the amazigh world people: Tamazight - a language with 38 consonants

Tamazight - a language with 38 consonants

The Berber language, Tamazight, belongs to the African branch of the Afro-Asian language family, along with ancient Egyptian. There are various names for the different Berber dialects (which are different enough to be called languages by some), but Tamazight is seen as the root language. Old Phoenician language is mixed into the the Tamazight and as evident to etymologists.

Tamazight has only 3 vowels - a, i, u. This parsimony, vowel-wise, is amply compensated by a generous number of consonants - 38 consonants in all. To be able to write all 38 with Latin letters, diacritical marks and letter-pairs (like for example gh, pronounced as one variant of r), are used. Even the $-sign has to be called upon to help symbolize one of the 38 consonants. Learning to correctly pronounce this multitude of consonants, with their sometimes minute differences of pronounciational nuance, is no easy task for a casual European student of Tamazight. English, in comparison, has 21 consonant letters in its alphabet, but reportedly 24 consonant sounds (if you include sounds like voiced and unvoiced "th", "sh", voiced "s", etc.)

In European languages the grammatical information of a word (tense, gender, number, etc) is most often given by "concatenation", i.e. by adding an appropriate word ending to the word: one table, two tables, happen, happened, etc. But that is not how the Berbers do it. The grammatical information in Tamazight is instead conveyed via several changes in the word, e.g. of the vowels in the word, or sometimes by simultaneously adding something to the front as well as to the end of a word. Plural of am$ar (= male elder) becomes im$arn (= male elders), while one corresponding female elder is tam$art and several female elders is tim$arin. (I am not able to explain how the consonant symbol "$" is pronounced, but it reportedly belongs to the class of "fricatives").

The word order is VERB - SUBJECT - OBJECT. "The boy drank water" is thus expressed as "Drank the boy water".

Tifinagh

As I mentioned earlier, the Berber language has not been written - until fairly recently - except as short inscriptions on monuments. The Berber alphabet that was used for this task in antiquity is called Tifinagh and consists of a number of strange-looking phonetic symbols. It is probably derived from the Phoenician alphabet and has only symbols for consonants. Some Berber activists have tried to augment the consonant symbols with vowel symbols. This modern form of Tifinagh is sometimes heroically used to write Berber, most often only by the activists themselves. Most people who are literate in Berber use the Latin letter system for writing Tamazight.

The name Tifinagh possibly means 'the Phoenician letters', or possibly from the phrase tifin negh, which means 'our invention'.

Editor's note: In fact, in modern Lebanese, tifingeh or tfingé means an ingenious twist or invention.
This further supports the meaning subscribed to the name.

Berber languages such as Tamazight, Tamasheq and Amazigh, which are spoken by about a million or so people in Morocco, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Libya.

Neo-Tifinagh alphabet as used in Morocco