Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846Richardson, James
History
Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846
Richardson, James
Sahara -- Description and travel
On the whole, however, I have not seen so many cases of indelicacy
in this part of the world, as are to be seen almost every day in Paris
and London. No, the morals of The Desert are mostly pure and continent as
compared to those of our great European cities.
My taleb to-day made a vocabulary of the Touarghee, Ghadamsee, and Arabic
languages. He finished also the translation of the third chapter of
Matthew into the Ghadamsee language, which I sent afterwards to the
British and Foreign Bible Society. I did not expect that he would have
done it so easily, thinking his religious scruples would have interfered.
He would have done all the Gospels had I paid him. According to Ben
Mousa, the Ghadamsee language contains a few Arabic words, and is a most
ancient dialect. It is spoken only at Siwah and Ougelah, two Tripoline
oases near the coast, ten days apart, on the route to Egypt, and there is
a dialect something like it in one of the Tunisian mountains. Many of the
Touarghee words, he says also, are very much like, if not the same, as
those of Ghadamsee. I showed him the Gospel of St. Luke, translated into
the Berber language of Algeria, through Mr. Hodgson, and published by the
Bible Society. He was only able to recognize a few Ghadamsee words in
this translation. The Berber dialects, which comprehend the Ghadamsee,
the Touarghee, the Kabylee, the Shouweeah (of Dr. Shaw), and the Shelouk
of Morocco, although more or less intimately related, are very dissimilar
in many words and expressions. But they are sister branches of one
original mother, which require to be reduced to consistency and harmony
by some mastermind, and then a very copious and powerful language might
be formed. Such is said to have been the state of the German language
when Luther made his translation of the Scriptures, by which he laid the
foundation of the present mighty language of the Germans. Their common
enemy is the Arabic, which is daily making inroads upon them; and the
probability is, instead of being moulded into one mighty whole, they will
in the course of a few centuries be destroyed by the language of their
religion, for which the Berber tribes have a superstitious reverence.
There is a singularity about the language of Ghadames: it has differences
as spoken by the two factions of the Weleed and the Wezeet, the
provincialisms of the country. It is highly probable that the various
Berber dialects are the fragments of the language of those formidable,
but doubtful, auxiliaries, which so often balanced and changed the
fortune of Roman and Carthaginian arms. Of all these Numidian dialects,
only one people has amongst them a native alphabet, the rest using Arabic
characters: this people are the Touaricks. It is besides worthy of
remark, that amongst all the African tribes of Central Africa, nay, every
part of Africa, excepting the Coptic and Abyssinian Christians, only one
alphabet has been found, none of the other tribes having any characters
wherewith to write.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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