Once in a while, we get requests to translate from English or French into North African dialects. For historical and political reasons, these languages are often referred to as dialects. But according to Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com, see below) and other sources, these Arabic varieties are languages in their own right. Colloquial Arabic in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria,…
Last Sunday, our tale was about fear and the gallows (God forbid). We said those who are hanged are taken down at sunset to spend the night at “Beb Souika”‘s oil mill to be buried the following day. Today’s tale deals with the same subject. However, this time, events take place in an earlier period.…
(see here Introduction to the Tunisian Stories and Overview) A certain woman was divorced from her husband. At that time divorce was a shameful thing and it wasn’t something that people of nobility would even recognize or admit to. If someone was pushed to divorce because of irreconcilable differences, they would hide it for fear…
(see here Introduction to the Tunisian Stories and Overview) Once upon a time, there was a tailor sewing in his shop. A woman selling jam passed him by, so he bought an ounce from her. He had some bread in his shop that he cut in two and spread the jam on one half to…
Every culture and every society has its stories. The Grimm brothers, Charles Perrault, Božena Němcová and others have collected and written down the fairy tales and stories of their countries. These often somehow have some things in common and also differ in interesting nuances. This also applies to Tunisia but with the exception that these…
In part one of this series, I introduced you to constructed languages (conlang) and in part two, planned languages. Now I’ll conclude with languages games, also called ludling in English: In a playful way, children, but also adults change an existing language according to predefined rules. The result is a kind of secret language that…
In the first part of this short series on artistic languages we focussed on constructed languages (conlangs). Planned languages, previously also called international auxiliary languages, represent another large section. Their history goes back to the seventeenth century when scholars and philosophers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, developed so-called a priori languages. These were strictly logical…
Part 1: Extra-terrestrial and indigenous peoples All languages that are not natural languages – in other words, they have not developed historically and are spoken (or expressed in gestures) by people – are known in linguistics as artificial languages or constructed languages. This includes planned languages such as Esperanto, fictional languages such as Klingon from…
There are several people on the web to whom a phrase like this is attributed: „You can speak 20 languages – but if you cut yourself you speak your mother tongue!“ Of course, that’s true. The mother tongue is the main language of a person, his or her language of the heart. This will not…
„A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.“ William Arthur Ward If nothing works, smile! Normally that helps. This morning I asked a guy to clean my shoes on a square around the corner. He smiles at me, pointed to my shoes, made hand gestures to show that I had to put the other…