,
10 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
An African intellectual giant, like so many from the colonial era, now largely forgotten: Saïd Cid Kaoui, a Berber born in 1859, near Amizour in Algeria, wrote the first comprehensive Tuareg language dictionary, which was published in 2 folio volumes in Algiers in 1894 and 1900. 
Denied the modest funding he'd requested from the French administration, Cid Kaoui published both large volumes - over 1300 pages in total - at his own expense. They were not typeset, but painstakingly lithographed from Kaoui's manuscript draft, by the Algiers printer A. Jourdan.
Cid Kaoui died in 1910. Because the dictionary was printed (on poor quality paper) in Algeria, not in France, his magnum opus has never had the wide circulation it deserved. But he, and his dictionary, should be remembered today: this is ground zero for Tuareg linguistic studies.
Cid Kaoui's dictionary is noticeable also for its pioneering use of the Tuareg Tifinagh script ⵜⵊⵉⵏⵗ, the ancestor of the Neo-Tifinagh script ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ now used today. It's our best surviving source for the original abjad script used to write the Tamazight languages.
In Morocco, use of Neo-Tifinagh was suppressed until 2003. The Moroccan state arrested and imprisoned people using this script during the 1980-90s. In Libya, the government of Muammar Gaddafi consistently banned Tifinagh from being used in public contexts such as store displays.
In 2003, however, the king of Morocco took a "neutral" position between the claims of Latin and Arabic script by adopting Neo-Tifinagh; as a result, books are now published in this script by IRCAM - Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe, and it is taught in some local schools.
The fundamental difference between the indigenous Berber script, Tifinagh, and the Neo-Tifinagh script used today, is that the former is an abjad (ie only consonants are represented), while the latter is a fully fledged alphabet (there are letters for all consonants and vowels).
This is why words written in Tifinagh ⵜⵊⵉⵏⵗ always look shorter than those in Neo Tifinagh ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ - in the former you are only seeing the consonants. Traditional Tifinagh does not indicate vowels except at the end of a word, where a single dot stands for any vowel.
One of the very first ever books entirely printed in the Berber Tifinagh script was this remarkable Tamasheq translation of Antoine de St Exupéry's "Le Petit Prince", printed in 1958 and mainly distributed in Niger and Mali. 1/2
Printed by the Imprimerie Nationale of the Ministère du Sahara, it's a rather beautiful production, with the original drawings included, 6 of them in full colour. 2/2
