African Romance: searching for traces of a lost Latin language

Did a Romance language survive in North Africa? What was it like? The story of a late Latin language, people who spoke it and a tour of its possible features.

~ Briefly ~

Our story starts with a map of modern Romance languages, zooming in one of the areas where a local neo-Latin language did not survive: Roman Africa. We'll meet Punic speakers in Carthage, hear of Roman and Vandal and Byzantine and Umayyad conquests, and Amazigh ("Berber") people all along as we uncover pieces of this tongue's story.

In the end we're left speculating, wondering about a language that maybe - possibly! - had a vowel system like Sardinian, k-sounding Cs like Dalmatian, b-sounding Vs like Spain and interacted with local languages that other Romance languages hardly knew.

~ Credits ~

Art, narration and animation by Josh from NativLang.

My doc full of sources for claims and credits for music, sfx, fonts and images:

[orpheonkatakrosmortarchoft]

The lost brother of our Romance family :(

Press F to pay tributos.

[Alice-grkb]

I never thought about African Latin but now I'm obsessed with this idea

[معرفةوترفيه-تظ]

I used to live in the city of Gafsa (the last city we have records of African Romance being spoken, specifically by Idrissi in the 13th century) and I reember the locals having a distinct word for "Pub" no other Tunisians used, it was "Tabarna", very simillar to the Latin "Taberna".
Also in the Tunisian dialect in large we have many words of possible Latin origin like "Qatus or "Gatus" for Cat (from "Cattus"), "Kayyas" for Road (from "Callis"), "Koujina" for "Kitchen" (from "Cochina"), "Kalsita" for Sock (from the vulgar latin "Calcita") and "Karrusa" for Carriage (from "Carrus")

[VoidOctopus]

I'm actually from Carthage! I used to walk by the ruins everyday on my way to school, it's a nice vibe

[BLAZINFAST]

“The city of Hippo grows hungrier by the day.”

[nikolaytsankov]

As a vulgar Bulgarian I am a big supporter of the idea that romans wouldn't be able to differentiate between B and V

[NativLang]

Let's end the year with some epic lost linguistic history.

[AirKIng]

I have literally waited for years to hear someone talk about this.

[kacperwoch]

Everyone: Latin is dead, Roman Empire is no more
Romance languages: No one's ever really gone

[pentelegomenon]

One of my favorite language facts: the last speaker of the Dalmatian language died in 1898 as an old man, only one year after a linguist learned of his existence and made a book based on the man's hazy memories of speaking the language with his long-deceased grandma. And had that not happened, our understanding of Dalmatian would have been based entirely on some old Dalmatian writings, none any less than 500 years old.

[alimanski]

Never realized "Carthage" was so similar to the Hebrew words "Karet Hadash" (meaning the exact same thing - "New city", though "Karet" is quite archaic)

[trolleymouse]

Welp, if this doesn't launch a half dozen conlangs, I don't know what will.

[genjama]

Just realized the map at the beginning has 3 blacked out areas. We might get 2 more videos folks

[aTunisianguy]

Well, I can only speak for tunisian vernacular arabic, but I can say this: the latin ending "us" is still very common. It features in words such as "Qattus" (meaning cat cat), "fallous" (chick as in chicken offspring) "barkus" (male sheep), etc. It's also used consistently an an ending in the regular deminutive case.

Actuall, the tunisian word for cat is possibly the most fascinating, because (at least to me), it always sounded as a compromise between latin (cattus) and arabic (Qitt), resulting into Qattus.

[bary]

I am an Amazigh from Libya and we use words from Latin like
agisi = caseus (cheese)
firnu = furnus (oven)
firas = pirus (pear)
akmis = camisia (shirt)

[gts]

I speak Kabyle, an Amazigh language, and in my local dialect, there isn't natively any b like "bear" or v like "vase". Rather, there is a voiced labial fricative [β], written "b" and, another one, where it's doubled or stressed, written "bb".
[b] and [v] do exist but most of the time, they are found in loanwords from Arabic and French.
Also, thank you so much for this video; I learned so much from it. Keep up the quality content!

[themadmanwithapen]

I remember reading a quote once that said that the Latin in Africa was indistinguishable at one point from the Latin of Sardinia.

[theskepticalapple]

You should look at Maltese, Europe’s only official Semitic language.

[-Blast]

There are lots of Latin words still being used in modern day Tunisian Arabic, some of these words are even used frequently :
-Qattus قطوس for “cat” from the Latin word cattus
-Kayyas كياس for “roadway” from the Latin word Callis
-Fallus فلوس for “chick” from the Latin word pullus
-Sbitar صبيطار for “hospital” from the Latin word hospitor
-Karrusa كروسة for “carrige” from the Latin word carrus
Tunisia was the most romanized of the three Maghrebi countries (Morocco and Algeria) and it was also where the roman Carthage was located. That explains the many Latin words still being used in Tunisian Arabic also known as “Tunsi” by Tunisians.

[lounesmaibeche]

Latin left many marks on Tamazight language. The calendar is based off of the Julian calendar, so all our months are still Latin based after 2, 165 years. The biggest Amazigh holiday "Yennayer" is based on "Ianuarii". And of course, there are various words in Tamazight that come directly from latin like "äng'alus" from "angelus", "ayugu" from "iugum", "azaglu" from "iugulum", "agluglu" and "kkal" from "coagulum", "agursel" from "agarcium", "abekkadu" from "peccatum" and "arumi" (foreigner) from "romanus". I'm pretty sure the general rule is if a Tamazight word ends with U or I, there's a good chance it comes from Latin.


I hope more people become interested in the Tamazight languages, because despite recent revitalization, the amount of people who speak it is a crumb compared to what it was a hundred years ago.


Also, Tamazight has a tendency to confuse certain consonants and B, which is probably why B=V. Whether B is pronounced V or V is pronounced B depends on the region. Other consonants which fall victim to this confusion include B=G and B=P.