À propos de Maarten Kossmann : The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber. Compte rendu d’un travail de synthèse

Abstract

With this detailed and comprehensive survey, Maarten Kossmann provides not only Berberists and Arabists, but also all linguists interested in language contact and related issues, with an impressive amount of data and with food for thought. Based on considerable documentation, his work offers a synthesis that had never been attempted before of most of the elements in the Maghrebian Berber languages that could be considered to be borrowings from Arabic, with a careful evaluation, in each case, of the validity of such an attribution. For this purpose, the author gives a summary of the relevant Arabic facts, followed by a detailed account of the Berber ones, which often leads him to real small monographic treatments of problems. From this point of view, his work can be considered, at least regarding the many issues studied, a historical and comparative grammar of ‘Northern Berber’. Therefore it seemed to us that this significant work deserved far more than a short notice, and we decided to review it in detail.