back a while ago i mentioned i were reading fatima sadiqi's sexy-ass women, gender & language in morocco. well, i managed to get my filthy baboon-paws on her grammaire du berbère (ISBN 2-7384-5919-6) and my life may now be complete. it describes the dialect/language of the aït hassan imazighn, a group living near marrakesh in morocco. it's not an easy thing to try to learn, at least for native english speakers - i suspect perhaps native speakers of a semitic language would have an easier time with the emphatic consonants, laryngeals and pharyngeals. like maghrebin arab dialects, most berber languages have only three vowels, unmarked for length; what in ancient times were long vowels and diphthongs have retained as [a], [i], [u] and all others have been lost. thus we have the sentence:
idda hmad s ssuq yawid atay
"Ahmad est parti au souk & a apporté du thé".
but now let's review the breakdown of this sentence:
i dda hmad s ssuq i awi d atay
il est-parti Ahmad au souk il a-apporté ici thé.
that's right, kiddos. there are word-initial consonant clusters - there's even a verb kk "passer" and a verb ssh (geminated [sh]) "manger". here's another doozy of a sample sentence:
tqqn tflut
"la porte s'est fermée" (the door is closed). two words, one vowel between them. and the difference between the causative and non-causative verb is the prefix -sh, which can assimilate:
kshm 'enter', shkshm 'to make enter'
nz 'to sell', znz 'to make sell'
and my current throat-gargling favourite, zh3l 'to do', zzh3l 'to make (to) do'.
that's right. that's a zh as in rouge followed by an 3ayn and an l, as compared with TWO zhs, 3ayn and i.
yeah, so it's right up with there the native languages of the northwest coast. only without the tones. (damnit!)
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