African Romance or African Latin is an extinct Romance language that was spoken in the Roman province of Africa by the Roman Africans during the later Roman and early Byzantine Empires, and several centuries after the annexation of the region by the Umayyad Caliphate in 696 AD. African Romance is poorly attested as it was mainly a spoken, vernacular language, a sermo rusticus.[1] There is little doubt, however, that by the early 3rd century AD, some native provincial variety of Latin was fully established in Africa.[2]

This language, which developed under Byzantine rule, continued through to the 12th century in various places along the North African coast and the immediate littoral,[1] with evidence that it may have persisted up to the 14th century,[3] and possibly even the 15th century,[2] or later[3] in certain areas of the interior.

Background

The Roman province of Africa was organized in 146 BC following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War. The city of Carthage, destroyed following the war, was rebuilt during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar as a Roman colony, and by the 1st century, it had grown to be the fourth largest city of the empire, with a population in excess of 100,000 people.[upper-alpha 1] The Fossa regia was an important boundary in North Africa, originally separating the Roman occupied Carthaginian territory from Numidia,[5] and may have served as a cultural boundary indicating Romanization.[6]

In the time of the Roman Empire, the province had become populous and prosperous and Carthage was the second-largest Latin-speaking city in the Empire. Latin was, however, largely an urban and coastal speech. Carthaginian Punic continued to be spoken in inland and rural areas as late as the mid-5th century, but also in the cities.[7] It is probable that Berber languages were spoken in some areas as well.

Funerary stelae chronicle the Romanization of art and religion in North Africa.[8] Notable differences, however, existed in the penetration and survival of the Latin, Punic and Berber languages.[9] These indicated regional differences: Neo-Punic had a revival in Tripolitania, around Hippo Regius there is a cluster of Libyan inscriptions^{[clarification needed]}, while in the mountainous regions of Kabylie and Aures, Latin was scarcer, though not absent.[9]

Africa was occupied by the Germanic Vandal tribe for over a century, between 429 and 534 AD, when the province was reconquered by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. The changes that occurred in spoken Latin during that time are unknown. Literary Latin, however, was maintained at a high standard, as seen in the Latin poetry of the African writer Corippus. The area around Carthage remained fully Latin-speaking until the arrival of the Arabs.

Origins and development

Like all Romance languages, African Romance descended from Vulgar Latin, the non-standard (in contrast to Classical Latin) form of the Latin language, which was spoken by soldiers and merchants throughout the Roman Empire. With the expansion of the empire, Vulgar Latin came to be spoken by inhabitants of the various Roman-controlled territories in North Africa. Latin and its descendants were spoken in the Province of Africa following the Punic Wars, when the Romans conquered the territory. Spoken Latin, and Latin inscriptions developed while Punic was still being used.[10] Bilingual inscriptions were engraved, some of which reflect the introduction of Roman institutions into Africa, using new Punic expressions.[10]

Latin, and then some Romance variant of it, was spoken by generations of speakers, for about fifteen centuries.[2] This was demonstrated by African-born speakers of African Romance who continued to create Latin inscriptions until the first half of the 11th century.[2] Evidence for a spoken Romance variety which developed locally out of Latin persisted in rural areas of Tunisia – possibly as late as the last two decades of the 15th century in some sources.[11]

By the late 19th century and early 20th century, the possible existence of African Latin was controversial,[12] with debates on the existence of Africitas as a putative African dialect of Latin. In 1882, the German scholar Karl Sittl [de] used unconvincing material to adduce features particular to Latin in Africa.[12] This unconvincing evidence was attacked by Wilhelm Kroll in 1897,[13] and again by Madeline D. Brock in 1911.[14] Brock went so far as to assert that "African Latin was free from provincialism",[15] and that African Latin was "the Latin of an epoch rather than that of a country".[16] This view shifted in recent decades, with modern philologists going so far as to say that African Latin "was not free from provincialism"[17] and that, given the remoteness of parts of Africa, there were "probably a plurality of varieties of Latin, rather than a single African Latin".[17] Other researchers believe that features peculiar to African Latin existed, but are "not to be found where Sittl looked for it".[17]

While as a language African Romance is extinct, there is some evidence of regional varieties in African Latin that helps reconstruct some of its features.[18] Some historical evidence on the phonetic and lexical features of the Afri were already observed in ancient times. Pliny observes how walls in Africa and Spain are called formacei, or "framed walls, because they are made by packing in a frame enclosed between two boards, one on each side".[19] Nonius Marcellus, a Roman grammarian, provides further, if uncertain, evidence regarding vocabulary and possible "Africanisms".[20][upper-alpha 2] In the Historia Augusta, the North African Roman Emperor Septimius Severus is said to have retained an African accent until old age.[upper-alpha 3] More recent analysis focuses on a body of literary texts, being literary pieces written by African and non-African writers.[23] These show the existence of an African pronunciation of Latin, then moving on to a further study of lexical material drawn from sub-literary sources, such as practical texts and ostraca, from multiple African communities, that is military writers, landholders and doctors.[23]

The Romance philologist James Noel Adams lists a number of possible Africanisms found in this wider Latin literary corpus.[24] Only two refer to constructions found in Sittl,[25] with the other examples deriving from medical texts,[26] various ostraca and other non-traditional sources. Two sorts of regional features can be observed. The first are loanwords from a substrate language, such is the case with Britain. In African Latin, this substrate was Punic. African Romance included words such as ginga for "henbane", boba for "mallow," girba for "mortar" and gelela for the inner flesh of a gourd.[27] The second refers to use of Latin words with particular meanings not found elsewhere, or in limited contexts. Of particular note is the African Romance use of the word rostrum for "mouth" instead of the original meaning in Latin, which is "beak",[28] and baiae for "baths" being a late Latin and particularly African generalisation from the place-name Baiae.[29] Pullus meaning "cock" or "rooster", was probably borrowed by Berber dialects from African Romance, for use instead of the Latin gallus.[30] The originally abstract word dulcor is seen applied as a probable medical African specialisation relating to sweet wine instead of the Latin passum or mustum.[31] The Latin for grape, traditionally indeterminate (acinis), male (acinus) or neuter (acinum), in various African Latin sources changes to the feminine acina.[32] Other examples include the use of pala as a metaphor for the shoulder blade; centenarium, which only occurs in the Albertini Tablets and may have meant "granary";[33] and infantilisms such as dida.[34]

Both Africans, such as Augustine of Hippo and the grammarian Pompeius, as well as non-Africans, such as Consentius and Jerome, wrote on African features, some in very specific terms.[35] Indeed in his De Ordine, dated to late 386, Augustine remarks how he was still criticised by the Italians for his pronunciation, while he himself often found fault with theirs.[36] While modern scholars may express doubts on the interpretation or accuracy of some of these writings, they contend that African Latin must have been distinctive enough to inspire so much discussion.[37]

Extinction as a vernacular

Prior to the Arab conquest in 696–705 AD, a Romance language was probably spoken alongside Berber languages in the region.[38] Loanwords from Northwest African Romance to Berber are attested, usually in the accusative form: examples include atmun ("plough-beam") from temonem.[38]

Following the conquest, it becomes difficult to trace the fate of African Romance. The Umayyad administration did at first utilize the local Latin language in coinage from Carthage and Kairouan in the early 7th century, displaying Latin inscriptions of Islamic phrases such as D[e]us tu[us] D[e]us et a[li]us non e[st] ("God is your God and there is no other"), a variation of the shahada, or Muslim declaration of faith.[39] African Latin was soon replaced by Arabic as the primary administrative language, but it existed at least until the arrival of the Banu Hilal Arabs in the 11th century and probably until the beginning of the 14th century.[40] It likely continued to be widely spoken in various parts of the littoral of Africa into the 12th century,[1] exerting a significant influence on Northwest African Arabic, particularly the language of northwestern Morocco.[38]

Amongst the Berbers of Ifriqiya, African Romance was linked to Christianity, which survived in North Africa (outside of Egypt) until the 14th century.[3] Spoken Latin or Romance is attested in Gabès by Ibn Khordadbeh; in Béja, Biskra, Tlemcen, and Niffis by al-Bakri; and in Gafsa and Monastir by al-Idrisi,[1] who observes that the people in Gafsa "are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue."[1][41][upper-alpha 4] There is also a possible reference to spoken Latin or African Romance in the 11th century, when the Rustamid governor Abu Ubayda Abd al-Hamid al-Jannawni was said to have sworn his oath of office in Arabic, Berber and in an unspecified "town language", which might be a Romance variety; in the oath, the Arabic-rendered phrase bar diyyu could signify some variation of Latin per Deu(m) ("by God".)[42] In their quest to conquer the Kingdom of Africa in the 12th century, the Normans were aided by the remaining Christian population of Tunisia, who some linguists, among them Vermondo Brugnatelli [it], argue had been speaking a Romance language for centuries.[43] A statement by Mawlâ Aḥmad[upper-alpha 5] is sometimes interpreted as implying the survival of a Christian community in Tozeur into the eighteenth century, but this is unlikely; Provost estimates that Christianity disappeared around the middle of the thirteenth century in southern Tunisia.[3]

Related languages

Sardinian

The spoken variety of African Romance, as recorded by Paolo Pompilio [it], was perceived to be similar to Sardinian[upper-alpha 6] – confirming hypotheses that there were parallelisms between developments of Latin in Africa and Sardinia.[11] The regions of Sardinia and North Africa have maintained long cultural ties since pre-Roman times, when the island fell under the Carthaginian sphere of influence in the 8th–7th centuries BC. This resulted in the Punic language being spoken in Sardinia up to the 3rd–4th centuries AD, and several Punic loan-words survive into modern Sardinian.[46][47]

Augustine of Hippo writes that "African ears have no quick perception of the shortness or length of [Latin] vowels".[48][49][upper-alpha 7] This also describes the evolution of vowels in the Sardinian language. Sardinian has only five vowels, and no diphthongs: unlike the other surviving Romance languages, the five long vowel pairs of Classical Latin, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū (phonetically [aː, eː, iː, oː, uː]), merged with their corresponding short vowel counterparts ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ [a, ɛ, ɪ, ɔ, ʊ] into five single vowels with no length distinction /a, ɛ, i, ɔ, u/.[upper-alpha 8] In the continental Romance varieties, ǐ, ŭ [ɪ, ʊ] merged with /e, o/ instead of /i, u/ as in Sardinian, which generally resulted in a six or seven vowel system, for example Italian /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/.

Adams theorises that similarities in some vocabulary, such as pala ("shoulderblade") and acina ("grape") across Sardinian and African Romance, or spanu[51] in Sardinian and spanus ("light red") in African Romance, may be evidence that some vocabulary was shared between Sardinia and Africa.[52] A further theory suggests that the Sardinian word for "Friday", cenàpura or chenàpura,[53] may have been brought to Sardinia by North African Jews.[54]

Muhammad al-Idrisi also says of the island's native people that "the Sardinians are ethnically[55] Roman Africans, live like the Berbers, shun any other nation of Rûm; these people are courageous and valiant, that never part with their weapons."[56][57][upper-alpha 9]

Blasco Ferrer suggests that the Latin demonstrative ipse/-a, from which derive both the Sardinian definite article su/sa as well as the subject personal pronouns isse/-a, could have exerted influence on the Berber feminine prefix ta, especially in its alternative forms θa, possibly via an intermediate form *tsa.[59] Apart from Sardinian, the only other Romance varieties which take their article from ipse/-a (instead of ille/-a) are the Catalan dialects of the Balearic islands and certain areas of Girona, the Vall de Gallerina and tàrbena, as well as medieval Gascon. However, the connection between ipsa and ta remains highly speculative.

Additionally, it is notable that Sardinian is the only Romance language in which the name for the Milky Way, sa (b)ía de sa bálla / báza, meaning "the Way of Straw", also occurs in Berber languages.[60]

Sardinian and African Romance may have belonged to a larger subgroup, known as Southern Romance, spoken in the medieval period not only in Sardinia and Northern Africa, but also in Corsica (at least in southern Corsica), southern Basilicata and perhaps other regions in southern Italy, perhaps Sicily, and possibly even Malta.

Other languages

Some impacts of African Romance on Arabic spoken in the Maghreb are also theorised.[61] For example, in calendar month names, the word furar "February" is only found in the Maghreb and in the Maltese language – proving the word's ancient origins.[61] The region also has a form of another Latin named month in awi/ussu < augustus.[61] This word does not appear to be a loan word through Arabic, and may have been taken over directly from Late Latin or African Romance.[61] Scholars theorise that a Latin-based system provided forms such as awi/ussu and furar, with the system then mediating Latin/Romance names through Arabic for some month names during the Islamic period.[62] The same situation exists for Maltese which mediated words from Italian, and retains both non-Italian forms such as awissu/awwissu and frar, and Italian forms such as april.[62]

Some scholars theorise that many of the North African invaders of Hispania in the Early Middle Ages spoke some form of African Romance, with "phonetic, morphosyntactic, lexical and semantic data" from African Romance appearing to have contributed in the development of Ibero-Romance.[63]

Brugnatelli pinpoints some Berber words, relating to religious topics, as being originally words from Latin: for example, in Ghadames the word "äng'alus" (ⴰⵏⵖⴰⵍⵓⵙ, أنغلس) refers to a spiritual entity, clearly using a word from the Latin angelus "angel".[64][65]

Characteristics

Starting from African Romance's similarity with Sardinian, scholars theorise that the similarity may be pinned down to specific phonological properties.[11] Sardinian lacks palatization of velar stops before front vowels, and features the pairwise merger of short and long non-low vowels.[2] Evidence is found that both isoglosses were present in African Latin:

• Velar stops also remain unaffected in Latin loanwords in Berber.[2] For example, tkilsit ("mulberry tree") < (morus) celsa in Latin,[66] and i-kīkər ("chickpea") < cicer in Latin,[67] or ig(e)r , ("field") < ager in Latin.[68]
• Inscriptions from Tripolitania, written as late as the 10th or 11th century are written with a ⟨k⟩, diverging from contemporary European Latin uses.[69] Thus, there are forms such as dikite ("say", 2nd person plural imperative), iaket ("he/she lies down"), dekember ("December") and pake ("peace") with ⟨k⟩ such as dilektus ("beloved"), karus ("dear") and Afrikana ("African"), found in an inscriptional corpus.[70]
• Some evidence that Latin words with a "v" are often written with a "b" in African Romance, as reported by Isidore of Seville: birtus ("virtue") < virtus in Latin, boluntas ("will") < voluntas, and bita ("life") < vita.[upper-alpha 10]
• The Albertini Tablets suggest high levels of phonetic errors and an uncertainty in the use of Latin cases.[72]
• In ostraca from Bu Njem [fr], there is evidence of significant number of errors and deviations from Classical Latin, such as the omission of the final -m in numerous endings after -a (being often misspelled accusatives). There is evidence of the e-spelling for <æ>, which is unaccompanied by evidence of merging <ē> and <ǐ> or <ō> and <ŭ>, the elimination by various strategies of vowels in hiatus,[73] as well as to a lesser extent the change of the short Latin <û> to a close <ọ>, and the retention of the -u spelling is kept in second declension words.[74]
• There is evidence that the vowel system of African Latin was similar to Sardinian.[69][75] In Latin loanwords in Berber, Latin short ĭ, ŭ result in i, u (instead of e, o) as in Sardinian. For example, pullus ("chicken") > afullus, cicer ("chickpea") > i-kīkər, pirus ("pear tree") > ti-firest.[76]

Augustine of Hippo's testimony on how ōs ("mouth") in Latin was to African ears indistinguishable from ŏs ("bone") also indicates the merger of vowels and the loss of the original allophonic quality distinction in vowels.[77][upper-alpha 11]

Moreover, in a study of errors on stressed vowels in a corpus of 279 inscriptions, scholars noted how African inscriptions confused between over-stressed and under-stressed vowels between the 1st and 4th century AD, with Rome reaching comparable error rates only by the late 4th to 6th centuries.[78]

Berber vocabulary

The Polish Arabist Tadeusz Lewicki [de] tried to reconstruct some sections of this language based on 85 lemmas mainly derived from Northwest African toponyms and anthroponyms found in medieval sources.[79] Due to the historical presence in the region of Classical Latin, modern Romance languages, as well as the influence of the Mediterranean Lingua Franca (that has Romance vocabulary) it is difficult to differentiate the precise origin of words in Berber languages and in the varieties of Maghrebi Arabic. The studies are also difficult and often highly conjectural. Due to the large size of the North African territory, it is highly probable that not one but several varieties of African Romance existed, much like the wide variety of Romance languages in Europe.[80] Moroever, other Romance languages spoken in Northwest Africa before the European colonization were the Mediterranean Lingua Franca,[81] a pidgin with Arabic and Romance influences, and Judaeo-Spanish, a dialect of Spanish brought by Sephardi Jews.[82]

Scholars believe that there is a great number of Berber words, existing in various dialects, which are theorised to derive from late Latin or African Romance, such as the vocabulary in the following list. It might be possible to reconstruct a chronology of which loans entered Berber languages in the Classical Latin period versus in Late Latin/Proto-Romance based on features; for example, certain forms such as afullus (from pullus, "chicken") or asnus (< asinus, "donkey") preserve the Classical Latin nominative ending -us, whereas other words like abekkadu (< peccatum, "sin") or muṛu (< murus, "wall") have lost final -s (matching parallel developments in Romance.)[83] Forms such as tayda (< taeda, "pinewood"), which seem to preserve the Latin diphthong ae, might also be interpreted as archaic highly conservative loans from the Roman Imperial period or earlier.

However, the potential chronological distinction based on word endings is inconsistent; the form qaṭṭus (from cattus, "cat") preserves final -s, but cattus is only attested in Late Latin, when one would expect final -s to have been dropped.[84] Further, the -u endings may instead simply derive from accusative forms which had lost final -m; as a comparison, words drawn from 3rd declension nouns may vary between nominative-based forms like falku < falco ("falcon"), and accusative/oblique-case forms like atmun < temo (Acc: temonem, "pole", c.f. Italian timone) or amerkidu ("divine recompense") < merces (Acc: mercedem, "pay/wages", c.f. Italiian mercede.)[83]

Nevertheless, as discussed previously, shared phonological outcomes between Latin-derived Berber words and the corresponding Sardinian and (to some extent Corsican) terms seem to be reflected in some of the vocabulary items in the list. For evidence of the merger of Latin short ǐ, ŭ [ɪ, ʊ] with /i, u/ instead of /e, o/, compare how Latin pirus/a ("pear tree/pear") results in Berber ifires and Sardinian pira vs. Italian pero, and Latin ulmus ("elm") becomes Berber ulmu and Sardinian úlimu vs. Italian olmo. For the lack of palatalization of velar stops, notice how Latin merces ("pay/wages") results in Berber amerkidu and Sardinian merchede vs. Italian mercede, and Latin cicer ("chickpea") becomes Berber ikiker and Sardinian chìghere vs. Italian cece.

For the other month names, see Berber calendar.

See also

• Africitas, a purported "style" of African Latin.
• Southern Romance, a proposed hypothetical Romance classification, including Sardinian and African Romance
• British Latin, another extinct dialect of Latin.
• Moselle Romance, another extinct dialect of Latin.
• Pannonian Romance, another extinct dialect of Latin.

Notes

References

Citations

Sources

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Further reading

• Sayahi, Lotfi (2014). Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa. Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521119368.

На других языках

[es] Lengua romance africana

[fr] Roman africain

[it] Lingua romanza d'Africa

[ru] Латинский язык в Африке