Lameen Souag
@lameensouag
Followers
4,249
Following
2,734
Media
668
Statuses
5,938
Linguist at LACITO, @CNRS (views mine, not theirs). Language change+contact in northern Africa: Berber, Songhay, Arabic... Old blog:
Joined October 2012
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
#เพียงเธอOnlyYouFullPilot
• 267518 Tweets
LINGORM NEW SERIES
• 263789 Tweets
#السعوديه_الصين
• 136864 Tweets
Paes
• 115475 Tweets
Sony
• 103143 Tweets
#西園寺さんは家事をしない
• 76308 Tweets
كادش
• 64216 Tweets
PS5 Pro
• 47039 Tweets
المنتخب السعودي
• 33785 Tweets
DAZN
• 32684 Tweets
سالم
• 32664 Tweets
مانشيني
• 31011 Tweets
バーレーン
• 30968 Tweets
高校生クイズ
• 26413 Tweets
OHMLENG X LIVEHOUSE
• 21367 Tweets
ZEEPRUK IN NY
• 18366 Tweets
BBS RAIN
• 16559 Tweets
レダーヨージロー
• 16140 Tweets
ヴィレヴァン
• 15126 Tweets
ゲーム機
• 14570 Tweets
فوز المنتخب
• 14237 Tweets
#COSAW24xZeePruk
• 13211 Tweets
Bafana Bafana
• 13150 Tweets
PSP2
• 11405 Tweets
#كلنا_معك
• 10757 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
Tabelbala, stretching tenuously between the vast sand seas and the barren basalt hills, the only oasis in the northern Sahara whose language - Korandje - comes from sub-Saharan Africa
tawərbət "Tabelbala"
kʷạṛa n dzyəy "village's language = Korandje"
7
65
229
A treasure trove on the Arabic dialect spoken in 11th century Sicily/Tunis, in the guise of a series of corrections of their solecisms
16
117
568
Three place names you probably wouldn't think were etymologically the same (but are):
Chester, England
Luxor, Egypt
El-Kseur, Algeria
12
71
547
Imagine standing in Timbuktu, a city that's been full of Arabic documents for 700 years, in a country where almost no one speaks French as a 1st language, and saying:
"Mali is a French-speaking place... anything that's been written in Arabic is from this invading force"🤡
9
184
477
"Learn Phoenician with the correct pronunciation: Grammar, vocabulary, general expressions, reading inscriptions"
Seeing a book this nerdy get published in Algeria gives me hope for the country's future.
9
20
228
Dozens of angry comments along the lines of "In every language apart from Hebrew"
Not one objecting to the omission of Burmese, Hausa, Tigrinya - also in war zones, with rather more speakers...
Did people think the list was complete? That there are only 40 languages on earth?
No
Non
Ne
не
Na
Ei
нет
жок
Nej
Nē
نه
Nei
ไม
Nee
Nem
Leai
Cha
Nie
όχι
لا
नहीं
Não
没有
Nein
ні
Níl
Maya
Nu
Nihil
いや
Hayır
아니
Ingen
ਨਹੀਂ
Hapana
žiadny
Không
होईन
Mba
In every language,
NO MEANS NO.
#orangetheworld
#16days
#GenerationEquality
2K
5K
11K
10
17
185
The year is 1351. Ibn Battuta, the furthest-ranging traveller of the medieval world, has turned his path towards Mali. In Sijilmasa, Morocco's gateway to the inland Sahara, he joins a caravan heading for Taghaza, led by Abu Muhammad Yendekan of the Masufa tribe...
Tabelbala, stretching tenuously between the vast sand seas and the barren basalt hills, the only oasis in the northern Sahara whose language - Korandje - comes from sub-Saharan Africa
tawərbət "Tabelbala"
kʷạṛa n dzyəy "village's language = Korandje"
7
65
229
3
65
185
Exciting, indignation-provoking lead: Cambridge undergrads are no longer being taught "gendered German"!
Banal actual content for the minority who read beyond the lede: Cambridge undergrads are going to learn how to use German's increasingly frequent gender-inclusive asterisk
4
30
169
Here, Ibn Quraysh gives the earliest statement of regular sound correspondences I'm aware of:
حتى لا يكون بين العبراني والعربي في ذلك من الاختلاف إلا ما بين ابتدال الصاد والضاد والڱيمل والجيم والطت والظاء والعين والغين والهاء والخاء والزاي والذال.
7
17
149
This treaty renders Portuguese "Guiné" (Guinea) as Arabic غناوة ghināwah.
Why the w, when Modern Standard Arabic has غينيا ghīnyā?
Well, Guinea/Guiné comes from Andalusi dialect ginēwa (=Algerian gnāwa).
This comes from Berber (Amazigh) ignawən ⵉⴳⵏⴰⵡⵏ.
MSA forgot :)
📜 Traité de paix et d'amitié entre la République d'Alger et le Portugal datant de 1813.
5
29
109
12
35
156
The earliest known Berber translation (into Tashelhiyt) of surat al-Fatiha, copied in 1694. (Afa 2015:44, الدليل الجذاذي للمخطوطات والوثائق الأمازيغية; many thanks to El Ouafi Nouhi for showing me this essential source.)
3
36
150
How to say "he turned yellow" across Arabic dialects - what have I got wrong? And what do you really say in different parts of Libya?
(Orange is انصفر inṣafar, gray is صوفر ṣōfar)
31
18
131
@RichardDawkins
Oh dear. Even the slightest acquaintance with linguistics, or a brief perusal of 19th c. dialect studies, should be enough for realising this claim is utter rubbish - although, given that the byline contains "The Times", one should have been able to guess that in the first place.
1
3
129
@JonathanACBrown
By and large, educated adults don't _speak_ Fusha either, unless giving a lecture. They speak dialect with variable amounts of Fusha vocabulary thrown in. It's almost never socially acceptable to have a conversation in proper Fusha, irrespective of how educated you are.
2
11
122
This is darkly hilarious. What I don't understand is how he expected to get away with it; does he really think no one in his target audience speaks Arabic, or has he just got a severe case of Dunning-Kruger about his Arabic competence? Or is he just confabulating on the fly?
Not a Borat Sketch! The IDF Spokesman points to a random calendar at the Rantisi hospital as "evidence" of a "hostage keepers' list" with "terrorists' names".
But the ONLY thing on that "list" is literally the days of the week (Saturday-Friday).
No tunnels, no weapon stash...🧵
2K
21K
46K
5
25
126
English speakers have no word for "saakuun", and therefore have difficulty planning more than two days ahead.
</pop-whorf-sarcasm>
We often view Somali through the lens of another language and end up focusing on what it lacks (Somali doesn’t have a word for X?!?). By centering Somali, we can better appreciate how rich it is. The way we describe time is just one example: how do you say Sakuun in English??
20
108
452
5
20
116
Looks like overheated rhetoric about Arabic being in danger is over 1000 years old. (To be fair, in Sicily it actually was...)
"Corruption has attacked the language... Every day its pillars are being demolished, its knights are dying... its lights are being turned out..."
4
16
115
Tfw people think loanwords remain eternally foreign:
"Like so many of the towns perceived to be English or English-speaking, London's name has nothing to do with the English language (add to the list Manchester, Dover, York, Leeds, Newcastle, and Canterbury.)"
9
15
112
Just out: "How a West African language becomes North African, and vice versa" - on lexical-typological convergence in the Sahel and how this has played out as languages enter or leave the area
(always happy to send offprints to anyone who wants them)
5
26
112
"A burglar broke the window" entails "The window broke", but you don't normally say the latter if you know the former; it flouts Grice's Maxim of Quantity. Tempting to call intransitive uses of a labile verb to describe agentive situations "exonerative voice"
2
29
113
Latin pascha "Easter" became "Eid"
in Berber: t(a)-faska
in Lingua Franca: pascha (see the ~1808 extract below)
Conversely:
Arabic ʕīd "Eid, festival" became "Easter"
in Maltese: Għid
6
20
104
How do intelligent, knowledgeable people end up believing misinformation?
We love to blame it on shady FB shares and WhatsApp groups - but sometimes it's because of respectable broadsheet newspapers.
3
35
98
It's striking how little North African bilingualism often compromises with monolingual expectations. Half the written info below is in Arabic, half in French, but there's no overlap between their content; the reader is simply expected to know both.
3
13
102
"Kabyle in Arabic Script: A History without Standardisation" (by me, in Open Access, just published after a long wait). A bit technical, but comments welcome!
4
34
96
A citation is not a "like". You cite sources to:
- avoid plagiarism;
- give context.
If people are choosing what to cite simply on the basis of who wrote it, then something needs fixing.
8
19
90
كتبت مقالة حول:
"أولى المفرداث الأمازيغية في العربية".
نُشرت اليوم بعد حوالي أربع سنوات. أتمنى أن تكون مفيدة.
My 1st published article in Arabic, "The first Amazigh borrowings into Arabic", came out today.
(FR/EN title+abstracts are a bit off.)
7
34
88
An original manuscript of Ibn Quraysh al-Taharti's 10th century attempt at comparative linguistics is online. The Berber section is on pp. 69v-70r:
"وبالبربرية فمثل أرياد* وهو الأسد"
[And in Berber, for example, aryad, which is the lion.]
6
26
91
@ELuttwak
Fascinating. How cunning of those missing youths to arrange in advance to get themselves photographed looking "like a Californian youngster", so as to fool _real_ people into thinking of them as fellow human beings whose deaths might matter.
0
3
88
Algerian Arabic دلّاع dəllaʕ "watermelon" (Moroccan دلّاح dllaħ) goes back 3000+ years, with cognates in New Kingdom Egyptian and Mishnaic Hebrew, as I was reminded in Gary Rendsburg's UCL talk today; see Hoch:
(and for MH, eg: )
7
27
88
The currently oldest known watermelon seed is apparently from the (Tamahaq-speaking) Tadrart Acacus region of SW Libya, 4000 BC - suggesting that watermelons originated in Africa rather than India.
The Siwi word for "watermelon" is taməkʷsa.
0
3
23
2
26
86
People are now actively hunting (with limited success) for sociolinguistic variables that mark non-humanness.
My point here is not that I dislike "delve," though I do, but that it's a sign that text was written by ChatGPT.
724
489
6K
1
14
91
Only in Yemen will you hear perfect Fusha with this phonology:
[ɟ] (voiced palatal stop, not affricate) for ج
[g] for ق
In a recent interview, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council, responded to the BBC presenter when asked: “What’s your connection to what’s happening in Palestine? You are miles and miles away.”
10
150
346
6
12
89
There's really no need to embarrass yourself like this, Senator; even if you can't find a dictionary in your local bookshop, there's a decent dictionary of Palestinian Arabic available free online:
The curriculum also glorifies “intifada” in it’s K-3 curriculum. Intifada, in the specific context of Israel, means killing Jews via stabbing, bombing, or other means.
837
121
676
3
27
82
Algerian Arabic:
skərfaj اسكرفاج = cheese grater
skərfəj اسكرفج = to grate
This looks suspiciously like a Romance borrowing (maybe kin to Italian sgraffio "scratch"), but I haven't found a good source... any ideas?
12
7
88
Whatever definition of "colonisation" you use, being ruled by outsiders is a very different experience depending on whether they:
-want to take your land and get rid of you (settlement);
-want to change your identity (integration);
-or simply want your labour (empire).
7
15
77
Enjoying a dictionary of Bukhara Arabic (Vinnikov 1962) - one of the only Arabic dialects to put the verb at the end:
anā `arabīya matḥáddas "I speak Arabic" (p. 60)
anā, márati isnenítna i kolḫóz šuġúl nesū "My wife and I both work at the kolkhoz" (p. 185)
6
9
77
Semantic narrowing is the key step in this miscontrual: in each case, a term with a broad meaning is reinterpreted as referring primarily or exclusively to whichever subset of its referents is seen as most threatening. ("Fatwa" is another case in point.)
Arabic words like “shaheed,” “jihad,” and “intifada” are regularly mistranslated or misconstrued in English-language media to stereotype and demonize the movement for Palestinian liberation.
But what do they really mean?
🧵1/8
43
8K
14K
1
24
80
Giving a talk in Malta tomorrow:
"Berber (Amazigh) elements in Maltese"
4
14
78
New publication on/in Tunisian Berber, by Fethi Ben Maammer - a collection of annotated folktales, with recordings apparently to be made available online :
Tinfas seg Jerba
"Tales from Jerba"
2
13
71
@rhaplord
That map really is pretty weird. Wolofs and Nubians and Somalis are supposed to be white now?
2
2
75
There's an old joke about an Egyptian teacher in 1960s Algeria trying to buy stamps:
-أعطيني طابع بريدي.
-؟؟
-طابع بريدي، زي دا (يُشير إليه)
-هاذا تامبر، واش بيك ماتعرفش العربية؟
1
4
74
"Nhopiw" and contact linguistics: A thread
In Algerian Arabic, French verbs are borrowed all the time, almost always by putting -a/i at the end, like Arabic weak verbs:
"pray!" ṣəlli!
"freeze!" kõžli!
"I prayed" ṣəllit
"I froze" kõžlit
"he prayed" ṣəlla
"he froze" kõžla...
4
26
73
One of the great constants of toponymy is that insecure nationalists care more about aesthetics than about history. There are many ways to do this:
4
22
76
"Oh kitty, you've left us, never to come back
You used to be one of us, just like a kid
Defending us from harm, you had our back,
Fighting beetles and rats - that's what you did."
4
13
72
In "Force equals mass times acceleration", the only originally English word is "times". The rest is from Latin.
Yet the sentence is in English. If the speakers of a language regularly use a given word, it's part of their language, no matter where it came from.
2
8
73
@FriederikeLupke
And many of these languages are widely spoken and growing rapidly...
-More people speak Swahili than Turkish
-More people speak Hausa than Italian
-More people speak Twi than Greek
-More people speak Somali than Swedish
2
11
75
The word "onion" occurs exactly once in both the Qur'an (baṣal) and the Bible (bəṣālīm), relating to the same incident in each case.
I wonder if there are any other words of which that holds true?
6
18
68
A fun polysemy in Alur, apparently pointing to a history of inter-ethnic exogamy:
"speak a language" = "ask in marriage"
2
9
71
I didn't even know there was a special word for "the bits of dung and urine that cling to the wool of sheep", much less that it was commonly mispronounced. Truly a rich language
2
4
67
Siwi (Egypt) - not unusually for Berber - has at least 8 distinct inherited Berber plural formations plus another 12 Arabic plural formations, most involving word-internal change. In this domain, heavy long-term contact has unambiguously increased morphological complexity.
2
8
70
A clear statement of diglossia - Fusha only in its place:
"The people became equal in error and solecism, except for a few. That few is distinguished… in correspondence and reading books and editing; but in conversation… they cannot go against what the masses have adopted."
2
2
69
I finally gave in and posted an analysis of that clip:
"I don't speak Arabic, this is in our Darja"
@frmachmag
7
27
69
How to say "become red!" across Berber (first imperative/aorist, then the imperfective, as in "don't become red!")
What have I missed?
(If "red" doesn't work for you here, try "thin": izdid / zdid/ zded / etc.
5
10
62
A lot to unpack in this picture, but sociolinguistically: the choice of English and no French for the banner sends a signal, simply by contrasting with the habit of French as the default foreign language in Algeria...
2
17
66
Isaac Newton dated the unification of Egypt to ~900 BC (current estimate: <3000 BC), and identified Sesostris with Sheshonk (1000 years apart).
Some of the conclusions of today's greatest minds will look as misguided as this in a few centuries. If only we knew which ones.
3
10
75
So I took a look at the FB page of Israa University Gaza (motto: "Israa University aims to become a world leader in science and knowledge and research to contribute to growth and progress"), and started browsing.
1
14
68
You could practically write a sociolinguistics thesis just on the reactions to this tweet.
I think the negative reactions are not just due to typical self-hatred, but also to the metaphor chosen: Darja is usually seen as "rough" rather than smooth
2
8
64
@HatimAlTai2
@JonathanACBrown
That's the double bind. You're supposed to perfect your Fusha without ever being allowed to immerse yourself in it - and to master dialect without ever being allowed to study it.
1
4
62
How many words does an unwritten language actually contain? There's no good upper bound, but we can safely say the lower bound is at least an order of magnitude away from 250, and probably far more
"A lexicographer estimated that the average 19th-century peasant used a vocabulary of 250 words, an educated person 5,000, and Shakespeare 27,780, though that last number is disputed” (Max Hastings, The Times)
Does that figure of 250 make origin of language seem less mysterious?
439
189
2K
2
5
63
Eid Mubarak everybody!
This Algerian Eid song has an interesting linguistic archaism in its first line:
مزّينهُ نهار اليوم
məzzinu nhaṛ lyum
"How good the day of today is!"
where məzzinu is < ما أزينه mā ʔazyanahu, a form scarcely if ever used in Algerian dialect today
5
12
65
Page from a new book by Ibba Brahim, of Djanet, illustrating points of articulation in Tamahaq (Tuareg).
(Wish I had a copy, but I don't.)
4
8
69
If your reaction to an apparently well-informed person saying "2+2=5" is along the lines of
"What must the context be for that to make sense?"
rather than
"YOU'RE SO WRONG LET ME EXPLAIN"
then you may be ready to do linguistic fieldwork.
0
11
66
Dialect writing is on the rise, but Arabizi is obsolescent. Every year it gets easier to just type in Arabic script, and every year more Arabic speakers get online who aren't comfortably bilingual in English or French. Count the Google hits:
"ماسمعتش": 111,000
"masma3tch": 3,490
12
6
63
Untranslatable diglossia joke in this sign:
"تبا لكم جميعا [Damn you all]
- in the English of films"
(See, English films are subtitled in stilted Fusha, and lots of people are trying to make protest signs in English, but not many speak it well enough... ah, never mind.)
9
14
62
"I've always been surprised, in the Paris metro, to hear announcements in English, in Spanish, even in Chinese, but never in Arabic."
"Pour les autorités (et une grande partie de l'opinion), le bon Arabe c'est celui qui oublie sa langue, sa culture et bien sûr sa religion."
0
14
33
6
13
61
This is what standard language ideology does to your brain: it blinds you to what's right in front of your eyes and ears.
1
7
59
wlid l-blad (وليد البلاد) "son of the country"
= a local
is a routine Algerian expression.
But today I heard for the first time
nsib l-blad (نسيب البلاد) "in-law of the country"
= someone married to a local.
3
5
63
No major language of Algeria has phonemic mid vowels; French /e/ and /ɛ/ often get pronounced as /i/.
In French, the city of Bejaia/Bgayet was Bougie, whence the generic French word for "candle".
Thus:
Bougie-vous=Bougez-vous (Move)
ou (or)
Tizi-vous=Taisez-vous (shut up) ↓
0
17
63
If Laozi had become a linguist, he would definitely have argued for the existence of zero morphemes
(below from Wu 2016)
1
6
63
Learning to write Tifinagh without books, blackboards, or schools
2
12
60
Algerian politicians: Tamazight should be written in Arabic or Tifinagh characters!
Activists: Oh, so you're going to write something in Tamazight then?
Politicians: Haha no, but how about a compromise: we'll stop you from publishing in Latin characters
It took only 4 issues of Algeria‘s🇩🇿 only Tamazight-language national daily „Tighremt“ to be banned.
Authorities blocked the 5th issue, stating that Latin characters are being used as reason. Editor Fodil Mezali says „decision is strictly political“.
2
18
23
8
17
56
Apparently the French state doesn't know what an abaya is or how to define it (much less a qamis), but decided to ban them anyway.
3
19
60
If this turned up in a medieval manuscript, they'd be calling it ""Middle Arabic"". Unambiguously Fusha words like "banana" combining with unambiguously Darja ones like "carrots"...
(The original point of the picture, from FB, was the prices. But what can I say, I'm a linguist.)
3
2
58
OK fine - this thread contains enough reasonably common misconceptions to be worth correcting...
2
15
59
Politeness, in any language of North Africa, is largely the art of exchanging blessings: "may God make it easy", "may He increase your prosperity", "may God heal"…
Makes me wonder: what do uncompromising laicists do instead? Switch to French?
11
7
55
I expected this book to include a plethora of blessings for every occasion, and it did. I wasn't, however, prepared for how many of them would be specifically about olive trees.
2
5
56
Eid Mubarak to all, and especially to those celebrating it in Palestine!
Your Algerian Arabic word of the day (with Leipzig glossing) is:
2
7
59
Burkina Faso demotes French from "official language " to "working language", following in Mali's footsteps.
Still not sure what changes this entails in practice, but anything that decreases the linguistic gap between officialdom and regular folks would be good news...
Le Burkina Faso révise sa Constitution et relègue le français au rang de « langue de travail »
5
8
46
1
3
56
First proverb I've ever seen with an exponential function - apparently, for the Tuareg, the spread of gossip can be described by the equation 3 x 2^n.
"Speech between two, when three hear, they become six; when six hear, they become twelve."
1
11
58
In Dellys, a casual goodbye is often just expressed with:
هاكذا
hakđa
"thus, like this, in this way"
Where else in the world, if anywhere, does this happen? (i.e. the use of a proximal manner demonstrative alone as a leavetaking-expression)
18
2
56
Happy Eid!
Eid Mubarak!
Sahha Eidkoum!
Ṣeḥḥa lɛid-nwen!
Tafaska tameggazt!
ʕuqba lgabəl!
Wa kay yeesi!
4
6
54
This shop takes it further: you have to know both languages to read a single sign on a single piece of paper! ("Frozen water available")
3
5
58
Learn Arabic - such a bargain, you get 1 language for the price of 2!
@HatimAlTai2
@JonathanACBrown
That's the double bind. You're supposed to perfect your Fusha without ever being allowed to immerse yourself in it - and to master dialect without ever being allowed to study it.
1
4
62
7
6
53
Pourquoi dit-on en français "Kabyle" /kɑbil/, plutôt que "Kabaïl", alors qu'en kabyle et en arabe c'est "Leqbayel"? D'où vient ce /i/ ?
D'une mauvaise lecture de l'anglais. Le premier à écrire "Kabyle", T. Shaw (1738), l'aurait prononcé /kəˈbɑɪl/.
2
11
52
Totally irrelevant to linguistics, just for a change:
This account gives a fascinating glimpse into 6th-c. Christianity, much of which may look more like shariah or halakhah to a modern reader than like modern Church of England practice. We see food purity rules:
1
13
54
Heard a Darja word I hadn't heard in a while:
يتشنڨل ičəngel
"he hooks"
It's from Turkish çengel "hook", and ultimately Persian چنگال (which is apparently partially cognate with English "hook"?!)
7
2
52
"Meat is named:
laḥm in Arabic [لَحْم]
māṣ in Hindi [मांस]
et in Turkish
gušt in Kurdish and Persian [گُشت]
bāṣār in Hebrew [בָּשָׂר]
??rwā in Syriac [?]
tifiyyi and also aqsum in Berber [ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵢⵢⵉ, ⴰⴽⵙⵓⵎ]
j?ja in Latin [?]
qarnī in Roman [carne]
in Greek"
.‖ Tifiyyi. (لحم وبالبربرية "تيفيّي" و "آكسوم" أيضا.).(Al-Idrisi. XIIe siècle).
3
2
22
9
8
53
Finished this book now - first descriptive grammar I've read from cover to cover in Arabic in a very long time (ever?) An important contribution to Berber descriptive linguistics despite the transcription problems.
1
7
52
Still reeling from this account of, among rather more important things, linguistic elicitation (ca. 1819)
4
4
54
A remarkable 19th c. manuscript from Ghadames in Libya, using a version of the Ghadamsi numerals described by Lanfry
3
16
46
Which Eurasian+African language families distinguish masculine and feminine agreement classes?
1. Afroasiatic; Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic, and Chadic all have precisely those two genders, no more. (Omotic doesn't, but Omotic is not a family and doubtfully Afroasiatic.)
3
17
54
🇩🇿: "clear the table" = ərfəd əṭṭabla ارفد الطابلة "pick the table up".
People used to eat off short tables (mayda مايدة), which they picked up and took back to the kitchen when done. Now tables are tall and stay put, but the expression remains the same...
As you go further back in time, the Skeuomorph principle becomes essential to reconstructing past cultures. Here's a prehistoric woven basket, from central Iraq, masquerading as a pot; almost no actual baskets survive from 8000 yrs ago, but see their phantom presence, in the clay
3
2
43
3
9
53
Turns out the only surviving Latin Manichean document was found in Algeria, in a cave near Tebessa, and is available online:
1
12
51
Canarian numerals in 1341, as written down by Boccaccio. Obviously Berber, except for 3, which is anomalous
(Thank you BNCF: )
3
12
51
@JonathanACBrown
A good solution, since you don't live in the Arab world; trickier if you do, I think...
I have known a couple of families that tried that in Algeria. It created a lot of tensions.
3
1
51
"Amazigh" is usually popularly translated as "free man", but - in the rare cases (S Morocco, SW Algeria) where it is attested as a common noun rather than just an ethnic name - it rather corresponds to "master, lord, gentleman" (سيد)
2
10
51
This might be my new favourite semantic shift:
SON-IN-LAW > BAT, because an Ahaggar Tuareg son-in-law veils his face in front of his mother-in-law
(Foucauld)
3
12
54
PSA: When a language has been passed on through local institutions for over a millennium in a given country, it's self-delusion to call it "foreign"
4
7
45
كلمة "لوبيا" أصلها من السومرية، لغة جنوب عراق القديمة، وهي أول لغة كتبت في العالم
Weekly Georgian Etymology: ლობიო lobio, kidney bean stew w/ herbs & spices. From Persian لوبیا lôbiyâ, < Anc Greek λόβια, pl of λόβιον cowpea, < Akkadian 𒇻𒂠𒊬 lubbu, < Sumerian 𒇻𒂠𒊬 lub cowpea. Now a central part of Georgian cuisine, it's not attested until the 17th century.
8
30
153
2
10
48
In Ramadan - when practicable - Muslims pray long communal evening prayers called Tarawih (Arabic تراويح).
In Zenaga, the Berber language of Mauritania, Tarawih has a non-Arabic name:
təžəgrärən
How did Zenaga get its own name for Tarawih? Read on...
1
16
47