<h1>About the Author</h1>
Hongwei Zhang is a PhD candidate in Comparative Semitic Languages in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He completed his master's degree in Arabic at Shanghai Overseas Chinese University, and then went to the United States to specialize in Semitic historical comparative linguistics, and completed the study of Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Syriac, Classical Ethiopian, Ugarita, Phoenician, Ancient South Arabian and other Semitic languages. His research interests are based on the historical comparative study of Afro-Asian and Semitic languages, and the descriptive research of modern minority languages of Afro-Asian and Semitic languages.
<h1>Berber? Berber? </h1>
A Sprach Iz Dialaquet Mitt An Armay on ֿLat
"Language is the dialect of the army and navy"
—Max Weinreich, sociolinguistic and Yiddish expert
Moroccan model appears on the cover of the Arabic edition of Vogue in January 2020
Arabic majors may have had this experience to varying degrees:
"What major did you study?"
"Arabic."
"Oh... Which country is Arabia? ”
Of course, this situation should mostly occur when dealing with interlocutors with weak geographical knowledge.
Arab States
With the deepening of professional learning, the "diglossia" phenomenon (Diglossia) in the Arab world may gradually become a well-known heart disease for professional students, and at the same time, this embarrassing scene may also appear:
"Do you know Arabic?"
"Well, Arabic major."
"Come, listen to what this man has to say!" (A fast-talking dialect of a certain country)"
In the face of unfamiliar things, we all like simple conceptualizations, yes and no, and further differences don't seem worth spending more time and effort to understand. This kind of concept and thinking inertia may not be important to the public, but it is crucial for professional learners and researchers.
When we use a simple conceptual mode of thinking to learn Arabic, we are likely to ignore the important sociolinguistic phenomenon of the Arab world - the colorful "dialects" everywhere; when we use a simple conceptual mode of thinking to study Arab social culture, we are likely to ignore the differences in the traditional cultures of different Arab countries, as well as the language, history, and culture of other ethnic groups living in different Arab countries that were and are of great significance.
The embarrassment faced by the simplistic concept of "Arab-Arabic" actually applies to a variety of ethnic groups and languages with which we are not familiar. I think I also used the stereotypes of "American English" and "British English" to decide on the template for my English "orthophony" training.
With the continuous expansion of china's exchanges with Arab countries in North Africa, some small knowledge that once existed only in the "Overview of Arab Countries" course has gradually entered the public eye. Nowadays, searching for "Berbers" on various electronic platforms can get a lot of related content, including many tourism products such as the local culture of North Africa - when the "mysterious Arabs" became no longer mysterious, it was the turn of the "mysterious Berbers" to appear. Immediately afterwards, the "Berber language" was also simply conceptualized.
A Moroccan Berber girl
"Berber" was originally a generic term. The Greek word βάρβαρος was borrowed by the Romans as Berber to refer to neighboring groups that were not friendly enough, and did not seem to coincide with the native inhabitants of North Africa. The 1st century AD Records of the Sea of Eritrea (Περίπλους τῆς Ἐρυθράς Θαλάσης) appears in the second paragraph of the opening chapter ἡ Βαρβαρλ 2κὴ χώρα "The Kingdom of the Berbers", although the Berber population should refer to closer to Egypt; perhaps the most influential name is Ibn Hellerdun's magnum opus, The Yin Jian and Origins of the History of the Arabs, Persians, berbers (كتبالعبر وديوان المبتدأ والخبر في أيام العرب والعجم والبربر）。 The Berber name Mauri in the Continuatio Hispana anno DCCLIV (754 Chronicle), although originally associated with "Mauritania", eventually became synonymous with the North African Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and Malta – the "Moors".
Berber's etymology has the meaning of "barbarian", in recent years, the Berbers, represented by the Moroccan Berbers, who have devoted themselves to reviving the national language and culture, began to propose to replace Berber with "Tamazight", and there is also a corresponding Arabic sound with الازيغية replacing البربرية.
To be honest, the idea is good, after all, the English language still inherits the same root word as barbararian. But, the question is, is the so-called Tamazight really equivalent to Berber?
Berber villages
As mentioned earlier, "Arab-Arabic" and "Berber-Berber" are similarly simplified concepts, and the latter is even worse than the former. The Berber language, Berber, is in fact one of the six major language families of Afroasiatic phylum, the Berber languages.
The old name for the so-called "Semitic Languages" that once existed in the "Afro-Asian language family" is a "historical legacy" in the field of historical linguistics in an era when there was insufficient understanding of languages outside the Afro-Asian Semitic languages, because of the misleading existence of the Western term Hamito-Semitic corresponding to "flash", that is, the language family consisted of a binary opposing Semitic language family and a "Semitic language family", which began in the early 1950s. Abolished under the advocate of linguist Joseph H. Greenberg.
The Afro-Asian languages belong to the egyptian, semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic language families. Although the specific kinship of the six language families is disputed, the consensus in historical linguistics is that the five language families, including the Berber language family, outside the Semitic language family, do not constitute the utopian "language families" derived from the biblical texts in the early years.
Map of Afro-Asian languages
The Berber language family, as the name suggests, is a family of languages that are related to each other. Although the relationship between berber languages within the Berber language family is closer than that of other language families, the differences between many Berber languages are relatively small, and even some native Berber speakers say that they can understand the "dialects" that they did not understand in a few weeks of contact time, so that some Berber native linguists also advocate treating different Berbers as different dialects of the same language. The quote from Max Weinreich quoted in the preface also vividly illustrates the so-called boundaries between language and dialect, which are often determined by non-linguistic factors.
For outsiders, we face a dilemma similar to "Arabic" – when native Egyptian Arabic speakers say they can easily understand Syrian Arabic, both may be "foreign languages" for students studying standard Arabic. In the same way, chinese native speakers who are familiar with traditional Chinese phonology, the southern and northern tones of the Chinese land can probably be easily understood and learned, and the history has also left a good story of Mr. Zhao Yuanren chatting and learning dialects, but for foreigners who learn Mandarin, Sichuan dialect, which is also a mandarin, is already a foreign language.
Although "interoperability" is the criterion for linguists to compromise languages, there may be differences for people with different mother tongues and related knowledge reserves; according to experts, the differences in languages within the Berber language family can be compared, even if they are small, to the languages of the Germanic language family.
<h1>Distribution of Berber speakers</h1>
The largest concentrations of Berber speakers are Morocco, Algeria and Libya. It is also not an easy task to check the situation of mother tongues in the local area, and the different statistics vary widely; the highest data say that the berber-speaking population (one) accounts for 45% of the total population of Morocco, 25% of the total population of Algeria and 25% of the total population of Libya. In addition, Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt have small Berber-speaking populations.
Berber distribution map
In Morocco, the language of the Berbers living in the High Atlas mountains and the Anti-Atlas mountains is called tašlḥiyt, and since Sous is the most populous place in this linguistic region, tasusit derived from "Sous" will also be used as a synonym for tašlḥiyt; the Berbers in the Middle Atlas mountains, They called themselves tamazziɣt, with many dialect variants; the berber language of the Rif mountains, which they called themselves θarifəçθ, also had many dialect variants.
In Algeria, the language of the northern Berbers, who call themselves θaqβayliθ, θaqβayliθ and tašlḥiyt are the two most important berber languages in terms of the population; in addition, Ouargla also has twargrit, tumẓabt in the Mzab valley, and so on.
The Tuareg, a nomadic people scattered in the Sahara Desert from southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, to Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, are also speakers of Berber, and their language can be collectively called Tuareg, but they also have their own names according to the "dialect" of tamāhaq, tamāžaq, tamašəq, tawləmmət and so on.
The Only Berber language in Tunisia is the tajerbit on the island of Djerba. There are Berbers who use tanfusit in the mountains of Jebel Nefusa in Libya, berbers who use jlan n isiwan in the Siwa oasis in Egypt...
Regime in the history of the Berbers
<h1>What do Berbers call their language? </h1>
With so many different languages listed, it is worth noting that we, as outsiders, should adhere to the respect of "fame and master". It is not difficult for those who are sensitive to language to find that when the vast majority of Berbers call their language, the language name appears as a t(a) -...-t. This ring suffix (roughly understood) is a typical negative marker of the Berber language family (the prefix t-marks negative, and the suffix-t marks both negative and singular); where t is a common sexual category marker that can be constructed into proto-Afro-Asian; in other Afro-Asian language families, all languages of the Semitic language family, Ancient Egyptian of the Egyptian language family, and most languages of the Kush language family can be found to mark the negative with consonant t. In the Berber language family, this negative marker can appear on the negative noun, and the language name also comes from this negative derivation pattern, taking Tamazight, which has the strongest sense of network existence at present, as an example:
Derived from the three consonant root letters m-z-ɣ, a-maziɣ, refers to "(one) Berber male in central Morocco", the plural i-maziɣ-ən, and ta-maziɣ-t as its negative derivative, which can refer either to "(one) Berber female in central Morocco", the plural ti-maziɣ-in, or the singular ta-maziɣ-t to refer to "Berber language in central Morocco". Similarly, from "(a) Arab male" a-ɛṛab, a negative singular ta-ɛṛab-t can be derived to mean "Arabic".
Thus, the name tamaziɣt, first of all, has its specificity and does not represent all the languages of the Berber language family, and secondly, its affix t(a) -...-t semantically corresponds to "language", which can be compared to the English term "Arabic", Arab-ic. Since in Chinese we do not use the Chinese translation of "Arabic", we should not use a translation of "Tamazigt" to correspond to tamazziɣt, and we should not use tamaziɣt as a synonym for many Berber languages. The latter makes an inappropriate analogy, similar to how foreigners equate "Beijing dialect" with "Chinese" in its entirety— I don't think my compatriots from all over the world would agree.
Facial totem of Algerian Berber women
Although no berber speaker calls their language "Berber", "Berber" as a term for linguistic taxonomy has its own significance: Berber languages with such a wide distribution have their own names, at least until the Berber national cultural revival in Morocco, Tamazight will not be used to refer to the entire language family, nor will Amazigh be used for the entire population.
Even today, berbers everywhere still use negative derivative nouns in their respective languages to refer to their own language, and Tamazight has gained a great sense of presence through the influence of Moroccan official institutions and network dissemination. Just as German, Dutch, English, Swedish, etc. can be uniformly classified under the "Indo-European Germanic Language Family", different Berber languages can also be uniformly classified under the "Afro-Asian Berber Language Family".
Berber has its own traditional script, tifinaɣ (translated "Tifina"), which was originally a consonant phoneme script similar to the original Semitic script, with no vowels recorded, no consonant overlap, and ancient inscriptions in Both North Africa and the Canary Islands. At the turn of the century, Morocco established the "Royal Amazig Cultural Academy" IRCAM(المعهد الكي للثقافة الأمازيغية,ⴰⵙⵉⵉⵉمⴰ ؿⴰⴳ ⴰⴳⴻⵍⴷⴰⵏ ⵏ ⵜⵓⵙⵙⵏⴰ ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ), trying to promote the standardization and writing of the Berber language, thus promoting the addition of the vowel alphabet to the new Nona language, and IRCAM has become the main force in promoting the revival of Berber language culture in all aspects.
The signage of the University of Tiziuzu in Algeria is available in Arabic, Tifenagh and French
However, similar to the name "Tamazight", IRCAM's "standard" written script and written language also have geographical limitations, at least the new Tifina language promoted in Algeria has certain differences, in addition to the traditional Tiffinal script of the Tuareg people also has its own characteristics, the final result, as if everyone feels that the "foreign" Latin alphabet does not need to compete for orthodoxy, so the Latinized Berber script has become a bridge of common communication. Many publications and scholarly works were published in Latinized script.