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This paper discusses one paragraph of the Kitāb al-Barbariyya, a medieval Berber commentary on Abū Ġānim’s Mudawwana. The brief note examined is a comment on the answer to a legal question, which mentions the ancient Berber names of a constellation and of a plant, quoting two lines of Arabic poetry. The passage occupies seven lines (f. 126b, ll. 8-14) of the manuscript MS.ARA 1936 found at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC) of Paris. The Berber words retrieved from this text are Amanar, the name of the constellation of Orion, and tabduɣt, the name of the cotton plant. Moreover, in this ancient text, the word (a)kermus, which in the contemporary Berber languages applies to some specific plants (figs, prickly pears, dates), and which, in this case, seems to mean simply ‘fruit’, which supports a possible etymology from the Greek karpós. A list of Arab authors quoted within the Kitāb al-Barbariyya is added at the end of the paper.

27 May 2021. Ibadi studies at the University of Milan-Bicocca Vermondo Brugnatelli (UMB) The Ibadi studies at the University of Milan-Bicocca started about 20 years ago, with a series of studies on the Berber language of the Ibadi community of Jerba, in Southern Tunisia. At the beginning, these researches were mostly devoted to linguistic issues, but they quickly switched to the wider field of literature and religious studies, after the discovery of a religious poem composed in the early 19th century by a Jerbian sheikh that belongs to a rich tradition among the Ibadi communities of Jerba, Mzab and Libya. Later on, the discovery of a huge manuscript in Medieval Berber containing a commentary on Abu Ghanim’s Mudawwana, opened another phase of the studies, namely the philological and codicological research on the Ibadi manuscripts, both in Berber and in Arabic. The existence of a small archive of documents retrieved in Libya by the Milanese scholar Eugenio Griffini at the beginning of the 19th Century is also exploited, and the publication of an unpublished Qasida from Jebel Nefusa (Libya) is currently under press. Over time, the researchers devoted to these studies in the Bicocca University have established a network of contacts with a number of colleagues around the world, in Oman as well as in the European and north African countries, some of whom have taken part in colloquiums in Milan, hosted by the Academia Ambrosiana. Vermondo Brugnatelli Vermondo Brugnatelli was born in Milan, where he also completed his studies in Hamito-Semitic (Afroasiatic) Linguistics. He is a specialist in historical linguistics and his main interests are particularly focused on the Berber world. He is currently Associate Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He is director of the “Centro Studi Camito-Semitici di Milano” that he founded in 1993, president of the Berber Cultural Association in Italy and secretary of the Berber section of the class of African Studies in the “Academia Ambrosiana”. Besides editing and translating the largest collection of Berber folktales (in three volumes) published in Italian to date, he has carried out studies on many areas of Berber linguistics and literature . His field research is focused on the eastern Berber varieties, in particular those of southern Tunisia (Jerba and Cheninni). He is also carrying out researches on Ibadi texts in Berber from North Africa, both from oral and written sources. In particular, he has already published several articles on a medieval Berber commentary of Abu Ghanim

Pendant des siècles, depuis l’arrivée de l’Islam dans l’Afrique du Nord, la langue berbère a été le moyen principal pour l’étude et la diffusion des fondements de la religion parmi la population, quand la plupart des individus étaient illettrés et ne connaissaient pas la langue arabe, notamment dans sa variété « classique ». Au fil du temps, la prévalence de la langue arabe au Maghreb et la diffusion de l’instruction ont modifié la situation, et la plupart des textes religieux anciens sont désormais transmis en traduction, et les nouveaux sont composés en langue arabe. Toutefois, jusqu’à très récemment, une tradition littéraire orale en langue berbère, réservée aux illettrés, a demeuré vivante jusqu’à très récemment et a été partiellement sauvée de l’oubli. Dans cette communication, on va présenter le rôle de Djerba dans la diffusion et le maintien de ces traditions, prenant en considération deux ouvrages : le Kitāb al-Barbariyya, un long ouvrage de jurisprudence ibadite remontant au Moyen-Âge et le poème religieux Tmazixt, composé oralement par un savant jerbien au début du 19ème siècle et gardé dans la mémoire et dans quelques notes écrites des contemporains.

Within the framework of studies concerning the importance of European manuscript collections for Ibadi history, this article aims at retracing the history of an archive put together by the French scholar Auguste Bossoutrot (1856–1937). This archive gathered a quantity of materials on the Arabic and Berber languages collected during his life. In particular, some of the manuscripts contain parts of a long religious work in Berber (<em>Kitāb al-Barbariyya</em>), discovered in the island of Djerba (Tunisia) among the Ibadi community of the island towards the end of the nineteenth century. This text was firstly discovered and reported to the scientific community by another French scholar, A. De Calassanti-Motylinski (1854–1907), but his untimely death prevented him from publishing it and the whereabouts of the manuscripts that contained it remained unknown until the discovery of Bossoutrot’s papers, which contained the longest extant copy of the work (about 900 pages).

In historic times, two catastrophic fissure eruptions originated in the Eastern Volcanic Zone of Iceland, known as Eldgjá eruption (934–940 CE) and Laki eruption (1783–1784 CE). Eldgjá produced 19.7 km3 of lava flows and 1.3 km3 of tephra; Laki emitted 14.7 km3 of lavas and 0.4 km3 of tephra. They released 232 and 122 megatons of SO2 into the atmosphere, respectively. Abundant historic descriptions of the effects of the Laki eruption indicate that the SO2 release produced a sulphuric aerosol that spread across the northern hemisphere with devastating impacts on the population and the environment, especially in Europe. In this study, we present two new written sources that enable the effects of the Eldgjá and Laki eruptions to be fixed to an exact date and place of occurrence in North Africa. These are a medieval North African chronicle known as Rawḍ al-Qirṭās, written in 1326 CE and describing events in Morocco, and a chronicle of events in the island of Djerba (southern Tunisia), written by Muhammad b. Yusef al-Musabi in 1792–1793 CE. These previously unrecognized sources describe in detail the fading of sunlight coupled with the persistent presence of a thick fog made up of fine particles carried over from long distances. The chronicles report events in Morocco in the time period October 938–October 939 CE, and in Tunisia in the year 1783 CE. These data can be interpreted as the first detailed evidence of the consequences of the Eldgjá and Laki eruptions in North Africa. They also can be helpful in dating and determining the area of influence of the eruptions; this may be useful for several applications, such as the numerical simulation of these events, or hazard planning in case of possible future similar eruptions from the same Icelandic area.

This paper deals with “defined” numerals, i.e. numerals used in a context where the number of items is already known, like English ‘both’ (‘the two’). Quantifiers referring to two items like ‘both’ are quite widespread in the languages of the world, and most of the Berber languages, too, possess a word, isnin, which is evidently built on the numeral ‘two’ (sin) and means ‘both’. Nevertheless, some Berber languages also display numerals meaning ‘the three’, ‘the four’ etc. This paper aims at describing such peculiar numerals and at providing a diachronic explanation of their origin. This reconstruction implies the presence of the ancient morphemes of determination that nowadays have been merged into all nouns, losing their original meaning and becoming simple nominal marks.

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