I knew, of course, that Carthage was founded by Phoenicians who brought their language with them, and I knew that the later stage of that language was known as Punic, but I was not aware that there were a great many inscriptions in the Latin alphabet, known as “Latino-Punic.” Lameen has a nice post on the subject, mentioning that “St. Augustine… quotes a number of Phoenician words, such as salus (< shalu:sh < shalo:sh < shala:sh < thala:th) ‘three’, in his works” and suggesting that “Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD,” and linking to bulbul‘s more extensive treatment (the second part of this post). I did not realize Plautus wrote an entire monologue in Punic; you can see it transcribed and translated (into German) here. If this stuff interests you, be sure to read both posts.
“I did not realize Plautus wrote an entire monologue in Punic”
I am ashamed to admit I didn’t know this either. That’ll teach me to ignore the dramatists…
It is suggestive that the limits of where Arabic is spoken today are about the same as the limits of where Aramaic and Punic were spoken 2000 years ago.
Careful! Punic was spoken in southern Spain.
Actually, I believe it was Ernest Renan who claimed that the expansion of each Semitic language “paved the way” for the next expanding Semitic language: thus Akkadian expanded and eliminated (non-Semitic) Sumerian, Akkadian is then eliminated by Aramaic, meanwhile Punic expands in North Africa and is in its turn eliminated by Arabic (as Aramaic today soon will be, sadly). True, Punic was spoken in Southern Spain, but then so was Arabic for a long time: Punic was, however, also spoken in other places where it was replaced by non-Semitic languages (Sardinia, for example).
Nevertheless it is true that Arabic, today, is chiefly spoken in lands that were Semitic-speaking before they were arabicized. Hence the well-known “structural stability” of Semitic languages may have little to do with the linguistic structure PER SE and more to do with the fact that Semitic languages, for most of their history, were chiefly in contact with other Semitic languages.
Beyond just the horrible sacrifice of the Punic first-born, their introduction of the pun into Mediterranean culture has to make you question the worth of their civilization.
Probably they just gradually annoyed each other to death, and would have died out anyway without the Roman intervention.
the fact that Semitic languages, for most of their history, were chiefly in contact with other Semitic languages.
Um: Sumerian, Elamite, Old Persian/Pehlevi/Farsi, Greek, Coptic, Romance (from Latin to Sabir)… What do you mean, chiefly?
Also, consider those Semitic languages which underwent centuries of intensive contact with non-Semitic languages, like Maltese (Italian/Sicilian) or Amharic where the structure has remained recognizably Semitic (e.g. the perfect/imperfect oposition and the root system).
Bulbul: my point is that a large number of Arabic speakers (East of Egypt the vast majority) today descend from people who, before shifting to Arabic, spoke other Semitic languages as L1’s: that neighboring languages (various stages of Persian, Greek…) influenced the Semitic languages spoken in the fertile crescent is indubitable, but there never was large-scale language shift from Greek or Persian to Arabic (unlike, say, the large-scale shift from Iranian to Turkic in Central Asia, or from Munda and Dravidian to Indo-Aryan in South Asia): thus, a country such as Lebanon has been predominantly Semitic-speaking for over three thousand years (with Phoenician, Aramaic and most recently Arabic having become the dominant form of Semitic): prestige languages such as (in the case of Lebanon) Greek, Latin, French and English have left their mark, of course, but there is a difference in nature between the influence of a prestigious elite language upon a language community as a whole, and the influence of large-scale shift to said language community: and large-scale language shift, in Lebanon as in many other Arabic-speaking countries, has as far as we know chiefly been a matter of shift between different Semitic languages.
I agree that Amharic and Maltese are still typologically Semitic, but less so, I would claim, than your typical Arabic dialect (Amharic has lost internal nominal plural-marking, for example, whereas as a rule Arabic dialects preserve it). And there is one modern Semitic language heavily influenced by contact with a non-Semitic language, Eastern neo-Aramaic (influenced by Kurdish), that is so deviant that a scholar recently wrote an article wondering whether it even deserves the label “Semitic” (from a typological perspective, of course). I may be able to dig up the exact reference should anyone be interested (my files are even messier than Ancient Middle Eastern history. Really!)
Etienne,
your point is well taken. But:
there never was large-scale language shift from Greek or Persian to Arabic
Are we really so sure? Do we even know enough about the population structure back then? Medieval Arab grammarians and language mavens often complained about the decline of Arabic (laḥn al-ʿāmma) and attributed it largely to what we would now call a language shift.
And then there’s Egypt with Latin, Greek and Coptic spoken at the advent of the Islamic conquest. Again, one would assume a significant language shift took place there.
Eastern Neo-Aramaic and Neo-Mandaic are a good example of Semitic languages with heavy contact interference. The question is whether they should be regarded as a rule or an exception. Considering their sociological status, I’m leaning towards the latter.
This debate strongly reminds me of Owens’ “paradigm stability”. He essentially argues the opposite point to yours and to illustrate, he brings up two examples: the Akkadian preterite and the Nigerian Arabic imperfect. Over four millennia lie between the two and yet, so Owens, the paradigm has remained virtually unchanged. Owens also points out that peripheral varieties of Arabic like Nigerian Arabic and Uzbekistan Arabic where one would expect the most deviation from the “neo-Arabic” “standard” are in fact pretty conservative. I think he makes a compelling argument for the linguistic factor being responsible for the structural stability of (at least) Arabic.
Bulbul–
Owens makes a good point, although I believe the intrusion of Arabic into Nigeria took place comparatively recently (fourteenth-fifteenth century) and was due to Bedouin settlers (whose Arabic is notoriously conservative).
While Greek had penetrated deeply into Anatolian territory, further South in the Middle East it was found solely in settlements along the coast, and in Egypt in Alexandria only: elsewhere it was an L2 only (a very prestigious one, granted): from what little I know of Middle eastern epigraphy and the like it seems indubitable that most of the Arabic-speaking countries East of Egypt were predominantly Aramaic-speaking in the seventh century. So while there doubtless were non-semitic speakers who shifted to Arabic, a majority of the shifters were Semitic speakers (again, that is certainly true East of Egypt: whether to the West speakers of Punic, Romance or Berber were the more numerous language group in North Africa is probably impossible to determine).
Incidentally, there were few if any Latin-speaking communities in Egypt or the Middle East: indeed there is strong evidence that (originally Latin-speaking) veterans’ colonies in Egypt (or the Eastern Mediterranean more generally) shifted to Greek rather quickly (which doubtless explains the paucity of Latin loans in Coptic or Aramaic when compared to the number of Greek loans in either language, and indeed many of these Latin loans seem to have been borrowed via Greek).
An example of Semitic languages being influenced by language contact is in the South Semitic Ethiopic languages, where the morphology remains Semitic but the syntax, especially the final position of the verb, is radically non-Semitic, presumably due to contact with Cushitic.
This is one of the more interesting discussions my comment sections have been graced with. I’m fascinated by this stuff.
It looks to me like Punic was quite restricted in distribution by the time the Arabs got to North Africa. Contrast the copious early Romance loanwords into Maghrebi and Andalusi Arabic documented by Corriente, and the several well-known Punic loanwords into Berber, with the paucity (nonexistence?) of Punic loanwords into Maghrebi Arabic, and contrast the Berber, Latin, and Greek etymologies given by al-Bakri with the absence of Punic ones (a few Punic placenames appear in his work, of course, but he is unaware of their etymology.) It seems probable that east of the Sinai Semitic languages were quite rare at the time of the Arab conquest – in which case, since West Asia accounts for only about a third of the Arab world by population (less by area), most Arabic speakers live in areas that were not Semitic-speaking.
Also, if the deciding factor were whether the previous language was Semitic or not, you would expect Egyptian Arabic to be the least conservative dialect – which is not obvious.
As to non-conservative Semitic languages, Central Asian Arabic too has become SOV, under the influence of Turkic and Persian. And of course there’s Nubi, a fairly recently developed, surprisingly well-documented Arabic-based creole in Uganda and Kenya with radically simplified morphology and other interesting differences.
Lameen: you make a good point, except that if, at the time of the Arab invasions, Romance in North Africa was a predominantly urban and Punic a predominantly rural language, we would expect the former language to have been more “visible” to Arab invaders than the latter, doubly so if we consider that Romance/Latin would have been associated with Christianity (and hence enjoyed a certain degree of prestige) in a way Berber would not have been. Moreover, while there are a great many Romance words in Berber as well as in North African Arabic, a major problem lies in disentangling words that go back to indigenous North African Romance from Romance words borrowed from (early) Iberian or Sicilian Romance…
Hat: the fact that there are fascinating discussions here speaks volumes about the quality of your postings. Really, what can I say, except: keep it up!
And while Coptic’s not actually Semitic, it has recognizable common factors with Semitic languages.
>copious early Romance loanwords into Maghrebi and Andalusi Arabic
These may have come into Andalusi Arabic first, though, and Spain was a richer region likely to export culture even aside from the impetus of forced emigration, so this may not be a measurement of the strength of Romance in early Islamic North Africa.
>well-known Punic loanwords into Berber, with the paucity (nonexistence?) of Punic loanwords into Maghrebi Arabic, and contrast the Berber, Latin, and Greek etymologies given by al-Bakri with the absence of Punic ones
But might a loan from Punic be invisible, if the cognate Arabic word was used? Or if Punic speakers quickly accommodated to Arabic, they might have left little trace. Are Aramaic loans into Arabic in the Mashriq distinguishable? Chinese people tend not to know that loans from Sino-Japanese words were originally coined in Japan.
And sometimes there is a lack of substrate influence even where we know a conquest took place, like the miniscule influence of British Celtic on English. Here my guess (which mysteriously I’ve never seen stated anywhere) is that both sides had enough familiarity with Late Latin to find it more convenient to communicate through that medium, though not enough to make it their own mother tongue.
>east of the Sinai Semitic languages were quite rare
I think you mean west…
There are enough phonetic differences between Punic and Arabic that one would expect many if not all loans to be recognisable – sh rather than th, uu rather than aa – and of course there are substantial semantic differences; enough, in fact, that Punic loanwords into Berber such as agadir “wall” or zalim “onion” are easily distinguished from Arabic ones. Then again, our records of Punic are sparse enough that a rare word might simply go unnoticed. In the Mashriq, a number of Aramaic loanwords have been spotted, although there the task is complicated by the fact that Classical Arabic itself already contained Aramaic borrowings, whereas it almost certainly does not contain Punic ones.
Incidentally, in an article a couple of years ago I actually suggested Maghrebi kaf “cliff” as a possible Punic loanword (cf. Hebrew kef); but the evidence is not particularly strong.
Caffeind: your idea about Late Latin being used for communication between Celtic and Germanic speakers in Early Britain is interesting, but unfortunately there do not exist any early Latin loans in Old English that are not to be found in its Continental relatives, which seems to preclude Latin having played a (non-elite!) role as a lingua franca.
We shouldn’t make the mistake of believing there to be a correlation between the number of speakers of various substrate languages and the number of words borrowed from said substrate languages. I stand by what I wrote earlier: Latin was certainly a more prestigious language than Punic, and hence would be expected to influence North African Arabic and Berber more than Punic would. (By the way, in my most recent comment above, “in a way Berber would not have been”, I meant of course “Punic”). Punic speakers’ greater demographic weight (assuming them to have been more numerous than Latin speakers, for the sake of argument) might not have been enough to compensate for this difference in prestige.
Berber is a greater influence on North African Arabic than either Punic or early Latin; number of speakers (and ancestry of current Arabic speakers) seems a plausible enough explanation for that.
>phonetic differences between Punic and Arabic that one would expect many if not all loans to be recognisable – sh rather than th, uu rather than aa
Right, but what if Punic speakers dealing with Arabs (or perhaps the Arabs too) were familiar with the systematic differences, and simply transposed a Punic word to the corresponding Arabic one? That would hide a loan, or prevent it, depending on how you view this. While Arabs may have been new to North Africa, the idea of various Semitic dialects would not have been.
>unfortunately there do not exist any early Latin loans in Old English that are not to be found in its Continental relatives, which seems to preclude Latin having played a (non-elite!) role as a lingua franca
That is also compatible with Latin playing the same role on the Continent at the same time, as we in fact know that it did. The only difference is that we think Gaul was totally Romanized and Britain only superficially Romanized, an idea which in turn is based more on our knowledge of the outcome of French in France and English in England, than on actual records or archeology.
Lameen: the difficulty is that, Berber still being a living language, it is difficult to know how many Berber loans/features (assuming for the sake of argument that we can always clearly distinguish cases of Berber influence upon North African Arabic from North African Arabic innovations that thence made their way into Berber…) in North African Arabic are ancient (due to substratum) and how many are more recent (due to adstratum).
Caffeind: I half agree with you: I am inclined to think Britain was more heavily romanized than most people believe, but the absence in Old English of loans not found in other North Sea Germanic languages makes me suspect that Latin was no longer the dominant vernacular at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.
As for the idea that Punic speakers might have been aware of Punic-Arabic sound correspondences: this is certainly something ordinary speakers can be aware of, but there is a sharp difference between synchronic and diachronic correspondences: Punic had a much simpler consonant system than Arabic, and thus there was no one-to-one equivalence between a Punic and an Arabic consonant. To believe that Punic speakers, in trying to make their words sound more Arabic (in and of itself not an unlikely scenario), always managed to hit upon the etymologically correct equivalents, strikes me as extraordinarily unlikely.
It is true that Punic speakers’ initial approximations to Arabic would have been full of inaccuracies. But we are talking about the ultimate effect on Arabic. Effects on North African Punic would be visible only if it had survived either as a language or as an identifiable substratum. For the effects on Arabic, it only matters that an identifiably non-Arabic loanword is not being coined.
Punic’s concentration in urban areas may have also decreased the need for loans from it. Rural languages contribute names for distinctive local rural features.
In even more basic terms, the volume of loanwords coined in a language encounter is highly dependent on the particular language contact situation and varies greatly.
As for Latin loans in Germanic, Germans served in the Roman army throughout the Empire, and much of their terminology for things in the Empire would have stabilized by the time of the invasions. How much new would they encounter in Roman Britain? And was there any German homeland unaffected by contact with Romans, or did they all exchange soldiers and traders?
We know the least about the initial Anglo-Saxon arrival and interaction with Romanized Britain, which may have been still somewhat intact and urbanized. This phase may have been the most likely to use Latin. In the mid-500s there were separate and hostile British and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the west and east, and little interaction. After the conquest was completed, there were pockets of British serfs remaining at the least in Wessex, and if some of these were Celtic-speaking, the explanation, if any, for the lack of loanwords has to be their social position. It certainly seems different from the wealth of Gaelic words recorded in Hiberno-English.
To caffeind: actually, there is regional differentiation in the Germanic-speaking area with regards to Latin loans: some such loans are only found in Anglo-Saxon and North Sea coast Germanic languages and dialects on the one hand, and some are only found in the High German area on the other: I believe (this is from memory) Old High German MILIZ “soldier”, from Latin MILITEM, is a case of a loan not found outside the High German area. I’m not denying there was loanword diffusion between different Germanic groups, but it did not yield a unified “pan-Germanic” set of Latin loans.
And while there few Celtic loanwords in Anglo-Saxon, “few” is more than “none”, and none is the number of Latin loanwords which are found in Anglo-Saxon and unknown elsewhere in Germanic. One might argue for diffusion from Anglo-Saxon to its continental brethren, but for this to have caused ALL Latin loans in Anglo-Saxons (and none of the Celtic loans? Explanations that involve speakers carrying etymological dictionaries around are not very credible) to have spread to Continental North Sea Germanic is improbable in the extreme.
“how many Berber loans/features… in North African Arabic are ancient (due to substratum) and how many are more recent (due to adstratum).”
Ancient or recent, I suspect they’re mostly substratum. The slow process of language shift from Berber to Arabic has never yet stopped since the 1100s; there are many Arabic-speaking communities today whose grandfathers spoke Berber, and such recently shifted communities often have noticeably more Berber words than others. (Cases like this illustrate the folly of arguing, as I read once in The Languages of China, that substratum influence has to be confined to a single generation.)
So does anybody know where I might find basic Punic words? Are there phonetic rules I might follow that would turn Hebrew or Arabic words into Punic words?
Writing a novel with female Carthaginian characters, they can’t all be called Sophonisba…
Lameen (in 2007): If recently shifted communities had fewer Berber words than ones that had been speaking Arabic for longer, you might argue for continuing substratum influence, but the erosion of substratum Berber words from a particular Berbero-Arabic topolect is surely an adstratum effect from more mainstream varieties of Arabic, no? (It might also have internal causes, if the Berber borrowings are irregular from an Arabic perspective.)
Etienne (in 2007): I don’t think you can argue convincingly for Latin being less important than Celtic based on zero loan words versus twenty loan words. Zero is perfectly consistent with a few loans that never got recorded in writing and were then lost.
Kevin Wald’s mnemonic song for the Celtic words:
Dunn, a broc or assa‘s hue;
Stǽr, what dry and ambeht tell!
Ríce, carr-strewn torr and cumb;
Clucge, cross-decked ancor‘s bell!
Bratt, a cloak not cíne-thin;
Luh, a funta‘s overrun!
Bannoc, cake kept in a binn;
And with gafeluc we’re done, done, done, done . . .
Note that less than half of these (dun, brock, ass, tor, coomb, cross, anchor, bannock, bin) survived to contemporary English, some only marginally. (Lough/loch is a reborrowing, the OED thinks.)
Ambeht? I’ve seen German Amt “government office” derived from “Celtic ambaktos“, heavily implying that this was borrowed into Proto-Germanic.
Looks that way. Quoth Bosworth-Toller:
ambeht, es; m.
A servant, attendant, messenger, officer; minister, servus, nuntius, legatus.
[O. Sax. ambahteo, m: O. H. Ger. ampaht, m: Goth. andbahts, m: O. Nrs. ambátt. f. ancilla: Lat. ambactus, m. a vassal, a dependant upon a lord.]
v. ombeht, ombiht, omeht.
ambiht, ambieht, ambyht [an-, em-, on-], gen. es; nom. acc. pl. o; n.
An office, ministry, service, command, message; officium, ministerium, jussum, mandatum
Ðæm óleccaþ ealle gesceafte, ðe ðæs ambehtes áwuht cunnon ‘all creatures obey him, that know aught of this service’, Bt. Met. Fox 11, 17; Met. 11, 9.
Lǽste ðú georne his ambyhto ‘perform thou zealously his commands’, Cd. 25; Th. 33, 10; Gen. 518.
[O. Sax. ambaht, n. servitium, ministerium: O. Frs. ambucht, ombecht, n: Ger. amt, n: M. H. Ger. ambahte, ambehte: O. H. Ger. ampahti, ampaht, ambaht, n: Goth, andbahti, n: Dan. embede, n: Swed. ämbete, n: Icel. embætti, n: Lat. ambítus, m. pp. of ambio.]
Hi, I am an aspiring novelist, I have a few Carthaginian characters in my story, and I am trying to avoid recycling the same names.
Here are some names that I have made up from existing Punic names: Ashtartyaton (Ashtart has given), Ashtarthilles (Ashtart saves), Ashtart-Shama(Ashtarta has listened), Paltashtart (Ashtart is my refuge), Barekashtart (Ashtart has blessed) and Bōdashtart.
Of course it’s for a female character, and I think these names are all grammatically masculine, also I am sure I don’t know the rules for putting the consonants together (perhaps their are vowels and possessive I don’t know about).
I used the hebrew word for joy* (I couldn’t find the Punic or Phoenician word for joy online) and Reseph (Phoenician war deity) to create the names Šemḥárašaf or Gelárašaf, I changed the pronunciation slightly, as I noticed that some phonemes change pronunciation, such as hebrew Siin become a Shiin (a reverse of arabic siin become a hebrew shiin)…
Of course, this is in no way accurate, and I know almost nothing about linguistics.
Sincerely seeking help
*apparently Hebrew has heaps of words for joy, but I settled on two.
I think Hanna could be a plausible female Punic name. It’s attested in the Bible and its male variants are recorded in Carthage – admiral Hanno, general Hannibal, etc.
yes I know. I will probably have a maid called Hanna.
I wanted a name which meant joyful war
and a name theophoric of Ashtart (the character is a midwife)
John Cowan wrote:
Kevin Wald’s mnemonic song for the Celtic words:
Dunn, a broc or assa‘s hue;
Stǽr, what dry and ambeht tell!
Ríce, carr-strewn torr and cumb;
Clucge, cross-decked ancor‘s bell!
Bratt, a cloak not cíne-thin;
Luh, a funta‘s overrun!
Bannoc, cake kept in a binn;
And with gafeluc we’re done, done, done, done . . .
Is that song supposed to be sung to the tune of “Doe a deer, a female deer..”? Because I just had me some fun right now.
In the Aeneid, Dido’s sister is called Anna, so Hanna is a plausible Punic name.
I know. very similar to the Hebrew word name Hannah. I guess not every girl in Carthage can be called Hanna, Dido, Elissa, Saphanbal, Yzebel, Muttunbaal and Arishat.
For this reason I am searching for the Punic word for “Joy” “Flower” “Beloved” “Pearl” “pretty” etc, a lot of women all over the world have names that mean things like that.
It’s very close relative of Hebrew, so you probably could safely use Hebrew names in the Bible- Maria (Miryam), Martha (Marta), Eve (Hawwah), etc.
Try Benz’s Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions. I see ’Amat‘aštart, ‘‘Aštart’s maid’ and ’Imi‘aštart ‘‘Aštart is my mother’, a female or male name (I’m guessing the vowels, and I’m not an authority.)
SFReader, Martha is later Aramaic; there’s no reason to assume that either it or the much earlier Miriam and Ḥawwa had a wider Semitic distribution.
Šemḥo=Joy derived from Hebrew Simḥa
Mezula=Lucky derived from Hebrew Mazal, but with the vowels derived from the North African prononuciation of Masuda, Mesuda (which was the name of the mother of Ahmad Al-Mansur)
Borfoz= Duck, from the Hebrew Barvvaz
Ṣippora=Bird or Sparrow from the Hebrew Tzippor
Pnenōh= Pearl from the Hebrew peninah
Zohofa=Gold from the Hebrew zhv other alternatives for golden
Poz=Golden from the Hebrew name Paz
Some attempts, probably way off…
I just realised Punic seems to lack an F.
The myth of DIDON founder of Carthage and native Latin of phénciens, through knowledge of the upright and the Internet falls into pieces like any sham.
The end of the Punic language and lybic tifinagh are writings the Amazigh language, ie berbere. Only their dévoppement that will give the Punic language and who will become the language of knowledge and communication in the Mediterranean for at least 1,200 years. It is she who will give the Hebrew Latin, Greek and other languages .The Phoenician is only a usurpation of language, because if you look at his grammar is the punique.La legend Dido have founded Carthage is only a sham Eastern which today falls into the water. because carhaginoise Numidian civilization did not wait a pseudo Queen invented to hide the true history and grand civilizing Berber who gave: The pharaohs, emperors, popes, nowadays califs.Même did everything to hide the vérite.Dailleurs you can see in the media are often ignored and has Arabic assiliés with all their material and immaterial heritage as the Arabian horse in the land of camel, making the business of secretive imperialists who have them ruiné.Ce they who brought civilisaiton the Phoenicians and not the reverse.
Dailleurs One may ask: where did they get their knowledge to civilize the Carthaginians?
History is full of hoaxes like the religions that some seized for his to parêtre supérieur.Quant the Arabic words are beacoup TAMAZIGHT the berbère.On language can list all the words .But when knows who created the grammar can be easily understood.
Now, we must rehabilitate the Punic as Latin origne and recognize his membership in the Numidian civilization.
John (almost a year ago): Every time a Berber community shifts to Arabic, that creates a new opportunity for substratum words to creep in, and potentially to spread to the wider community. To take a modern Algerian example, the popular expression dargaz “what a man!” (Kabyle d argaz “he’s a man”) seems to be recent, and could plausibly have been introduced by Kabyle speakers shifting to Arabic in, say, 1970s Algiers (which many of them did); if so, then it could be considered an extremely recent substratum word. As for the erosion of substratum words from a particular topolect, that relates more to cultural changes than anything else; the array of traditional pots, farm implements, and wild plants for which such vocabulary is commonest is no longer a part of most people’s daily lives.
Very interesting thread! I learned a lot.
In Colloquial Arabic of North Africa.. there is almost no berber loan words at all.. maybe 0.1% . There is more Spanish and even Turkish words.
This is a huge mystery to me.
In countries like Algeria.. Algerian Arabic is at least 30% French loan words.. 69% Arabic
This thread may or may not be the best for it, but I find the new paleo-genetics observation from the Reich lab amazing:
It turns out that not just Roman cities (as we already know) were very Greek in their ancestral makeup, but Punic cities, including Carthage itself, were predominantly Greek by the origins of their population (dwarfing the Levantine ancestry)
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB86313
Apropos Greek migrations to Italy, BTW, there is an interesting study of ancient Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia off the Neapolitan coast (established in VIII c. BCE, it was the earliest Greek outpost in the area). There is no DNA from the Pithekoussai skeletons due to hot, acidic volcanic soil, but the isotopes tell where the inhabitants were coming from.
https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00187-7
Amazing indeed!
…huh.
The Greeks were the Hungarians of the first millennium BCE.
An interesting archaeological paper on pre-Punic and early Punic era Maghreb. The newly excavated Bronze Age site at Kach Kouch, some 50 km SE of Gibraltar, shows early Iberian Bronze Age influences during the tentative habitation phase around 2000 BCE, then a slowly emerging permanent settlement in the centuries before Punic expansion, and finally a spread of East Mediterranean influences after 800 BCE.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/rethinking-late-prehistoric-mediterranean-africa-architecture-farming-and-materiality-at-kach-kouch-morocco/62D5077593941A815BA6B1C14E9185BB
I am wondering how “Kach Kouch” should be pronounced — I found a video online that pronounced it exactly like the phrase “catch couch” in English, but I am not sure the voice was even human, let alone someone actually familiar with the place.
Those “how to pronounce” sites are pretty much uniformly worthless. It’s obviously French-based spelling, so I would guess “cash coosh,” but it would help if I could find an Arabic version, which I can’t — Google Maps shows where it is, but no Arabic.
It wasn’t a “how to pronounce” site per se; it was a summary of the research. But it sounded like someone just gave the press release or some other article on the site to a machine reader (or, possibly, a human with a very regular-sounding voice). Looking at the channel, it looks like the owner is interested in archaeology, but I don’t get the sense of deep expertise or scholarship.
Here, at 1:23 (the horrible video made it feel like a lot longer.) Spelled كاش كوش, pronounced something like [kæʃ kuəʃ], though I don’t know what variety of Arabic the narrator speaks and whether it’s close to local pronunciation.
Thanks; I’m pleased my guess was correct, and the Arabic is what I would have expected as well.
it’s a transliteration, I think*. From some English text.
It is قَشْقُوش in ar.WP** (qashquush, not kaash kuush) but I guess they guessed it (reconstructed, not ‘transliterated’) from English or French:-)
* see Owl ”machine readers”, Hat “worthless” above.
** also (in Latin letters) in French, Spanish and Dutch WP
Curiouser and curiouser! Thanks for doing further digging, and now I don’t know what to think.
(Which is, of course, good for me.)
This is the Arabic WP site about the site:
https://ary.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%AA%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%84%D9%88%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%82%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%AE%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%84_%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%B4_%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B4
In the maps in WP:Jebala and WP:Ghomaras the valley Oued Laou is located almost precisely on the border between them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebala_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghomaras
Which does not, I think, mean much for the etymology of Kach Kouch, but places it in context of two known dialects: Jebli (Arabic) and Ghomara.
(But not all ‘Ghomaras’ are Berberophones: the language border is deeper within Ghomara territiry)
Y, wow, thx. It is ‘Moroccan Arabic’ WP (ary.WP) and it has كاش كوش !
But it doesn’t have any references in Arabic and the spelling looks strange to me. I’m confused.
It has a reference to an English-language article by Bokbot and Onrubia-Pintado, who first described the site. Unfortunately they don’t say anything about the origin of the name.
“Kach Kouch, ou Dhar Moudden selon son toponyme d’origine, tient son nom actuel d’un terme arabe désignant des objets éparpillés au sol”
https://www.maghrebnaute.com/2025/03/05/kach-kouch-un-village-vieux-de-4-000-ans-bouleverse-lhistoire-du-maghreb/
Maybe a local term that doesn’t show up in general dictionaries?
كشكوشة=écume (froth, scum) is what I turned up in looking in darija / arabe marocain – French dictionary lemmata that match phonetically
Speaking of the archaeology of North Africa (as you do), one of the authors of the Kach Kouch paper has a Researchgate page with many interesting papers available:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Youssef-Bokbot
A few titles:
• The beginning of the Neolithic in northwestern Morocco
• Ancient genomes from North Africa evidence prehistoric migrations to the Maghreb from both the Levant and Europe
• New Light on the Silent Millennia: Mediterranean Africa, ca. 4000-900 BC
• Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant
• The prehistoric site of Oued Beht, Khémisset, Morocco: an interpretative report on 2021–2022 fieldwork and associated research
• Cemeteries, Rock Art and Other Ritual Monuments of the Tangier Peninsula, Northwestern Africa, in Wider Trans-Regional Perspective (c. 3000–500 BC)
Continuing to speak of the archaeology of North Africa — a while back, I wondered at the name “Utica”, a city in New York State (there are many other places in the USA also called “Utica”), and was surprised to find that the original was a Phoenician city in what is now Tunisia.
WikiP Utica, Tunisia:
I’m a little suspicious about the statement that the city’s name is to supposedly “contrast the settlement with the later colony Carthage” — I mean, when they founded the place, did they know that they would be rivals with a place calling itself “New City”? I suppose it’s not impossible that the city had some other name originally, never recorded or even hinted at, which was later changed at some point (when?) to emphasize their seniority over the “New City”.
But it occurred to me as a possibility that the city was always named “Ancient”, and was given that name because signs of some vastly older settlement were still there when the colony-city was founded by the Phoenicians. Archaeology does not yet support this, but seeing the research from Morocco suggests that something may yet be uncovered.
In Magna Graecia there is Neapolis and, close by, Palaiopolis.
What was the Punic name of Nova Carthago (modern Cartagena)?
If colonists (often unimaginative) call their colony “city”, and then there is a new colony close by (also called by its inhabitants “city”), what is more natural than calling one “the old one” and the other “the new city”. And the Romans also often called their capital just urbs, without an added Roma.
The name of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenkodogo
in Burkina Faso is literally “Old Town” in Mooré (tẽ̀ng-kʋ́dgo.)
There don’t seem to be any counterbalancing New Towns around there. It’s just Old.
(I met the grandfather of the current king of Tenkodogo a few times. He was a very interesting man to talk to. He was careful to explain to me that his branch of the royal family was actually senior to that of the Mossi king in Ouagadougou – correctly, I think. He offered me one of his daughters in marriage one time, but I am fairly sure he did it just to wind me up.)
Hausa sabon gari “new town” has acquired a technical sense of its own:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabon_Gari
“Oldham” looks like it should be “Old Town” etymologically, but apparently it probably isn’t:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldham
“Tempane” (Tɛmpaan), a village in Kusaasi territory, is etymologically “New Towns/Villages” (teŋ-paan, with a now-obsolete plural form of the adjective paal/paalig “new.”) No old villages nearby, though …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College,_Oxford
is so called because it was only founded in 1379, of course.
Still younger than the New Castle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle,_Newcastle
The Old College in Edinburgh was once New College, but they built a newer one.
Wiener Neustadt, est. 1194, actually raided by actual Mongols a while thereafter. (Unless of course they all happened to be Tatars or whatever.)
Instead of “old home”, it’s “old holm“. Big deal…
To be nitpicky, the Hebrew verbal root ʿ-t-q and its Proto-Semitic ancestor has as its original meaning ‘move, displace’, whence ‘advanced’ and then ‘old’, as well as an intensifier ‘extraordinary’ (or ‘passing’, if you want to be fancy.) These semantic shifts are attested elsewhere in Semitic as well. I don’t know what the range of meanings was in Punic. That said, my ignorant guess is that ‘old’ is the likely translation here, after all.
Mooré kʋ́d- “old”, as in “Tenkodogo” tẽ̀ng-kʋ́dgo, seems to be from the same root as kʋ̀ɩ “dry out, wither” (= Kusaal kʋdig.) To those of us of a certain age, the semantic shift may seem to be a little … close to the bone …
One prefers the Arabic قديم; “preceding” is more like it. Latin vetus seems to be a repurposed “year”, which is also less damaging to the self-esteem.
“Old” itself seems to have originated as “grown up”, which is, of course, better yet:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/old
I have to say that there is a whiff of ancient euphemism about some of these. (But not among the clear-eyed realists who speak Western Oti-Volta languages.)
If Wiktionary is to be believed, Hebrew זָקֵן “be old” etc is something to do with beards:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%96%D7%A7%D7%9F#Hebrew
Well, it beats being dried out and withered, I suppose. Seems a bit sexist, mind …
I wonder if יָשָׁן “old” (of things) might be related to שָׁנָה “year” (and thus parallel to Latin vetus)?
Northern German vergammelt means “rotten, moldy” and such… but I have no idea about the direction (or indeed whether it’s native or a Danish loan).
Re Owlmirror’s puzzlement about Utica (the one in Oneida County, N.Y.), the wiki article helpfully explains “Many central New York cities are named after places and figures of the Greco-Roman world, including Rome, Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy, Homer, Cicero, and Ovid.” Some of these became largeish places, others have remained smaller. (One of my great-great-grandfathers was born in Homer back before 1820.)
This piece says that “New York’s Classical place names were nearly all bestowed in a fourteen-year period between 1789 and 1803” and tries to explain why: https://antigonejournal.com/2021/10/classical-place-names-america/ See also the fictitious N.Y. city of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium_(Kurt_Vonnegut), said to be a Classically-named stand-in for actually-existing Schenectady, which had been named well before the classical-toponyms boom.
The dictionaries of Gesenius (18th edition) and Koehler//Baumgartner confirm this, or rather Wiktionary stole it from there.
Apparently not, it only looks like that in Hebrew. In Ugaritic, the word for “old” is yt̲n.
Ah, thanks. Versus šnt, from
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Semitic/%C5%A1anat-
Ah, well. Beautiful hypothesis meets ugly fact.
@DE, “I could have married the king’s daughter, dear / she would have married me / but I have forsaken her crowns of gold / all for the love of thee”
There’s something weird going on with the Kusaal words for “old man” and “old woman”, respectively bʋnkʋdʋg and pu’anya’aŋ.
Kusaasi culture respects the elderly, to a much greater degree than ours. So it’s odd that both words, on the face of it, are less than respectful.
Bʋnkʋdʋg is etymologically “old thing“; “old person” would be ninkʋdʋg, and “old man” would be expected to be dau kʋdʋg. You can use bʋn “thing” of people, but it’s normally jocular: thus e.g. bʋngiŋ “shortarse” (literally, “short thing.”) So, on the face of it, you’d expect bʋnkʋdʋg to mean “old fart”, rather than to be the neutral term for “old man.”
Pu’anya’aŋ is even odder. Pu’a is unproblematic: it’s “woman.” But nya’aŋ as an adjective normally means “female”, and in Kusaal it’s otherwise applied exclusively to non-human animals, e.g. pɛnya’aŋ “ewe”, banya’aŋ “bitch.”
The cognates of nya’aŋ elsewhere in Western Oti-Volta also mean “adult female” (of an animal) but are likewise used with “woman” to mean “old woman.”
In case that was insufficiently mystifying, both Mampruli and Farefare use that very same etymon with “man”, to make the neutral terms for “old man”, respectively dɔnyaaŋŋa, bʋra-yã’aŋa … (though Dagbani, usually very close to Mampruli, has the word you’d actually have expected to see, viz dokurigu.)
Except with “man” and “woman”, this nya’aŋ adjective seems throughout Western Oti-Volta to mean exclusively “female”; it probably contrasts with the adjective which turns up in Kusaal as sad-/sa’a- “female, sexually mature but not yet having given birth”, so the original core sense was presumably “female, having given birth at least once.”
No idea what’s going on with all this. Though it reminds me that the sole example in the Papuan language Lavukaleve of a human-reference word with masculine-feminine-neuter grammatical gender different from its natural gender, apart from neuter babies, is ruima “old man”, which is feminine.
It’s Constructions all the way down …
@de
Could this be a taboo/affectionate dysphemism, c.f., ball-and-chain (or b—- in some circles) for “girlfriend, wife”?
I wondered if this nya’aŋ might not be the “adult female” adjective at all, but the homophonous nya’aŋ “behind, after, East”, but it’s the wrong way round: what’s “behind” you in temporal terms in Kusaal is the future, not the past …
Could this be a taboo/affectionate dysphemism
That’s probably at least part of it, yes. (In particular, that seems plausible especially for bʋnkʋdʋg.) I’ve been thinking about this …
It’s true that Kusaasi culture is more respecting of age than ours. But thinking about family relationships, there’s a generational aspect too. The most respected relatives are your parents’ generation. (The respectful way of addressing a stranger of about the same age and the opposite sex is m diemma “my parent-in-law”, or if they are distinctly older than you, m ba’ “my father” or m ma “my mother.”)
But your grandparents stand in the traditional reciprocal joking relationship to you (called ràkɩ́ɩre in Mooré, from ràkɩ́ya “sibling-in-law”, this being the prototypical relative you have such a relationship with. The Kusaal proverb Diembil anɛ dakiig “A young parent-in-law is a sibling-in-law” is more or less equivalent to “familiarity breeds contempt.”)
So it does actually seem quite possible that the terms have got generalised from referring to one’s own grandparents. (The archetypal Old People.)
(My darija sucks and Lameen must understand the word(s) better…)
0. The local spoken language is [Moroccan] Jebli Arabic, shaped by migration of Arabophones (like all Arabics) and shift from Morisco (for Muslim speakers) Spanish and Berber and deviant for Morocco. But I can’t remember an Arabised Spanish toponym and local toponyms are Berber.
Also Moroccan Arabic (TV, the Moroccan ‘capitals’) and the literary language is literary Arabic.
Also French and Spanish.
1. (confidently) Kach Kouch is meant to be French spelling. The Arabic sounds must be:
⟨K⟩ – /k/ or /q/ (realisations of these vary)
⟨ch⟩ – /š/
⟨a⟩ – /a/ [æ]
⟨ou⟩ – /u/ [u]
Jebli has /čV/ in Spanish loans and certain Arabic words, particularly šāf (or čāf) “see”.
Literary Arabic has short and long vowels, Moroccan Arabic has replaced short vowels with a short /ə/ (depending on accent you may not even hear it) and its “etymologically long” vowels aren’t really long.
Jebli has “normal” vowels where Moroccan has a /ə/, but they behave as if they have developed from /ə/ (partly predictable and have nothing to do with the “etymological” vowels found in literary Arabic).
2. When I read Kach Kouch without thinking, I read it as qᵃšquᵘš (ᵃ short vowel diacritic, u vowel letter, ᵘ diacritic, uᵘ long vowel).
CᵛCCVᵛC and CᵛCCVᵛCḧ* (as in كشكوشة) is unremarkable reduplication in Arabic.
You may not know what kaškuuš, kaškuuša, qašquuš or qušquuš mean but there must be a place in the Arabophone world where they are words:)
Etymological ⟨KᵛšKuᵘš⟩ (K letters ⟨k⟩ or ⟨q⟩, ᵛ an unspecified vowel diacritic)
Moroccan /KᵊšKuš/,
Jebli /KæšKuš/
Also Kach Kouch does not seem to be the name of a village or a hill, it must be the name of a[n unknown] thing on a hill. Which means it must be an Arabic word, not a toponym. Like “objets éparpillés au sol” above.
* ḧ for an Arabic letter which reads as /a/, shaped as Arabic h and has borrowed dots from Arabic t
3. ⟨Kaᵃš Kuᵘš⟩ is weird.
It can be a transliteration from French, a local unanalysable name or a phrase in Arabic.
a transliteration of French Kach Kouch – looks ideal.
a local unanalysable name – why write it as two words?
a phrase in Arabic – does not look Arabic and does it mean “couche cash”, two loans?
And… Wiktionary has Moroccan kūš “diapers” (collective) and Levantine kāš “cash”.
It also “doesn’t look” Russian, but wonderfully, I can translate it from Russian (because Russian also has borrowed French French couche). But the translation is idiotic:)
I imagine it’s qǝšquš; if it were kǝškuš they’d probably write it as Kechkouch instead. Maybe an expressive derivative of qǝšš “furniture, stuff” (Classical “straw”)?
“stuff”
…brought by the researchers. Shovels, tents…
“uᵘ long vowel” – uᵘps! I meant ᵘu and qᵃšqᵘuš etc.! I don’t know why I did it:/
qᵃšquᵘš looks better in Latin…
But
qᵃšqᵘuš
can be changed to
qᵃšqᵘwš
which is beautiful. It is a strict transliteration (the harakat are where they’re wrriten in Arabic, and same letter w for all its roles) and it is convenient. If you tell a Russian unacquinted with Arabic to read aw, aj, uw, ij as diphtongs (where “diphtongs” uw, ij are long vowels uu and ii), she will produce decent long Arabic vowels even though Russians don’t understand length. Or she will do it if you write uu and ii…
Must work with ᵘw, but not wu or wᵘ.
___
Arabic transcription systems annoy me and I love to experiment with them. I think I would adopt ᵘ and ᵃ for a “bridge” system…. but I remembered what’s wrong with this approach. i
Not sure about ḧ.
De Prémare’s dictionary has:
qəšquš: top, summit, crown (of a tree); (fig., pej.) very tall person; wily old man.
qšaqəš: small things of little value, knick-knacks, etc.
I guess either it was on top of a hill, or the locals didn’t think much of the artefacts…
What surprises me is that the articles I find when I google “Kach Kouch” speak of it as a revolution. Did anyone really think that nobody was there, in North Africa? It’s a good land. With mountains. “Mountains” must mean rainfall and diversity even if plains were arid (Sahara was “green”).
“Shovels, tents” – Sounds surprisingly pleasant in Russian:
ɫɐ pa: tɨ,
pɐ ɫa:t kʲɪ
(лопаты, палатки)
lopáta (lop the root) is a shovel.
lepetát’, v.n. lépet “to babble” (also trepetát’, trépet tremble, sheptát’, shëpot whisper, toptat’, tópot stomp, shórokh rustle)
lopotát’ (variant)
ropata is a word which perplexes me. It means (meant in 1200:)) “a mosque, pagan temple or western rite church”.
I wonder if it is same root as
rópot. ropót is said about dissatisfied crowds. They gather to listen to a star, they wait, they wait and you come and say “wait” and hear rópot tolpy “r. of crowd”. (I don’t know what it is, but I imagine it as participants expressing their dissatisfaction without shouting).
roptát’ is a verb you read in the Bible. Characters do it “at God” and when they do it, that is a BAD thing.
(I read the Bible when I was a child and this is how deep my understanding is. I also don’t know what does “fear” means in the context of God. In Arabic “fear” can mean respect – Veiled Sentiments has a paragraph about it. A man did something a decent man shouldn’t do and girls don’t ta7ashsham and “children don’t fear him”. Is this what the Bible means?)
“toptat’, tópot stomp, shórokh rustle”
toptát’ – about the effect it has on what you’re stomping upon.
topotát’ – colloquial, about the sound (not in literary Russian). Not sure if I can say that the “roots” here are lep, trep, shep, shëp, top given that the repetition of the vowel is a part of sound symbolism and maybe the “t” too… top-top is found in baby talk without t, but not lep trep shep rop strek grokh etc. etc. etc.
shurshát’ “to rustle”
___
This “fear” is to DE’s topic of Bible translations. “WHY on Earth should I fear what is GOOD?” thought child-me. “Why do THEY do it?”
ropót is said about dissatisfied crowds. They gather to listen to a star, they wait, they wait and you come and say “wait” and hear rópot tolpy “r. of crowd”. (I don’t know what it is, but I imagine it as participants expressing their dissatisfaction without shouting).
roptát’ is a verb you read in the Bible. Characters do it “at God” and when they do it, that is a BAD thing.
The KJV for Exodus 16:8 is “And Moses said, This shall be, when the LORD shall give you in the evening flesh to eat, and in the morning bread to the full; for that the LORD heareth your murmurings which ye murmur against him: and what are we? your murmurings are not against us, but against the LORD.”
Is ропот used there in Russian? Oh, wait, I can check. Yes it is, and I just copied it from there.
Many modern English translations have “grumblings” and “grumble”.
I think dissatisfied crowds murmur more than they grumble, in English. Or maybe you could hear a few grumbles but a lot of murumuring. I could be wrong.
Russian mur, mur-mur etc. mean “purr”.
(As I was typing a purring cat jumped at me. And… he means that he’s hungry.)
Exodus 16:8
Sadly, I see that the Kusaal Bible just uses nyɔl “grumble, complain.” Seems a missed opportunity for a language which does ideophones so much better than mere SAE (even Russian.)
The Mooré version has yẽgme “mutter, mumble, buzz, hum.” Better … (The presumed Kusaal cognate, nya’am, means “whisper”, which evidently wouldn’t do for the grumbly crowd.)
The Dagara dictionary has the excellent verb ‘hʋ̃-‘hʋ̃ “murmurer”, but sadly there is no Exodus translation in which I could see if it’s used in that verse.
mur-mur etc. mean “purr”
Evidently a Hausa cat (mussa.) With rhotacism, Because Cat. (It repeats its own name, being essentially a Pokémon.)
Oddly, Kusaasi cats go miau.
There are a lot of peculiar terms for “cat” in Western Oti-Volta. Kusaal usually borrows the Hausa word (as amus), but also uses dɔɔg biig “house child” and apu’asabilig “black woman.” I came across “chief’s wife” elsewhere. Mooré yũuga “cat” is exactly homophonous with yũuga “navel.” No idea …
It’s probably connected in some way with the techniques that cats have developed to mind-control their human servants. But I have said too much …
“mussa” recembles Maghrebi forms which I would love to catalogise but don’t really understand how to do that.
Lameen must know:)
It looks like a loanword in Hausa, so it could well be connected in some way.
(It also has a somewhat phonaesthetic air, but even phonaesthetic words can get borrowed. I can produce some pretty clear examples in Kusaal.)
“Oddly”
I like 猫 “cat”. Or 貓
A picture and a character which reads “miao” (and in turn – I think? – depicts a field and sprouts).
māo in Mandarin and miau in the south.
https://i.redd.it/oq0gqr6g2my41.png
The map is from Behnstedt and Woidich.
Maybe it is Berber (a)mucc and Moroccan Arabic (a)mušš (a)məšš from Berber.
It is not in the map in Tunisia. I have an impression that someone in Tunisia knows it (and not in the meaning “the basic word for cat” which is cattus) but…
..but given Arabisation of Berberophone Tunisians (particularly – I have no idea, why – when the country was occupied by the French), if so, it is not suprising.
https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/comments/gj9poj/the_word_cat_in_arabic_dialects/
“For, example, if an Arab guy says bsssss for a cat, it would be very offensive in Russia they say ksssssss which is somewhat offensive in Arabic.” – I appreciate the link to 50 Russian words for cats, but I want to know how exactly I must be very offended by bsssss:(
I remember I saw a thread on a language forum, along the lines of “share cat words in your language!” and wrote maybe 20 but I think didn’t post them.
De Prémare’s dictionary has:
qəšquš: top, summit, crown (of a tree); (fig., pej.) very tall person; wily old man
Thanks for looking that up, Lameen! The site does look fairly topographically prominent and isolated (as here).
agree
I’m not even sure if any of Russian libraries has Colin or De Prémare:(
(I’m thinking about buying them* **, but the war led [me in]to an idiotic mental circle.
(a) without knowing how to pay and how shipping to Russia works (maybe normally. or I can order it to someone’s address in Germany or Montenegro and… and… I don’t know) I’m not finding money and places that sell books I need
(b) without being ready to pay and buy I’m not finding a a way to pay. I think what I need is a Tajik card…)
*buying. photographing each page. uploading somewhere:) Normally Im lazy to do such things but for darija I can do it.
**I forgot! THE good way of doing it is a trip to Morocco…