Grasslands of Nigeria - Sahel, Tuareg Languages, Guinean Forest-Savanna Mosaic, Sudano-Sahelian (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Sahel, Tuareg Languages, Guinean Forest-Savanna Mosaic, Sudano-Sahelian, Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel. Excerpt: Tuareg (or Tamasheq/Tamajaq/Tamahaq) is a Berber language or family of closely related languages spoken by the Tuareg, in many parts of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso, with a few speakers, the Kinnin, in Chad. Other Berber languages and Tamashaq are quite mutually comprehensible, and are commonly regarded as a single language (as for instance by Karl Prasse); they are distinguished mainly by a few sound shifts (notably affecting the pronunciation of original z and h). They are unusually conservative in some respects; they retain two short vowels where northern Berber languages have one or none, and have a much lower proportion of Arabic loanwords than most Berber languages. They are traditionally written in the indigenous Tifinagh alphabet; however, the Arabic alphabet is commonly used in some areas (and has been since medieval times), while the Latin alphabet is official in Mali and Niger. The Tuareg languages may be written in the Latin alphabet, the Arabic script, or Tifinagh. The Malian national literacy program DNAFLA has established a standard for the Latin alphabet, which is used with modifications in Prasse's Lexique and the government literacy program in Burkina, while in Niger a different system was used. There is also some variation in Tifinagh and in the Arabic script. The Arabic script is mostly in use by tribes more involved in Islamic learning, and little is known about its conventions. Tifinagh usage is restricted mainly to writing magical formulae, writing on palms when silence is required, and recently letter-writing. The DNAFLA system is a somewhat morphophonemic o... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=148223