Some Eastern Oti-Volta languages have a su form IIRC, but I’d need to look it up when I get home. There is no reconstructable Proto-Oti-Volta word for “horse”: the etymon seen in Kusaal wief is purely Western Oti-Volta, that in Moba taanm is confined to Gurma, and so on. I don’t know whether the Ewe and Yoruba words for “horse” are ultimately borrowed from Mande (on first principles I’m a bit leery of monosyllabic correspondences just based on initial consonants and a possible vowel) but it’s not at all impossible a priori. I hope more knowledgeable people can step in and correct my errors, and perhaps explain the ط for Soninke /d/. But I am very much out of my bailiwick in western Africa. Looking into this has been very fun and informative for me, which is why I wrote up the results for others. (There is a description of these mutations here.) Perhaps this alternation is responsible for the borrowing into Arabic with initial ش /ʃ/? The writing with qaf ق in شنقيط would doubtless reflects the fact that inherited etymological Arabic q ق is realized as /g/ in Hassaniya Arabic. In these alternations, /s/ apparently alternates with /t͡ʃ/ (or /c/?) after a nasal. Soninke has a series of initial consonant mutations after certain morphemes ending in nasals. And gèdé is “well, spring of water, source”. The n is the Soninke definite marker, which is a nasal bearing a low tone and follows the noun it makes definite, if I understand the construction correctly (although the orthography used in Taine-Cheikh’s article hyphenates to the following noun). It is apparently a West African areal term (perhaps originally diffused from Mande?) also seen in Temne asoe, Kru so, Ewe and Fon so, Yoruba esin, and Edo esi. In this, sì is “horse”, cognate with Maninka and Bambara so and Susu sona within Mande. The name is explained as being Soninke si n-gede “well of the horse” (alternatively written si-n gede). 310 here, in her chapter “Mauritanian and West Saharan Arabic” of the volume Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches (2018). Perhaps that’s because caravan stations were outside the perspective of early European explorers, and the Islamic maps either aren’t extant or aren’t accessible online to an English speaker.Īnd how was “Chinguetti” derived from the Arabic name شنقيط Šinqīṭ?Ĭatherine Taine-Cheikh offers an etymology of the name in the final paragraph on p. One of the odd things to me is that this important ancient town doesn’t show up on old maps. Another half hour and I’ll have the Songhay and maybe even Seneca in there, so I should stop and see if anyone thinks it’s plausible. But I knew nothing about the region and this is just what half an hour on google led me to. So I’m putting forward the hypothesis that Chinguetti had a French development of its own via Bilad Shinaqiti. This is apparently sometimes spelled in a way transliterated Shinaqiti, which seems to further establish that it’s related to the Sanhaja/Zenhaga. Other early maps show the Regnum Senegae:Īnd I read that the Arabic locational trinomial Shinqiti isn’t typically meant as a reference to the town/city of Shinqit, but to the entire region – Bilad Shinqiti, encompassing all of Moorish NW Africa. The etymology of Senegal is thought to be related to the Zanhaya or Sanhaja tribe, which is spelled Zenhaga on this early map: And how was “ Chinguetti” derived from the Arabic name شنقيط Šinqīṭ? (Thanks, Trevor!) National Geographic even estimates that 700,000 manuscripts have survived in the city of Timbuktu alone.Įthiopia - that’s quite a journey! If I ever knew about Makuria (Greek Μακουρια, Arabic al-Muqurra), I’d forgotten. Upon the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering, some one million manuscripts have since survived from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean. Thousands of more old manuscripts have equally survived in the West African cities of Chinguetti, Walata, Oudane, Kano, and Agadez. Also, thousands of documents from the medieval Sudanese empire of Makuria, written in at least eight different languages were dug out at the southern Egyptian site of Qasr Ibrim. Just about 250,000 old manuscripts from the libraries of Timbuktu still survive in present-day Ethiopia. I’ve made several posts about the manuscripts and libraries of Timbuktu (put “Timbuktu” into the search box to find them), but I found some details in this story particularly interesting:
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