I’m as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don’t have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in the words of the OED “A member of a class of travelling poets, musicians, and entertainers in North and West Africa, whose duties include the recitation of tribal and family histories; an oral folk-historian or village story-teller, a praise-singer.” I was aware that the Mande languages spoken in the area don’t use this word or anything like it (the Bambara word, for example, is jeli), but I was surprised to see the OED’s “uncertain ulterior etym.” Merriam-Webster simply says it’s from French. So I went to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé and found that it went back to 1637 (as guiriot) and that the etymology is, yes, uncertain: “peut-être issu, par l’intermédiaire d’un parler négro-port., du port. criado « domestique ».” Hmm. I don’t much like it, but I guess it’s possible. Why wouldn’t they have adopted a local word for such a characteristic local phenomenon, though?
‘Griot’ coming from ‘Criado’ sounds plausible. It raises for me the question why do we use the Portuguese-derived word ‘mandarin’ to describe the officials of Imperial China.
Well, that would explain the Billy Taylor album, “Urban Griot” an album I highly recommend, by the way.
Thomas A. Hale, on his website, says:
“The modern term griot stems from a 17th century French word, guiriot, whose origin is not clear. There are many theories for the origin of the word, but the one I am working on now traces guiriot back 1,000 years to Spanish (guineo) in the 16th century, Arabic and Berber (agenaou, gnawa) in the 14th century and, finally, to roots in the term for the Ghana empire.”
Pierre Guiraud in the article on gris-gris in his Dictionnaire des étymologies obscures finds it first attested in the same 1637 text as guiriot. Guiraud often prefers a semantic approach and for gris-gris, “un nom donné par les Européens”, mentions the various Romance versions of the French guérir, to heal, ultimately from Frankish *warjan, to protect.
In dubious cases I generally go for the explanation least flattering to nationalists, so via Portuguese, but Old Portuguese guerir looks more likely to me than criado as an origin for guiriot.
Perhaps they preferred the word as a style, or status point. Performers have been known to want to distinguish themselves, and do love affectation. Just a thought.
Hale’s explanation opens a new can of worms: Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, which I have seen described as cognate.
Fragano Ledgister wrote:
It raises for me the question why do we use the Portuguese-derived word ‘mandarin’ to describe the officials of Imperial China.
Mandarin comes from the Portuguese word for minister, and was used to describe the bureaucrats in imperial China. Before the Mandarin language was declared the national spoken language, it was used primarily in the government, and called 官話 (minister speech). The Portuguese word eventually became used to describe the language as well.
Oops, I just realized that I totally didn’t answer your question. I actually don’t know why English would use a Portuguese word to describe the officials.
This Wikipedia page also lists an alternate theory, that it came from the word 滿大人 (Mǎn dàrén), meaning Manchu official, but I’ve never seen that cited anywhere else before.
I always worried about griot not looking West African (and the Krahn people of Liberia), but just because most local languages don’t permit initial [gr] doesn’t mean they all don’t.
Assuming the T is graphic in French because grio looks non-French . . . no, that’s too big an assumption already.
I suppose it comes from criado via criao then a stress shift to initial to allow unstressed [a] to drop out. Then a hand-waving story about a West African language that has an aspirated/unaspirated distinction like Germanic or Sinitic rather than the voiced/voiceless of Romance, so [k] is perceived as [g].
The first European lingua franca of the Indian Ocean and East Asia was Portuguese. I used to have a book tracing Portuguese vocabulary through various languages from Japan to Madagascar.
Claw, that Wikistub is really bad, so I wouldn’t take the “Man daren” theory (for which there is no reference) seriously, mainly because “mandarin” is attested in the early 16th century, but also because it doesn’t reference a much more common theory that relates the word to Malay mantari (“counsellor of the king”, “minister”, according to most French dictionaries like the TLF).
It also doesn’t mention that during a part of the Ming, there were two administrative languages, one for the South (based on the Nanjing dialect) and one for the North (based on Beijing dialect and other Northern varieties). At one point you had to be fluent in both to get an official position.
Interesting. The North and South had been divided ~900-~1200, but when the Mongols united them for ~90 years(after a long war) they didn’t use Chinese as an admninistrative language at all. So apparently the Sung and Chin traditions carried on underground, without being in communication with one another, so the total separation was more than 400 years (907-1368 for the Liao areas, which I think included Beijing.)
I’ve never thought about it, but that reunification was quite an amazing feat. Geographers say that China’s unity is unexpected; in the Middle East, Europe, or South Asia, an area like China would have probably been divided into four major nations and a bunch of little border and buffer states.
There’s also the minor matter, if I’m not mistaken, that Modern Chinese daren is a pinyin transliteration based on Modern English values, with devoiced d and postalveolar r, and the older Wade-Giles tajen is much more comfortable for any rendition into any Romance language.
There’s no Chinese etymology for mandarin. Like mantari, it comes from Sanskrit mantri (oblique stem mantrin), one having a mantra. The Portuguese encountered it in India as a term applied to Brahimns and when they found that China also had a powerful intelligentsia (to get a government job you had to have immersed yourself in Confucian scholarship), they considered it the same sort of phenomenon. Likewise the Portuguese used an Indian word for rice porridge, kanji, for the Chinese rice porridge zhou (juk in Cantonese), and that’s why we know this dish as congee.
Might this word have anything to do with those wonderful small black cherries called griotte?
Dearest chocolate lady
la griotte (sour or Morello cherry – Prunus cerasus) from l’agriotte from Old Occitan agriota from Latin acer from PIE ak-.
So much for the easy stuff. Now, who do you have to know (carnally or otherwise) round here to learn how to do italics?
Just put an i between angle brackets; then at the end put /i between angle brackets. Presto!
Angle brackets! I’d been trying square ones. Which must explain why I couldn’t use the < sign above to mean “from”.
Thanks, Hat.
Couldn’t griot come from the verb crier?
A friend of mine, living in Mali, complained once in a “live” e-mail about the ceremony going on next door, ceremony during which a griot was performing — and quite loudly it seemed. Loud enough at least to make my friend, a usually mild-mannered person, write “P… de griot !”
Likewise the Portuguese used an Indian word for rice porridge, kanji, for the Chinese rice porridge zhou (juk in Cantonese), and that’s why we know this dish as congee.
The Chinese had been eating congee for centuries already and had several words for it (in various forms of Chinese, but presumably Mandarin had one too), so why did they adopt a foreign word for a dish they already knew?
Is there a good source to read about the transmission of the word kanji into Chinese?
(sorry for random upping but the congee question has puzzled me for a decade at least…)
I took the wrong train from London once and found myself in Random Upping.
As far as I know, Chinese doesn’t use either kanji or congee. It’s English that uses the congee, just as it is English that uses Mandarin.
I know only two Chinese words for congee, 粥 zhōu and 稀饭 xī-fàn (pronunciation given in Mandarin). The second means something like ‘diluted rice’. I’m not sure of the geographical distribution but both are now known and used.
As far as I know, Chinese doesn’t use either kanji or congee. It’s English that uses the congee, just as it is English that uses Mandarin.
Ah! That makes sense, and I am embarassed it didn’t occur to me. Thank you.
The word Djeli is Mandinka. The word grout is french rendition of Wolof word Gewel.
Does anyone have indigenous words Gris Gris and juju?
It has been suggested that Wolof géwal, géwél, géwël ‘griot’, Serer kawul, Fulɓe gawlo, etc., are ultimately from Arabic قوال qawwāl ‘loquacious, eloquent; itinerant singer’ (regularly derived from the root qwl ‘say’ on the pattern qattāl making nouns designating the performer of a repeated or habitual action, the member of a profession, etc.). True? Learning this makes me happy, but it doesn’t help with the etymology of griot.
(I hope that link to p. 145 in Jean Léopold Diouf Dictionnaire wolof-français et français-wolof on Google books works for LH readers.)
Learning this makes me happy, but it doesn’t help with the etymology of griot.
I agree on both counts, and I thank you for sharing it!
This Wikipedia page also lists an alternate theory, that it came from the word 滿大人 (Mǎn dàrén), meaning Manchu official, but I’ve never seen that cited anywhere else before.
Happily, that nonsense is now gone from the Wikipedia article. The OED still hasn’t revised the entry, so it’s still “of uncertain ulterior etymology.”
The word Djeli is Mandinka. The word grout is french rendition of Wolof word Gewel.
Isn’t it more likely that French guiriot (attested 1637), griot (1688), originated as a rendition of a Mande term of the family of Mandinka djeli (as listed here in Delafosse (1929), La langue mandingue et ses dialectes : Malinké, Bambara, Dioula. Dictionnaire mandingue-français, p. 286)?
Is that a habitual murderer?
Is that a habitual murderer?
Not bad. You’ll be a semiticist yet!
I don’t know how it is in Arabic, where the templates are significantly different in form and function than in Hebrew. Hebrew also has the template qaṭṭāl in the sense of habitual actor, but speifically for verbs in the pi‘el binyan (or qiṭṭēl, if you’d rather). qtl in the sense ‘to kill’ uses the qal binyan (‘light’, properly pa‘al or qaṭal), which would use qōṭēl or qaṭlān as the habitual actor noun.
Biblical Hebrew qtl is an Aramaic loan, and occurs in only three places (in Job and Psalms). This is what the CLA tells me about the Aramaic root, including qāṭōl, qāṭōlā ‘murderer’. I am as ignorant about Aramaic templates as I am about Arabic ones.
Note in the entry the plant names, ‘dog killer’ (dogsbane), ‘hyena killer’ (aconite), and ‘father killer’ (Arbutus sp., Strawberry tree). Supposedly the latter name comes from the observation that the fruit remains intact until the seeds sprout, which then ‘kill’ it.
If the Manding etymology of French guiriot is correct, then the French -ot perhaps reflects a Manding suffixal/enclitic -o, originally a definite article, now the “default marker” of Mandinka nouns, for instance. There is a brief description of this -o here, section 2.2.
For the curious, here (top of p. 71) is the passage containing the first attestation of French guiriot given by the TLFi. This particular reference does not emphasize or imply servitude at all.
Also for the curious, I reproduce below the account of the etymology of guiriot from Portuguese criado given by L.‐F. Flutre in “Sur deux mots qui viennent d’Afrique : Baobab et griot”, Studia Neophilologica vol. 28, n° 2, 1956 (available here for those with access), which is cited in the TLFi. Flutre summarizes the etymology proposed by Henri Labouret in “A propos du mot « griot »” in Notes africaines, n° 50, April 1951, p. 56, a relatively inaccessible publication. (Apologies for any OCR errors.)
So that’s what that particular etymology amounts too.
(a comment above)
Hale published an article in 1997.
It is messy (I don’t remember many of etymologies mentioned there and have to re-read) but entertainining: he lists etymologies (I guess not all) proposed by different authors since 1778.
About criado he notes: “Labouret’s theory has some basis in the fact that the Portuguese arrived in West Africa long before the French, and that Portuguese was spoken along the coast from Senegal southward for some distance.” but then adds that “There is also an obvious link between loud verbal expression and a Portuguese family of words based on the verb gritar, ‘to shout.’” and then objects that the Portuguese called griots judeu “Jew” (why not borrow this word if borrow from Portuguese) and moves on to discussing history of Jews in “Senegambia” and “upriver” from Timbuktu.
He mentions several Berber words too, which is so uncommon nowadays🙂
“several Berber words” – well, not too many: “The French Africanist Vincent Monteil has suggested that griot came from the Berber iggio, or iggiw or iggow (1968:777-78).” (also iggawen, agenaou, was discussed here) and unexpected proposal connecting “Ghana” to berber tagant “forest”.
Not a linguist and writes not for linguists, but loves obscure words.
PS while Wolof tamakat is tama-kat and not ta-maka-t and not tamak-at and I suppose not unnatested Russian *tama-kat (tama colloquial “there”, kat “to roll”, by analogy with samokat “kick-scooter” (sam “self”) influenced by tam-syam “there-here”)
Ghana:
“Although the Soninké call their empire Wagadu, Levtzion points out that ta-ganat is a word of Berber origin and means “forest” (1995b). [Levtzion 1995b . Personal communication, 23 Nov. ] Many archaeologists believe that a millennium ago southern Mauritania, the land of Ghana, was probably covered with forest (McIntosh 1995) and constituted, in a broader sense, “the forest zone” that lies below the Sahara. Today, in fact, the ruins of a town called Ghanata lie ten kilometers north of Kumbi-Saleh; and according to Soninké oral traditions, Ghanata was the name of the capital of the Soninké empire (Levtzion 1980:25). It may well have been that the two linked cities described by Al Bekri, the one for the king of Ghana and the other for Muslim traders, were in fact known as Ghana and Kumbi Saleh.
It does mean forest in Morocco and Zenaga, but this suggestion is new to me. “Named after the Ghana Empire, in turn, per J. B. Danquah, from Soninke gajanŋa.” in Wiktionary is also not very convincing.
My surname is Griot but I am 100% European descent. My great grandfather immigrated to the US from France but I’m curious how he ended up with that last name. It’s pretty uncommon and I’ve always been confused by the etymology
A problem with deriving griot from a Mandinka form with the so-called “determiner” -oo (which usually just marks the default form of noun, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if it got incorporated into a loan) is that this morpheme actually deletes a preceding non-root short vowel altogether; Creissels’ Mandinka grammar actually cites jali “griot” -> jaloo.
I don’t have any idea how old that rule actually is, though. For all I know it may postdate the French invasions.
Mandinka does not actually have a ɟ/g contrast, at least not unless you count loanwords, so I suppose the initial consonant can indeed be finessed.
Kita Malinke has dropped the -o and just retains the tone as the marker (except in posh and poetic diction, e.g. in the recitations of – griots.)
@CG
Grillo is a rather old and widespread Italian surname, but I don’t know if the French name is either parallel or borrowed.
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grillo_(cognome)
Regarding your 100% “European” descent, I would remind you that, due to the lamentably miscegenatory policies of the Roman Empire, as well as the inability or unwillingness of most subsequent governments to practice racial hygiene, it is quite possible that your ancestors, through no fault of their own, were unable to exclude African, Asian or Semitic contributions to their bloodline.
@CG. You will find several dozen people bearing the family name Griot here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=&middlename=&lastname=Griot&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=&locationId=&memorialid=&mcid=&linkedToName=&datefilter=&orderby=r&plot=
Too much work. Wwwwwwway too much work.
Too much work
Yes, it sounds really ahrad.
@CG “European” descent.
Since the out-of-Africa hypothesis appears to be well-established, we are all of African ancestry in all our lines (except Neanderthal ones that certain of us may have). Which is not to say that you necessarily descend from a griot.
Indeed. There are no “indigenous peoples”*, except perhaps for a few unadventurous souls somewhere in the general area of Kenya or Ethiopia.
* In reality, the term seem to be used fairly consistently to mean specifically “were already there before modern European colonisation efforts got underway in that part of the world.” Objection to this is probably as wrong-headed as any other deployment of the etymological fallacy.
Personally, I’m more autochthonous, anyway. My forebears were spontaneously generated in Welsh caves. You puny humans should all go back where you came from.
@DM: Too much work. Wwwwwwway too much work.
The weeds always look taller on the other side of the fence. I will never understand the things Indo-Europeanists do.
“were already there before modern European colonisation efforts got underway in that part of the world.”
…. ‘and who are not now the dominant ethnicity there’. Thus we do not normally say that Germans are indigenous to Germany. Whether we are to say that Thais are indigenous to Thailand or Tongans to Tonga is a question.
Note the “European colonization” in there. That probably means “during the ‘age of discovery'” too — whether some Yamnaya horde from just inside “Europe” could be said to have colonized what is now Germany back in the minus fourth is not relevant in that dialectic.
But yeah, while there are border cases, the UN definition of indigenous correlates pretty well with sociopolitical reality. There are modern European countries like Germany and north of there where a majority of the population don’t have any “foreign” ancestors in written records, and if “we” really arrived from somewhere like current Croatia 6000 years ago and just stayed put, that is probably longer than most indigenous people can claim. That doesn’t mean that my culture is endangered the same way theirs probably is, but it leaves me at a loss for an English word to describe my ethnicity. Unlike the Welsh, we don’t claim to have grown organically from rotten oak trunks.
@lars
Usually the question does not arise except when there are incursions by outsiders, and some ethnicities are more syncretist than others. Was there a time when Danish meant “not German/Prussian” or Swedish meant “not Danish”? I believe there was definitely a time when English or German meant “not French”. I think Scandinavia is a case in point where ethnicities (apart from the Finns or Lapps) correspond to political divisions, rather than ethnic ones.
Well, IIRC there is a period in the 400-600 interval or so where it seems that the Danes were ruling from the current Svealand. So when the Danes went to Denmark, my guess is that the Swedes were those who weren’t Danes.
I don’t think anybody knows what the Dan- part of Danmark means, but if it the -mark part (‘borderland’) was as seen from Germany, then yes the Danes were non-Germans.
And the (lack of) incursions by outsiders is exactly the point. What do you call an ethnicity that’s just maintained itself in place for 6000 years (taking the North Germanic lands as a whole), if indigenous is defined to mean something else?
There certainly are places (like Polynesia) where it is clear that the “indigenous people” were unequivocally the first people ever to get there. (Australia, too, come to think of it. The Greenlanders are far from the first settlers of Greenland, but they are the only group that has actually survived to date.)
I don’t know whether you can count as “indigenous” if you’ve pretty thoroughly eradicated the traces of any predecessors (as seems to have happened, more or less, in Britain, with the Western Hunter-Gatherers.)
A Western Oti-Volta tindaana “earth-priest” is supposed to be the descendant and heir of the very first settler in the area: in practice, that seems really to mean the descendant of whoever was actually in control before the Mossi-Dagomba invaders took over and created chieftainships, only about six or seven hundred years ago.
A lot of groups in West Africa preserve stories about mysterious predecessors, now vanished, like the Tellem in Dogon country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellem
(I think this WP article is largely based on Dogon tradition rather than known fact.)
The actual process of the original settlement of West Africa by modern humans seems to be almost completely unknown, as far as I can make out. Probably not much earlier (if at all) than the spread beyond Africa, at any rate.
Well, if you take that to its logical conclusion there probably are no locations in the world with indigenous people, some time in the last 30000 years there probably was a total replacement of people and things. If it was really traceless we can’t tell, but it probably happened anyway. And if there are exceptions, we can’t tell who they are.
Or maybe we can somehow prove that the current indigenes somewhere were the first modern humans to arrive, but then they probably killed off some Neanderthals or Denisovans. Nothing under the sun is new. On the other hand, last time this was discussed here, someone mentioned a UN-recognized indigenous (and probably well-deserving) population that had provably displaced some other ethnicity within the last 300 years. Or 600, maybe, that doesn’t change the point. You can’t reason about this from prehistory, it’s the current state of affairs that counts.
The actual process of the original settlement of West Africa by modern humans seems to be almost completely unknown, as far as I can make out. Probably not much earlier (if at all) than the spread beyond Africa, at any rate.
Why? If chimps could spread to West Africa (separated genetically anyway by hundreds of thousands of years), why not people?
I’m not claiming that it’s difficult, just that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of actual evidence about timescales and the like. But people didn’t originate in West Africa, any more than they originated in Eurasia.
Bits of West Africa probably were virtually uninhabitable at one relevant time or another (though not always what you might think: when the Sahara was still green, it was the Niger riverine areas that were too swampy and disease-ridden for settlement, apparently.)
Maybe in the common sense of monolithizing the Aboriginals as if they were a single superethnicity, but if we divide them in a couple hundred peoples, it’s again much less obvious if everyone’s still holding on to their immeasurably ancient homelands. 50,000+ years is a lot of time for tussles. Very local invasions usually don’t seem to get in the way of indigeneity claims, but if you know how the sausage is made, one has to grant that especially the massive geographic range of Pama-Nyungan looks rather suspicious.
Even Polynesia, too, has at least a few clear or suspected cases of similar replacement-by-neighboring people, I seem to recall something about e.g. Fiji when I last looked into this.
Of course, once some people have completely killed off their precedessors + perhaps assimilated the last survivors, clearly no practical use holding it against their modern descendants anymore, if there’s no one left who might file for grievances, land rights etc. with the federal government or whatnot. Very few people out there seeking justice for the Dzungars, for instance, much fewer yet for indeed the Neanderthals.
Kita Malinke has dropped the -o and just retains the tone as the marker (except in posh and poetic diction, e.g. in the recitations of – griots.)
So in Kita Malinke poetic diction, the original *V-o sequences with the ‘article’ suggested by subsequent developments in the various Manding languages (*jeli-o, for instance) are in fact still attested? Does Creissels (2009) Le malinké de Kita have a description of this poetic diction? I don’t have access to this book at the moment.
(For the benefit of LH readers, here is the Manding etymology of griot as first sketched in Charles S. Bird (1971) ‘Oral Art in the Mande’, pp. 15–23 in Carleton T. Hodge, ed. Papers on the Manding (quoted in Thomas Albert Hale (1998) Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music, p. 358):
For examples of the different ways in which this apparent original *V-o sequence with the ‘article’ has developed in the Manding languages, LH readers can consult, for instance, Valentin Vydrin (2016) ‘Tonal inflection in Mande languages: The cases of Bamana and Dan-Gwtaa’, pp. 83–105 in E.L. Palancar and J.L. Léonard, eds, Tone and Inflection: New facts and new perspectives (available here):
There is also an interesting description of the changes caused by the ‘article’ in Marka-Dafing found in section 5.2 of Peter Jenks and Rassidatou Konate (2022) ‘Indexed definiteness’, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1) (available here). It seems that authors say that the ‘article’ is an underlying -ú: ‘Dafing has a definite article =ú’. I wonder how they arrive at this statement, since it is not immediately apparent from the data they give. The author Konate is a native speaker, however. In any case, the Marka-Dafing the original sequence *V-ò seems to have undergone an rightward assimilation, the complete opposite of the leftward assimilation in contemporary Malinke: in Marka-Dafing, the quality of the final vowel of the noun is spread to the mora of the article (with rounding from the article being retained in a-ú → ɔ́-ɔ́.)
Mandinka does not actually have a ɟ/g contrast, at least not unless you count loanwords, so I suppose the initial consonant can indeed be finessed.
On this point, Eric Charry (2000) Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa, p. 107, n. 30, makes the following interesting observation:
The reference Avezac 1845 is to Marie-Armand Pascal de Castera-Macaya d’Avezac (1845) Vocabulaire guiolof, mandingue, foule, saracole, séraire, bagnon et floupe recueillis à la Côte d’Afrique pour le service de l’ancienne Compagnie Royale du Sénégal, available here on Google Books (at the end of the file). This is an edition of a manuscript containing alphabetical glossaries of various languages of the region of Senegambia. The manuscript is evidently anterior to the suppression of the monasteries in France in 1790, but Avezac does not attempt to date it further. Note also the spelling of Jolof/Wolof as guiolof even in the title of the manuscript.
Is the first attestation of the Mande word the mention made by Ibn Battuta, in his account in his journey to Mali? From an edition quickly ripped from the internet:
The Arabic بنبي is apparently Manding bambi, ‘dais’. The شقشاق šaqšāq (vocalization?) is evidently a bird. (Considering the red beak, I was wondering whether in this passage, it was perhaps the white stork (Ciconia ciconia). Cf. Nöldeke (1904) Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft p. 115, n. 1: ‘In Tlemcen heißt der Storch bū šaqšāq » visiblement une onomatopoée « Marçais 288’. Also, Lucy Durán (1995) ‘Birds of Wasulu: Freedom of Expression and Expressions of Freedom in the Popular Music of Southern Mali’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 4:101–34, is particularly interesting in the information it gives about the association between griots and birds, particularly the marabou and the vulture: ‘Thus great kono singers are termed kono koroba (“old bird”) and sometimes simply duga (“vulture”)’. Manding duga is ‘vulture’—note the name of the performer Dūġā at the court of the king of Mali in Ibn Battuta’s account. In particular, the marabou (Leptoptilos crumenifer) seems to feature in griot verse or performance—another stork, but its beak is not red.)
The form of the plural that Ibn Battuta (or subsequent editors?) gives, julā, puzzles me. I would have though this would be Manding jula ‘itinerant trader’, as in the language name Dioula.
There are people on Kaua‘i who still resent Kamehameha I, though he was, to outsiders, perfectly indigenous.
I have also seen people argue as to whether Palestinians or Jews are the true indigenes of a certain piece of land in the Levant. Oh, the merriment.
To me, “indigenous” is a justifiably mushy term. But then, “colonization” and “imperialism” are equally mushy. In practice, they refer to the most recent and widespread wave of colonialism and its ideology, that of European empires elsewhere in the world. “Indigenous”, roughly, refers to the victims of that particular wave. The U.N. likewise avoids a strict definition and opts for an “understanding”.
Does Creissels (2009) Le malinké de Kita have a description of this poetic diction?
He doesn’t actually particularise about the sandhi of -o in such cases.
The text he presents at the end actually is part of a recitation by a celebrated griot, but, disappointingly, it doesn’t seem to show any examples: the marker is just realised as usual, as a low tone.
Historically, it appears to derive from an enclitic *-wò, eerily similar to the Kusaal enclitic nwa /wå̀/ “this.” Sort of thing the long-rangers love to cherry-pick. (The Kusaal form actually represents proto-Oti=Volta *ŋ͡má, but I don’t expect that would bother them.)
Still, it seems likely enough that the deletion of final short vowels before it is a secondary development.
@JP Even Polynesia, too, has at least a few clear or suspected cases of similar replacement-by-neighboring people,
In Aotearoa, there’s the Moriori, who were alleged by the mainland Māori to be a previous race that died out. Turns out they were Māori like everybody else (with a slightly different accent) who departed for remote islands and became pacifists. Easy pickings for the mainlanders who traded with the Europeans to get guns.
Songhay has both enclitic -òó (definite singular) and demonstrative wòó “this (sg.)”. More grist for the mill of Mande-Songhay contact studies
In Aotearoa, there’s the Moriori, who were alleged by the mainland Māori to be a previous race that died out. Turns out they were Māori like everybody else (with a slightly different accent) who departed for remote islands and became pacifists.
I learned about them from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas:
Songhay has both enclitic -òó (definite singular) and demonstrative wòó “this (sg.)”
Proto-Western-Oti-Volta evidently didn’t have any articles, but the various modern Western Oti-Volta languages all do, with the exception, as ever, of the prodigal child Nõõtre in far-off Benin.
Each language has made its own choice between reflexes of enclitic *ŋ͡ma “this”, *la “that”, *maga “only” and proclitic *ɲa “who/which.” Even closely related languages have gone for different options, so the idea of having a definite article seems to have got diffused areally, but not the substance of it.
Even closely related languages have gone for different options, so the idea of having a definite article seems to have got diffused areally, but not the substance of it.,
This is what I suspect happened in Europe and the Middle East too: Egyptian to Canaanite to Aramaic and Arabic…
…and Egyptian perhaps to Greek, whence to Romance and then Island Celtic and Germanic. Czech is next.
People who aren’t picky, or simply don’t have much of a choice in their surroundings, can do quite well without definite articles and demonstratives. They simply point, grab or do without.
When what’s available (“living standards”) increases over time, desires and preferences also grow. “I want not the rotten fish in front, but that fish you hide behind counter”. Definite articles could thus be seen as an enhancement to bargaining. To give the fingers a rest from all that pointing they had to do previously.
@stu
As you say, definite articles qua definite articles are not necessary but the widespread adoption of definite articles in Romance seems to have coincided with a time of declining or at best static living standards…maybe people wanted to say “buy the rotten fish, it’s all we can afford.”
@Hat quoting Cloud Atlas: time immemorial, … millennia of imperishable peace, …
“Millenia”? Over-romanticised balderdash: the Moriori lost contact — if they did — with mainlanders only during the 1500s, and kept alive the oral history of violent myths and tribal warfare. Admittedly this has only come to light over the past few decades as historians have made efforts to discover those of Moriori ancestry, and their stories.
I think the words are put in the mouth of a highly unreliable witness in Cloud Atlas, IIRC.
(I disliked the book greatly*, and have no intention of rereading it to check, so I may be wrong.)
* It’s very accomplished, and I can entirely understand why readers whose judgement I respect esteemed it. I just found that its remorseless cynicism about humanity fails to rise above the uninformed dogmatic negativity of a pissed-off teenager, and thought that its elaborate nested structure was a gimmick to distract the reader from its fundamental lack of moral seriousness. Apart from that, it was great.
I think the words are put in the mouth of a highly unreliable witness in Cloud Atlas, IIRC.
Yes, and it’s a mistake to look to novels (or movies, or operas) for accurate history. If you want that, read history.
fundamental lack of moral seriousness
It’s also a mistake to look to novels for moral guidance. I can’t believe I have to explain these things to you people. Get a grip!
Shure nuff. Just saying why I didn’t like it. Preaching in fiction puts me off even when it’s well done and I agree with the moral. When it’s as subtle as a flying brick and the lesson is merely “people are shit”, I’ve got better things to do with my time.
What I meant by “lack of moral seriousness” is that nothing about the novel really convinced me that Mitchell genuinely espouses this nihilistic vision of humanity. It came over as a mere literary pose. Just preening. Which is a serious literary fault.
Not like, e.g. Céline. Repellent, yet authentic. Mitchell – ain’t. Just repellent.
(I didn’t like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet either, for different but not wholly unrelated reasons. I’m consistent …)
Sure, I understand; the odd thing is that I didn’t get that message from it at all!
You may be right. I planned ahead with my catchall disclaimer about understanding why readers whose judgement I respect esteemed it.
I feel rather the same about John Crowley’s Ægypt series. It is technically brilliant (and I certainly would reread it); it has a great many undoubted literary excellences (and I don’t mean that to come off as faint praise at all.) It seems to me to be exactly the sort of thing that ought to be much more highly rated by the literary establishment, but gets downgraded Because Genre.
I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s something gone deeply wrong with it. I once wrote a very lengthy review on Amazon explaining why I was unhappy with it, before coming to my senses and deleting it all. But I would hardly have done that for something that was just no damn good.
It’s not the Gnosticism. I like (literary) Gnosticism. It’s the inauthenticiity.There are matters that, if you decide to engage with them at all in a novel (and you don’t have to), you are obliged to treat with due respect. Otherwise, you should leave them alone, and your novel can have other great merits instead.
I don’t think it’s illegitimate to find that sort of lack of authenticity a serious literary fault. In that sense, ethical issues do have a place in literary criticism. Aesthetics can’t be separated out from the rest of human morality so neatly.
Get a grip!
Mea culpa for not checking what this dross [**] is before posting. Anways I’d never get as far through it as identifying this unreliable witness.
[**] Judgment based on its first para in wikip; never mind DE’s considered critique. What the f is ‘metafiction’ anyway? Fiction with its pants down.
mistake to look to novels (or movies, or operas) for accurate history.
It’s a mistake for fiction to take the name of an actual historic peoples and weave total bollocks around it. That’s doubling-up on the abuse not to say genocide they’ve already suffered. Is this brick-throwing Mitchell so incompetent he can’t even make up a name?
P.S. yeah what D.E. says about inauthenticity. Homer might have been somewhat ahistorical wrt the races he mentions. But that’s authentic mythologising.
I’m calling “Get a grip!” on you.
I learned about them from …
You didn’t learn anything ‘about’ anybody. You learnt a name of a peoples, a couple of geographical names; you saw a co-occurence of triggering terms for a pacifist.
AFAICT there’s no blowholes on Cape Young — or indeed anywhere else on Rekohu. You’d a thought such a culturally significant location would have a local name: i can find none. Mitchell, despite all his fancy-pants talk of fiction, can’t even make up a decent myth, and has to exploit and garble somebody else’s.
Skinner 1923:376
I don’t think it’s illegitimate to find that sort of lack of authenticity a serious literary fault. In that sense, ethical issues do have a place in literary criticism. Aesthetics can’t be separated out from the rest of human morality so neatly.
How dare you complicate my snap judgments and easy apothegms?!
…That said: You’re quite right, of course.
You didn’t learn anything ‘about’ anybody. You learnt a name of a peoples, a couple of geographical names
So you don’t really learn or know anything ‘about’ anybody or anything unless you’ve got a graduate degree in the subject or done the equivalent work on your own. Superficial knowledge is worse than no knowledge at all. Gotcha.
>the name of a peoples
Trying to figure out your typo here. Did you mean a (Mr.) Peebles? Or maybe a Weebles? They wobble but they don’t fall down.
@Lameen thank you. And confirmed maybe (“there is a story”) by Michael King, a historian who’s taken particular pains to untangle the misinformation around Moriori.
I’m only somewhat going to withdraw and apologise. I’m not sure if it’s more inauthentic and exploitative to put a painful and substantially true story in the mouth of a “highly unreliable witness” and in the same breath the preposterous “millennia”.
you don’t really learn or know anything ‘about’ anybody or anything
… if you take your gossip from a peddler of metafiction/historical fiction/science fiction [wp]. You might say that reading Mitchell intrigued you enough to go and read up about Moriori. Did it? Then you didn’t *learn* it from the fiction. At best you heard of the term in the fiction. Superficial whatever acquired only from fiction is not knowledge. In what way would that differ from listening to only Fox News?
@Ryan no typo.
You might say that reading Mitchell intrigued you enough to go and read up about Moriori. Did it? Then you didn’t *learn* it from the fiction. At best you heard of the term in the fiction.
Yes. That’s how we learn about things. That’s how the sausage of information is made. Sorry the process is so displeasing to you. I am reminded of the fact that mathematics articles on Wikipedia are useless to anyone but mathematicians because mathematicians refuse to allow any watered-down/inaccurate/incomplete material (such as uninformed outsiders might be able to grasp) because it’s not perfect according to the standards of mathematicians.
articles on Wikipedia are useless to anyone but mathematicians because mathematicians refuse to allow any watered-down/inaccurate/incomplete material
Someone should start Explainapedia.