Talk:Berber languages

Tamazighth?

I think that "THamazighth" should be mentioned as another translation for "Berber language" as in many regions no words start with "T". In addition, neither the terms "Berber" nor "Tamazighth" is used to describe the language people speak in many regions. Only the "dialect" name is used (as Thakbaylith in Kabilya and Thashawith for the Shawi Language in Aures Algeria) Josef.b

Grammar Section / Page splitting

Right now, the sections on morphology/syntax take up more of the page than seems to be standard (looking at other language pages in better standing). Also, I think currently there's not enough information on how different Berber languages compare to each other re: the common morphological and syntactical features.

I'm currently thinking either of the following would be a good move:

1) Move the Morphology/Syntax sections into a new page ("Grammar of the Berber Languages" ?) and add even more tables to compare languages, or replace the current tables with new tables that include multiple languages (like the table following "In Kabyle and Tuareg, the perfect of verbs that express a quality is conjugated with suffixes: " in the page right now) (The "Berber" chapter in "The Afroasiatic languages (2012)" even already has charts for multiple languages for the same grammatical features!)

2) Move the individual examples/charts into the pages for each individual language, and then just reference the grammar pages for those languages on this page (like in Finnic languages#General characteristics) Blueshiftofdeath (talk) 14:36, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Most of the material was added here:[1]. I trust that the original text in the German WP was written by someone with a solid knowledge about the Berber languages, but I can see a major OR issue in the current version of the text (which speaks a bit against solution 1): many generalized statements are unsourced, and only the examples are verifiable. E.g. things like:

• "The personal pronouns of Berber can be divided into two main groups: free forms and clitics, the latter being further classified according to their syntactic function. The following example forms are taken from Tahaggart, a dialect of Tuareg..." – The Tahaggart data is sourced, but which source tells us that this is a recurrent feature in Berber languages?
• "In Kabyle and Tuareg, the perfect of verbs that express a quality is conjugated with suffixes..." – Is this meant to imply that this is a characteristic particular only to Kabyle and Tuareg? And if so, where is the source in support of it?

Typological overviews are fun to write, and again, I trust that someone wrote this piece in good faith and with considerable expertise, but for WP, generalized statements need explicit sources. So to be on the safe side, we should follow secondary sources such as Kossmann's chapter in the 2012 volume, or Mohamed Elmedlaoui's chapter in this book (both of which I used to write this short section: Cushitic_languages#Typological_characteristics). Once the text is solidly based on secondary sources, it will of course be ok to flesh out generalized statements with primary language data from individual language sources (if space allows). –Austronesier (talk) 20:53, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good! I'll probably take a stab at it in the next week or two. Blueshiftofdeath (talk) 03:19, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

I've made a first pass at rewriting the Morphology and Syntax sections (which I've merged for now into one section); will make a second pass when I get access to "Semitic and Afroasiatic: Challenges and Opportunities", which will probably be in a few weeks. In any case I believe that everything in the section now is explicitly taken from a secondary source.

(I ended up deleting most of the existing material because either it didn't seem to be generalized, it was potentially out of date (it seems like a lot of advancements were made around the 1950s) and there were newer sources that covered similar material, or it was impossible for me (or probably the typical English Wikipedia user) to verify because the source was in French.) Blueshiftofdeath (talk) 03:26, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Deleting material because it is in a language you don't know is not acceptable. Foreign-language sources do count as sources on English Wikipedia; if you can't verify it because you don't know the language, the appropriate of course of action is to let it be. Also, as far as I can see, a lot of the material you deleted did have recent English-language sources, e.g. much of the stuff in the syntax section. It is possible that some of the explicit or implicit claims in the material I translated from the German wikipedia were not adequately sourced (I haven't checked its sources myself), but at least it did include tables showing examples of what the grammar of a Berber language might look like. As things stand, you have just deleted that and, in most cases, not added any comparable or adequate replacement for most of the tables, nor even moved them to the articles on the respective individual languages. All in all, this is a rather destructive approach to other people's work.--62.73.72.3 (talk) 12:03, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

"Berber" as term for ancient languages

The common ancestor of Berber languages (and genetics) lived just 2000 years ago. So, all languages that existed earlier cannot be called "Berber", they're "para-Berber" at most, in cases in which they actually are. It's a shame that Wikipedia doesnt have an article on Ancient Libyan language, which is obviously a very ancient language and played an important part in history. --95.24.66.180 (talk) 16:49, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

See Numidian language. –Austronesier (talk) 21:21, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Consonants borrowed from arabic?

The Wikipedia article still says that tamazight took from arabic the ق ح ع sounds even though it has been shown through paleographists,berberists,and egyptologists that these sounds were used in the oldest recorded amazigh language which is that of the qeheq tribe in egypt of which the oldest amazigh text is named after before the arrival of the arabs by more than 1000 years,so i would want the editor's of this page to take this into consideration and discuss this matter so we can keep this article up to date with the latest data and findings. ⴰⴽⵙⵉⵍ ⴰⴱⴰⵄⵇⵉⵍ (talk) 00:58, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

My understanding is that even if Amazigh languages used to have those sounds, they likely lost them over time and then subsequently borrowed them from Arabic.

That being said, the connection between the Qeheq tribe and Amazigh languages is interesting! I'm seeing a potential source for this here: https://shs.cairn.info/revue-etudes-et-documents-berberes-2023-1-page-319?tab=resume but it'll be hard for me to integrate it myself due to the language barrier. Not sure if @Austronesier will have better luck? Blueshiftofdeath (talk) 05:23, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

@Blueshiftofdeath: Thanks for the ping! It seems there is no language barrier as the article is written in English. The only barrier is the (pretty modest) paywall :) But I agree with you that the findings from an early (para-)Berber language won't change the fact that in the sound system of extant Berber languages, the pharyngeals and /q/ only in occur in loan vocabulary, even if If Qeheq data requires us to expand the number of Proto-Berber segments to accomodate for their reflexes in Qeheq. According to Kossmann, only two pharyngealized sounds need to be reconstructed for Proto-Berber if based on non-borrowed vocabulary in extant Berber languages.

Amazigh languages have plenty of inherited roots from Proto-Afro-Asiatic with pharyngeals, including /q/. /q/ is not a foreign sound, it's the natural tense allophone of /ɣ/ (ɣɣ>q/qq, ɣt>q, etc.). And all these consonants (q, ḍ, ṭ and ẓ) are in fact theorized by Berber specialists to be derived from previous ejectives, which are common throughout the Afro-Asiatic family as in Omotic, Chadic, Cushitic, and even some Semitic languages. The only uncontroversially borrowed pharyngeal consonant is the voiced pharyngeal approximant ʕ, from Arabic. And even that occurs in Berber words! (as a rather spontaneous innovation from /ɣ/ in random words). Il Qathar (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 18:20, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

/q, ḍ, ṭ and ẓ/ are not pharyngeals (only /ħ/ and /ʕ/ are), they're pharyngealized. Besides, as you say, /q/ is not a phonological segment, [q] originally appears as an allophone of *ɣ unless phonemicized through the introduction of Arabic loanwords. (That's why it says "nongeminated" in the lede). Also, being uvular doesn't necessarily make it align structurally with pharyngealized *ḍ and *ẓ. Historically, yes, provided these sounds can be derived straightforwardly from the Proto-Afroasiatic ejectives. –19:57, 10 September 2024 (UTC)Austronesier (talk)

Why is it in the initial section?

The last paragraph in the article's initial section, which details amount of words derived from Arabic, should not be included in this part of the article, as it is meant to introduce the topic. Instead, this content would be more appropriate in a section like "Influence on Other Languages" which already exists, where the impact of Arabic on Berber can be discussed in detail. Furthermore, the paragraph is too general, especially with statements like "Almost all Berber languages took from Arabic the pharyngeal fricatives..." and similar sentences that follow. These need more nuance.

To clarify, Maarten Kossmann’s Berber-Arabic Language Contact can be cited here to show that the uvular stop /q/ existed in Berber languages independently of Arabic influence. Additionally, Lameen Souag's Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt): A Study in Linguistic Contact (pp. 34-37) explores how the Siwa Berbers maintained their linguistic structure despite Arabic contact, which would provide further support for this argument. TahaKahi (talk) 08:29, 9 October 2024 (UTC)