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quote he cites on this actually says nothing about North Africa, and for good reason: even
at the last glacial maximum North Africa was never covered by ice (see map), and was if
anything more habitable before 18000 BC than it is now. He also notes (p. 2) that Berber
princes have long claimed Yemenite origins. Such claims are questionable for many
reasons (the desire for prestige, the originally matrilineal traditions of many Berber tribes,
and no pre-Islamic attestations) but even if true, it would prove nothing about the
language: people change their language all the time without changing their ancestry, as
any emigrant can tell you. The rest of his argument is a hotchpotch of miscellaneous
quotes which at best claim that various early North African peoples or languages or
cultures originated in the Middle East; in a particularly ludicrous case, he blithely quotes
Bousquet (1957) to the effect that the Berber language came from Asia Minor [Turkey!]
None of these quotes so much as mention the Arabian peninsula.
In fact, the linguistic evidence means that Proto-Semitic may well have been spoken in
Arabia and certainly was spoken in the Middle East, but the common ancestor of Berber,
Egyptian, and Semitic was most likely located in Africa. You see, as noted above, these
three language families are also quite closely related to Chadic (spoken mainly in Nigeria
and Chad) and Cushitic (spoken around the Horn of Africa) which means that 4 out of 5
branches of this family are native to Africa. It is more likely that one branch left Africa than
that 4 branches each separately followed the same narrow path across Sinai or crossed
the Red Sea. (For theoretical background, see Campbell 2004.)
In other words: whether the similarities this book gathers between Arabic and Berber are
valid or not, they don't do anything to support the author's claim that Berber descends from
Arabic. Do they at least have the merit of being valid comparisons? Sometimes, but not
with any consistency. Many of his comparisons look rather far-fetched, eg on p. D:
tamu woman < Ar. mi menstruator
argaz man < Ar. rakza(tu l-'usr) pillar (of the family)
ixf head < Ar. xf' appear, because the head stands out
tadat armpit < Ar. dadaah tickling
alm camel < Ar. lum the foam that comes out of camels' mouths
Many others are clearly genuine loanwords, often featuring sounds that cannot be
reconstructed for Proto-Berber, though I don't think many of these are original suggestions,
eg:
(p. D) axrraz cobbler < Ar. xaraza to sew leather
(p. H) abrid road < Ar. bard ( confirmed by the Tuareg pronunciation of this word,
abrid)
(p. 38) lbl onion < Ar. baal ( Siwi happens to preserve an older word for "onion":
afllu)
(p. 78) tazamt belt < Ar. izm
A couple are known Phoenician loanwords:
(p. 57) agadir, aadir "wall" - Ar. jidr
A few are well-known Afroasiatic cognates, and scattered among them may be other valid
cognates:
(p. 250) ils tongue - Ar. lisn