thanks for adding this sentence. I work on a farm and so I like to learn farm words.

You're welcome. It's a pleasure to learn that. Our language is deeply related to farming. Most Northern Berbers are sedentary farmers. They live in stone or adobe houses and practice all sorts of farming and breeding.

in that case im surprised that you use the same word, u3ecciw for hut, cabin and barn. we have many words for farn structures in English - coup, sty, mow, stable, freestall, shelter, garage, polebarn, bankbarn, ect.
I would be interested in more sentances with all kinds of farm vocabulary.

>>>> in that case im surprised that you use the same word, u3ecciw for hut, cabin and barn.


Thank you very much for raising this issue. You should know that even if we live on the Mediterranean coast, many aspects of our life (we, rural Berbers) remained, more or less, primitive, although we have sophisticated many other things. The stage of develpment of our culture may be compared to that of many African ethnic groups and some Native American ethnic groups like the Pueblo and the Zuni.

In our traditional life, we have houses, roads, stairs, some pieces of furniture, farming tools, weapons, all sorts of clothes, pottery, tapestry, granaries, etc. But we don't make the same distinctions as those made in more sophisticated societies of modern Western Europe (mainly influenced by the development of cities). Our culture is, more or less, a proto-historic culture, i.e. a culture of the early beginnings of history, comparable to that of the earliest settlements of Mesopotamia, 4000 years BC. In our cultures, the main place where people live is the village,and "urban centers" are just used as markets. Until recently (the mid-1950's) there were no Berber tribes that lived in towns and cities, and Berber tribesmen came to urban centers only to work or to trade at weekly markets.

Berber women had to learn many skills like weaving, making pottery and sewing. They wove their own carpets, made their own pottery and made their own dresses. They had also to learn farming and they helped their husbands on the farms. This was a life where Berber tribesmen were autonomous. I.e. they had to make by themselves many of the tools they needed for their daily life. They didn't buy food from the market and they mainly bought only beautiful clothing (made in the city), and also steel items (like axes and hoes). Our villages were like the Scottish villages of the Highlands or like Ireland prior to the English invasion.

The vocabulary is very rich, but it doesn't cover the same items as the vocalularies of modern European societies (which got significantly sophisticated after the 16th and the 17th centuries).

This is why, if we (Berbers) want to modernize our vocabulary, we have to adapt some older words (mainly unused synonyms) and give them more specialized meanings, or we have to coin new words (derive them from existing lexical roots), or even borrow words from other languages. Anyway, our vocabulary needs to be modernized and adapted to modern life if we want our language to develop.

Regarding farming, few new words would need to be added. But in other areas like employment, technology, administation, law, etc. many new words are yet to be suggested/coined. This is already on the way, and there are already many Berber neologisms used in the sentences I (and a group of other friends) contributed to Tatoeba. Most of these neologisms had been coined by Mouloud Mammeri and various other authors in between the 1970's and the 1990's.

>>>> I would be interested in more sentances with all kinds of farm vocabulary.

I'll do my best to add these kind of sentences. I promise. I know that this would help you to learn Berber better since you would certainly try to make your own sentences while doing some farming works :-) That's a good idea!

Thanks for that lecture on Berber life. It was quite interesting.

You're welcome ^^

By the way, have you read Dune by Frank Herbert? There are desert people called Fremen, and I think they might have been inspired by Berbers, since Amazigh seems to mean "free men".

Wow, that's interesing :-)

Actually, I haven't read the book, but since you mention this, I'm going to read it.

Another thing: In one of the old Star Wars films (episode 5), the desert scenes were filmed in Southern Tunisia, in a Berber-speaking area called Tatatouine. The strange houses in that film were traditional houses built or carved in desert rocks by local farmers.

"Amazigh" is said to mean "free man". According to Salem Chaker (a professor of Berber in France), this word might have been derived from root *ZƔ/JƔ which is related to the meaning of "courage, bravery".

Source: http://fr.scribd.com/doc/150561...e-Word-Amazigh

As for the meaning of "free man" it comes from the fact that some Berber groups had slaves or servants (and some Tuareg and Mauritanian groups still have them today), and although these slaves/servants spoke Berber, they are never referred to as Berbers by the people who own them. Hence the distinction between "akli" (slave) and "Amaziɣ" (Berber = free man).

Interesting. I think that the scenes on Tatooine in Star Wars might very well have been inspired by Dune, which was released a few years earlier. The Fremen are portrayed positively in Dune. They're very strong because they live in the harsh conditions of the desert, but they also have strange customs and don't like outsiders too much. They worship the big worms of the desert. Anyway, Dune is a good book so I don't think you'd be wasting your time, but as a Berber you might have a different perspective on the story. It was written by an American and his understanding of the desert and Berbers was probably not so good.

Anyway, from what you said, it seems that Berbers are more sedentary farmers, than desert nomads. So I suppose that you don't even live in the desert. So maybe the Fremen are bit more like the Bedouin nomads.

Although I haven't read the book, I saw the film and I loved it. I love those stories that take place in an old world/universe with a very long history and many characters and nations.

I think that I even have the old novel somewhere at home (in French). I must have bought it around 6 or 7 years ago from a bookstore that sells old books. But believe it or not... I prefer to buy another copy rather than to dig into the millions of tons of old things and books I have at home.

As for nomad Berbers, nowadays, they are much less than before. They way of life has been particularly disrupted by the French colonization of North Africa. When France set up modern political borders between Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria in the late 19th century, it prevented many tribes from crossing the once non-existent borders in order to go to their pastures. In addition to that, the French military destroyed the caravan trade that existed between the northern Saharan oases and the African cities of the Niger and Senegal rivers area (in order to diminish the capacities of resistance of the local people).

Historically, there have always been sedentary Berbers and nomad Berbers, and there were often conflicts between them. In early historic times (around the 4 millenium BC), when the earliest Berber populations of the Mediterranean area started to conquer the Sahara (where the main population was black), these early Berbers were cattle breeders. Their descendents are modern Tuaregs and most of them are still nomads (breeding camels, sheep, goats and local breeds of bulls). In Mali and Niger, their traditional way of life has been strongly disrupted by civil war.

By the end of the Roman period (in the 3rd or 4th centuries AD), a powerful group of nomad Berber tribes (thought to be the ancestors of the Zenata tribes) started to move from the East of North Africa (Libya and Southern Tunisia) to the west. They spread all over the North of the Sahara (in the area called here the High Plateaus). Their dialects are still spoken today, and they are still closely related to one another.

Although Islam arrived to North Africa in the late 7th century AD, the main language in the rural areas remained Berber until the coming of the Arab nomad tribes of Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in the 11th century. Some Zenata nomad Berbers resisted them, but the Arab nomads were much more powerful and united and they eventually defeated them. This was a significant event in the history of North Africa, since this marked the beginning of the Arabization of nomad and rural Berbers (including sedentary Berbers), and this process of Arabization continues to date, since a growing number of Berber-speakers abandon their native Berber language to speak Arabic.

Most of the High Plateau nomad Berbers mixed with the Arab nomads and became part of them. They claim that they are Arabs. Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun described this process in his days, in the 15th century, and these are the people which came to be known by Europeans as "Berduins", here, in North Africa.

During the Middle Ages and until the 19th century, there was a kind of feudalism between the desert sedentary Berbers and the Arab nomads. The sedentary Berbers lived of farming in oases, and they grew date palm trees and other crops. The lived in villages called "iɣrem (pl. iɣerman)" (ighrem pl. igherman), and many of these villages kept the Berber language alive. Although these villages were fortified, they didn't really have a great military strength. As for the nomads, they lived in tents and they moved from place to place. They were warriors and they defended the fortified villages of sedentary Berbers who were their allies, and in exchage of that, these sedentary Berbers gave the Arab nomads a share of their crops. This system was considered as feudal because, according to it, the land and the oases didn't belong to the sedentary Berbers who cultivated them, but to the Arab nomads. However, the relations between the nomads and the sedentary were generally peaceful, and it can be considered as a kind of symbiosis.

Of course, this was unknown in the green lands of the north, where there were fewer nomads and they had only commercial relations with the sedentary.

Thanks for this very thorough explanation of Berber history.

Ulac aɣilif a ameddakel.
You're welcome, mate.