ON BASQUE AND ITS TIES WITH GEORGIAN, ARMENIAN, AND TAMAZIGHT.

American linguist Morris Swadesh (1909-1967) created a world map of current languages according to comparative linguistics, taking into account their common origin. The lexico-statistical or glottochronological Swadesh method is based on taking 215 words in two groups of 100; key words such as personal pronouns, low numerals, parts of the body, kinship names, some action verbs, some adverbs of time and place, objects of nature, very common actions, bodily actions and questions.

Swadesh claimed that in the basic vocabulary the rate of change is so regular in languages, that he had been able to create a system of measuring the elapsed time in which two languages were related in the past and that today are separated geographically.

According to Swadesh, that basic vocabulary of 100 or 215 words changes less than 20% per millennium in each language. These variations in vocabulary leave a common ground between two or more languages related to each other, which is measured chronologically, thus establishing the time distance between a language and its more modern relatives. If the number of words with the same root between two languages in these two groups of 100 is less than or equal to 5%, it is considered a similarity by chance (the figure does not respond to anything specific, the method has many random parts), and if it is greater it would be the result of some common past.

There is a formula to know the time elapsed between the period in which the contact occurred and the current moment, and the result with Basque was the following (with the rest of the languages with which Basque has been compared by this method the result is inferior and not significant):

list 215    list 100

Northwest Circassian Caucasian:

6.62% 7.52%

Northwest Avar Caucasian:

3.80%     5.37%

Georgian, South Caucasian:

4.73% 7.52%

Rift Tamazight (northern Morocco):  

6%         9.67%

Southern Tamazight (southern Morocco)    

7.38%       10.86%

Many of the similarities considered good are more than questionable, since the evolution of words and languages is not taken into account, some borrowings from other languages are considered good, etc.

Nor can we forget American linguist R.L. Trask, that compared Hungarian and Basque and found in 2 hours of searching 65 similar words that could only be the result of chance, but that lead to question many investigations: this exercise tested by other researchers with other unrelated languages has given the same surprising result. R.L. Trask said “I can't understand why some linguists get so excited when they find two dozen Basque words that look like two dozen other Berber or Sumerian words.”

Basque and the languages of the Caucasus

The Caucasus is located 4,000 kilometers from Garonne-Pyrénées-Ebro where the Basques live. In the Caucasus, about 50 different peoples coexist with almost 22 languages. The main difficulty in establishing the Basque-Caucasian relationship consists of this lack of unity.

Swadesh's lexico-statistical ratio of Circassian and Georgian to Basque is 7.52%, higher than any other language in the world. The supposed contact would have occurred in the Magdalenian, about 10,000 years ago. With the rest of the languages of the Caucasus, current Basque is similar in typology (verbs, the ergative, etc.) and in the etymology of some words, but its lexical-statistical relationship with all of them is less than 5%.

There are also parallels between Basque and Georgian in syntactic aspects, such as the use of the ergative (transitive-intransitive verbs, “Nor-Nork” forms) that do not occur in any other European language, the reflexive way of making sentences such as: “I have seen my head in the mirror” (nire burua ispiluan ikusi dut), and not: “I have seen myself in the mirror”, the use of base twenty to count, etc.

But many current or recent renowned linguists are skeptical about the relationship with the Caucasian languages. Basque linguist Koldo Mitxelena (1915-1987) said that: “In summary, there are some Basque-Caucasian lexical similarities that cannot be demonstrated to be possible, but on the other hand there are a large number whose extraordinary implausibility can be demonstrated (…). Even if Basque and the Caucasian languages go back to a common origin, the number of missing intermediate links must be so high that it is to be feared that, due to not knowing them, the ancient ties of kinship will not be established."

If there is a relationship, for both Koldo Mitxelena and Xabier Kintana, it has to go back to the fifth and sixth millennia or earlier.

Basque and Armenian

Armenian linguist and Basque philologist Vahan Sarkisian, creator of the Basque-Armenian Dictionary and a Grammar of the Basque Language in his language, is the main promoter of the "Basque-Armenian theory" and the one who has done the most work in recent years on ethnolinguistic kinship between both peoples.

This prestigious Armenian linguist affirms that "the best promoters of this theory were neither Basques nor Armenians and, therefore, they had no direct interests in the issue. I am referring to the Englishman Edward Spencer Dodgson and the German Joseph Karst. The former knew well Basque. In Paris he began to study Armenian and quickly detected the similarities, which he initially summarized in a list of 50 words. Karst was an Armenianologist and, when he came into contact with Basque, he compared issues related to anthropology, the phonetic system, the grammar and the lexicon and extracted more than 400 similarities. (...) We understand without problems, for example, what Zabaltegi, or Ormazabal means, because it means exactly the same in Armenian. We feel at home, and that already means something. Armenian is considered an Indo-European language (Basque is the only pre-Indo-European language in all of Europe, prior to the invasions of these peoples), but if we bring to light the twenty most important regularities of the language we will see that they coincide more with Basque than with any other neighboring languages such as Georgian or Persian. And not only referring to the lexicon. In Armenian, for example, words are not formed with an initial -r, our throat has a hard time pronouncing it. The same thing happens to the Basque language, to the Basque throat.

Neither Armenian nor Basque recognize the accumulation of consonants, they are unpronounceable to us, while in other languages neighboring ours, such as Georgian, groups of up to five or six consonants are common. We could mention many other characteristics that separate us from our neighbors and bring us closer to Basque, such as the postponed article, the way of forming the plural, not to mention toponymy, which provides an enormous amount of similarities. (…) I believe that this type of coincidences - which even affect the articulation apparatus, which has a physiological nature - cannot arise from mere contact, they cannot be imported or exported. Karst said that Armenian and Basque are two varieties of the same linguistic stem (…) The only thing I would dare to say with any certainty is that perhaps in ancient times the entire area was occupied by the same ethnic-cultural element, which gave way terrain to other elements, leaving vestiges in Euskadi and Armenia, as survivors of a great and ancient civilization.”

It is curious that Armenian – which does not give any relationship with Basque through the Swadesh method – and Georgian are, apparently, more similar to Basque than to each other when they are neighboring peoples. To conclude this short summary, let's share a toponymic curiosity: in Georgia there is Mount Gorbeya (like the highest mountain in Bizkaia and Alaba), in Armenia is the sacred Mount Ararat (like the Aralar mountain range between Alaba, Gipuzkoa and Alta Navarra), and also a mountain named Gora (mountain in the language of the area and "up" in Basque). The curiosity is even greater because the Araxes River bathes Mount Aralar, and in the Armenian Mount Ararat there is a river called... Araxes.

Basque and Tamazight

Tamazight, by the Swadesh method, is not related to Arabic or Egyptian; nor with Georgian, but with Basque, as well as the Cadmitosemitic languages from which it comes. Therefore, Basque is a language that may have common elements with Georgian and Berber, but they do not have any with each other.

The percentage of lexical-statistical relationship of Swadesh of Basque with Southern Tamazight is 7.38% and with Rift Tamazight is 6% (taking the 215 words because with 100 the percentage increases). Therefore, by this method there would be a relationship or common substrate between both languages. Based on the percentage relationship, contact would have taken place about 8,000-9,000 years ago.

In Berber the names given to animals are very similar to those given in Basque. «Aker» & «iker» (billygoat), «asto» & «ezet» (donkey); They also coincide in the way of saying horse, crow, river, brother, lie, name ("Izen" and "isem"), "I" and others.

Within this analysis we must mention the Guanches, native inhabitants of the Canary Islands before the arrival of the Spaniards. From the writings found (archaeology confirms this) it is believed that the Guanches would speak a Tamazight language that, due to the isolation of the islands, would maintain a greater degree of relationship with Basque. There are those who even see Basque place names in the Canary Islands such as: Los Llanos de Aridane (Harrigane: stone peak), Argindei, Tinizara (Tinitzaha), Tajuia, Tenegia, Jedei (Iedegi) in La Palma and in Lanzarote: Masdeche (Mahats- etxe: grape-house), Haria, Orzola, Guinate (Gainate: high step), Yaiza (haitza: rock), Ajache, Tesegite, Mozaza etc.

An anecdote that is often told is that the first conquerors of the Canary Islands believed that the natives spoke Basque.

Between Basque and Tamazight the similarities are reduced to the lexical or lexicographic level, since syntactically and grammatically there does not seem to be any relationship, both in current speech and in the past; there are just similarities in verbal articulation or in the use of some particles.

Julio Caro Baroja said in this regard: “I must warn in any case that the relationship between Basque and the African languages called Hamitic is not as founded as claimed. On the contrary, the hypothesis of a relationship between Basque and the Caucasian languages, which is perhaps the one that has produced the least interest in the Peninsula, seems to be the most prudent, because it is based on linguistic, morphological and strict observations.

Koldo Mitxelena had the same opinion, and believed it was necessary to study more the relationship between Basque and the Caucasian languages which, unlike the supposed kinship with Tamazight, did cause serious doubts.

[x]

@knario47

Plug-in’s [company hired by Moroccan broadcasting company 2M to dub foreign media] team included translators who wrote scripts in Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic and French. Plug-in co-director Chraïbi explained that “Nous avons dû ‘créer’ un nouveau langage… une nouvelle darija, qui ne soit ni trop casablancaise, ni trop fassie, ni trop chamalie, ni trop vulgaire” (Ziraoui 2009), ‘we had to create a new language… a new Moroccan Arabic, that isn’t too Casablancan, too Fessi, too Northern or too vulgar’ (my translation). For example, curse words in the original language recording were not translated into the curse words commonly associated with the speech of inner city Casablanca residents, but instead were changed or removed altogether. This ideology that the work at Plug-in consisted of creating a neutral or an unmarked variety of Moroccan Arabic that “everybody” could listen to and understand was one I heard repeatedly from voice actors and staff at Plug-in. It was a position that aligned with the generally held ideology discussed in Chapter 1 that Moroccan Arabic was the lingua franca of Morocco. As shown earlier in the present chapter, however, the observation was made by viewers that the variety of Moroccan Arabic used in dubbing was not neutral, for various reasons, including that it was marked too strongly as Casablancan and that the lexical items chosen were ‘dirty’ and ‘rough.’ Indeed, the fact that there are no ideologically “neutral” translations, in that all translations involve the negotiation and discursive construction of social and linguistic relations of power, is one that has long been recognized by linguists and anthropologists (Jaffe 1999b). The basic assumption by Plug-in that a Moroccan Arabic translation would be understood by “all” Moroccans[] erased a significant body of viewers who were monolingual Tamazight speakers. My question to employees at Plug-in if serious consideration was ever given to creating a Tamazight translation of a foreign series was met with laughter and incredulity.

— Jennifer Lee Hall, Debating Darija: Language Ideology and the Written Representation of Moroccan Arabic in Morocco (PhD dissertation), 2015, pp. 210-11

Jaffe, Alexandra 1999b Locating Power: Corsican Translators and Their Critics. In Language Ideological Debates. J. Blommaert, ed. Language, Power and Social Process, Vol. 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ziraoui, Youssef 2009 Darija. Série Je T’aime, Série Je T’adore.

Women in High Atlas, Morocco.

A bilingual inscription in Punic (Phoenician, Carthaginian) and Berber (Tamazight, Numidian) from a 146 BCE mausoleum at Dougga in Tunisia.

There's many arguments on the indigenous north african status of Morocco right now.

As a mixed Siwi, I'm very grateful to my Moroccan brothers and sisters right now, because the support I have been given for using my voice to speak about Egyptian Imazighen and our shared erasure has been amplified and validated by them.

Sadly, this support wasn't shared by a lot of Arabs and I've been exposed to erasure of my Siwi heritage and the Siwa Oasis as a whole, or instead called derogatory terms and insults.

However, this is a positivity post, specifically to the Moroccan Imazighen who've accepted me into our small community and that together, we will continue the fight for our people and our land and our cultures.

We are indigenous and we are proud.

We are valid and we are strong.

I trust Morocco to bring the world cup home to our people and to Africa 🫶🏽

And even if they don't, they've shown the world the excellence of Africa.

ⵣ Imazighen Excellence ⵣ

Yennayer 2973 - Amazigh New Year Party "Yennayer", a new year's celebration steeped in tradition, has been celebrated since antiquity in the Maghreb and by Maghrebis around the world. The Amazigh (Berber) New Year is one of the oldest popular festivals celebrated in North Africa. The millennial festival of "Yennayer", literally "first month" or even "door of the year", is held every year on January 12 or 13. The Amazigh calendar is an ancient agrarian solar calendar, also called "fellahi" "peasant". Yennyer is primarily a nature festival according to pagan customs, held to honor nature, drive away winter and start the new harvest year. . . . . #amazigh #imazighen #maroc #morocco #tamazight #agadir #rif #nador #chleuh #kabyle #souss #casablanca #tinghir #marrakech #maghreb #berbere #algerie #tiznit #berber #rabat #tafraout #tiziouzou #oujda #tanger #mellab #marocaine #bejaia #marruecos #photography #ahidous https://www.instagram.com/p/CnT_giKN1wc/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

ⴰⵙⴳⴳⴰⵙ ⴰⵎⴳⴳⴰⵣ 2973: Nosotros, como bereberes, celebraremos el año bereber 2973, que se considera el segundo calendario más antiguo del mundo después del calendario hebreo, que se remonta al gran acontecimiento de la historia bereber, la victoria de los bereberes sobre los faraones dirigidos por los bereberes. rey Shishang, que derrotó al rey de Egipto, el faraón Ramsés III, en el año 950 antes de cristo, orillas del río Nilo tras los intentos fallidos de los faraones por apoderarse de las tierras de los bereberes orientales, y como dicen las antiguas escrituras, " Los bereberes de las regiones orientales de Tamazgha han buscado la ayuda del rey Shishang, y con esta gran victoria ascendió al trono de Egipto y gobernó la vigésima segunda dinastía, y el gobierno bereber de Egipto continuó hasta las fronteras de la vigésima sexta. dinastía para devolver el trono de Egipto a los faraones de nuevo. Además, el Año Nuevo Amazigh, o lo que llamamos 'id Nayr, coincide con el inicio de la nueva temporada agricola, y así la celebración se convierte en dos celebraciones, la primera es una celebración de la victoria mostrada al Rey Sheshang, y la segunda es una celebración del comienzo de una nueva temporada agrícola, por lo que todos los pueblos del norte de África celebran este gran evento, ya sea en pueblos o ciudades. El año amazigh se diferencia de otros años como el gregoriano, el hijri y el hebreo, ya que no está ligado a una religión o creencia, sino que es una celebración a través de la cual renovamos nuestra conexión con la tierra y perpetuamos la memoria de una epipeya historica. Sin embargo, están obligados por los alimentos preparados con todo lo que la tierra produce en el año, como el cuscús y las gachas (hagouz), en las que se coloca una semilla de dátil, quien la encuentra comiendo se considera afortunado, y su año será lleno de alegrías, felicidad y sustento abundante. - #berbertattoo #berber #madrid #Barcelona #españa #portugal #peru #Shakira #chile #tamazight #vida #viajes #viaje #tenirefe #algerie #morocco #marruecos #marrakech #Venezuela #argentina #vacation #mexico #italiano #viral (en Marrakech) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnXnoE3LYXA/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

"Yaiza (haitza: rock)" As a Yaiza (spelled as z is in basque and also canarian accent, not the spanish hard z (so you'd imagine how much i've struggled with this living in mainland spain)) this made me some kind of special way inside haha. I've never heard about this and always hated my name because i was bullied for having it (among other things) but this makes me like it a bit more, even if it's not enterily true/not confirmed.

Kaixo anon!

I'm a Yaiza too!! And it did feel special when I read it too. I liked my name because it comes from an indigenous people, but just to imagine it may also be linked to Basque makes me adore it 🧡🧡

Azul  ⴰⵣⵓⵍ

🌻

Azul Flawn 🌻

(welcome)

Tamazight, the other prevalent first language in Morocco, is spoken by roughly 40-50% of the Moroccan population. Varieties of Tamazight in Morocco are generally considered lacking in social, cultural and economic capital and arguably comprise the most devalued language in Morocco (Ennaji 2005; Sadiqi 2007). They are associated with folklore, poverty, rurality and women (Hoffman 2006). In response to a long history of discrimination against Tamazight, the Moroccan King Mohammed VI created the Moroccan Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture charged with directing Tamazight language policy and cultural affairs. He also publicly recognized the Tamazight language as a valuable part of the cultural heritage of all Moroccans and adopted the Tifinagh writing system, an alphabetic system based on a 5,000 year old script, with which to teach and to write a standardized variety of Tamazight (Errihani 2006). According to the new constitution voted for on July 1, 2011, Tamazight is now also an official language alongside Standard Arabic. Moroccan Arabic, by contrast, was not recognized in the constitution.

Errihani (2006) argues that the new Tamazight language policy in Morocco is seen by many Moroccan intellectuals as merely a symbolic and political maneuver by the Monarchy to appear responsive to Western, pluralist, identity politics and discourses of minority rights. He warns it will be ineffective in either teaching Tamazight to Moroccan Arabic speaking children or raising the cultural and economic value of Tamazight language varieties more generally. Furthermore, he notes that Tamazight, while a mandatory school subject, is never the medium of education and that by taking effect only in public schools it targets the poor and disadvantaged disproportionately, since children of the elite tend to enroll in private French or English medium schools where State education policies have limited reach. My experiences visiting public schools in the central region of Morocco support this view. I repeatedly heard teachers complaining that they did not have the training necessary to teach Tamazight and Tifinagh and that the amount of time, when spent on the subject at all, would have been better put towards French or English. One school I visited in the region of Beni Mellal had placed all the Tamazight educational materials received by the government directly into storage, and years later had yet to utilize them because according to the director, the children’s parents were against the teaching of a standardized Tamazight to native Tamazight speaking children. They viewed the Tamazight standard developed by the Moroccan government as a fake and inauthentic language imposed upon them for political purposes.

— Jennifer Lee Hall, Debating Darija: Language Ideology and the Written Representation of Moroccan Arabic in Morocco (PhD dissertation), 2015, pp. 18-19.

Ennaji, Moha 2005 Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco. New York: Springer.

Errihani, Mohammed 2006 Language Policy in Morocco: Problems and Prospects of Teaching Tamazight. The Journal of North African Studies.

Hoffman, Katherine 2006 Berber Language Ideologies, Maintenance, and Contraction: Gendered Variation in the Indigenous Margins of Morocco. Language and Communication 26(2):144-167.

Sadiqi, F. 2007 The Role of Moroccan Women in Preserving Amazigh Language and Culture. Museum International 59(4):26.

Hey i saw you mentioned you speak Tamazight, what kind? Is it relatively difficult or easy to learn? I’m not gonna learn it tbh but i’m just curious! I’ve been reading some Tamazight (Tarifit) translated poetry and in some books they write it in Arabic script and in some in Latin script, do you read it in either of these or in Tifinagh or do you mostly speak it?

Hello! I'm so glad you asked! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about my heritage language.

My father is from the Middle Atlas in Morocco, so the Tamazight we speak is mostly known as tamazight, but also sometimes tachelhit or shilha. It's written with the Tifinagh alphabet, but also the Latin or Arabic one, and I can read it in Latin and Arabic, and can decipher some Tifinagh letters.

I can't tell you if it's difficult or not. It's my second language, I've been able to speak it since little, but I'm actually not fluent in it. There is a school in France called the Inalco that teaches all kinds of African and Asian languages, and when I was a kid, we received at home several USamerican women who had learned it and could speak it even better than me, so I imagine that it's actually not that hard.

I mostly speak it, when I go back home, with the family or to do grocery shopping or things like that. I don't really speak it outside of Morocco, even when I meet people who do speak it, because Arabic is considered the main language of all Maghrebian (North-Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania and Egypt) people, the common language.

Tamazight is a fascinating subject. The language and its people might be as old as 3,000 to 7,000 years old (old Proto-Berber and contemporary Proto-Berber), it's a branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages and can itself be divided in many branches, just as diverse as Romance languages. And it's also an important social, political and cultural theme, being the indigenous language and people of North Africa, and having its own movements of political and cultural reclamations - Tamazgha, fictitious entity and toponym corresponding to all the lands that belong originally to the Imazighen people and used as the name for the political movement; it represents the Amazigh nation, united and whole. Tamazight is one of the official languages of Morocco since 2011, which is why if you go to Morocco you'll see that all the signs on streets and buildings, all the ads and official papers, are written in Arabic, French, and Tamazight.

The discussion of postcolonialism in Morocco and Algeria in particular are very tied to the recognition of the Tamazight language and people as the original colonised people of North Africa long before Europe decided to step foot on the continent. But that's another story, which is a favourite of my father but I'm not too knowledgeable about.

"Exister, Libre! Entre berbérité, islamité et laïcité", Livre de Fouad Benyekhlef, préface de Oumayma Hammadi.

De l'importance de la conscience de soi du peuple rifain et de l'auto-détermination et le libre arbitre.