Qui la versione italianaToday I would like to write about a subject that make
me sad, a part of the Roman world, which has essentially vanished into thin air
after a slow silent agony that has lasted centuries. A world ignored by most.
A while ago, wandering hyperlink after hypelink, I
found the story of a 12th-century Arab traveler, Muhammad al-Idrisi, one of
those spectacular individuals that Islam gave to the world in the centuries of its
splendor: cartographer, geographer, archaeologist ante litteram, he crossed the
world from the British Isles to Egypt.
I was particularly impressed by a quote from him: crossing
the Maghreb, Al Idrisi writes about the languages spoken in those lands, Arabic,
of course, the Berber dialects and what he calls al-lisān al-lātīnī al-'ifrīqī.
The Latin language of Africa.
It seems obvious if you think about it, in the Roman Province
of Africa people spoke Latin, Berber and the Punic, and later the Vandal of the
conquerors. St. Augustine in his writings mentions several times the curious accent
of the “local” Latin Isidore of Seville
in the 7th century (just before the Arab conquest) also speaks of the strange
way “Africans” spoke Latin ("birtus, boluntas, bita uel his simili quae Afri
scribendo uitiantnon for B sed per V scribenda").
Nothing more normal than with the end of imperial unity,
the various local pronunciations, became dialects, starting to become "vulgar"
and finally real languages.
In Africa, this process was interrupted by the Arab invasion,
but, of course, also this it’s obvious
if you just think about it for a moment, there was not a clear break, it
was not an instant process, in the Maghreb people did not start to speak Arabic
the day after the conquest.
When Tariq ibn Ziyād landed in southern Spain at the
beginning of the 8th century most of his troops spoke neither Arabic nor Berber,
they spoke an Afro Romance dialect, that sounded quite weird, but, we know, it
was understandable to the ears of the conquered populations.
We do not know much about what this Afro Romance was like,
but from various traces to linguists think he was quite similar to Sardinian (indeed
according to some hypotheses Sardinian would be a survival of the Afro Romance)
and that he left his mark also in the Castilian, but we know almost nothing more.
It's remained an incomplete language, in fieri.
It was a slow death, that of the Afro Romance, probably
linked to the parallel disappearance of the Christian communities of those lands,
it is in fact to be assumed that the two things were associated.
In the 12th Century Roger of Sicily made an attempt to
enlarge his kingdom to North Africa, it is the beginning of the end for the
surviving Christian minorities who had supported him, after the retreat of the Normans
they will meet the hostile reaction of the Muslim majority, and with the disappearance
of Christianity the last traces of Afro Romance seem to disappear too. After this
we have only the testimony of Al idrisi from which we started our story and some
grave inscriptions in Tripolitania of
the following century.
After that silence falls on North African Romanitas.
Only imposing ruins
remained, voiceless.
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