You don’t eat kolanuts, then?”

    I suppose you could say this is basically “innit?” in Hausa.

    Kusaal (as it happens) has a bewildering variety of entirely homophonous nɛ̄‘s, where it’s hard to know if you’re dealing with distinct words that happen to sound absolutely identical or with various hard-to-unify senses of the “same” word. Or even to decide if that’s a meaningful question in the first place.

  110. David Eddyshaw says

    @Xerîb:

    Thanks for that link. Here’s a link to Lameen’s post itself for the benefit of the lazy, and because it’s always a joy to link to Lameen’s blog anyway:

    https://lughat.blogspot.com/2018/03/qaswarah-revisited-quranic-hapax-in.html

  111. I think I must systematically read everythign Ahmad al-Jallad wrote these years, form books to twitter.

    قسورة illustrates it.

    You say qaswaraḧ , he produces a picture. a 2000 old picture. Wow.

  112. David Eddyshaw says

    Following the link to Lameen’s previous post on qaswarah, I note that some (sensibly anonymous) commenter in 2013 actually suggested “cassowary” as the origin …

  113. Cassowary is an interesting word as well. A recent treatment can be found in Waruno Mahdi (2007) Malay Words and Malay Things: Lexical Souvenirs from an Exotic Archipelago in German Publications Before 1700, p. 193ff., especially footnote 223 on p. 193, with a possible early mention of the bird in Arabic. The word is apparently attested only quite late in western literary Malay, in the 19th century, and is first attested securely in European accounts, if I recall correctly. I hope the pages are visible here on Google Books:

    https://tinyurl.com/Alunekafwali

    https://tinyurl.com/Arabicalhawari

  114. David Eddyshaw says

    It is interesting.

    (Also, Google Books seems to think I’m French. I wonder if can I leverage this into EU citizenship …)

  115. Also, Google Books seems to think I’m French
    They probably take you for one of Nos ancêtres les gallois.

  116. That’s a really interesting book. I’ll try to find a copy when libraries open again. Of course, the quoted “savory tidbit” has caught my juvenile attention (Mahdi’s translation from the German):

    The 10th [Aug 1676] it was found that the birds cassowaries [Vögel Cassuarisen] walking around in the fort, had eaten up all the bullets, and off and on, bit by bit, dropped them out again, undigested. As punishment for not having watched better, the lot fell upon Capt. Armis, to pick up the bullets, and to chase the birds around in the fort, until they had let out all the bullets again.

    Perhaps there’s hope yet for that hapless man of the cloth.

    Waruno Mahdi has been present on various bulletin boards dealing with linguistics, particularly Austronesian, since the early days of such things, in the 1990s. His knowledge has always stood out as vast and detailed. His website is worth a look.

  117. aiki
    (plural ‘ayyuka’ or ‘aikace aikace’)
    1. Work, duty, job, task, activity, operation, working, function
    2. (idiom) Difficult

    aiki tuk’uru hard working … (tuk’uru: hard work, exertion)
    aikin ashsha immorality …
    aikin fiɗa surgery …
    aikin gadi security job …
    aikin gona agriculture, farming …
    aikin haji pilgrimage …
    aikin hajji pilgrimage …
    aikin jarida journalism …
    aikin lambu gardening …
    aikin likita medical profession …
    aikin soja military service …
    aikin tarayya cooperation … (tarayya: Federal, having sex)
    aikin wucin gadi casual work …
    aikin yi employment, job …
    aikin ƙwadugo labour …
    aikin ƙwarai good deeds …


    Wow. What “aiki” represents in the English column?
    Several suffixes: -ity, -age, -ion, -ing… And several nouns: job, deed… Now, how many repetitions of these there are in the right column?

  118. David Eddyshaw says

    Also

    (Barka) da aiki!

    which is the commonest way to greet someone during the day, assuming that it’s not the first time you’ve seen them that day. (“Blessing on your work”: work being interpreted as pretty much any activity short of sleeping or idle conversation.)

  119. David Eddyshaw says

    The related verb aika means “send”; interestingly, this particular semantic overlap also goes right through Volta-Congo (e.g. Kusaal tʋm “work; send.”)

  120. PlasticPaddy says

    @ de
    Báil ó Dhia ar an obair = (May the) Blessings from God (be) on the work

  121. I mean, this (near zero) degree of repetition in a sample of this size is truly remarkable. I do not remember anything like that:-/

  122. It is a funny (but well-formed) morpho-semantical cathegory. “English translations of aiki(n)”. It is a class in English – or a slice of a class.

    You could argue that it is coincidence: -ing is just gerund, and -age is just French that occurs in tonnage. But at this scale? And it is not just need for specialized words, no words like “hajj” here, only compounds.

    There is a powerful factor(s) that lead to this:

    1. Distinct parts. “Military-serv-ice”, “medical-profess-ion”, “pilgrim-age”, “surg-ery”.
    You can always map “aiki” to a specific part: “here aiki stands for ‘-age’ ” or “here aiki stands for ‘job’ “.
    Even “labour” is likely getting reanalized as lab-our (cf. glam-our. I know that glamour once was grammar, but it is not anymore).

    2. indifference to whether the second part if a suffix (-ity, -age, -ery, -ion, -ing, -ism, -ice, -ure, -ment, [-our] – just in this sample) or a noun (job, service, …).

    3. huge number of synonyms in the right part of comounds. Again, a sample of this size with almost no repetitions? Impressive.

  123. David Eddyshaw says

    I don’t think that aiki really corresponds to English word fragments in these cases; it’s rather that it’s a very colourless word for all sorts of activities, which gets its specific meaning from being modified by the following word. For example aikin likita is literally just “work of a doctor”; if aiki corresponds to anything in “medical profession”, it’s to “profession”, not “-ion.” The specialisation “work” -> “profession” just arises from the context.

    You could make similarly impressive lists in English with colourless verbs, like “do” or “go.”

  124. Yes, it is a colourless word for all sorts of activities.

    The specialisation “work” -> “profession” just arises from the context.

    Just like specializations
    [work, duty, job, task, activity, operation, working, function], activity, prefession, job, employment, service, labour, deeds
    AND specializations:
    -ity, -age, -ery, -ion, -ing, -ism, -ice, -ure, -ment,

    I have no ready explanation why English would systematically need pilgrimage and farming rather than “pilgrim job” and “farm job”.

    Yes you can “explain” it on etymological grounds: “farm-ing” is from “to farm”. “Journal-ism” is also a regular formation from journal. But too many diverse histories and diverse etymologies gathered in one semantical field.

    I am familiar with a process that eventually leads to specialized words like “sex”, or “hajj”.
    X, Y, Z.
    I am familiar with a process of generalization:
    [X A], [Y A], [Z A]. Journalism, communism, buddhism, onanism, feminism
    But we here have a process that led to
    [X A] [Y B] [Z C], where A, B, C semantically are the same.

  125. Yes, I agree that “profession” and “service” are different and you can treat them as specialization. Or “title” and “degree” and “style” etc. With “emploment” and “job” it is more subtle maybe.

    When I was a child I read a book about Slavic langauges. It has a short excerpt, translated to some dozen of them. I counted variation. The greatest number of roots was used in translations of a word “flag” – and almost all of them (and more) are found in Russian. The next one was “bad”. The processes leading to accumulation of “flag”, “banner”, “standard” etc. AND to accumulation of colloquial words for “bad” are different.

    it’s a very colourless word for all sorts of activities
    Or you could say that aiki “job” is absolutely normal, it is just in English it got fragmented.

    You could make similarly impressive lists in English with colourless verbs, like “do” or “go.”
    How? You mean near synonyms? “Make”, “act”… what else?

  126. PlasticPaddy says

    @drasvi
    I do not like to pick up on people’s language, but maybe your attempt to extract a pattern or an explanation for the cases you evince of variations in English suffixing / noun formation is based on an expectation of order, logic or utility (i.e., you use the word “need”), which may be absent for the growth or acceptance of new noun forms. I think the nouns formed from “work” are mostly Germanic compounding: workplace, housework, so the Latin prefixes and suffixes do not attach well (rework is ok but not prework or postwork and the only suffixed form I recall now is the ironic workaholic). Whereas act seems to be more plastic: playacting (Germanic) but reactionary (Romance).

  127. expectation of order, logic or utility (i.e., you use the word “need”),

    PlasticPaddy, no, a “need” is exactly what I do not see. “The specialisation “work” -> “profession” just arises from the context.” DE says. I meant: I do not see any intuitive mechanism that could lead to this variation (that could allow me to predict it here). I do see a pattern though.

    I, of course, expected English to have accumulated a few layers of random stuff. There is a phenomenon I am familiar with: English easily adopts foreing abstract noun suffixes. (If I am familiar with it, it does not mean that there is nothing to analyze here, but it is not new for me at least) I did not expect to find “farm job”, “journal job”, “pilgrim job”, and “ashsha job” (aikin ashsha “immorality”).

    But when I clicked 6 suggestions from the search window, and found 6 different suffixes, I wanted to see the whole list from this dictionary. It is 16 positions. I expected to see some 5 -ings there, and several -ions. When I found almost no repetitions I was surprised. This is not what data normally looks like.

  128. the commonest way to greet someone during the day, assuming that it’s not the first time you’ve seen them that day. (“Blessing on your work”: work being interpreted as pretty much any activity short of sleeping or idle conversation.)

    Equivalent to the traditional expressions “Godspeed” in English and “Бог в помощь” [‘God to (your) help’] in Russian.

  129. David Eddyshaw says

    @drasvi:

    Ah. I misunderstood you. Your point was about English, not Hausa.

    I think a lot of this is just due to the fact that English vocabulary is of such mixed origin: Germanic, French, Latin … and that, not content with simply stealing whole words, English has often cheekily separated them into component morphemes and recombined the pieces at will. Perhaps in overcompensation for its poverty of flexion, English has pirated other languages’ derivational morphology in a big way.

  130. Blessing on your work

    ҳорманг/hormang

  131. David Eddyshaw says

    Unsurprisingly, Kusaal uses an exactly parallel greeting formula to the Hausa Barka da aiki, in the form [Bareka nɛ] tʋʋma!

    It used to amuse me that “work” seemed to comprise pretty much anything short of just plain sitting about, but from this very discussion I realise that my amusement was based on a linguistic error: aiki and tʋʋma have a broader semantic range than English “work”, and “activity” might be nearer the mark in many contexts. The semantic overlap with “send” makes more sense in that light, too.

  132. Yes, my Hausa-Russian dictionary (of course I have a Hausa-Russian dictionary) defines aiki as “работа, дело,” where работа is ‘work’ and дело is an equally multivalent word: it can mean ‘business, affair, occupation, cause, matter, point, fact, deed, thing, (legal) case, battle,’ not to mention a bunch of idioms like то и дело ‘continually, time and again.’

  133. Yan makarantar bokoko / Ga karatu ba salla, / Sai yawan zagin Mallam.

    “Pupils of the public schools / Do have knowledge, but do not observe Salat,/ And often insult the teacher.”

    From : Umar, Muhammad Sani 2002. ‘Islamic Arguments for Western Education: Mu’azu Hadejia’s Hausa Poem, Ilmin Zamani’. Islam et Societies au du sud du Sahara 16, 85-106.

    * I corrected “Saldt”

  134. It is also mentioned in a piece titled Is Boko Haram? Asking the Fodios by Ibrahim Hassan, offered me by academia:

    “On the opposition is, for example, the Hausa verse, very popular among children and youths, including those acquiring western education which runs thus:
    Yan makarantar bokoko*2 / Ga karatu ba salla, / Sai yawan zagin Mallam.
    Pupils of the boko schools / Do read, but do not observe Salat, / Only much insult of the teacher.
    * 2 . the term bokoko is meant to make further mockery of the term boko”

    (Again I rearranged the verse in two lines)

    Would be nice to listen to it, but I only found this: staged performance and a modern tune. (I hoped to find a performance in a natural setting, to learn the tune and determine if it is a children’s song or rather an adult one. Besides, I think, stage is detrimental to music).


    P.S. reverse capitalization: salla-Salat Mallam-teacher is funny.

  135. David Eddyshaw says

    Now I think of it, the usual sense we associate with “work” (something you do to “earn a living”) is not only highly culture-bound but actually quite recent even in our own culture. (I’m just halfway through Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which is one of those useful books that makes you realise that things you take completely for granted as part of the natural order are actually anything but natural.)

  136. Huh. The first sense of work in the OED (updated September 2014) is “An act, deed, or proceeding; something that is in the process of being, or has been, done or performed.” Pretty general!

  137. Citations as recent as 1916: Papers & Proc. Amer. Sociol. Soc. 10 18 “The Greeks who triumphed at Marathon and Salamis did a work without which the world would have been deprived of the social value of Plato and Aristotle.”

  138. David Eddyshaw says

    Thanks for the link to Muhammad Umar’s piece, drasvi. Interesting stuff.

    (Many horrible misprints and/or absence of any proof-reading: ftgh throughout for fiqh … you’d think a journal actually about Islam could do better than that, instead of producing Cthulhu-speak …)

    The poet Mudi Sipikin mentioned in the article is (Alhaji) Mahmud Muhammad, who is said to have acquired his nickname from his “spick and span” appearance. He deserves a WP page, but if he has one, I can’t find it …

  139. I’m just halfway through Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which is one of those useful books that makes you realise that things you take completely for granted as part of the natural order are actually anything but natural.

    You’ll want to follow it up with Graeber’s Debt, which deals with similar material from a more up-to-date (and anthropological) perspective.

  140. fiqh < corrupted ftgh < fhtagn

  141. John Emerson says

    In classical Chinese 事 shi4 and 用 yong4 have an enormous range of meanings very similar to that of aikin. It drives me nuts trying to translate one of them in two different places in such a way as to make it clear that it’s the same word twice. And it also drives me nuts trying to decide which roguh English equivalent to us. This is especially important for 用, which I think is an unrecognized key word in the Daodejing.

    Both can be either a noun or a verb.

  142. David Eddyshaw says

    Pupils of the public schools / Do have knowledge, but do not observe Salat,/ And often insult the teacher.

    In a proper ecumenical spirit, I would like to point out that this is actually just the Muslim version of

    “If you ain’t got Jesus, you’re just an educated fool.”

    (Indeed, the point generalises well beyond religion: it’s a rebuke to the Gradgrinds who think that all education apart from vocational training is mere frippery.)

  143. January First-of-May says

    “An act, deed, or proceeding; something that is in the process of being, or has been, done or performed.”

    …is that the sense in phrases like “literary work” or “his best work”?

  144. karatu bar, salat yok
    salat bar, karatu yok…

    It was an old Soviet sketch, about a construction worker whose job is smoking, because mortar bar, brick yok, brick bar, mortar yok.

  145. American Sign Language has a gestural bound morpheme that converts activities into jobs or professions, as shown in most of the profession titles in this video.

  146. David Eddyshaw says

    I know nothing about derivational morphology in Sign Languages, but on first principles (probably an unsafe argument) I would imagine that it would be be comparatively transparent (agglutinative rather than fusional, so to speak): more like German, less like French.

  147. This picture of the Arabian leopard was in my facebook feed this morning:

    https://www.facebook.com/bigcatswildlife/photos/a.519805581817191/1075046449626432/

    Which got me thinking, in the Wiktionary entry for qaswara:

    compare Hobyót ḳaṣ̂áwrət, the plural of ḳáyṣ̂ər (“lion”)

    the gloss should be “leopard”, I believe, following Aki’o Nakano (2013) Hobyot (Oman) Vocabulary with example texts, p. 286, and Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle (2015) Le hobyot parlé au Yémen, p. 20.

  148. January First-of-May says

    the gloss should be “leopard”, I believe

    Lameen’s linked article gives the gloss as “panther”. I’m not sure which particular species of Panthera this is supposed to imply, if any (though probably not the lion).

  149. Magical allo:

    A page at academia.edu of Anastasia Grib, a very energetic girl, judging from this page in Russian.

    She has several publicaitons about West African allo, but I have only browsed through the first one: Allo: Qur’anic boards from Northern Nigeria – catalogue of the exhibition of Frank Van Craen Gallery 24.04 – 10.05.2014 – http://www.frankvancraen.be/alloboards/.
    Possibly the catalogue is in better quality there, then on academia.edu. I did not compare.

    It is French, then pictures, then English, then pictures. But I only look at pics:)

  150. And there is a book about secret magical allo by a collector: amazon, with an extensive text excerpt, and this , with pictures.

    He is very dismisive about Anastasia’s “desk study”. After quoting an excerpt from the catalogue he says:
    At best the above ethnographic description represents the fruits of wishful thinking—in fact, as the narrative and the analysis of this narrative will reveal, nothing could be further from reality.

  151. David Eddyshaw says

    magical allo

    West African Islam is much more representative of traditional Islam than the Salafi type that has tended to usurp the name of Islam of late (although there have always been tendencies to self-renewal and reform complicating the picture, long before the Saudis muscled in on the act.) In particular, Islam allows magic (ruqyah), though not sorcery, and clerics are often called upon for magic in traditional societies. The washings of Qur’anic texts from writing-tablets have power.

    The whole story of Islam in West Africa is fascinating, both historically and anthropologically. Spencer Trimingham’s classic Islam in West Africa, though old, is still well worth looking at (if you can find it.)

    Even among the Hausa, who (like Turks) tend to regard themselves as Muslim more-or-less by definition, the situation is actually rather more complicated. The bori spirit-possession cult is still alive and well (and dominated by women), and the god(ess) of Kano, Tsumburburai, still resides on his/her holy hill.

  152. David Marjanović says

    Lameen’s linked article gives the gloss as “panther”. I’m not sure which particular species of Panthera this is supposed to imply, if any

    “Panther” generally means “black panther”, and “black panther” means “melanistic leopard” (except when it means “melanistic jaguar”, rarely seen in Yemen).

  153. “The washings of Qur’anic texts from writing-tablets have power.”

    Of course!!!

    But these are with pictures. The author (Antoine Lema) says, they are made by mallams, that their owners are not willing to admit possession of one (implying that there can be something un-Islamic about them) and that they are only found in Northern Nigeria (if they are secret, how can he be sure?).

  154. By “of course” I mean: I am not used to washable texts, but it is enogh to imagine the process:)

  155. A. Brigaglia, Fī Lawḥin Maḥfūẓ: Towards a Phenomenological Analysis of the Quranic Tablet, in The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 12., pp. 86-87, — someone put the whole Studies in Manuscript Cultures series on archive — wrote about such a tablet-with-pictures, with a reference to Grib too.

    It is the same Brigaglia who is the source of “… ba haram ba ne” quotation above. After disagreeing with Grib 2009 (they both criticize her), he came up with the same explanation that she gave in 2014: The writing from the Quran and the zoomorphic drawings were either designed to be washed off the slate and drunk or, more probably, they were drafted by the practitioner on the wooden board in order to be used as a model to be copied multiple times on paper, then enclosed in leather bags and carried by his clients in the form of talismanic belts, necklaces or others.

    It seems, A. Lema uncovered something unknown to, at least, Brigaglia and Grib (and to me, but I am not representative:)). And it is hard to imagine that these tablets were used for “washing off” the ornament or as blueprints. Brigaglia makes a mistake by trying to “explain” something new with something familiar (washing off) instead of admitting: “I do not know what it is:(“.

  156. Apropos of nothing at all, I just noticed (in the process of looking up bokko) that there is a Kanuri word bóká “fetishist” (whatever they mean by that.) It looks suspiciously similar to Waama boko “diviner”, which comes from a root reconstructable all the way back to Proto-Oti-Volta (the Kusaal reflex is ba’a.) Well, coincidence is always possible; still …

    I, in turn, noticed Hausa

    bōkā m (f.bōkanyā̀) 1. Native doctor, herbalist. 2. Wizard. 3. (fig.) Liar.
    bōkancī̀ m 1. Being a native doctor. 2. (fig.) Lying.

    Blench:

    Jju à-bvók
    Aten abo
    Ikun obok
    Ura m-buwa
    Esimbi wɛ̀ɛ̀ki pl. bɛ̂ɛ̀kì
    PM *-ból`
    Igala oboci
    Ẹdo ɔ̀-bô
    Ishe ɔ̀bùgúl
    Nupe bŏci
    Idoma oboci
    Strangely the obvious Niger-Congo sources for this Hausa term are ignored by Skinner (1996:24) in favour of some rather unlikely remote Afroasiatic cognates. Tarok, aboka+, has reborrowed the term from Hausa with the meaning ‘mirror’.Some Kainji languages, e.g. cLela boka may be reborrowings from Hausa.

    here

    Which make me naturally curious about this root in other lnaguages.

  157. David Eddyshaw says

    Well spotted, drasvi!

    The Oti-Volta words are specifically “diviner”, but in Kusaasi culture, at any rate, that’s about as close as you get to our “wizard”; the word usually rendered “witch” (male or female), sɔen [sɔ̃j], really means something more analogous to our “vampire”: it’s someone who steals a person’s kikiris, the three or four components of a person’s siig “life force.” A person can be a sɔen unknowingly.

    The Kusaal “diviner” word is ba’a, which derives from *ba̰:ga, where the g belongs to the stem (plural ba’ab, from *ba̰:gba. The etymon is reconstructable to Proto-Oti-Volta, and the Waama boko plural bokiba is the expected reflex. The SIL dictionary glosses it “devin, charlatan” (charlatan showing the same charming colonial attitude as the English “witch doctor.”)

    The k is probably original. If Proto-Oti-Volta inherited root-final voiced stops, they seem to have undergone lenition to fricatives or approximants in all branches, and it’s not clear to me as yet whether this was already the case in the protolanguage or whether there was still a contrast among non-initial stops in voice alone. (Waama is part of a Sprachbund where g is devoiced everywhere, so that doesn’t signify anything.)

    It wouldn’t be all that surprising on first principles if Hausa had got the word boka from some Volta-Congo language: even Hausa biyu “two” seems to be of such an origin.

    Whether Proto-Oti-Volta specifically is plausible as the actual source is an interesting question. As I remarked above, one tends to think of the Oti-Volta languages as recipients of loans rather than providers of loans, but that is probably to some extent merely a perception generated by the fact that the group is on the whole little-studied. The remarkable uniformity of Hausa is a pretty clear sign that it has expanded to its present range fairly recently, and it would not be at all a stretch to suppose that the ancestors of some Hausa spoke Oti-Volta languages, or fairly closely related “Adamawa” languages, at least*.

    The time-depth for Proto-Oti-Volta is also very hard to estimate. My subjective feeling is that the internal diversity of the group is roughly the same as Indo-Aryan, for what it’s worth.

    *I avoid talking about “Gur”/”Voltaic” because I don’t think it’s actually a valid subgroup of Volta-Congo, and it’s not just me: there is evidence, for example, that some “Adamawa” languages are more closely related to the “Gurunsi” branch of the putative Central Gur than to the Oti-Volta “branch.”

  158. David Eddyshaw says

    I wonder if Hausa boko “bogosity” is actually related to boka “practitioner of pagan divination”, especially as the latter word seems to have much the same sort of pejorative overtone for Muslim Hausa as charlatan?

    There would be a sort of pleasing symmetry about a Hausa word denigrating Western ways being connected with a Hausa word denigrating traditional pre-Islamic cultural practices.

  159. prework or postwork and the only suffixed form I recall now is the ironic workaholic

    Prework/postwork are attested adjectives meaning ‘before/after work’. As for Latin/Romance compounds with work-, there are workplace, workforce, workpiece, workspace, ….

  160. PlasticPaddy says

    @jc
    I thought drasvi was talking about variability in the formation of nouns, so I was not considering those adjectives (which for me at least are not able to double as nouns or verbs, unlike “rework”). Re workforce etc., you are right. The Germanic style of compounding is used also with Romance elements in English so you even get forms like “spacesuit”, where both elements are Romance.

  161. January First-of-May says

    so you even get forms like “spacesuit”, where both elements are Romance

    This example (somewhat belatedly) reminds me of a statement by some 20th century linguist (I have sadly forgotten which one) that in linguistic terms the phrase Да здравствует советская власть is 100% Church Slavonic – it consists of Church Slavonic roots fitted with Church Slavonic affixes and Church Slavonic particles in a Church Slavonic word order, all of which (he claims) would have been different in native East Slavic. Of course semantically (“long live the Soviet power”) it could hardly be less Church Slavonic.

  162. I think this link (112-120) belongs to “On Traslationese”, but I am a bit lazy to write a post there.

    It is Scaliger’s text where the notion of langauge familier/proto-languages was introduced (matrices that is wombs, origins) and its Slavonic translation. Morpheme-by mopheme.

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