# Ugaritic/Akkadian influence on Jewish-Moroccan Arabic



## origumi

(Not sure if this is the correct place... where's the "Other Semitic Languages" forum?) (Moderator note: thread moved)

In a Hebrew article published today about the Arabic dialect of Moroccan Jews http://www.inn.co.il/News/News.aspx/199709, the following claim appears:


> השפה שאיפיינה את יהודי מרוקו ולתוכה שורבבו מילים וצירופי לשון מאיטלקית, צרפתית, עברית ואנגלית זאת לבד מהשפות העתיקות אכדית ואוגריתית.


That is: "the language that characterized the Jews of Morocco, into which words and expressions joined from Italian, French, Hebrew, English, and also the ancient languages *Akkadian* and *Ugaritic*".

Does anybody know anything about Akkadian or Ugaritic influence on the Moroccan dialect, either the Jewish or the general?


----------



## Flaminius

Hello, *origumi*.

Might the portion just mean that Akkadian and Ugaritic influences can be observed in the language because Hebrew was influenced by them?  I am perhaps lacking the discernment to judge it from the nuances of the Hebrew sentence, but just maybe...


----------



## clevermizo

That's a bizarre claim. However, weren't there North African Jewish populations in antiquity (i.e., pre-Islamization/Arabization)? If that's the case, maybe those "Akkadian/Ugaritic" influences are actually Punic influences from ancient times?


----------



## sokol

Akkadian was still used in written documents in the 3rd century AD but it died out centuries ago as a spoken language. Shortly before and after the Babylonians conquered Judaea it was probably still vital as a spoken language and certainly still important as a written language.

So I guess that the Akkadian influence to be found in Jewish-Moroccan Arabic only could be traced back to that time - direct influence of Akkadian on Moroccan-Jewish Arabic seems to be highly unlikely, or as clevermizo wrote - it is a rather bizarre claim.

About Ugaritic - well, wasn't there significant Ugaritic influence on Hebrew? If so Ugaritic influence could have influenced the Arabic dialects of those Jews, to just name another possibility.


----------



## berndf

origumi,

how serious do you think this is? I couldn't find anything about this "Mordechai Chanuna" (or "Hanoun" as they transcribe it on their English page). And Arutz Sheva isn't exactly reputed to be the most objective and impartial news organization, to say it politely.


----------



## clevermizo

sokol said:


> About Ugaritic - well, wasn't there significant Ugaritic influence on Hebrew? If so Ugaritic influence could have influenced the Arabic dialects of those Jews, to just name another possibility.



Not to seriously entertain this thread too much longer but wouldn't the North African Jewish population pre-Islam have been non-Hebrew speaking (and the influence upon Hebrew not of particular interest)? Either Aramaic or maybe Punic or Berber-speaking? Furthermore I don't know how anyone could deduce this influence from loan words. The grammar of Jewish Moroccan Arabic is essentially or was essentially the same as the grammar of Muslim Moroccan Arabic. Any random Hebrew word in Jewish Moroccan Arabic would have an obvious cognate in Ugaritic or a more distant one in Akkadian which would make any out-there claim about influence from those languages possible.

I wish I could understand Hebrew better than I can, but my guess is that the article is trying to "de-Arabize" Jewish Arabic speech. I'm sure the average speech of any Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jew is almost entirely Arabic. "De-Arabizing" Arabic dialects for political purposes is pretty well established. There are groups in Lebanon that say Lebanese Arabic is actually Aramaic or even Phoenician and not Arabic at all.


----------



## berndf

clevermizo said:


> I wish I could understand Hebrew better than I can, but my guess is that the article is trying to "de-Arabize" Jewish Arabic speech. I'm sure the average speech of any Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jew is almost entirely Arabic. "De-Arabizing" Arabic dialects for political purposes is pretty well established. There are groups in Lebanon that say Lebanese Arabic is actually Aramaic or even Phoenician and not Arabic at all.


This is my suspicion as well. And it would fit my picture of Arutz Sheva.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Wasn't Ugaritic also extinct since about 1000 B.C.E and not even known about until discovered last century? And therefore highly unlikely to have possibly been able to have had any influence on Jewish Moroccans whose history goes back no later than the first century C.E?


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Wasn't Ugaritic also extinct since about 1000 B.C.E and not even known about until discovered last century? And therefore highly unlikely to have possibly been able to have had any influence on Jewish Moroccans whose history goes back no later than the first century C.E?


Yes, that's probably why clevermizo suspected indirect influence via Punic.


----------



## origumi

berndf said:


> how serious do you think this is? I couldn't find anything about this "Mordechai Chanuna" (or "Hanoun" as they transcribe it on their English page).


I share your feeling about how much Chanuna is (or actually is not) a linguistics authority.




> And Arutz Sheva isn't exactly reputed to be the most objective and impartial news organization, to say it politely.





clevermizo said:


> I wish I could understand Hebrew better than I can, but my guess is that the article is trying to "de-Arabize" Jewish Arabic speech. I'm sure the average speech of any Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jew is almost entirely Arabic. "De-Arabizing" Arabic dialects for political purposes is pretty well established. There are groups in Lebanon that say Lebanese Arabic is actually Aramaic or even Phoenician and not Arabic at all.


I think you are wrong here. Although the site in which the article appeared is known for its right-wing views, there's no attempt of de-Arabization. On the contrary, the article is about the beauty of the Jewish-Moroccan *Arabic*. The Moroccan Jews (at least the old generation) are proud for their Arabic dialect, similarly to the feeling of other Arabic-speaking Jewish communities, each for its distinct dialect.

The reference to foreign influence of several languages is an attempt to demonstrate how rich and deep-rooted the Moroccan dialect is.


----------



## berndf

origumi said:


> I think you are wrong here. Although the site in which the article appeared is known for its right-wing views, there's no attempt of de-Arabization. On the contrary, the article is about the beauty of the Jewish-Moroccan *Arabic*.


You are right. If de-Arabization had been on the author's agenda, we wouldn't have written a book about "Jewish-Moroccan *Arabic*" in the first place.


----------



## sokol

clevermizo said:


> Not to seriously entertain this thread too much longer but wouldn't the North African Jewish population pre-Islam have been non-Hebrew speaking (and the influence upon Hebrew not of particular interest)?


I expect so, but if Jewish communities in Africa maintained what Eastern European Jews did, that is their Yiddish "Shul" (= school) where they did begin their Hebrew studies at quite a young age (I think they began at age 4 or 5) then they still could have had a decent commend of Hebrew.

Many Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire could only read and write Hebrew and Yiddish in the early 18th century (to a degree at least) but couldn't read nor write (but only speak) the majority language.

Of course I have no idea if the situation in North African Arabic countries was similar.
But if they did it is just possible that their Hebrew influenced their (then already) native Jewish Arabic.

Ugaritic influence on Hebrew of course - if there was any worth mentioning - could only have happened in Near East (Judaea or Mesopotamia) as Ugaritic died out long before Akkadian did.


Note, I am not at all advocating that there was significant influence of Akkadian and/or Ugaritic on Hebrew. 

And as berndf said above that the source you quoted might be very problematic indeed it's probably better to discount this as a highly improbable, at least as long as no evidence to the contrary could be given.


About indirect influence of Punic (that is, Akkadian and/or Ugaritic words loaned through Punic to Jewish-Moroccan dialects): does anybody know if Punic was still spoken in the Tunis region when Jews spread west in the Roman Empire? Punic colonisation on the Algerian and Moroccan coast never was dense so it is probably not likely that any Punic was still spoken there at the time, but the Tunis region might be a different matter. Still, even if it was spoken - it'd be still far-fetched to claim that Punic influenced those Jewish dialects.


----------



## berndf

The last Roman sources of someone knowing Punic were from about 400AD. But at that time it probably wasn't anyone's native language any more and knowledge was scarce. The Jewish community in the area must have been established not long after the destruction of the temple, i.e. some 300 years earlier. This means it is possible they had direct contact with Punic. But maybe the Vulgar Latin dialects of the region (which as far as I know are completely extinct now) might have born Punic influence.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Another point to consider is that Ugaritic is supposedly very similar to Arabic (according to the Wikipedia article), so could it not be possible they've merely mistaken Arabic characteristics for Ugaritic ones?


----------



## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> Another point to consider is that Ugaritic is supposedly very similar to Arabic (according to the Wikipedia article),


I don't think so. Wikipedia refers so some characteristics, not to the language as a whole. It also says that Ugaritic has charateristics similar to Akkadian...


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Wikipedia refers so some characteristics, not to the language as a whole.



There's the characteristics mentioned there specifically and there's others. I've noticed quite a few in the little reading I've done about Ugaritic. I noticed for instance that the verb conjugation patterns are exactly the same as Arabic, something I've never come across between two Semitic languages.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> There's the characteristics mentioned there specifically and there's others. I've noticed quite a few in the little reading I've done about Ugaritic. I noticed for instance that the verb conjugation patterns are exactly the same as Arabic, something I've never come across between two Semitic languages.


Well, Arabic has more than the 10 reconstructed binyans of Ugaritic, hasn't it? But even if they were *exactly* the same, that could hardly be relevant here because we are speaking of an dialect of *Arabic*. And one would hardly identify grammar rules which are identical to Arabic as "Ugaritic".


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Well, Arabic has more than the 10 reconstructed binyans of Ugaritic, hasn't it?



I don't recall stating it's the same in everything (that would make it Arabic, not Ugaritic).



> But even if they were *exactly* the same, that could hardly be relevant here because we are speaking of an dialect of *Arabic*. And one would hardly identify grammar rules which are identical to Arabic as "Ugaritic".



Since I don't understand Hebrew, I'm unable to determine what the characteristics are, which are mentioned in the article as being Ugaritic-like or Akkadian-like. If someone would care to translate the main features considered to be like those two languages, then we could get a better idea on whether they might actually be Arabic features, mistaken for features of the other two languages.

Anyway I just suggested it as a possible explanation.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I don't recall stating it's the same in everything (that would make it Arabic, not Ugaritic).


Well, you wrote "the verb conjugation patterns are *exactly* the same as Arabic"



Abu Rashid said:


> Since I don't understand Hebrew, I'm unable to determine what the characteristics are, which are mentioned in the article as being Ugaritic-like or Akkadian-like. If someone would care to translate the main features considered to be like those two languages, then we could get a better idea on whether they might actually be Arabic features, mistaken for features of the other two languages.
> 
> Anyway I just suggested it as a possible explanation.


You are aware that we are talking about *Arabic* as spoken by Moroccan Jews*, not about Hebrew?
__________________________
_*Yes, they traditionally spoke Arabic but written with Hebrew/Aramaic letters_


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Well, you wrote "the verb conjugation patterns are *exactly* the same as Arabic"



Yes and they are.

af3al, taf3al, taf3aleena, yaf3al, taf3al, naf3al etc.

I never said anything about derived forms of verbs though.

Perhaps you misunderstood the terminology I used, but as far as I'm aware, verb conjugations refer to what I intended, not derived forms.



> You are aware that we are talking about *Arabic* as spoken by Moroccan Jews*, not about Hebrew?



The original article origumi linked to (which I assume mentions some of the features of Akkadian and Ugaritic thought to be in their dialect) is written in Hebrew.... I don't understand the article, and therefore cannot comment further on what the article claims about Moroccan Jewish Arabic, Akkadian and Ugaritic.


----------



## clevermizo

To be fair, the Ugaritic verb conjugation paradigm (not the derived forms, but the basic form) is very similar to Arabic (almost identical if we believe the vowels here), although it is very similar to Classical Arabic, not colloquial Arabic. I doubt Moroccan Jews are going around using the duals or other complicated inflection. Anyway, I don't know if this topic really deserves that much more inquiry.

Suppose my great-aunt gives one of her nieces a present for her birthday, and then this niece over time forgets about the present. Then she gives me the present for my birthday, without thinking. I could hardly say that my great-aunt gave me this birthday present. There really can't be any influence of Akkadian and Ugaritic on Moroccan Arabic (of anyone) unless Jewish Moroccan scholars were pouring over ancient cuneiform tablets late on Sabbath evenings trying to infuse their dialect with a sense of antiquity.


----------



## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> The original article origumi linked to (which I assume mentions some of the features of Akkadian and Ugaritic thought to be in their dialect) is written in Hebrew.... I don't understand the article, and therefore cannot comment further on what the article claims about Moroccan Jewish Arabic, Akkadian and Ugaritic.


English version: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135722. Not too much info - I translated already the relevant part.


----------



## origumi

Doing some more research, I'm can tell that mentioning Ugaritic and Akkadian in this context is most likely baseless.

The author says the following in a newspaper interview http://www.mynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3840851,00.html:


> השפה המרוקאית היהודית, הממשיכה להיות מדוברת בגאון גם בימינו, היא שפה היסטורית שנרקחה לאורך מאות בשנים ומכילה מילים מהשפה התנ"כית ושפת הקודש, וגם מילים בספרדית שהובאו מתקופת גירוש ספרד על ידי היהודים שנדדו למרוקו. ברבות השנים נוספו גם מילים מאכדית, אוגריתית, יוונית ולטינית, וכן משפות מודרניות כמו צרפתית, ספרדית, איטלקית ופורטוגזית.


That is: "The Moroccan Jewish language, which continues to be spoken in our days, is an historical language that was formed along hundreds of years and contains words from the Biblical and [other] holy scriptures [Hebrew] language, and also Spanish words brought by the Jews deported from Spain [in the 15th century] who migrated to Morocco. *During the years *more words were added from *Akkadian*, *Ugaritic*, Greek and Latin, and also modern languages like French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese".

Also, in another Jewish Moroccan dictionary, of the Casablanca dialect (2008) [not sure if it's a previous version of the same dictionary or another one], the same phrase appears http://www.kedma.co.il/index.php?id=2183:


> ניתן למצוא בשפה מילים משפות עתיקות מאוד כמו: עברית, אכדית, אוגריתית, יוונית, ולטינית וכן משפות מודרניות כמו: צרפתית, ספרדית, איטלקית, פורטוגזית.


It looks like a typical situation of copy&paste rather than linguistic facts, unless it refers to Akkadian and Ugaritic words from Hebrew / Aramaic sources (the Gemara and more) that were adopted by the Moroccans.


----------



## Hemza

origumi said:


> Doing some more research, I'm can tell that mentioning Ugaritic and Akkadian in this context is most likely baseless.


Unfortunately, as many other articles concerning Moroccan Arabic and other Arabic dialects, studies rarely lose out of sight political/ideological goals. Here I guess, it's either a way to distinguish Jews even more from Muslims (which means "not only from a religious point of view") or to try to distinguish the Arabic dialect spoken by Jewish from its Arabic roots (without denying the several influences it went through). You find the same kind of -sorry- lame claims about multiconfessional States where for instance, some writers try to distinguish a so called Christian related language spoken by Christians Lebanese/Syrians/Iraqis (when it's not Egyptians) which would bear no link with Arabic and which is supposedly different from the dialect spoken by Muslims (itself being sometimes related to Arabic sometimes not, according to the writer mood, although both understand each other perfectly). Distinguishing a language is always a way to distinguish the targeted population.


----------

