The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language,[1] or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.[2] April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders."[3] Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.[1][3]
Etymology
Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.[4] However, the term "Franks" was actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period.[5][6] Later, the meaning of lingua franca expanded to mean any bridge language. Its other name in the Mediterranean area was Sabir, a term cognate of saber ("to know") in most Iberian languages and of Italian and Latin sapere and French savoir.[citation needed]
Origins
Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Tamazight, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.[citation needed]
The grammar of the language used aspects from many of its lexifiers. The infinitive was used for all verb forms and the lexicon was primarily Italo-Romance, with a Spanish interface. As in Arabic, vowel space was reduced. Further, Venetian influences can be seen in the dropping of certain vowels and intervocalic stops.[citation needed]
History
This mixed language was used widely for commerce and diplomacy and was also current among slaves of the bagnio, Barbary pirates and European renegades in precolonial Algiers. Historically, the first to use it were the Genoese and Venetian trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean after the year 1000.
Phonology
| Labial | Alveolar | Post-alv./ Palatal |
Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ||
| Plosive | voiceless | p | t | k | |
| voiced | b | d | g | ||
| Affricate | voiceless | t͡s | t͡ʃ | ||
| voiced | d͡ʒ | ||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʃ | |
| voiced | v | z | |||
| Approximant | median | j | w | ||
| Lateral | l | ʎ | |||
| Trill | r | ||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Open | a |
Morphology
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | mi | noi |
| 2nd person | ti | voi |
| 3rd person | ellou (m) ella (f) | elli |
Vocabulary
Because it was a pidgin, Mediterranean Lingua Franca had a very small vocabulary. This and the fact the language is not well attested means only a few hundred words in the language have been recorded to the present-day.[9]
Sample text
| Sabir[9] | English[9] |
|---|---|
| Benda ti istran plegrin benda marqueta maidin. Benda benda stringa da da agugeta colorada dali moro namorada y Ala ti da bon matin. Por Ala te rrecomenda dar maidin marqueta benda con bestio tuto lespenda xomaro estar bon rroçin. Peregrin taybo cristian si querer andar Jordan pilla per tis jornis pan que no trobar pan ne vin |
Benda, [oh] you foreign pilgrim – benda, marqueta, maidin [names of coins] One benda, one benda, I give a lace, a colored lace. Give it to your Arab girlfriend and Allah give you a good morning. By Allah I recommend you to spend a maidin, a marqueta, a benda [to hire] a beast complete with provisions: a donkey is an excellent steed. Good Christian pilgrim, if you wish to go to the Jordan, take bread for your journey for you will find neither bread nor wine |
See also
Notes
- 1 2 Operstein, Natalie. "The syntactic structures of Lingua Franca in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque" (PDF). Retrieved 29 May 2023.
Although written representations of, and/or extra-linguistic comments on, LF come from more than one period and more than one area of the Mediterranean, the principal documentation of this contact language is circumscribed by the area of the Maghreb in the period between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century (Cifoletti 1989, 2004; Camus Bergareche 1993; Arends 1998; Couto 2002)
- ↑ Bruni, Francesco. "Storia della Lingua Italiana: Gli scambi linguistici nel Mediterraneo e la lingua franca" [History of the Italian Language: Linguistic exchanges in the Mediterranean and the lingua franca] (in Italian). Archived from the original on 28 March 2009. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
- 1 2 McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change (in German). Cambridge University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-521-44665-5. Retrieved 29 May 2023.
- ↑ "lingua franca". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 13 December 2011.
- ↑ Lexico Triantaphyllide online dictionary, Greek Language Center (Kentro Hellenikes Glossas), lemma Franc (Φράγκος Phrankos), Lexico tes Neas Hellseenikes Glossas, G.Babiniotes, Kentro Lexikologias(Legicology Center) LTD Publications. Komvos.edu.gr. 2002. ISBN 960-86190-1-7. Archived from the original on 24 March 2012. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
Franc and (prefix) franco- (Φράγκος Phrankos and φράγκο- phranko-
- ↑ Weekley, Ernest (1921). "frank". An etymological dictionary of modern English. London. p. 595. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ↑ Parkvall, Mikael (2005). Alan D. Corré (ed.). "Foreword to A Glossary of Lingua Franca" (5th ed.). Milwaukee, WI, United States. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 4 December 2015.
- 1 2 3 Operstein, Natalie (2 December 2021). The Lingua Franca: Contact-Induced Language Change in the Mediterranean (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact) (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 107–116, 315. ISBN 978-1316518311.
- 1 2 3 Mallette, Karla. "Mediterranean lingua franca, ca. 1450–1650: Threshold or holdover?" (PDF). pp. 30, 32, 46.
Bibliography
- Brown, Joshua. 2022. "On the Existence of a Mediterranean Lingua Franca and the Persistence of Language Myths". Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period (edited by Karen Bennett and Angelo Cattaneo). London: Routledge, pp. 169–189. ISBN 9780367552145.
- Brown, Joshua. 2024. "Digital approaches to multilingual text analysis: the Dictionnaire de la langue franque and its morphology as hybrid data in the past". Multilingual Digital Humanities (edited by Lorella Viola and Paul Spence). Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. London: Routledge, pp.213–229.
- Dakhlia, Jocelyne, Lingua Franca – Histoire d'une langue métisse en Méditerranée, Actes Sud, 2008, ISBN 2-7427-8077-7.
- John A. Holm, Pidgins and Creoles, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-35940-6, p. 607.
- Henry Romanos Kahane, The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin, University of Illinois, 1958.
- Hugo Schuchardt, "The Lingua Franca". Pidgin and Creole languages: selected essays by Hugo Schuchardt (edited and translated by Glenn G. Gilbert), Cambridge University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-521-22789-5.
- Nolan, Joanna. 2020. The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Drusteler, Eric R. 2012. "Speaking in Tongues: Language and communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean." Past and Present 217: 4–77. doi:10.1093/pastj/gts023.
- Hitchcock, Louise A., and Aren M. Maeir. 2016. "A Pirate's Life for me: The Maritime culture of the Sea Peoples." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 148(4):245–264.
- Lang, George. 1992. "The Literary Settings of Lingua Franca (1300–1830)." Neophilologus 76(1): 64–76. doi:10.1007/BF00316757.
- Operstein, Natalie. 2018. "Inflection in Lingua Franca: from Haedo's Topographia to the Dictionnaire de la langue franque." Morphology 28: 145–185. doi:10.1007/s11525-018-9320-8.
External links
- Dictionnaire de la Langue Franque ou Petit Mauresque, 1830. (In French)
- A Glossary of Lingua Franca, fifth edition, 2005, Alan D. Corré. It includes articles about the language from various authors and sample texts.
- Tales in Sabir from Algeria
- Lingua franca in the Mediterranean (Google book)