Berbers Celts and their origins
C R Pennell
nothing at all - sorry about that, my caps lock stuck and I couldn't
import the file. Grrr.
Right, here goes: any comments received with interest.
ORIGIN OF THE IRISH/WELSH/BERBERS
This discussion crops up quite often on this list - so I thought
people might be interested in this. I have been reading the
papers of E.W. Drummond Hay, British Consul in Tangier 1829-45,
father of John Drummond-Hay who succeeded him as Consul-General
and made, shall we say, a bigger impact.
Edward Drummond Hay knew very little Arabic, but that did not
stop him recording things he heard about Morocco in a series of
notebooks - which he called common-place books. These were not
designed for publication - they are in great disorder, but to jog
his memory in the future. In other words they were intended only
for his own use, not to impress anyone else. Thus while he may
have been incorrect (frequently was) he was not conciously
perverting the truth. Basically he recorded what he heard from
4 sorts of informants: 1. His Jewish secretaries and interpreters
in the Consulate, Isaac Pinto - an old Moroccan Jewish family
that - and Isac Abensur, who most certainly did speak and write
Arabic, and probably some Berber as well. 2. Passing Moroccans
{Muslims and Jews, Berber and Arabic Speakers] with whom he set
up interviews, with Pinto or Abensur, usually, as translator. 3.
Othe COnsuls - particularly John Mullowney US Consul-General 1821
-31 who DID speak Arabic and William Willshire or Wiltshire,
British vice-consul in Mogador for much of the early 19th century
and a long-term resident and merchant there. 4. His son, John
Drummond-Hay, who also spoke good Arabic.
The following 2 extracts are from the commonplace books in the
Bodleian Library in Oxford.
{202} BERBER OR SCHLOH LANGUAGE
Mr John Redman tells me (10th Nov: 1844) that he had at
Mazagan some short time ago a servant from Soos who spoke the
Schloh (or as some write Shelluh) language [i.e Berber] and a
Welsh sailor having come with a vessel to that place his servant
found that he cd understand a great part of what the Welshman
said - Now [???] see to what Vallancey & others have written of
the connection between the anct British tongue and the Phenician
[sic].
{28} I copied the following observation into a fly leaf of my
annotated copy of Mr Thomson's [illegible] several years ago from
a No of the LITY: GAZETTE of which I omitted to note the date -
"A correspondent assures us, that a native of Marocco who
accompanied Joseph Lancaster into Ireland found much of the
vernacular dialect intelligible to him: the Welsh was likewise
too [??] but in a less degree." - I have no doubt that this Moor
was of the Barbar & not the Arab race."
Does anyone know who Joseph Lancaster might have been, BTW - this
was written c.1835 so sometime in the 1820s?
Richard Pennell History NUS
C R Pennell
Niall Gallagher
In a previous article, his...@leonis.nus.sg (C R Pennell) says:
(notes from the British Consul in Tangiers, mid 19th C)
>
>
>{28} I copied the following observation into a fly leaf of my
>annotated copy of Mr Thomson's [illegible] several years ago from
>a No of the LITY: GAZETTE of which I omitted to note the date -
> "A correspondent assures us, that a native of Marocco who
>accompanied Joseph Lancaster into Ireland found much of the
>vernacular dialect intelligible to him: the Welsh was likewise
>too [??] but in a less degree." - I have no doubt that this Moor
>was of the Barbar & not the Arab race."
Berber is a Semitic language, related to Arabic and Hebrew, while Irish
and Welsh are Celtic (Indo-European) Languages. I once had occasion to
hear Berber spoken (by a Tunisian) and I couldn't understand anything. So
I would suspect from my circumstantial evidence and the very different
linguistic origins for Berber and Irish/Welsh (which are not mutually
intelligible in my experience) that these observations are flawed.
regards.....Niall Gallagher
--
Niall Gallagher ad...@freenet.carleton.ca
ni...@bnr.ca
Heather Rose Jones
> ORIGIN OF THE IRISH/WELSH/BERBERS
[from the notebooks of Edward Drummond Hay]
[two third and greater-hand accounts of the mutual intelligibility of
Celtic languages and certain north African languages]
>
>Richard Pennell History NUS
>
I hate to be a professional skeptic, but a useful background to the
consideration of accounts like this might be the work of Jan Harold
Brunvand on the subject of "urban folklore". He gives numerous examples
of the "friend of a friend" who was an actual witness to events that
can be proved never to have happened. Now if we had an account from
a native speaker of Welsh or Gaelic who said, "I was travelling in
North Africa and found that I could converse freely with the inhabitants
of such-and-such a place, and here are some specific examples of
words and constructions that are closely parallel." Well, then you
might start to get my attention.
Heather Jones
C R Pennell
All quite true (well nearly) but the question is WHY these stories
circulated.
Actually, according to the INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LINGUISTICS
(Standard on this sort of thing) the present generally classification of
Berber is as a group of languages in the Afro-Asiatic family. Other
groups in the family are now called Semitic, Cushitic, Egyptian and Chaldic.
Berber is "closer" to Semitic than to others in the group, indicating a
link further back in the past.
Anyway, back to the main point. Why do these stories circulate.
A hypothesis - remember this is the early 19th century.
A. Berber and the various Gaelic languages are out of the ordinary, don't
fit the patterns of the dominating language of the region.
B. Both groups of languages are spoken by people who were politically
marginalised at the time - wild and wooly countrymen in the eyes of
respectable "civilised" townsmen.
C. The need to categorise meant that people tried to fit languages and
cultures into containers so as to recognise them - compare the arguments
of the origins of Basque. What the categorisers wanted to avoid was
anomalies.
D. - and this is bound up with a really potent myth in North Africa -
Berbers look like "us" - us being northern Europeans with fair hair and
pale eyes. Actually not all Berbers DO have these features, but enough
(particularly in the Rif in Morocco) do for them to do service as
proto-Europeans - some French scholars calimed that they wre really
Normans who had settled there centuries before. Proto-Europeans, separate
racially and culturally - and it was alleged religiously - could more
easily be attracted and turned into agents of European colonialism/
Christianity etc. This produced a French colonial polcy in Morocco almost
100 years after the Consul which tried to divide and rule the country on
precisely this basis.
In another thread on this group - soc.culture.gaelic - someone else
comments on p-q gaelic claiming that although they are mutually
unintelligible HE could understand bits of Welsh from his knowledge of
Irish. (Compare the "Moroccan" above who claimed it was easier to
understand Irish but he could get bits of Welsh!)
Basque is the obvious comparison - but does anyone know any others?/
feel like talking about the sort of interrelationships between cultural
affinities and who does the defining etc.
Richard.