#berber — Public Fediverse posts

Mise à jour de la spécification UD (Universal Dependencies) Treebank #Kabyle.

Cette version 0.5 : Révision et vérification des sources : assistée par Claude (Anthropic) alors que le plus gros de la version 0.4 (non publiée) a été fait avec Qwen 3.8Max.

https://kabyle-specs.github.io/viewer.html?file=specs%2Fkabyle-ud-specification.md

#treebank #UD #Taqbaylit #berber #Tamazight #Tamaziɣt

ICYMI: Authentischer Berber-Bettüberwurf mit handgeknüpften Fransen (natur) https://www.kunstplaza.de/shop/berber-bettueberwurf-natur/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Berber #Bettüberwurf #Wohnkultur

ICYMI: Authentischer Berber-Bettüberwurf mit handgeknüpften Fransen (terrakotta) https://www.kunstplaza.de/shop/berber-bettueberwurf-terrakotta/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Berber #Bettüberwurf #Inneneinrichtung

Camel Gold by Bernd Schunack

https://tmblr.co/Z7VXvxjjhx_2Ku00

#berber #amazigh #sahara #desert #morocco #sunset #dunes #merzouga #camel #gold #sun #shade #hills #fantastic #light #traces #grass #endless #nature #landscape #travel #nowhere #blue #sky #panasonic #lumix #g91 #ergchebbi #backlight #flickr

Authentischer Berber-Bettüberwurf mit handgeknüpften Fransen (natur) https://www.kunstplaza.de/shop/berber-bettueberwurf-natur/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Berber #InteriorDesign #Natur

Authentischer Berber-Bettüberwurf mit handgeknüpften Fransen (terrakotta) https://www.kunstplaza.de/shop/berber-bettueberwurf-terrakotta/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Berber #Bettüberwurf #Wohnkultur

Remarkable life
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260527-estevanico-the-african-explorer-who-crossed-north-america #estevanico #berber #morocco #spain #history #anthropology #indigenous

Poppy update pic.

#Dogs #BerneseMountainDog #Berber #DogsOfMastodon #Pics

Fatimid Caliphate troops in North Africa, ~10th century AD

https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/1978356/fatimid-caliphate-troops-in-north-africa-10th-century-ad

Drove from #merzouga to #errachidia yesterday. It's a route that comes relatively close to the #algerian border and is home to a lot of #berber nomads. One woman was kind enough to invite us for tea.

Quick stop for food in Errachidia at a cafe that was slowly filling up with people preparing for the #Morocco / #Mali football match. It's part of the #African Cup of Nations, which we landed right in the middle of. Sadly it was a 1-1 tie.

Later on we took a flight back to rainy #Marrakesh where we're snacking, recharging and doing a little shopping at the local Artisanal market. Got belts and jewelery. And the ceremonial #Morocco floor pillow. Because you gotta.

Still cold here, but we're getting used to it.

#traveling

This morning's view, while I'm digesting breakfast and thinking about software development. Nothing on the schedule until noon. A much needed break after a couple of days of excitement.

#Traveling is lovely, but coming home will be good too. The kids are struggling a bit with the local food, so I'm plotting to make a couple of seasonal delicacies when we're back in the cold north. I have a serious craving for a crispy pork roast and ris a la mande - our traditional rice pudding with almonds and cherry sauce.

For now, we're in the desert and later today we'll be having what I hear is the traditional weekly #couscous #barbecue at a local #berber family-run restaurant.

After that we're heading back to #Marrakesh for a couple of days and then home.

Enjoy the holidays! :-)

#merzouga #riad #morocco #africa

Lots of things happened today. Had "#Berber pizza" in a village. Bought spices. Met a baby camel. Rode camels. Got peed on by one. Tried camel milk. Visited the Moulay Ali Cherif Mausoleum with garden and mosque. Lovely place. Big on the peaceful coexistence of #Christianity, #Islam and #Judaism. Visited a commune of women and children rescued from the desert by #DoctorsWithoutBorders and supported the women's workshops by buying some bracelets. Also visited one of their tiny one room schools. Cute kids.

Tomorrow we're leaving the desert behind and heading back to the big city.

#rissani #merzouga #Morocco #Africa #traveling

Ancient Berber Cities, Tunisia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_YbbcdWwnU

> The abandoned villages/cities of #Guermassa, #Douiret, and #Chenini in the #Dahar Mountains in Southern Tunisia, are enduring remnants of #Berber #heritage. Guerma...

#Culture #Tunisia

Die "Mausūʿat at-turāṯ al-amāzīġī" ist eine monumentale 12-bändige #Enzyklopädie, die das reiche Erbe der #Berber Nordafrikas in sozialen, kulturellen und politischen Dimensionen umfassend dokumentiert. Mit ihrem interdisziplinären Ansatz bietet das Werk einzigartige Einblicke in die facettenreiche Geschichte des #Maghreb.

https://halit.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/search?q=Maus%C5%AB%CA%BFat+at-tur%C4%81%E1%B9%AF+al-am%C4%81z%C4%AB%C4%A1%C4%AB&v=1915667259

#Nordafrika

État d'avancement de la traduction collaborative de certains composants du « TranslationProject » en #Kabyle.

Traduction « privée » sur invitation effectuée par l'équipe `kab-l10n` connue sous le nom kabyle « Imsidag » / localizers.

- La commande `grep` : 98%
- La commande `wget` : 66%

Les composants verrouillés ont déjà été envoyés au projet upstream.

Merci à @Codeberg et à @weblate

#taqbaylit #l10n #i18n #tamazight #berber #linux

Quelques infos à propos de la police de caractères : Amazigh-Motifs via FontForge.

#Tamazight #Motifs #Fonts #Amazigh #Berber

Rethinking Proto-Semitic

This week, I was stoked to attend a workshop in Marburg, Germany, entitled “Rethinking Proto-Semitic” and organized by profs Stefan Weninger and Michael Waltisberg. Despite some cancellations, the workshop had an amazing lineup of speakers—and a terrific atmosphere. Here’s my summary of the talks.

Leonid Kogan, “What can we learn from Eblaite on Proto-Semitic morphology?” Ongoing study and decipherment of the 24th-century BCE East Semitic language from Ebla, Syria shows the following features that are interesting for reconstruction:

1. personal pronouns: independent 1sg. /ʔanā/, 1pl. /nuḥnū/, 2m.sg. /ʔatta/, 2m.pl. /ʔattunu/, 3m.sg. /suwa/, 3f.sg. /siya/; suffixed 1du. /-nay/, 1pl. /-nu/, 2du. /-kumay(n)/, 3du. /-sumay(n)/
2. 3m.pl. prefix conjugation /ti-…-ū/
3. t-perfect, as in Mesopotamian Akkadian
4. autobenefactive use of the ventive /-am/
5. no subjunctive marker -u, unlike Mesopotamian Akkadian (this is big)
6. t-stem infinitives with both prefixation and infixation, like dar-da-bí-tum /tartappidum/ ‘to roam here and there’, cf. ra-ba-tum /rapādum/ ‘to roam’
7. nominal oblique “masculine” plural ending /-ay/, as reconstructed for Sargonic Akkadian and Assyrian and compatible with Babylonian; unlike Central Semitic *-ī-na
8. singular case endings preserved in the construct state and before pronominal suffixes, e.g. ba-lu da-a-tim /baʕlu daʕātim/ ‘owner of knowledge (nom.)’, me-gi-ru12-zu /migrusu/ ‘his favourite (nom.)’
9. productive use of terminative *-is, e.g. DU-ti-iš /halaktis/ ‘for the journey’
10. ‘twenty’ with -ū vowel like Central Semitic, not -ā like other languages

Maria Bulakh, “Intercalated *a as a plural marker in Soqotri and its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic”. While superficially hard to recognize (and Jorik and I didn’t attempt to in our paper on this subject), reconstruction of Modern South Arabian and especially Soqotri attest insertion of *-a- between the second and third radical of *CVCC- nouns in the plural. No external plural suffix though.

Me, “Rethinking the Proto-Semitic stative”. Slides here. Got some good suggestions for languages where I could go looking for a synchronic distinction between resultative *qatal-a and preterit *ya-qtul.

Ahmad Al-Jallad, “Revisiting the post-verbal morphemes *-u and *-n(V) in Semitic: a proposal for a unified theory”. The different verbal suffixes/enclitics shaped like -u and -n(V) in Akkadian, Central Semitic possibly Modern South Arabian, and Gurage (South Abyssinian) could all descend from the Proto-Semitic *=u(m) locative, which gained various subordinating and durative meanings. Central Semitic *ya-qtul-u instead of *ya-qattal-u for the imperfect could show a collapse in the distinction between *ya-qtul and *ya-qattal related to the rise of the West Semitic perfect *qatal-a.

Michael Waltisberg, “Issues of reconstructive methodology in Semitics”. Based on his review of Rebecca Hasselbach(-Andee)’s 2013 Case in Semitic, Waltisberg discussed some methodological questions like whether our reconstructed Proto-Semitic represents an actually spoken language or just maps correspondences between different languages and whether there is room for dialectal diversity and different chronological stages within a protolanguage. (Prof. Hasselbach-Andee sadly had to cancel her planned attendance.)

Lutz Edzard, “Linguistic divergence and convergence in Arabic and Semitic revisited”. As the most protolanguage-sceptic scholar at the workshop, Edzard reviewed some of his problems with the linear-descent-only family tree model where every language in a family descends from a kind of ancestral singularity with no internal diversity.

Vera Tsukanova, “What can modern Arabic dialects reveal about the etymology of the L-stem in Semitic?” The development of the L-stem (*qātal-) in historical Arabic suggests that it is more likely that this stem originally had a concrete meaning like applicative that was bleached in some languages than that it was originally vague and acquired its specific meaning in pre-Arabic.

Eran Cohen, “Semitic k-based similative particles—comparative and diachronic aspects”. Different Semitic particles starting with k- can be diachronically related to each other according to recognized historical pathways of development.

Na’ama Pat-El, “Homomorphs and reconstruction”. We are probably not dealing with one, syncretic morpheme but rather two homophonous ones in the cases of 1) prefix conjugation 2m.sg./3f.sg. *t-; (2) f.sg. abstract noun/m.pl. adjective suffix *-ūt-; (3) f.sg. noun or adjective/weak root verbal noun or infinitive suffix *-t-. In the latter, most controversial case, Pat-El invoked some evidence that the verbal nouns like Biblical Hebrew šéḇeṯ ‘sitting’ (from y-š-b) are syntactically masculine (e.g. Ps 133:1).

Stefan Weninger, “The Semitic Urheimat question: a review of the proposals and some perspectives”. An overview of some proposed points of dispersal for the Semitic languages since the late 19th century, the main contenders being the Arabian peninsula and East and North Africa. In the Q&A, Kogan added his own suggestion, published in an Encyclopedia Aethiopica article: Canaan.

Walter Sommerfeld, “The concept of a common Semitic cultural area (‘Kish Civilization’) in the 3rd millennium”. Contemporary evidence shows that there is no basis for Ignace Gelb’s concept of a distinctly Semitic culture in Early Dynastic northern Babylonia.

Apart from these talks, we spent about half the time in unstructured panel discussions, on phonology, morphology, methodology, and classification/Urheimat questions. Each discussion was kicked off by a short, stimulating talk, mostly by attendees who did not present full papers: Martin Kümmel, Michaël Cysouw, and Aaron Rubin. This was an experimental feature of the workshop, and I’m on the fence about it; the discussions were certainly fun and a lot of interesting points were brought up (e.g. Kogan: linguistic paleontology shows that Proto-Semitic speakers did know hyraxes but did not know oryxes, and only Canaan is [+hyrax][-oryx]), but it felt like they yielded fewer concrete insights than regular talks would have. It was a nice way to get some more people involved, though, also from adjacent fields (Indo-European/Indo-Iranian and Caucasian/Germanic linguistics).

All in all, it was wonderful to be able to fully geek out about Proto-Semitic and its daughters for a couple of days. There’s plans to publish proceedings, so hopefully in a few years you’ll be able to read all about these topics in full detail. Stay tuned.

#Akkadian #Arabic #Berber #conference #EastCushitic #Eblaite #Egyptian #Gurage #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

Welchen Stellenwert hat die Kultur der #Berber / #Amazigh im heutigen #Tunesien und wie ist deren eigenes Selbstverständnis? Heifel Ben Youssef u Sarah Ben Ali haben für ihre Film-Reprotage mit Angehörigen der Bevölkerungsgruppe u Forscher*innen gesprochen (ar/fr mit engl UT) youtu.be/MqhzOasvOmY

Währen in #Tunesien die Kultur der #Berber / #Amazigh für den #Tourismus gefördert u exotisiert wird, kämpfen Angehörige der Volksgruppe um Anerkennung. Von Rihab Boukhayatia via @nawaat (fr) https://nawaat.org/2025/01/15/reportage-a-zriba-olia-amazighs-tunisiens-reduits-au-folklore/

Forschende des Orientalischen Instituts der #UniLeipzig haben kürzlich gemeinsam mit ihrem Kollegen Viktor Forian-Szabo das Buch „Berberstudien, #Islamwissenschaft und #Arabistik in Leipzig“ veröffentlicht.

Das Werk befasst sich erstmals ausführlich mit den Leistungen des Leipziger Professors Hans Stumme, der als Pionier der akademischen Erforschung der Sprache und Kultur der #Berber (Imazighen) gilt.

Mehr erfahren: https://www.uni-leipzig.de/newsdetail/artikel/neues-buch-befasst-sich-erstmals-mit-leistungen-des-leipziger-professors-hans-stumme-2025-02-24

Währen in #Tunesien die Kultur der #Berber / #Amazigh für den #Tourismus gefördert u exotisiert wird, kämpfen Angehörige der Volksgruppe um Anerkennung. Von Rihab Boukhayatia via @nawaat (fr) https://nawaat.org/2025/01/15/reportage-a-zriba-olia-amazighs-tunisiens-reduits-au-folklore/

The Semitic languages show a regular correspondence of p in some languages and f in others. For instance, ‘mouth’ in Akkadian is p-ū; Biblical Hebrew pe; Biblical Aramaic pūm; Ge’ez ʾäf;1 and Classical Arabic fam-. (Modern South Arabian should have an f too, but has replaced this word.) This sound is uncontroversially reconstructed as Proto-Semitic *p, as in *p-ūm ‘mouth’.2 Traditionally, the change of *p to f was taken as a diagnostic feature of the South Semitic languages.

[p] to [f], a plosive changing into a fricative, is an example of lenition. Lenition is a common type of sound change, so we tell our students, so it makes sense that *p is the older sound and it changed to f. So far, so good.

While preparing my first couple of classes for Comparative Semitics this year, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about this anymore. Two things bother me:

1. The examples of p > f I know about are all part of a larger change affecting other plosives too, like Grimm’s Law (Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, *kw > Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *h, *hw and related changes) or Aramaic and Hebrew BGDKPT-spirantization. Is just p turning to f really so common? How about just f turning into p?
2. Most scholars don’t accept the family tree above anymore. In the current model, the changes look more like this:

Now we need three or four separate instances of *p > *f—just as I’m starting to doubt how common that change is. Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), who argue for this second family tree, explain this as an areal change that spread through contact. But what kind of a contact scenario should we think of here? Did f spread from Ancient South Arabian (if those languages even had it) to all its neighbours? It’s not like we see enough other shared contact features to confidently posit a South Semitic language area or something.

Looking at Afroasiatic, things don’t get better:

• Berber has f, not p
• Cushitic has f, not p
• Egyptian has p and f, but we don’t know which one corresponds to Semitic *p (if either)
• Chadic: same as Egyptian, to my knowledge
• (I’m not sure Omotic is Afroasiatic, still reading up on this)

So if we posit Proto-Semitic *p, either we need two more independent cases of *p > *f (Berber, Cushitic),3 maybe more (Egyptian? Chadic?), or we reconstruct *f for Proto-Afroasiatic and say Proto-Semitic changed *f to *p. At which point, why not cut out the middleman and keep *f, then change it to *p in East and Northwest Semitic? Just two changes instead of the minimum of six you need otherwise.

So, are there any good arguments to reconstruct Proto-Semitic *p—or should we press *f and leave behind this relic from theories that believed in a South Semitic subgrouping?

1. Probably influenced by Cushitic, but we can still take it as related to the other Semitic words. ↩︎
2. In my opinion, the only word known so far with a superheavy syllable, exceptionally permitted because the word is monosyllabic. ↩︎
3. I’m also really starting to doubt that Cushitic is one family. So maybe make that four (Berber, Beja, Agaw, East/South Cushitic). ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/11/07/froto-semitic/

#Afroasiatic #Agaw #Akkadian #Ancie #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthAr #Omotic #ProtoSemitic

I bet the service here is just amazigh.
-
#pun #wordplay #humor #barber #Berber #Amazigh #London

Week 18, 2024: What @[email protected] album languages grew the most this week?

So the top spot is shared by fictional languages and a language family. It's a little awkward. Go…Nigeria? 🥈🇳🇬🎉

📊 #Wikidata 🎶🎵 #ExMusica @[email protected] #Berber
#ⵜⵓⵜⵍⴰⵢⵜⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ #PidginNaịjirịa #NigerianPidgin