Can an alphabet save a culture?
https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/

On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 12:53:20 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
> Can an alphabet save a culture?
> https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/
\ It says 2 brothers made a script for Fulani 30 years back to keep the
language from disappearing like most of the world's 6500 languages.

I ask: If every one of those 6500 languages had a script, how many
would survive?

On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 6:09:14 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 12:53:20 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
> > Can an alphabet save a culture?
> > https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/
> \
> It says 2 brothers made a script for Fulani 30 years back to keep the
> language from disappearing like most of the world's 6500 languages.
>
> I ask: If every one of those 6500 languages had a script, how many
> would survive?

If by Fulani one means the West African language it's culture is not
in any danger and it should have been being written (in Arabic script)
three hundred years ago or longer.

Or take a case here where I live. The last fluent speaker of Wiyot died
in 1962 but the linguists had done good work with him before he died
and people are now trying to revive the language. But no one claims to
be fluent. Meanwhile the feeling of Wiyot has revived enough that
just recently the city of Eureka gave the island in Humboldt Bay where
the biggest Wiyot town had been back to the tribe. It looks like Wiyot
culture - in some form - will survive. With or without the language.

On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 9:19:14 PM UTC-7, DKleinecke wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 6:09:14 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 12:53:20 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
> > > Can an alphabet save a culture?
> > > https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/
> > \
> > It says 2 brothers made a script for Fulani 30 years back to keep the
> > language from disappearing like most of the world's 6500 languages.
> >
> > I ask: If every one of those 6500 languages had a script, how many
> > would survive?
> If by Fulani one means the West African language it's culture is not
> in any danger and it should have been being written (in Arabic script)
> three hundred years ago or longer.
>
> Or take a case here where I live. The last fluent speaker of Wiyot died
> in 1962 but the linguists had done good work with him before he died
> and people are now trying to revive the language. But no one claims to
> be fluent. Meanwhile the feeling of Wiyot has revived enough that
> just recently the city of Eureka gave the island in Humboldt Bay where
> the biggest Wiyot town had been back to the tribe. It looks like Wiyot
> culture - in some form - will survive. With or without the language.
>
English is not a culture. When is a language a culture? Perhaps when
it spoken only by 1 tribe. Rapa Nui, the indigenous language of Easter
Island, is also the name of the indigenous people, many living in Chile,
and the name of their culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapa_Nui_people

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 21:19:12 -0700 (PDT): DKleinecke
<dkleinecke@gmail.com> scribeva:

>On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 6:09:14 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
>> On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 12:53:20 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
>> > Can an alphabet save a culture?
>> > https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/
>> \
>> It says 2 brothers made a script for Fulani 30 years back to keep the
>> language from disappearing like most of the world's 6500 languages.
>>
>> I ask: If every one of those 6500 languages had a script, how many
>> would survive?
>
>If by Fulani one means the West African language it's culture is not
>in any danger and it should have been being written (in Arabic script)
>three hundred years ago or longer.

Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:

> Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
> non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.

The same meaning exists in Arabic "فلان" and Swahili "fulani". In Sw, it
is not restricted to persons with unknown or unremembered name but is used
for things as well ("kitu fulani" = "a certain [some]thing").

As Sw has lots of Ar loans but hardly vice versa, I guess the origin is
Ar, and the Pt and Sw words are loans from Ar. Has anyone an idea about
etymology, e.g. related words in Ar?

Fulani as the name of a W African ethnicity and language may be totally
unrelated but it is also conceivable that it was coined by Arabs with the
meaning "this [certain] people and their [unintelligible] language". Such
word formations are quite common, e.g. "nemec" (mute) for German or
"barbar" (brabbling) for Non-Greek.

--
Helmut Richter

On Tue, 30 Aug 2022, Dingbat wrote:

> On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 12:53:20 PM UTC-7, Dingbat wrote:
> > Can an alphabet save a culture?
> > https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/
> \
> It says 2 brothers made a script for Fulani 30 years back to keep the
> language from disappearing like most of the world's 6500 languages.
>
> I ask: If every one of those 6500 languages had a script, how many
> would survive?

Having a script is probably one of the prerequisites for survival of a
language but having a unique script for this language only is probably
more of an obstacle.

--
Helmut Richter

On Wednesday, August 31, 2022 at 6:03:04 AM UTC-4, Helmut Richter wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
> > Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
> > non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.
> The same meaning exists in Arabic "فلان" and Swahili "fulani". In Sw, it
> is not restricted to persons with unknown or unremembered name but is used
> for things as well ("kitu fulani" = "a certain [some]thing").
>
> As Sw has lots of Ar loans but hardly vice versa, I guess the origin is
> Ar, and the Pt and Sw words are loans from Ar. Has anyone an idea about
> etymology, e.g. related words in Ar?
>
> Fulani as the name of a W African ethnicity and language may be totally
> unrelated but it is also conceivable that it was coined by Arabs with the
> meaning "this [certain] people and their [unintelligible] language". Such
> word formations are quite common, e.g. "nemec" (mute) for German or
> "barbar" (brabbling) for Non-Greek.

The name of the WAfr language in the French literature is "Peul."
There are descriptions of its Arabic orthography from the early
20th century, but it is largely written with the Roman alphabet
these days.

Scripts -- usually syllabaries -- have been devised for a couple
dozen languages of West Africa over the last two centuries or
so (and not imposed on the speajers by colonial outsiders).
The first we know of is Vai, still in use by the Vai people
of Liberia alongside Arabic and Roman orthographies, each
of the three in its own cultural sphere. The most successful
one is N'ko, which serves several (mutually intelligible) Manding
languages spoken by millions of people of, roughly, the Volta
River basin. N'ko resembles Arabic writing, being right-to-left
with the letters within a word connected at the base but including
letters for all the vowels, and marking tones with dots.

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:03:00 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.usenet@email.de>
scribeva:

>On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
>> Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
>> non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.
>
>The same meaning exists in Arabic "????" and Swahili "fulani". In Sw, it
>is not restricted to persons with unknown or unremembered name but is used
>for things as well ("kitu fulani" = "a certain [some]thing").
>
>As Sw has lots of Ar loans but hardly vice versa, I guess the origin is
>Ar, and the Pt and Sw words are loans from Ar.

True. See Wiktionary.

>Has anyone an idea about etymology, e.g. related words in Ar?

Hebrew and Aramaic have cognate roots, see Wiktionary.

>Fulani as the name of a W African ethnicity and language may be totally
>unrelated but it is also conceivable that it was coined by Arabs with the
>meaning "this [certain] people and their [unintelligible] language". Such
>word formations are quite common, e.g. "nemec" (mute) for German or
>"barbar" (brabbling) for Non-Greek.

Right. Seems possible or even plausible.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

On Thursday, September 1, 2022 at 2:24:54 AM UTC-4, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:03:00 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.u...@email.de>
> scribeva:
> >On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> >
> >> Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
> >> non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.
> >
> >The same meaning exists in Arabic "????" and Swahili "fulani". In Sw, it
> >is not restricted to persons with unknown or unremembered name but is used
> >for things as well ("kitu fulani" = "a certain [some]thing").
> >
> >As Sw has lots of Ar loans but hardly vice versa, I guess the origin is
> >Ar, and the Pt and Sw words are loans from Ar.
> True. See Wiktionary.
> >Has anyone an idea about etymology, e.g. related words in Ar?
>
> Hebrew and Aramaic have cognate roots, see Wiktionary.

Nothing to do with Fulani.

> >Fulani as the name of a W African ethnicity and language may be totally
> >unrelated but it is also conceivable that it was coined by Arabs with the
> >meaning "this [certain] people and their [unintelligible] language". Such
> >word formations are quite common, e.g. "nemec" (mute) for German or
> >"barbar" (brabbling) for Non-Greek.
> Right. Seems possible or even plausible.

On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:

> Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:03:00 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.usenet@email.de>
> scribeva:
>
> >On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> >
> >> Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
> >> non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.
> >
> >The same meaning exists in Arabic "????" and Swahili "fulani". In Sw, it
> >is not restricted to persons with unknown or unremembered name but is used
> >for things as well ("kitu fulani" = "a certain [some]thing").
> >
> >As Sw has lots of Ar loans but hardly vice versa, I guess the origin is
> >Ar, and the Pt and Sw words are loans from Ar.
>
> True. See Wiktionary.
>
> >Has anyone an idea about etymology, e.g. related words in Ar?
>
> Hebrew and Aramaic have cognate roots, see Wiktionary.

Klein’s etymological dictionary
https://archive.org/details/AComprehensiveEtymologicalDictionaryOfTheHebrewLanguageErnestKlein1987OCR
has:

"ploni" adj. a certain person or place, such-a-one, so-and-so, (in the
Bible only occuring in the phrase "ploni almoni" 1Sam.21:3, 2Kg.6:8,
Ruth 4:1).

In addition, he gives the Aram., Syr., and Arab. ("fulan") cognates as
well. So P-L-N (=Ar. f-l-n) seems to be a common Semitic root but with no
further derivatives in the Hebrew. The use of "almoni" (anonymous) is also
restricted to this one phrase.

--
Helmut Richter

On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Helmut Richter wrote:

> "ploni" adj. a certain person or place, such-a-one, so-and-so, (in the
> Bible only occuring in the phrase "ploni almoni" 1Sam.21:3, 2Kg.6:8,
> Ruth 4:1).

Indeed, in the first two of these passages, the Swahili Bible uses the Sw
word "fulani" in this context. As I have only a printed copy, I cannot
check whether "fulani" is used at many other places.

--
Helmut Richter

Thu, 1 Sep 2022 21:59:48 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.usenet@email.de>
scribeva:

>On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Helmut Richter wrote:
>
>> "ploni" adj. a certain person or place, such-a-one, so-and-so, (in the
>> Bible only occuring in the phrase "ploni almoni" 1Sam.21:3, 2Kg.6:8,
>> Ruth 4:1).
>
>Indeed, in the first two of these passages, the Swahili Bible uses the Sw
>word "fulani" in this context.

Loanword from Arabic? Swahali has lots of them. Perhaps Swahili
grammar prescribes that there has to be an i at the end?

And the regions where Fulani was and Swahili is spoken have quite a
distance between them

>As I have only a printed copy, I cannot
>check whether "fulani" is used at many other places.

fulani site:wordproject.org/bibles/sw/
Several occurrences.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 07:15:25 +0200: Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com>
scribeva:

>>As I have only a printed copy, I cannot
>>check whether "fulani" is used at many other places.
>
>fulani site:wordproject.org/bibles/sw/
>Several occurrences.

Is Swahili one of those few languages, next to English, Bahasa
Malay/Indonesia, Interlingua and Ido, that can be written entirely in
ASCII, without any special accented letters? Looks like it.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 07:20:32 +0200: Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com>
scribeva:

>Fri, 02 Sep 2022 07:15:25 +0200: Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com>
>scribeva:
>
>>>As I have only a printed copy, I cannot
>>>check whether "fulani" is used at many other places.
>>
>>fulani site:wordproject.org/bibles/sw/
>>Several occurrences.
>
>Is Swahili one of those few languages, next to English, Bahasa
>Malay/Indonesia, Interlingua and Ido, that can be written entirely in
>ASCII, without any special accented letters? Looks like it.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/702899/need-a-list-of-languages-that-are-supported-completely-by-ascii-encoding

--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:

> Is Swahili one of those few languages, next to English, Bahasa
> Malay/Indonesia, Interlingua and Ido, that can be written entirely in
> ASCII, without any special accented letters? Looks like it.

Yes. There are no diacritics except the apostrophe (which has an ASCII
code as well) to disinguish -ng- [ŋg] like "finger" from -ng'- [ŋ] like
"singer". If these two English words were loans to Sw, they would be
written as "finga" and "sing'a".

--
Helmut Richter

On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:

> Loanword from Arabic? Swahali has lots of them. Perhaps Swahili
> grammar prescribes that there has to be an i at the end?

The -i or -u (after labial consonants or after -u- in the preceding
syllable) is appended to enforce the rule that Sw syllables are open. For
this rule there are a handful of exceptions but this is the normal case.

> And the regions where Fulani was and Swahili is spoken have quite a
> distance between them

I do not think there are direct connection between the two but the use of
Arabic as a lingua franca for some purposes including slave trade is a
common feature.

--
Helmut Richter

On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Helmut Richter wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
> > Is Swahili one of those few languages, next to English, Bahasa
> > Malay/Indonesia, Interlingua and Ido, that can be written entirely in
> > ASCII, without any special accented letters? Looks like it.
>
> Yes. There are no diacritics except the apostrophe (which has an ASCII
> code as well) to disinguish -ng- [ŋg] like "finger" from -ng'- [ŋ] like
> "singer". If these two English words were loans to Sw, they would be
> written as "finga" and "sing'a".

And I think a similar scheme ist quite common in East Africa, e.g. DR Congo
https://termisti.ulb.ac.be/archive/rifal/PDF/rifal23/rifal23_Atibakwa%20Baboya.pdf

A difficulty in many countries is that the existence of such a standard
does not at all automatically entail that texts in the pertinent languages
are indeed written according to the standard, e.g. in the DR Congo
Lingala, Kikongo and Chiluba. It is easier to design a standard than to
enforce it. In contrast, Swahili spelling is quite consistent in Tanzania,
Kenya, and Uganda, and has fairly small deviations in the DR Congo.

The modern spelling of Swahili (consonants as in English; vowels as in
German, Spanish or IPA; very few extra rules) is in large parts an
invention of Edward Steere (1828–1882), and it is much easier to use than
other Sw spellings such as those of Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–1881) or
Charles Sacleux (1856–1943) which make much finer phonetic distinctions
that are primarily important to linguists but not to the ordinary people
who just want to note down texts unambiguously.

In West Africa there seems to be a greater inclination to use more
diacritics or special letters (i.e. letters that are not ASCII even when
common diacritics are stripped off).

--
Helmut Richter

On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 1:15:28 AM UTC-4, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> Thu, 1 Sep 2022 21:59:48 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.u...@email.de>
> scribeva:
> >On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Helmut Richter wrote:
> >> "ploni" adj. a certain person or place, such-a-one, so-and-so, (in the
> >> Bible only occuring in the phrase "ploni almoni" 1Sam.21:3, 2Kg.6:8,
> >> Ruth 4:1).
> >Indeed, in the first two of these passages, the Swahili Bible uses the Sw
> >word "fulani" in this context.
>
> Loanword from Arabic? Swahali has lots of them. Perhaps Swahili
> grammar prescribes that there has to be an i at the end?
>
> And the regions where Fulani was and Swahili is spoken have quite a
> distance between them

?

There's nothing endangered, moribund, or extinct about Fulani.

https://celt.indiana.edu/portal/Fulfulde/index.html

> >As I have only a printed copy, I cannot
> >check whether "fulani" is used at many other places.
> fulani site:wordproject.org/bibles/sw/
> Several occurrences.

On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 8:55:00 AM UTC-4, Helmut Richter wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Helmut Richter wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> >
> > > Is Swahili one of those few languages, next to English, Bahasa
> > > Malay/Indonesia, Interlingua and Ido, that can be written entirely in
> > > ASCII, without any special accented letters? Looks like it.
> >
> > Yes. There are no diacritics except the apostrophe (which has an ASCII
> > code as well) to disinguish -ng- [ŋg] like "finger" from -ng'- [ŋ] like
> > "singer". If these two English words were loans to Sw, they would be
> > written as "finga" and "sing'a".
> And I think a similar scheme ist quite common in East Africa, e.g. DR Congo
> https://termisti.ulb.ac.be/archive/rifal/PDF/rifal23/rifal23_Atibakwa%20Baboya.pdf
>
> A difficulty in many countries is that the existence of such a standard
> does not at all automatically entail that texts in the pertinent languages
> are indeed written according to the standard, e.g. in the DR Congo
> Lingala, Kikongo and Chiluba. It is easier to design a standard than to
> enforce it. In contrast, Swahili spelling is quite consistent in Tanzania,
> Kenya, and Uganda, and has fairly small deviations in the DR Congo.
>
> The modern spelling of Swahili (consonants as in English; vowels as in
> German, Spanish or IPA; very few extra rules) is in large parts an
> invention of Edward Steere (1828–1882), and it is much easier to use than
> other Sw spellings such as those of Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–1881) or
> Charles Sacleux (1856–1943) which make much finer phonetic distinctions
> that are primarily important to linguists but not to the ordinary people
> who just want to note down texts unambiguously.

The notion of phoneme, and phonemic orthography, didn't exist
in their (presumably Sacleux did it as a young fellow) day.

Could Steere have had a similar background to the Pacific missionaries
who came up with phonemic orthographies for Polynesian languages
in the 1830s-40s -- spelling Toga not Tonga, Kiribati not Kiribas?

> In West Africa there seems to be a greater inclination to use more
> diacritics or special letters (i.e. letters that are not ASCII even when
> common diacritics are stripped off).

Those languages have much richer phonemic systems than Swahili.

Fri, 2 Sep 2022 10:49:29 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.usenet@email.de>
scribeva:

>On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
>> Is Swahili one of those few languages, next to English, Bahasa
>> Malay/Indonesia, Interlingua and Ido, that can be written entirely in
>> ASCII, without any special accented letters? Looks like it.
>
>Yes. There are no diacritics except the apostrophe (which has an ASCII
>code as well) to disinguish -ng- [?g] like "finger" from -ng'- [?] like
>"singer". If these two English words were loans to Sw, they would be
>written as "finga" and "sing'a".

Like Bahasa fingga and singa, maybe. Or was that my own kripld
Ingglish spelling sistam?
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

Fri, 2 Sep 2022 06:34:06 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@verizon.net> scribeva:

>On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 1:15:28 AM UTC-4, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>> Thu, 1 Sep 2022 21:59:48 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.u...@email.de>
>> scribeva:
>> >On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Helmut Richter wrote:
>
>> >> "ploni" adj. a certain person or place, such-a-one, so-and-so, (in the
>> >> Bible only occuring in the phrase "ploni almoni" 1Sam.21:3, 2Kg.6:8,
>> >> Ruth 4:1).
>> >Indeed, in the first two of these passages, the Swahili Bible uses the Sw
>> >word "fulani" in this context.
>>
>> Loanword from Arabic? Swahali has lots of them. Perhaps Swahili
>> grammar prescribes that there has to be an i at the end?
>>
>> And the regions where Fulani was and Swahili is spoken have quite a
>> distance between them
>
>?
>
>There's nothing endangered, moribund, or extinct about Fulani.

Oh, I thought I read the last fluent speaker died in 1962. But that
must have been some other language then.

>https://celt.indiana.edu/portal/Fulfulde/index.html
>
>> >As I have only a printed copy, I cannot
>> >check whether "fulani" is used at many other places.
>> fulani site:wordproject.org/bibles/sw/
>> Several occurrences.

--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

On Thursday, September 1, 2022 at 3:34:11 PM UTC-4, Helmut Richter wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
> > Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:03:00 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.u...@email.de>
> > scribeva:
> >
> > >On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> > >
> > >> Would Fulano be a Fulani speaker? In Portuguese, Fulano is a
> > >> non-existent name, meaning Mr. So-and-so.
> > >
> > >The same meaning exists in Arabic "????" and Swahili "fulani". In Sw, it
> > >is not restricted to persons with unknown or unremembered name but is used
> > >for things as well ("kitu fulani" = "a certain [some]thing").
> > >
> > >As Sw has lots of Ar loans but hardly vice versa, I guess the origin is
> > >Ar, and the Pt and Sw words are loans from Ar.
> >
> > True. See Wiktionary.
> >
> > >Has anyone an idea about etymology, e.g. related words in Ar?
> >
> > Hebrew and Aramaic have cognate roots, see Wiktionary.
> Klein’s etymological dictionary
> https://archive.org/details/AComprehensiveEtymologicalDictionaryOfTheHebrewLanguageErnestKlein1987OCR
> has:
>
> "ploni" adj. a certain person or place, such-a-one, so-and-so, (in the
> Bible only occuring in the phrase "ploni almoni" 1Sam.21:3, 2Kg.6:8,
> Ruth 4:1).
>
> In addition, he gives the Aram., Syr., and Arab. ("fulan") cognates as
> well. So P-L-N (=Ar. f-l-n) seems to be a common Semitic root but with no
> further derivatives in the Hebrew. The use of "almoni" (anonymous) is also
> restricted to this one phrase.
>
> --
> Helmut Richter

FLN PLN PLoNi ~ PLuRal/PLeNti(ful)/P.otli @Azt: b.orderly\b.ound.ar.ed
= defined one of: a kind/an order
PLoNi might link to (PL) + uni.que

Fri, 2 Sep 2022 10:50:37 -0700 (PDT): Daud Deden
<daud.deden@gmail.com> scribeva:

>On Thursday, September 1, 2022 at 3:34:11 PM UTC-4, Helmut Richter wrote:
>> On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>>
>> > Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:03:00 +0200: Helmut Richter <hr.u...@email.de>
>> > scribeva:
>FLN PLN PLoNi ~ PLuRal/PLeNti(ful)/P.otli @Azt: b.orderly\b.ound.ar.ed
>= defined one of: a kind/an order
>PLoNi might link to (PL) + uni.que

Please don’t post incomprehensible codes.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

On Fri, 2 Sep 2022, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> There's nothing endangered, moribund, or extinct about Fulani.

Yes, indeed. The web page cited in the original contribution of this thread
is very unclear and contradictory about this issue. It reads:

The language of the Fulani people of West Africa, known as Pulaar, is
spoken by over 40 million people, so it’s not in immediate danger.
However, for most of its history, Pulaar never had an alphabet. Fulani are
increasingly doing business, finding information, and expressing themselves
via text on mobile devices. And if they can’t communicate digitally with an
alphabet that reflects the language they speak, they will use other writing
systems, and one day, other languages.
For languages that have no digital script, the writing is on the wall.
Thirty years ago, two Fulani brothers took it upon themselves to reverse
this inevitability. They created an alphabet that would one day spread
across the global Fulani community and beyond.

The statement is that “it’s not in immediate danger” and that creating a
new alphabet exclusively for this one language is the only way to rescue
the language from that (non-existent?) danger. This is already
contradictory. Moreover, Fulani has already two working “digital” (that
is: with a standardised encoding that is alread commonly implemented on
computers and smartphones) scripts, Arabic and Latin, and why should the
invention of a new non-digital script for the language bring about any
betterment?

This somewhat weird issue has not been further discussed here. Instead, the
thread deviated in a general discussion of the word “fulan” which is used in
several languages to denote something like “a specific one of which I do not
know the name”. It exists in several Semitic languages in very different
appearances but with the same root consonants, from which one may infer that
the origin is indeed a common Semitic root. On the other hand, it seems to be
a root that is restricted to only one or very few rather infrequent words at
least in Hebrew. The appearance in non-Semitic languages is uniformly
“fulan-” with a language-specific ending appended – this indicates an Arabic
loan. So far, so good.

What is still an open question is whether the similarity of the name of the
ethnicity called „Fulani“ (and other related names) and the Arabic word is
mere chance or not. I see three possible scenarios:

– African name, coincidence with Arabic word by mere chance
– name coined by Arab traders
– name of African origin, taken over (and deformed) by Arabic folk etymology

--
Helmut Richter