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THREE TASHELHIYT BERBER TEXTS FROM THE ARSÈNE ROUX ARCHIVES

HARRY STROOMER

1. Introduction My contribution to this volume in honour of Professor Frits Kortlandt consists of an edition of three short Berber texts from the oral tradition of South . On various occasions Professor Kortlandt has emphasized the importance of good and reliable text materials for linguistics, on the basis of which good analyses of phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic features can be made. The texts presented below are taken from the archives of Arsène Roux (1893-1971) in Aix-en-Provence, who was a great specialist in the Berber language of the Middle Atlas called Tamazight, and in the Berber language of South Morocco called Tashelhiyt Berber (henceforth abbreviated as TB).1 Having lived in Morocco for some forty years, with language infor- mants permanently at his disposal, Roux was always in an excellent posi- tion to collect linguistic data and texts from the berberophone areas of his main interest.2 His deep knowledge of Middle Atlas Berber and Tashelhiyt

1 In Morocco, Berber is spoken in the Rif (Tarifit), in the Middle Atlas (Tamazit) and in the High Atlas, the plains and the Anti-Atlas (Tasusiyt, Taliyt), by an estimated 45% of the total population of 30 million people. In Algeria, Berber languages are spoken in Kabylia, in the Aurès mountains and in the Mzab areas, a total of 25% of the population, also of 30 million people. Tuareg Berber is found in the south of Algeria, in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Smaller groups of berberophones live in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Berber immigrant communities of various origins have settled in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel. Of all Berber languages Tashelhiyt Berber is the one with the highest (estimated) number of speakers: some 8 to 9 million. 2 Roux was born on the 5th of February 1893 at Rochegude, Drôme, France. He received primary and secondary education in Algeria. In 1913 he entered military service and left for Morocco where he worked as a translator in Central Morocco from 1913 to 1919. From 1919 to 1927 he was a teacher of Arabic at the Ecole Militaire and the Lycée at Meknès and in charge of public courses of Arabic and Berber. In 1927 he founded the Collège berbère d’Azrou, an institution where he was the director from 1927 to 1935. In these years also he was responsible for public courses of Berber at Azrou. From 1935 to 1944 he was director of the Collège Moulay Youssef at Rabat. From 1935 to 1956 he was professor in Berber dialectology at the Institut des Hautes études marocaines and chief inspector of the  )"33:Û45300.&3

Berber is evident from the personal library and papers that he left behind after his death.3

2. About the texts The TB text materials in the archives of Arsène Roux can roughly be divided in two categories: some 140 ethnographic texts and some 140 oral- literary texts.4 From the oral-literary texts I have selected three from the Ashtuken region, south-east of . I will give a very brief introduction to each of the texts and a translation into English that remains as close to TB as normal English usage permits. Of course these texts represent only three out of many narrative types that can be found in TB oral culture.

2.1 The vagabond-sidi The first text is about Sidi Ali Baddi. In both Moroccan Arabic and Berber the word sidi may indicate someone with the status of a saint. Famous “saint-sidis” abound in Morocco, e.g. the patron saint of Marrakesh, Sidi Bel Abbas, or the patron saint of the Moroccan south, Sidi Hmad U Musa of . In a more generalized meaning, the word sidi indicates a normal male person of flesh and blood who is respected because of his piety and his modest lifestyle and who, for that reason, may sometimes be asked to act as a judge in a conflict. courses of Arabic at the Moroccan lycées and collèges. After the independence of Morocco in 1956 he went to Bayonne, France where he kept various responsibilities in relation to the teaching of Arabic in France. He travelled to Morocco several times in order to check his Middle Atlas Berber texts. Arsène Roux died in Pau on the 19th of July 1971. 3 A few years after his death his library and papers were donated to the director of the Encyclopédie berbère, Professor Gabriel Camps to constitute the Fonds Roux.TheFonds Roux was placed on the first floor of the Institut de Recherches méditerranéennes, 5, avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence. Today the Fonds Roux belongs to the Iremam, (Institut de recherches sur le monde arabe et musulman, CNRS-Universités d’Aix-Marseille), an institution that recently moved to a location called the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme (MMSH) in Aix-en-Provence. A catalogue of Tashelhiyt Berber manuscripts written in Arabic characters has been compiled by Nico van den Boogert, Catalogue des Manuscrits Arabes et Berbères du Fonds Roux (Aix-en-Provence), Travaux et Documents de l’IREMAM, Aix en Provence, 1995. The non-manuscript part of the Fonds Roux has been catalogued by Harry Stroomer and Michael Peyron (with the help of Claude Brenier-Estrine), Catalogue des archives berbères du Fonds Arsène Roux (forthcoming). The latter catalogue also gives a list of publications of Arsène Roux. 4 The present author prepares the text editions of both the ethnographic texts and the oral-literary texts from the Roux archives.