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45-408: Proto-Berber shows features that clearly distinguish it from all other branches of Afroasiatic, but modern Berber languages are relatively homogeneous. Whereas the split from the other known Afroasiatic branches was very ancient, on the order of 10,000~9,000 years BP , according to glottochronological studies, Proto-Berber might be as recent as 3,000 years BP. Louali & Philippson (2003) propose, on

90-678: A homorganic tense counterpart, with the sole exceptions of *β, *ʔ. The consonants *ɟ and *g have remained distinct in some Zenati languages : Similarly, Proto-Berber *c, corresponding to k in non-Zenati varieties, became š in Zenati (but a number of irregular correspondences for this are found). For example, căm "you (f. sg.)" becomes šəm . (The change also occurs in Nafusi and Siwi .) Eastern Berber languages : Proto-Berber * -əβ has become -i in Zenati. For example, * arəβ "write" becomes ari . (This change also occurs in varieties including

135-652: A development that is to some degree reflected in the dialect names. It is realized as h in Tamahaq (Tahaggart), as š in Tamasheq and as simple z in the Tamajaq dialects Tawallammat and Tayart. In the latter two, *z is realised as ž before palatal vowels, explaining the form Tamajaq . In Tawallammat and especially Tayart, this kind of palatalization actually does not confine itself to z . In these dialects, dentals in general are palatalized before /i/ and /j/ . For example, tidət

180-606: A few speakers, the Kinnin , in Chad . Tuareg dialects belong to the South Berber group and are sometimes regarded as a single language (as for instance by Karl-Gottfried Prasse ). They are distinguished mainly by a few sound shifts (notably affecting the pronunciation of original z and h ). The Tuareg varieties are unusually conservative in some respects; they retain two short vowels where Northern-Berber languages have one or none, and have

225-667: A much lower proportion of Arabic loanwords than most Berber languages. The Tuareg languages are traditionally written in the indigenous Tifinagh alphabet. However, the Arabic script is commonly used in some areas (and has been since medieval times), while the Latin script is official in Mali and Niger . Blench (ms, 2006) lists the following as separate languages, with dialects in parentheses: Speakers of Tin Sert (Tetserret) identify as Tuareg, but

270-643: Is CV(C)(C), including glottal stops (see above). Contrastive stress may occur in the stative aspect of verbs. Different dialects have slightly different consonant inventories. Some of these differences can be diachronically accounted for. For example, Proto-Berber *h is mostly lost in Ayer Tuareg, while it is maintained in almost every position in Mali Tuareg. The Iwellemmeden and Ahaggar Tuareg dialects are midway between these positions. The Proto-Berber consonant *z comes out differently in different dialects,

315-704: Is also followed by a phonetic glottal stop . Gemination is contrastive. Normally /ɣɣ/ becomes [qː] , /ww/ becomes [ɡː] , and /dˤdˤ/ becomes [tˤː] . /q/ and /tˤ/ are predominantly geminate. In addition, in Tadɣaq /ɡ/ is usually geminate, but in Tudalt singleton /ɡ/ may occur. Voicing assimilation occurs, with the first consonant taking the voicing of the second (e.g. /edˤkăr/ > [etˤkăr] ). Cluster reduction turns word/morpheme-final /-ɣt, -ɣk/ into [-qː] and /-kt, -ɟt, -ɡt/ into [-kː] (e.g. /tămaʃăɣt/ > [tămaʃăq] 'Tamasheq' ). Syllable structure

360-464: Is based on examining the differences that characterize ancient stages of Semitic and Egyptian in the third millennium BC. Many researchers have estimated the differences to have taken 4,000 years to evolve, resulting in breaking this language family in six distinct groups (Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic) in the eighth millennium BC. Proto-Afroasiatic is thus from the tenth millennium since it took at least 2,000 years before it reached

405-543: Is considerably different from other Afroasiatic branches, but modern-day Berber languages display low internal diversity. The presence of Punic borrowings in Proto-Berber points to the diversification of modern Berber languages subsequent to the fall of Carthage in 146 BC; only Guanche and Zenaga lack Punic loanwords. Additionally, Latin loanwords in Proto-Berber point to the breakup of Proto-Berber between 1 and 200 AD. During this time period, Roman innovations including

450-500: Is derived from /u/. Comparative evidence shows that /ə/ derives from a merger of Proto-Berber */ĭ/ and */ŭ/. Sudlow classes the "semivowels" /w, j/ with the vowels, and notes the following possible diphthongs: /əw/ (> [u]), /ăw/, /aw/, /ew/, /iw/, /ow/, /uw/, /əj/ (> [i]), /ăj/, /aj/, /ej/, /ij/, /oj/, /uj/. The consonant inventory largely resembles Arabic: differentiated voicing; uvulars, pharyngeals (traditionally referred to as emphatics) /tˤ/, /lˤ/, /sˤ/, /dˤ/, /zˤ/ ; requiring

495-706: Is pronounced [tidʲət] in Tayart. Other differences can easily be traced back to borrowing. For example, the Arabic pharyngeals ħ and ʻ have been borrowed along with Arabic loanwords by dialects specialized in Islamic ( Maraboutic ) learning. Other dialects substitute ħ and ʻ respectively with x and ɣ . The basic word order in Tuareg is verb–subject–object . Verbs can be grouped into 19 morphological classes; some of these classes can be defined semantically. Verbs carry information on

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540-425: Is required, and in letter-writing. The Arabic script is mostly in use by tribes more involved in Islamic learning, and little is known about its conventions. The DNAFLA system is a somewhat morphophonemic orthography, not indicating initial vowel shortening, always writing the directional particle as < dd⟩, and not indicating all assimilations (e.g. ⟨Tămašăɣt⟩ for [tămašăq]). In Burkina Faso

585-647: The Central Atlas Tamazight dialect of the Izayan , Nafusi, and Siwi.) Ghadamès and Awjila are the only Berber languages to preserve Proto-Berber *β as β; elsewhere in Berber it becomes h or disappears. The Proto-Berber consonantal system reconstructed by Allati (cf. Allati, 2002, 2011) is based on remains from the ancient stages of this language preserved in the ancient toponymical strata, in Libyan inscriptions and in

630-643: The University of Copenhagen instead uses the unambiguous "b2k", for "years before 2000 AD", often in combination with the Greenland Ice Core Chronology 2005 (GICC05) time scale. Some authors who use the YBP dating format also use "YAP" ("years after present") to denote years after 1950. SI prefix multipliers may be used to express larger periods of time, e.g. ka BP (thousand years BP), Ma BP (million years BP) and many others . Radiocarbon dating

675-448: The carbon isotopes in the atmosphere, which scientists must account for. In a convention that is not always observed, many sources restrict the use of BP dates to those produced with radiocarbon dating; the alternative notation "RCYBP" stands for the explicit "radio carbon years before present". The BP scale is sometimes used for dates established by means other than radiocarbon dating, such as stratigraphy . This usage differs from

720-561: The Nile River valley to North Africa 4,000–5,000 years BP due to the spread of pastoralism, and experienced intense language leveling about 2,000 years BP as the Roman Empire was expanding in North Africa. Hence, although Berber had split off from Afroasiatic several thousand years ago, Proto-Berber itself can only be reconstructed to a period as late as 200 AD. Blench (2018) notes that Berber

765-497: The ancient toponymical strata show that the basis of word formation is a monosyllabic lexical unit (vc, cvc) whose vowels and consonants are part of the root. Its forms and its characteristics are similar to those of the base of word formation postulated for proto-Afroasiatic. The composition and the reduplication/doubling process whose traces are preserved in all the Afroasiatic branches, including Semitic where they are fossilized in

810-485: The basis of the lexical reconstruction of livestock-herding, a Proto-Berber 1 (PB1) stage around 7,000 years BP and a Proto-Berber 2 (PB2) stage as the direct ancestor of contemporary Berber languages. In the third millennium BC, proto-Berber speakers spread across the area from Morocco to Egypt . In the last millennium BC, another Berber expansion created the Berber peoples noted in Roman records. The final spread occurred in

855-529: The comparisons between the varieties of modern Berber languages or with Touareg, considered by some authors like Prasse to be the variety that best preserved proto-Berber. Some earlier attempts to derive the phonemic inventory of Proto-Berber were heavily influenced by Tuareg because of its perception of being particularly archaic. Karl G. Prasse and Maarten Kossmann reconstruct three short vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ and four long vowels /aa/, /ii/, /uu/ and /ee/. Their main reflexes in modern Berber languages are shown in

900-452: The emphasized concept to be placed first, be it the subject or object, the latter giving an effect somewhat like the English passive. Sudlow uses the following examples, all expressing the concept "Men don't cook porridge" (e denotes Sudlow's schwa): Again like Japanese, the "pronoun/particle 'a' is used with a following relative clause to bring a noun in a phrase to the beginning for emphasis,"

945-661: The emphatics are denoted by "hooked" letters, as in Fula , e.g. ⟨ɗ ƭ⟩ . The vowel system includes five long vowels, /a, e, i, o, u/ and two short vowels, /ə, ă/ (on this page, /ă/ is used to represent IPA [æ] ). Some of the vowels have more open "emphatic" allophones that occur immediately before emphatic consonants, subject to dialectal variation. These allophones include [ɛ] for /e/ and /i/ (although /i/ may be less open), [ɔ] for /o/ and /u/ (although /u/ may be less open), and [ă] for /ə/ . Karl Prasse argued that /e/ goes back to Proto-Berber , while /o/

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990-626: The existence of a fact, of a situation...i.e. it expresses a state, a quality (cf. Allati, 2002, 2011b/c, 2013 below) having the value of a stative (cf. idem et Allati, 2008). It is not oriented in relation to its determinants (agentive subject, object...) whose syntactic functions are insured by casual elements including the casual affix (ergative) that indicates, as needed, the agent or the subject. Similar elements attested in Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic, and remains preserved in Semitic drove Diakonoff to postulate

1035-471: The exponential decay relation and the "Libby half-life" 5568 a. The ages are expressed in years before present (BP) where "present" is defined as AD 1950. The year 1950 was chosen because it was the standard astronomical epoch at that time. It also marked the publication of the first radiocarbon dates in December 1949, and 1950 also antedates large-scale atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons , which altered

1080-453: The first millennium AD, when the Tuareg, now possessing camels, moved into the central Sahara ; in the past, the northern parts of the Sahara were much more habitable than they are now. The fact that there are reconstructions for all major species of domestic ruminants but none for the camel in Proto-Berber implies that its speakers bred livestock and were pastoralists. Another dating system

1125-571: The following table: Tuareg and Ghadames also have /o/, which seems to have evolved from /u/ by vowel harmony in Tuareg and from *aʔ in Ghadames. Allati has reconstructed a Proto-Berber vocalic system made of six vowels: i, u, e, o, a. Without the long vowels that are not Proto-Afroasiatic (cf. Diakonoff, 1965 : 31, 40 ; Bomhard et Kerns, 1994 : 107, among others) and that evolved in some modern Berber varieties (Toureg, Ghadames, ...),

1170-480: The global ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 . Dates determined using radiocarbon dating come as two kinds: uncalibrated (also called Libby or raw ) and calibrated (also called Cambridge ) dates. Uncalibrated radiocarbon dates should be clearly noted as such by "uncalibrated years BP", because they are not identical to calendar dates. This has to do with the fact that the level of atmospheric radiocarbon ( carbon-14 or C) has not been strictly constant during

1215-596: The language is Western Berber . The Tuareg languages may be written using the ancient Tifinagh (Libyco-Berber) script, the Latin script or the Arabic script . The Malian national literacy program DNAFLA has established a standard for the Latin alphabet, which is used with modifications in Prasse's Lexique and the government literacy program in Burkina, while in Niger a different system

1260-439: The modern Berber varieties. It had stops b, t, d, k, g; fricative s; nasal n and liquids l, r. The stops of the phonological system have evolved since the proto-Berber stage into variants from which other consonants have been progressively formed (Allati, 2002, 2011). Karl G. Prasse has produced a comprehensive reconstruction of Proto-Berber morphology based on Tuareg. Additional work on the reconstruction of Proto-Berber morphology

1305-508: The name (standard codes are used) of the laboratory concerned, and other information such as confidence levels, because of differences between the methods used by different laboratories and changes in calibrating methods. Conversion from Gregorian calendar years to Before Present years is by starting with the 1950-01-01 epoch of the Gregorian calendar and increasing the BP year count with each year into

1350-416: The origin of practical radiocarbon dating in the 1950s. Because the "present" time changes, standard practice is to use 1 January 1950 as the commencement date (epoch) of the age scale, with 1950 being labelled as the "standard year". The abbreviation "BP" has been interpreted retrospectively as "Before Physics", which refers to the time before nuclear weapons testing artificially altered the proportion of

1395-455: The ox-plough, camel, and orchard management were adopted by Berber communities along the limites , the borders of the Roman Empire . In Blench's view, this resulted in a new trading culture involving the use of a lingua franca , which became Proto-Berber. Reconstructions of the ancient stages of this language are based on comparisons with other Afro-Asiatic languages in various stages and on

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1440-510: The past from that Gregorian date. For example, 1000 BP corresponds to 950 AD, 1949 BP corresponds to 1 AD, 1950 BP corresponds to 1 BC, 2000 BP corresponds to 51 BC. Tuareg languages The Tuareg ( English: / ˈ t w ɑːr ɛ ɡ / ) languages constitute a group of closely related Berber languages and dialects . They are spoken by the Tuareg Berbers in large parts of Mali , Niger , Algeria , Libya and Burkina Faso , with

1485-411: The pharynx muscles to contract and influencing the pronunciation of the following vowel, and no voiceless bilabial plosive . The glottal stop is non-phonemic. It occurs at the beginning of vowel-initial words to fill the place of the initial consonant in the syllable structure (see below), although if the words is preceded by a word ending in a consonant, it makes a liaison instead. Phrase-final /a/

1530-403: The quadrilaterals and quintiliterals, constitute the type of word formation at that stage of Berber. These remains also show that agglutination is the Proto-Berber mode of the grammatical adjunction of morphemes whose placement was not fixed in relation to the elements that they determine (cf. Allati, 2002, 2011b/c, 2012, 2013, 2014). The relations between the predicate of existence, the core of

1575-485: The recommendation by van der Plicht & Hogg, followed by the Quaternary Science Reviews , both of which requested that publications should use the unit "a" (for "annum", Latin for "year") and reserve the term "BP" for radiocarbon estimations. Some archaeologists use the lowercase letters bp , bc and ad as terminology for uncalibrated dates for these eras. The Centre for Ice and Climate at

1620-511: The same type of syntactic construction for proto-Semitic and proto-Afroasiatic (cf. Diakonoff, 1988, 101 ; cf. equally Allati, 2008, 2011a, 2012). Many elements equally show that proto-Berber did not have the noun-verb contrast, the rection contrasts, diathesis and person (cf. idem). Before Present Before Present ( BP ) or " years before present ( YBP )" is a time scale used mainly in archaeology , geology, and other scientific disciplines to specify when events occurred relative to

1665-596: The span of time that can be radiocarbon-dated. Uncalibrated radiocarbon ages can be converted to calendar dates by calibration curves based on comparison of raw radiocarbon dates of samples independently dated by other methods, such as dendrochronology (dating based on tree growth-rings) and stratigraphy (dating based on sediment layers in mud or sedimentary rock). Such calibrated dates are expressed as cal BP, where "cal" indicates "calibrated years", or "calendar years", before 1950. Many scholarly and scientific journals require that published calibrated results be accompanied by

1710-411: The stage where these different branches of this language family evolved. From that perspective, Proto-Berber was the first Berber stage to depart from Proto-Afroasiatic in the eighth millennium. It was restructured several times during the almost 10,000 years that separated it from its modern shape, which has preserved few relics. Roger Blench (2018) suggests that Proto-Berber speakers had spread from

1755-681: The subject of the sentence in the form of pronominal marking. No simple adjectives exist in the Tuareg languages; adjectival concepts are expressed using a relative verb form traditionally called 'participle'. The Tuareg languages have very heavily influenced Northern Songhay languages such as Sawaq , whose speakers are culturally Tuareg but speak Songhay; this influence includes points of phonology and sometimes grammar as well as extensive loanwords. Tamasheq prefers VSO order; however it contains topic–comment structure (like in American Sign Language, Modern Hebrew, Japanese and Russian), allowing

1800-399: The system is preserved in the southeastern Berber varieties including Tuareg . It is equally close to the proposed Proto-Afroasiatic vocalic system (Diakonoff, 1965, 1988). Alexander Militarev reconstructs the vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ in his proto-forms. Kossmann reconstructs the following consonantal phonemes for Proto-Berber: As in modern Berber languages, most Proto-Berber consonants had

1845-406: The utterance in the proto-Berber stage, and its determinants ordered around it without a pre-established order, are indicated with affixes (cf. idem). The Proto-Berber relics preserved at the lexico-semantic and syntactic levels show that the proto-Berber syntactic construction is of the ergative type (cf. idem). The proto-Berber statement core is a predicate of existence, a lexical base which posits

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1890-527: Was done by Maarten Kossmann. Proto-Berber had no grammatical case . Its descendants developed a marked nominative that is still present in Northern Berber and Southern Berber /Tuareg. Some Berber languages lost it thereafter, recently in Eastern Berber and Western Berber ( Zenaga ). The relics of the ancient morphological segments preserved in the modern varieties, in the Libyan inscriptions and in

1935-446: Was first used in 1949. Beginning in 1954, metrologists established 1950 as the origin year for the BP scale for use with radiocarbon dating, using a 1950-based reference sample of oxalic acid . According to scientist A. Currie Lloyd: The problem was tackled by the international radiocarbon community in the late 1950s, in cooperation with the U.S. National Bureau of Standards . A large quantity of contemporary oxalic acid dihydrate

1980-525: Was prepared as NBS Standard Reference Material (SRM) 4990B. Its C concentration was about 5% above what was believed to be the natural level, so the standard for radiocarbon dating was defined as 0.95 times the C concentration of this material, adjusted to a C reference value of −19 per mil (PDB). This value is defined as "modern carbon" referenced to AD 1950. Radiocarbon measurements are compared to this modern carbon value, and expressed as "fraction of modern" (fM). "Radiocarbon ages" are calculated from fM using

2025-543: Was used. There is also some variation in Tifinagh and in the Arabic script. Early uses of the Tifinagh script have been found on rock art and in various sepulchres . Among these are the 1,500 year old monumental tomb of the Tuareg matriarch Tin Hinan , where vestiges of a Tifinagh inscription have been found on one of its walls. Tifinagh usage is now restricted mainly to writing magical formulae, writing on palms when silence

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