North African Linguistics

Azul fellawen! It's finally time for another lesson in Zuaran Berber. First off, some basic vocabulary, including masculine, feminine, and plural nouns. Note that masculine nouns typically start with /a/ and feminine nouns typically start and end with /t/. Masculine plurals typically begin with /i/ and end with /n/. Feminine plurals typically begin with /ti/ and end with /n/ but there may be some other plural patterns. أزول فلاون! إنه أخيرا وقت درس جديد بالتويلولت! أولا, بعض المفردات الأساسية ومنهم أسماء في صيغة المذكر والمؤنث والجمع. لاحظوا أن الاسم المذكر عادة يبدأ ب(ا) وأن الاسم المؤنث يبدأ وينتهي ب(ت). يبدأ الجمع المذكر ب(اِ أو اِي) وينتهي ب(ن) وبدأ جمع المؤنث ب(تِ أو تي) وينتهي ب(ن) كذلك ولكن قد توجد تراكيب أخرى للجمع. Twilult English تويلولت عربي afrux boy افروخ ولد tafruxt girl تافروخت بنت bushir older word for boy بوشير ولد (كلمة قديمة) ibushiren boys ايبوشيرن أولاد tibushiren girls تيبوشيرن بنات akshish young man اكشيش شاب takshisht young woman تاكشيشت شابة awal speech اوا...

I think it would be nice to make some information on Twilult more easily publicly available, so I'm going to start a series of posts about the language, starting with the basics that I know so far. As I learn more, I'll keep adding posts. أعتقد أنه سيكون من اللطيف أن اجعل بعض المعلومات ان لغة أهل زوارة أي تويلولت متاحة علنا بسهولة أكثر فسأبدأ سلسلة بوستات عن اللغة وسوف أبدأ بالأساسيات التي أعرفها. خلال رحلتي في تعلم هذه اللغة سأضل أكتب أكثر. Today will be something simple -- personal pronouns. بوست اليوم عن شيء بسيط وهو الضمائر الشخصية. A note about transliteration: I've used <e> to represent the schwa, which can sound like a schwa or often to my ears like a short /ɪ/ like the <i> in "bit." <ch> represents the /tʃ/ like in English "chair" and <sh> is /ʃ/ like in English "share." The Arabic transliteration is based on ways I've seen native speakers write informally. I tried my hand at a Tifinagh transliteration but I...

So several months ago I made a Zuaran friend on the internet when I was trying to find a partner to practice my Tachelhit with. I tried looking up his variety of Berber (Twilult) to find there are almost no resources, and what little there is is fairly old. There is a grammar of Zuaran Berber, but the linguist conducted all of his "field work" with a single speaker offsite in the UK, and the grammar mostly only details the verbal morphology. It also includes a small corpus including a long story and some dialogues. My friend has been on and off teaching me bits of his language, and we've been communicating in mostly Egyptian Arabic! Even though he's Libyan, he's able to speak some Masry since he lived for a few years in Cairo. We were talking about how it's important to document the local language -- linguistic minorities suffered greatly under Gaddafi's regime and now that there are some initiatives to start using indigenous languages in schools, changes ...