Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur: From Sea Jargon to Military Order? [1st ed. 2023] 303130554X, 9783031305542

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: The Evolution of Lingua Franca to Sabir and Beyond
References
Hugo Schuchardt Archive, Graz, Austria
Archives Nationales Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Louis Faidherbe, Colonialist and Linguist
References
Archives Nationales de Sénégal
Section Ancienne des Archives Historiques de l’Armée, Vincennes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Parallels of Sabir and Français Tirailleur
References
Hugo Schuchardt Archive
Bibliography
Chapter 4: The Mixed Fortunes of Sabir
References
Archives Nationales Outre-Mer
Leland Barrows Personal Collection
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur From Sea Jargon to Military Order?

Joanna Nolan

Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur

Joanna Nolan

Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur From Sea Jargon to Military Order?

Joanna Nolan SOAS London, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-30554-2    ISBN 978-3-031-30555-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30555-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mike, for unending patience

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Cathy Scott at Palgrave for her interest in, and shaping of, my idea. Thanks too to all the Palgrave production staff, especially Petra Treiber. I am very grateful to the staff at the London Library and the Special Collections at SOAS library for their help sourcing particular books and articles. Un grand merci to the very helpful and accommodating archivists at the Archives Nationales Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence. My most heartfelt thanks go to Professor Leland Barrows of Voorhuis University, South Carolina, for his insights, generosity with his archive materials, and warm support. I am especially appreciative of his incredible organization of materials he sourced 50 years ago and for his permission to publish particular images. My final thank you goes to my husband, Mike, and our wonderful children, William, Lara, and Min, who have tolerated my distraction with very good grace.

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Contents

1 The Evolution of Lingua Franca to Sabir and Beyond 1 2 Louis Faidherbe, Colonialist and Linguist19 3 Parallels of Sabir and Français Tirailleur43 4 The Mixed Fortunes of Sabir77 Index93

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Arabic and Lingua Franca translations of days of the week (Leland Barrows personal collection) Arabic and Lingua Franca translation of points of the compass and winds (Leland Barrows personal collection)

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CHAPTER 1

The Evolution of Lingua Franca to Sabir and Beyond

Abstract This chapter explains the context for the emergence and subsequent decline of Lingua Franca, its change of name, and, gradually, lexical makeup, as it became known as Sabir with the occupation and colonization of Algeria by the French. It provides a theoretical background to pidgins to better explain the (shared) features of Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur and a sense of the academic and research landscape of the mid-late nineteenth century within which both languages were in use. It also provides an introduction to the plurilingual environment of Senegal in the same period. Keywords Lingua Franca • Sabir • Pidgins • Oral languages • Senegal This monograph traces the potential connection between Lingua Franca, the pidgin spoken from the early seventeenth century onwards, across the Mediterranean and in the Barbary Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, and the later military pidgin, Français Tirailleur, which originated in Senegal. It explores how, with the arrival of French colonizing forces in Algiers, the ubiquitous North African pidgin Lingua Franca metamorphosed initially in name (to Sabir) and subsequently in its linguistic makeup but did not disappear entirely. In fact, its key characteristics appear to recur in the evolution and design of other languages, including quite © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Nolan, Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30555-9_1

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possibly Français Tirailleur. The latter was the principal means of communication between French colonial officers and their multinational and multilingual subordinates drawn from across West Africa from the latter half of the nineteenth century for several decades. This regiment, known as the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, was established by Louis Faidherbe, a French colonial administrator who had served in Algeria on two separate postings (where he would have inevitably been issued with the Lingua Franca Dictionnaire1 and in fact learned and used the language), in Guadeloupe and Senegal. An autodidact and consummate linguist, Faidherbe studied European dialects, Caribbean patois, African languages and produced several dictionaries and grammars of West African languages. The monograph will highlight how Faidherbe’s focus on maximizing communication and his understanding of languages, together with his attention to detail in the organization of his troops, suggests that he may well have played a founding role in the functional pidgin, Français Tirailleur. It will also explore how Sabir was deemed a useful model by colonial educators elsewhere in France’s outre-mer territories, as evidenced by the writings of, among others, Étienne Aymonier, the principal of the école coloniale and, prior to that, the head of France’s administration of Indochine, today’s Vietnam. Contemporaneous with the prevalence of pidgins such as Sabir and Français Tirailleur was the burgeoning ‘popularity of artificial languages, such as Esperanto, Ido, Volapük, etc.’ (Avram et al. 2016: 102). There is a potentially reciprocal relationship between the evolution of pidgins with their lexical and grammatical characteristics which maximize communication and the interest in new artificial languages. Indeed, a number of linguists including Hugo Schuchardt, considered by many as the father of pidgins and creoles, focused their research on both linguistic varieties. As Fought observes, ‘on the theoretical side, Schuchardt quite seriously compared the process of pidginization with the creation of an artificial auxiliary language’ (Fought 1982: 432).

1  The Dictionnaire (1830) was a short 100-page book with a brief introduction to Lingua Franca, a wordlist of approximately 2000 words and a series of 8 dialogues, based predominantly in terms of their largely functional content, according to Operstein (2018), on two Italian language text books. Printed in Marseille, it was explicitly produced for French colonial troops to facilitate communication with their new subjects in Algeria. See Nolan (2020) for more detail.

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This chapter provides some theoretical background2 to the two pidgin languages and the study thereof, before examining the reasons for Lingua Franca’s sustained use and proliferation on the Barbary Coast and then charting its decline and ‘rebranding’ both in terms of lexifier and status. I identify some of the key definitions and descriptions of Sabir by contemporaneous sources. The chapter concludes by detailing the social, historical, and linguistic context of the French colonial mission to Senegal where Français Tirailleur first emerged. *** It is important to acknowledge from the outset that the very nature of contact languages, jargons, foreigner talk, and pidgins—all of which have been used to label both Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur—means that there will be naturally and inevitably be overlaps grammatically and even lexically between the two languages and not specifically because of the connection that I am suggesting may exist. This makes it hard for any argument to be conclusive. In addition, the discipline of pidgins (and creoles) is often viewed as rather complicated and fluid. As Siegel observes, ‘Progress in the study of languages in contact has been hindered by terminology often as unfixed as some of the languages it is used to describe’ (Siegel 1985: 357). He goes on to cite Mühlhäusler (1985), who concludes: ‘Having read most of what was published in this area over the last twenty years…I am left with the feeling that it comprises a conceptual mess aggravated by a terminological mess’ (Mühlhäusler 1985: 53). Rather than a ‘mess’, I feel it is a multifaceted discipline where each pidgin—with its potentially diverse numerous lexifiers, speakers for whom it is often a second, third, or fourth language, and its varying geographic and temporal spread—is so distinct that it resists fixed patterns, systems, and rules. Generalizations are inevitable, as are exceptions and anomalies. There are multiple, often contradictory, theories regarding pidgins but I am here predominantly embracing the description and analysis offered by Parkvall and Bakker (2013). Parkvall and Bakker (2013: 21) acknowledge the challenges of defining a pidgin, comprehensively reviewing other linguists’ various definitions from a number of perspectives including social, lexical, and labelling, and concluding that, to some extent, the sole ‘common denominator’ of the many identified features appears to be 2  I am not here attempting a comprehensive study of pidgins, nor in Chap. 3 am I providing an in-depth structural analysis of the two pidgins; that is not the intention of this monograph. Rather I am using the theoretical and grammatical information to support my contention that Sabir and Français Tirailleur may be linked.

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language contact—but that ‘since virtually every language is in contact with one or several others, and since all written and spoken languages presumably display foreign influences, this would reduce “pidgin” to simply mean “language”, something that would hardly contribute to our understanding of language in general or of contact phenomena in particular’ (Parkvall and Bakker 2013: 21). They sound the further warning note that ‘If we get to define the term ourselves, there is a risk that we choose only pidgins that fit our preconceptions’. In my highlighting of parallels between Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur, I am aware of, and vigilant about, a similar possibility. Parkvall and Bakker (2013) itemize the following key elements which define a pidgin, namely, that it: 1. Is a language that is conventionalized (and not spontaneous) 2. Is used as a lingua franca in a contact situation 3. Is native to no one 4. Fulfils only restricted communicative functions (i.e is used in a limited number of domains) 5. Draws to some extent on one or more of the languages spoken or known by the groups in contact as sources 6. Has some norms of forms and usage and hence some stability 7. Is highly reduced lexically and grammatically compared to its input languages. (Parkvall and Bakker 2013: 22)

Sebba divides pidgins and creoles into several different types, based on the social rather than linguistic basis of a pidgin’s origins. Many pidgins fit into more than one of these classifications, which include military, seafaring and trade, plantation (colonial) pidgins, and urban contact vernaculars (Sebba 1997: 27). Similarly, Parkvall and Bakker identify firstly trade and secondly warfare and policing (2013: 51) as ecologies with the greatest potential for pidgin emergence and usage. Parkvall and Bakker identify the features of pidgins—shared by the majority, with the caveat that ‘a general problem in pidgin studies is that many of the features associated with these languages is clearly based on intuition rather than empirical research’ (2013: 32) and indeed that there tends to be a lack of the latter, an issue evident in Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur in part due to their small and relatively unreliable corpora. ***

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The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Sabir remained a subject of interest and Français Tirailleur was at its apogée, coincided with a concerted movement by a number of linguists to establish an international auxiliary language. A leader in both the fields of pidgins and creoles and the search for an Esperanto or equivalent was Hugo Schuchardt, the esteemed linguist who wrote the seminal article on Lingua Franca. He conducted his research for this study and the majority of his other work by compiling testimony provided by ‘on the ground’ correspondents, in the case of Lingua Franca across North Africa. This ‘network of knowledge’ (Melchior and Schwägerl-Melchior 2016) comprised more than 2000 correspondents ‘including linguists, philologists, “amateurs” of language and literature, but also ethnologists and ethnographers, historians, biologists, “simple” linguistic informants and many others’. Not only then was there a human, but also a linguistically theoretical, network. I provide here examples of just a few of the connections, not only within Schuchardt’s own network but also linking him to Faidherbe and demonstrating the interrelated nature of the study and scholars of pidgins, creoles, and auxiliary languages. One of Schuchardt’s key correspondents on Lingua Franca/Sabir, Henri Gaidoz wrote to him about a play showing in Algeria the title of which may well have been in Sabir:3 Ça m’ti garde pas ma bile mire,Vaudeville en un acte et cinq Juifs, par Mardochée fils de Chaloum.Théâtre Lyrique Dar-el-Bey, Constantine; 1ère représentation, le 10 mai 1880. Je copie ce titre pour vous dans la Bibliographie de la Revue des Etudes Juives3 no 2 Oct. Déc. 1880, p 306. 4Serait-ce du Sabir ? où du Judéo-algérien ? That doesn’t concern you, mother-in-law”. Vaudeville in one act and five Jews, by Mardochée, son of Chaloum. Lyric Theatre, Dar-el-Bey, Constantine, First performance, 10th May 1880. I copy this title for you from the bibliography of the Review of Jewish Studies, no. 2, Oct–Dec 1880, p.  306. Would it be Sabir? Or Jewish-Algerian? (HSA Letter 1883 026-03232; my translation)

3  It is noteworthy that Gaidoz clearly considers Schuchardt the linguistic expert on Sabir, despite himself being a renowned philologist.

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Henri Gaidoz also wrote to Schuchardt about both the creole of Guadeloupe4 (an area of linguistic interest for Faidherbe and potentially a source of inspiration to him for spreading the French language) and with regard to an international auxiliary language. Another of Schuchardt’s principal linguistic correspondents on dialects, Victor Waille, teaching at the École des Lettres in Algiers, sent him Faidherbe’s 1884 article on Lingua Franca, as well as his response to the General’s French language teaching proposals. Lucien Bonaparte, an early correspondent on Lingua Franca who first sent Schuchardt his copy of the Dictionnaire (1830), was the uncle of Roland Bonaparte who potentially collaborated with Schuchardt as the Honorary President of the Société Internationale des Amis de l’Esperanto ‘International Society of Friends of Esperanto’. Shortly before the publication of the Français Tirailleur manuel, the Governor of German New Guinea emphasized that ‘an easy to learn transition language is needed with the natives’ (Voeste 2005 cited in Avram et al. 2016: 102). Avram also examines the contemporaneous conception of the unrealized Kolonial Deutsch, a language whose objective coincides closely to Français Tirailleur, as per the following stated aims: it can be used between Germans and “natives” as well as among different linguistic groups of “natives”; it makes it possible to transfer unreliable “natives” from one colony to the other, thus effectively neutralizing what would be now termed potential security risks; it is a powerful symbol of German authority. (Avram et al. 2016: 105)

Although this era of interconnectedness of linguistic innovation and innovators was slightly later than  Faidherbe, and it is unlikely he was involved in any way even with the notion of the manuel (1916), his

4  In a letter to Schuchardt in 1882 (HSA, Gaidoz writing about the creole of Guadeloupe, adds a comment referring to an earlier query from Schuchardt citing Globus, a contemporary geographical journal:

Je ne sais rien de ce que raconte le Globus, et je crois qu’il a confondu le patois nègre avec le langage parfois enfantin de la littérature du Folk-Lore qui commence à attirer l’attention en France I know nothing of what Globus is saying, and I think that it has confused the patois nègre and the sometimes childish language of the Folklore literature which has started to attract attention in France. (HSA 1882a: 015-03222; my translation)

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proposals for language learning feature in debates of the period and his linguistic spirit of enterprise is intrinsically linked with the currents of language study and planning. In addition to the fluidity and consequent blurring inherent in the domain of pidgin languages, I want to highlight here as I have done previously the related challenge of studying predominantly oral and, in this case, dead languages.5 In terms of Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur, this is compounded by both having a limited and partially questionable corpus, which I explore in more detail in Chap. 3. There is the potential for contentious debate regarding their origins, their usage and spread, and even their very existence. As the historian, Patrick Collinson (2007), observes, ‘It is possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence. Because, of course, 99% of the evidence, above all, unrecorded speech, is not available to us’.6 The late Hilary Mantel extends this thought in her first Reith lecture (2017), remarking that even the evidence which is available is ‘always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge’. The study of these languages involves intense and multifaceted research. In his book, Searching for Sappho, Philip Freeman writes, ‘The little-known story of the recovery of many of Sappho’s works reads like a detective novel with idealistic young adventurers, shady antiquities dealers, and fragments of poetry hidden away in the most likely places’ (Freeman 2016: 12). While I would not label myself or any other scholars or research institutions thus, it is indisputable that philological finds can often emerge from a chance encounter. Some of the more valuable linguistic data informing this study came from a very generous American professor, Leland Barrows, who first unearthed them during the course of researching his thesis in Paris nearly half a century ago when he made the acquaintance of Faidherbe’s granddaughter, Madame Ogé. Although they were not pertinent to his own thesis, they add immeasurably to my knowledge of Faidherbe’s linguistic passion and ability and provide evidence of written Lingua Franca, a much-prized discovery. Such finds are rare; mostly, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow’ (Nietzsche 1997: Preface, aphorism 5). ***  See Nolan 2020, The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca: Fact and Fiction.  This is, of course, especially true of the languages explored here.

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Lingua Franca’s origins lie in the plurilingualism which existed throughout the Mediterranean for centuries, driven by commerce, conflict, and migration. North Africa provides an even more interwoven linguistic picture. Before the establishment of the Turkish Regencies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli in the late 1500s, there were already multiple Romance language communities across North Africa. Spanish Presidios, or fortified bases, existed in Morocco and in Algeria (both in Oran and in Mers-el-­ Kebir) and were examples of one such linguistic enclave. French was spoken in the Bastion de France in Algeria, Genovese (or Ligurian) on the island of Tabarka, Italian and Spanish in the Tunis port of La Goulette or La Goletta. Spanish, Italian, and French alternated in Tripoli depending on the controlling power—Spain, Italy, or the Knights of Malta (Cremona 2001: 290). A truce between François I of France and Ottoman Emperor Suleiman in the early sixteenth century (Cremona 2001: 290) facilitated and promoted trade between Europe and North Africa and the Levant, with commercial centres set up in Sidone, Aleppo, and Tripoli (in Syria) as well as Algiers and Tunis. Prior to coming under the control of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, the population of Africa’s North Coast thus saw their destiny as already linked to (Christian) Western Europe. By the late sixteenth century, the Barbary States of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were treated as ‘regencies’, Algiers, the most powerful of the three, and its Pasha ‘became the officially recognized representation of the empire in the West’ according to Fisher (1957: 83). This may have been in part due to the Ottomans allowing native Europeans (who had converted to Islam as corsairs) to rule their regencies, particularly Algiers. It is evident that even before the Spanish Abbot Haedo, whose topographical study of Algiers (Haedo 1612) provides the earliest detailed information about Lingua Franca’s ubiquity in Barbary, wrote his account of the city-state, the population was multilingual, its leaders, albeit sustained by Turks, being Western European and Romance language-speaking. The Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were already strategically located, Western-looking, commercial hubs. The influx of powerful corsairs, thousands of European slaves, and the financial leverage these brought would only increase the need for a common tongue, a lingua franca. The sheer number of Europeans—free and enslaved—living in the Barbary States, and the (largely) unregulated commercial activities, predominantly the trade in stolen goods and people, created the conditions

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for Lingua Franca to flourish as a basic communication tool between the diverse groups. The power vacuum created by the unusual combination of remote official Ottoman authority that was subverted and/or substituted by local Arabic- or Turkish-speaking leaders in the Regencies, the economic imperative and power held by mostly European corsairs (and their permeation of executive and social hierarchies), and the ever-shifting multilingual slave and mercantile communities, all contributed to an environment which demanded a contact language accessible to everyone. Cifoletti (2004) coined the phrase Barbary Lingua Franca to describe the particular variety spoken throughout the multilingual society of North Africa for more than 250  years. Evidently, this was not a single variety. Variation occurred diachronically and geographically. The three Regencies of Barbary were more than 1000  km apart, each city with its individual makeup of European diasporas, slave populations, and trading routes. These factors led to inevitable flux in the linguistic repertoire of Lingua Franca speakers and the consequent language they used. The attempt to find a single lexifier of Lingua Franca misunderstands the very nature of the pidgin. As Selbach puts it, ‘lexical variants were as much a part of the language as variant lexifiers’ (Selbach 2008: 18). With the increased presence and integration of the French into Algiers, at least, and later further into Algeria and North Africa, the term Lingua Franca was gradually substituted by the title, Sabir, which surfaced for the first time in May 1852 in an article entitled La Langue Sabir, in the Algiers newspaper, L’Algérien, journal des intérêts d’Algérie. It was published anonymously but Schuchardt identifies its authors by surname only as MacCarthy and Varnier (Schuchardt 1909, trans 1980: 74). Although Schuchardt is widely credited with deducing their names, it seems he actually learned them from his Algiers-based correspondent, Morel-Fatio. Enclosing a copy of the article, Morel-Fatio’s letter (HSA 1882b: Letter 6-7473) refers to one of them as un érudit du crû (‘an expert scholar’). MacCarthy and Varnier (1852) describe Sabir’s everyday usage (Cifoletti 2004: 262–3) and its ubiquity throughout the region (MacCarthy and Varnier 1852, cited in Cifoletti 2004: 265): On la parle à Constantinople comme à Gibraltar; à Marseille comme à Alger, à Tunis, à Tripoli, à Alexandrie; dans les villes de l’Adriatique, et de la Mer Noire comme dans les échelles du Levant.

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It is spoken in Constantinople, Gibraltar, Marseille and Algiers, in Tunis, Tripoli and Alexandria, and in the towns on the Adriatic and the Black Sea as well as the ports across the Levant. (MacCarthy and Varnier 1852, cited in Cifoletti 2004: 265; my translation)

The fact that everyone could speak the pidgin, and that it was used for all daily communication needs, would seem to reinforce the sense of a simple name change. The name Sabir may derive from the contemporaneous lexicon—where sabir is translated in the Dictionnaire (1830) as ‘to know’ (Dictionnaire 1830: 73)7—but it seems more likely to stem from the best-known literary example of Lingua Franca, Molière’s 1670 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This features a long speech delivered by a character posing as the son of the Turkish Sultan ostensibly speaking in Lingua Franca whose opening words are Si ti sabir: Si ti sabir Ti respondir: Si non sabir, Tazir, tazir. If you know, Answer; If not, Be quiet. (Molière 1798: 71; my translation)

This hypothesis is confirmed in a letter to Schuchardt from Morel-Fatio in Algiers, who explains the use of Sabir as no more than the description of Lingua Franca by a Frenchman who was familiar with Molière’s play (HSA 1882b: Letter 6-7473). Au sujet du mot sabir pour désigner la langue franque en Algérie, je le crois d’introduction récente: c’est évidemment quelque français d’après 1830 ayant lu le Bourgeois gentilhomme, qui a eu l’idée de baptiser ainsi ce bizarre langage.

7  Schuchardt’s Algiers-based correspondent, Morel-Fatio made a play on the potential double meanings of sabir in a letter to the Austrian linguist: Je tâcherai aussi de savoir ou sabir un peu plus exactement ce qu’on parle au port entre marins des divers pays romans. ‘I will try to know [or sabir] more precisely what is spoken by the various Romance nationality sailors at the port’ (HSA 1882b: Letter 6-7473; my translation).

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On the subject of the word sabir to describe Lingua Franca in Algeria, I think it was introduced recently; it’s obviously some Frenchman around 1830 who had read Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and had the idea of thus naming this strange language. (HSA 1882b: Letter 6-7473; my translation)

In his article of 1884, Faidherbe also mentions the name change: le nom de langue franque…depuis la conquète de l’Algérie les Français l’appellent le sabir ‘the name Lingua Franca…since the conquest of Algeria, the French call it Sabir’ (Faidherbe 1884: 158). Given that several of Schuchardt’s correspondents attempt to differentiate between the two names, it seems likely that Schuchardt asked the same question of several different individuals living in the cities of North Africa and the Levant. They offer different interpretations. The most common is a rejection of the term Sabir as not being a concept they have encountered. This is the case with Emil Jellinek who, writing from Oran, says that Sabir is not found in Algiers, Tunis, Malta, Tripoli, or Zanzibar, but that a language known as Lingua Franca does exist in all such places (HSA 1882c: Letter 1-8742). He does qualify in a later letter that this is a new iteration of Lingua Franca—no longer simply Spanish, Arabic, and Italian, but now with additional French input—adding somewhat archly: The French occupation thus exercised its influence not only on African politics, but also added a new element to the lingua franca. (HSA 1882d: Letter 4-8745; my translation)

Evidently, by the early 1880s, there is a definitive increase in the French lexifying influence on what was coming to be known more widely if not ubiquitously as Sabir. In terms of the size of its lexicon, MacCarthy and Varnier (1852) claim that Sabir comprised 200 words, 50 of which, at most, were in common usage. Bono ‘good or nice’ or its negative—indicated by no or non—is used ubiquitously and such overextension applies to most nouns and verbs: andar ‘to go’ denotes all verbs of motion, while tenir ‘to have’ indicates all variants of possession and chapar ‘to catch, take’ dispossession of all kinds (MacCarthy and Varnier 1852, cited in Cifoletti 2004: 265). The French geographer, Élisée Reclus, in his detailed description of the North African region, concurred with the wordcount, referring to it as a jargon of ‘rudimentary character, composed of about 200 words’ (Reclus 1887: 321). Comparatively, Lingua Franca’s lexicon appears from the

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wordlist in the Dictionnaire (1830) of more than 2000 words to be much more extensive and almost double the size of what is today deemed typical of a pidgin (Holm 1989: 63). However, an analysis of the Dialogues section of the Dictionnaire reveals that there are fewer than 150 tokens in use, thus relatively closer in number to, and indeed actual usage of, the Sabir lexicon. Of these 150 tokens, the verbs andar ‘to go’, tenir ‘to have, hold, own’, star ‘to be, stand, feel’ and counchar or fazir ‘to make, build, do’ dominate the phrases. There is semantic broadening across verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The title of the Dictionnaire (1830) already offers an alternative nomenclature to Lingua Franca: langue franque ou petit mauresque. There is, thus, implied equivalence of langue franque and petit mauresque. The petit mauresque epithet suggests a low prestige regional colonial pidgin and conveys the distance between the language used by the indigenous population and the implicitly superior French colonists, as will be further elaborated and evidenced in terms of Français Tirailleur. French disdain for the language is apparent from the preface: cet idiome qui ne sert guère aux usages familiers de la vie, et aux rapports commerciaux les moins compliqués n’a ni orthographe, ni règles grammatiques bien établies this “lingo”, which barely serves for daily needs and the most basic commercial exchanges, has no established spelling or grammar. (Dictionnaire 1830: 2; my translation)

The preface subsequently justifies the choice of idiome to define Lingua Franca: cet idiome que l’on n’ose appeler une langue ‘this lingo, which one couldn’t presume to call a language’ (Dictionnaire 1830: 5; my translation), once again demeaning its linguistic status. Petit (little) implies a rudimentary and lesser language and was also used in conjunction with other languages in French colonial history to define the pidgins established, respectively, in West Africa and the West Indies (Minervini 1996: 266), as per indeed one of the alternative titles for Français Tirailleur, namely, petit nègre (Venier 2016: 297). Consistent with this, in terms of the status of its speakers in Barbary, Cifoletti suggests a key distinction between Sabir and its predecessor. The former is designated as the language of the lower classes, in stark contrast with Lingua Franca, which was the preserve of the upper echelons of Barbary society, spoken extensively by the Beys and Deys of the Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (Cifoletti 2004: 27–8). There may well have

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been a shift in the demographic of speakers of Lingua Franca as Algiers was colonized, such that the principal speakers of the pidgin were increasingly the lower classes or at least those subjugated by the French. Certainly Sabir, from the derogatory nature of its name to the inferior status of its speakers, seems to have had low prestige. Venier (2016) confirms how French contempt is reinforced by the word, Sabir, quoting the 1852 article of MacCarthy and Varnier: En Orient on l’appelle langue franque, sans doute à cause de la franchise dont elle jouit dans tous les ports; en Algérie on la désigne par un de ses verbes: sabir ‘comme on désigne les bâtards par un de leur défauts’ a dit un modern cronique, quelque peu rancunier. Le sabir lui avait, comme il raconte lui-même, joué de mauvais tours In the Orient it is called Lingua Franca, doubtless because of the commercial freedom it enjoys in all ports; in Algeria it is referred to by one of its verbs: sabir ‘as one refers to mongrels by one of their flaws’ said a modern, somewhat resentful chronicler. Sabir, as he himself says, had done him disservice. (MacCarthy and Varnier 1852 cited in Cifoletti 2004: 263; my translation)

Venier characterizes the language  itself as storpiata e povera ‘crippled and lacking’ (Venier 2016: 300). It is questionable whether this reflects an actual lexical impoverishment of Lingua Franca once it ‘becomes’ Sabir or whether the ‘crippled and lacking’ epithet simply reflects the French perception of the ‘mongrel’ language. *** Prior to the 1820s, the French presence in Senegal, which dates back to the mid-seventeenth century, had largely been confined to the trading post of Saint Louis and the island of Gorée, a key departure point for the slave trade with France, and ‘until the 1850s French influence extended little beyond the island at the mouth of the [lower Senegal] river’ (Mclane 1986: 39). There was evidently some French language contact from the outset: ‘The population of Rufisque8 speak a fairly intelligible kind of French […] they pronounce in our language offences and swearwords’ (Delafosse 1931: 11) but no sense of a formalized language. It was only from the 1850s onwards that the French adopted a more expansionist approach into Senegal. In January 1853, months into Faidherbe’s posting to the colony, the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies wrote to the then  Rufisque is a city near Dakar on the coast close to the island of Gorée.

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Governor Protet, highlighting la voie nouvelle où tendent à entrer depuis quelque temps tous les intérêts ‘the new path where all Senegalese interests have tended to lead for some time’ (Schefer 1921: 225), suggesting thereby Senegal’s enhanced economic importance, with concomitant increases in personnel, for the French. This correlated with Faidherbe’s own view which he expressed a few years later, Ayant servi en Algérie, je ne pouvais qu’être partisan d’une occupation plus sérieuse du Sénégal ‘Having served in Algeria, I could only be in favour of a more serious occupation of Senegal’ (113 APOM 1). Evidence of this more committed approach, detailed in the following chapter, is Faidherbe’s founding of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais with all his fastidious attention to detail and dedicated focus on education (and specifically language). Senegal in the 1850s was plurilingual both at the societal and individual level. It was an ethnic, social, and linguistic crossroads.. Wolof, Pulaar or Peul, Soninké, Serer, Mandinké, and Arabic were all widely used. In Saint Louis, where Faidherbe was based, Wolof was predominantly spoken and in fact could be considered the city’s lingua franca in the early nineteenth century: Tous les habitans, hommes et femmes, mulâtres et nègres libres, parlent passablement le français. Leur language usuelle et naturelle, cell de tous les peoples voisins, et l’ylof. Les étrangers apprennent d’abord à compter. J’ai retenu les noms des nombres All the inhabitants, men and women, mulattoes and free blacks, speak passable French. Their usual and natural language is Wolof, and is also the language of the people of neighbouring areas. Foreigners first learn how to count in Wolof. I can recall the names of the numbers. (Durand 1802: 217; my translation)

This description of Wolof’s prevalence somewhat echoes Haedo’s 1612 observation of the ubiquity of Lingua Franca in Algiers.9 Although  Haedo 1612 wrote of Lingua Franca’s penetration of Algiers society:

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Este hablar franco es tan general que no ay casa do no se use. No ay turco ni moro, ni grande ni pequeño, hombre o muger, hasta los niños, que poco o mucho y los más dellos muy bien, no le hablan. This lingua franca is so widespread that there is no house where it is not spoken. Nor is there Turk or Moor, old or young, man or woman, even child, who doesn’t speak it a little or well, and most of them speak it very well. (Haedo 1612: 24; my translation)

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Durand’s comment that everyone also speaks passable French, this is specific to the cosmopolitan and commercial population of Saint Louis, and not representative of other less outward-facing regions of Senegal, where societies would have been less influenced by the French and their language. That this was the case is evidenced in the 1852 account of Barthélémy Durand-Valentin:10 je sens le besoin di dire quelques mots sur cette étranger pretention qui commence à se faire jour et qui voudrait que nous considérions chez nous au Sénégal depuis St Louis jusqu’à Backel… Comment? Nous sommes chez nous, et une fois sortis de cette étroite langue de sable sur laquelle repose St, Louis, nous trouvons immédiatement en Pays étranger, tribuitaires de l’Étranger, autant pour les articles d’échange que pour tout ce qui tient à l’alimentation de notre population… I feel the need to say a few words about this strange pretension which is beginning to emerge and which would like us to consider ourselves at home in Senegal from St Louis to Backel… In what way? We are at home, and yet once out of this narrow strip of sand on which St. Louis sits, we immediately find ourselves in a foreign country, on foreigner tributaries, as much in terms of kinds of exchange as for all that relates to food for our people. (Durand Valant 1852  in ANS 13G33 cited in Barrows 1974: 16; my translation)

He continues to enumerate the otherness of trading, social and commercial relations outside Saint Louis, reinforcing the sense of the lack of France’s and French language penetration of the rest of Senegal. There are immediate parallels and differences in the linguistic ecology of the two pidgins, Lingua Franca (latterly Sabir) and Français Tirailleur. The multilingual settings of Barbary and Senegal both required a hybrid language that would maximize communication, and thus embodied typical settings for the emergence and sustained use of a pidgin, with the characteristics outlined above. Lingua Franca’s reincarnation as Sabir involved a shift towards French in terms of lexification, and yet there was a deliberate and distinct divide between the two languages, as part of the colonial mentality to sustain the distance in status between standard 10  Interestingly, Durand-Valentin was half Senegalese, half French and yet clearly as a member of the elite urban commercial community of Saint Louis he recognized the divide between that and the wider Senegalese population.

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French and the inferior pidgin. The latter years of Sabir and the evolution of Français Tirailleur both coincided with a growing appetite among linguists for the establishment of an international auxiliary language, perhaps predictably given the increased opportunity for travel and exploration, the spread of European Imperial power into hereto uncolonized regions, and the need to communicate there.

References Hugo Schuchardt Archive, Graz, Austria HSA 1882a: Letter 015-03222; Henri Gaidoz to Hugo Schuchardt HSA 1882b: Letter 6-7473; Alfred Morel-Fatio to Hugo Schuchardt HSA 1882c: Letter 1-8742; Emil Jellinek to Hugo Schuchardt HSA 1882d: Letter 4-8745; Emil Jellinek to Hugo Schuchardt HSA 1883: Letter 026-03232; Henri Gaidoz to Hugo Schuchardt

Archives Nationales Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France 113 APOM 1, Fonds Faidherbe

Bibliography Avram, Andrei, Kolonial Deutsch and Français Tirailleur, in eds. Schmidt-Brücken, D., Schuster, S. and Wienberg, M., 2016. Aspects of (Post) colonial linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrows, Leland. 1974. General Faidherbe, The Maurel and Prom company, and French Company and French expansion in Senegal, PhD thesis, Los Angeles: University of California. Cifoletti, Guido, 2004. La lingua franca barbaresca, Roma: Il Calamo. Collinson, Patrick, 2007. Not biographable in London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 23 29 November 2007 Cremona, Joseph, 2001. Geografia linguistica e ‘lingua franca’ del Mediteranneo, in Carlo Napoli e il Mediterraneo. Atti del convegno internazionale svoltosi dall’11 al 13 gennaio, 2001, ed. Giuseppe Galasso and Aurelio Musi: 289-304, Naples: Società napoletana di storia patria. Delafosse, Maurice, 1931. Les noirs de l’Afrique. Paris: Payot et cie. Dictionnaire, 1830. Dictionnaire de la Langue Franque ou petit Mauresque, suivi de quelques dialogues familiers, et d’un vocabulaire de mots arabes les plus usuels; a l'usage des français en Afrique, Marseille: Feissat et Demonchy. Durand, Jean-Baptiste- Léonard, 1802. Voyage au Sénégal, Paris: Henri Agasse.

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Faidherbe, L.L.C., 1884. L’Alliance francaise pour le propagation de la langue francaise dans les colonies et les pays étrangers, Revue Scientifique, 3rd series (7): 104-9. Fisher, Sir Godfrey, 1957. Barbary legend: war, trade and piracy in North Africa 1415-1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fought, John, 1982. The Reinvention of Hugo Schuchardt (Review Article), Language in Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Dec., 1982), pp. 419-436. Freeman, Philip, 2016. Searching for Sappho, London: W.W. Norton. Haedo, Diego de, 1612 Topographia e historia general d’Argel, Vallodid. Holm, John, 1989. Pidgins and Creoles, vol. II. Reference Survey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacCarthy and Varnier, 1852. La Langue Sabir. L’Algérien, journal des intérêts de l’Algérie, 11 May. Mantel, Hilary, 2017. BBC Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4 Lecture 1: http:// downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2017/reith_2017_hilary_mantel_lecture%201.pdf, retrieved 24.11.22 McLane, Margaret O. 1986. Commercial Rivalries and French Policy on the Senegal River, 1831-1858, African Economic History No. 15 (1986), 39-67 Melchior, Luca and Schwägerl-Melchior, Verena, 2016. Networks come categoria descrittiva nella storia della disciplina: esempi e prospettive, PhiN-Beiheft 11/2016: 5-22. Minervini, Laura, 1996. La lingua franca mediterranea. Plurilinguismo, mistilinguismo, pidginizzazione sulle coste del Mediterraneo tra tardo Medioevo e prima età moderna, Medioevo romanzo, XX/2: 231-301. Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1798. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Marseille: Jean Mossy. Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1985. Patterns of contact, mixture, creation and nativization: their contribution to a general theory of language, in: Charles-James N. Bailey & Roy Harris, eds. Developmental Mechanisms of Language. Oxford: Pergamon Press: 51–87. Nietzsche, Friederich (trans. Hollingdale, R.J), 1997. Daybreak: Thoughts on the prejudice of morality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nolan, Joanna, 2020. The elusive case of Lingua Franca: Fact and Fiction, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Operstein, Nathalie, 2018. The Making of the Dictionnaire de la langue franque. Zeitschrift für romanische philologie 134: 1114-1153. Parkvall, Mikael and Bakker, Peter, 2013. Pidgins. In Contact Languages: A Comprehensive Guide, Peter Bakker and Yaron Matras (eds), 15-64. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Reclus, Élisée, 1887 (reprinted 2018). The Earth and Its Inhabitants, Vol. 2: Africa; North-West Africa, London: Forgotten Books.

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Schefer, Christian, 1921. Instructions générales données 1763 à 1870 aux gouverneurs et ordinateurs des établissements française en Afrique occidentale, Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion. Schuchardt, Hugo, 1909, edited and translated by G.G.Gilbert, 1980. Pidgin and Creole Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebba, Mark, 1997. Contact Languages: pidgins and creoles, London: Macmillan. Selbach, R., 2008. The superstrate is not always the lexifier: Lingua Franca in the Barbary Coast 1530-1830. In S.  Michaelis (Ed.), Roots of creole structures: weighing the contribution of substrates and superstrates (Creole language library, 33): 29-58. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Siegel, Jeff, 1985. Koines and koineization, Lang. Soc. 14: 357-378, Cambridge University Press. Venier, Federica, 2016. L’invenzione del consenso: il caso di lingua franca, RIFL/ BC (2016): 292-309.

CHAPTER 2

Louis Faidherbe, Colonialist and Linguist

Abstract This chapter details the career progression and personal pursuit of languages of Louis Faidherbe and how the two strands came together in his posting to Senegal, where he produced linguistic texts on numerous African languages and worked to spread French through Senegalese schools. The chapter explores Faidherbe’s substantial body of work on multiple languages from the French colonial archives and the personal collection of an American professor. Documents found in the latter highlight Faidherbe’s acquisition of Lingua Franca, with written evidence. Keywords Louis Faidherbe • French colonization • Patois • Pidgins • Lingua Franca • West African languages • Tirailleurs Sénégalais This chapter charts the career of Louis Faidherbe, the founder of the West African regiment, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais and potentially, in part, the language used by its soldiers, Français Tirailleur. In conjunction with Faidherbe’s progress and various postings, the chapter highlights his burgeoning interest in languages and linguistics. It uses in-depth analysis of materials from France’s Archives Nationales Outre-Mer to demonstrate Faidherbe’s near-obsession with language, and particularly with pidgins, patois and dialects, many of which share lexical and grammatical features with Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur. The corpus of my research also includes the private archive of Professor Leland Barrows who wrote his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Nolan, Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30555-9_2

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1974 thesis on Faidherbe’s relations with French companies and their commercial interests in Senegal. The chapter illustrates the critical link between Faidherbe’s colonial mission and his investigation of indigenous languages and promotion of shared language learning. Faidherbe viewed the potential for a colony’s success as contingent on maximal effective communication and the spread of French influence and values through education. Louis Léon-César Faidherbe was of humble origins, born in Lille in 1818. Although gifted in mathematics which enabled him to attend elite education establishments, the École Polytechnique and later the École d’Application in Metz (Brunel 1892: 2), Faidherbe did not seem destined for a successful military career. He achieved less than expected at both institutions, incurred substantial debt, and thoroughly disliked his initial year of military service, at Arras in 1843 (Barrows 1974: 90–91). That he should progress through the military ranks overseas, ultimately becoming governor of one of France’s more important colonies and that he should leave a legacy of promoting French language and culture across the globe, through his role in the Alliance Française, seems largely due to a fortuitous first posting in 1843 to Algiers. Barrows, from his reading of Faidherbe’s personal papers and military assessments of his performance, concludes that Faidherbe was ‘a very bright, sensitive young man [who exhibited] sentimentality and appreciation for exotic cultures’ (Barrows 1974: 93–4). After Faidherbe’s three years in Algeria, one of his immediate supervisors (Archives de l’Armée, Vincennes: dossier personnel, 1847) gave him a favourable rating but commented that he knew no foreign languages at this point, although this seems unlikely given observations made of his linguistic competence in his next tour in Guadeloupe. His evident interest in the native societies of Algeria and of Guadeloupe in his subsequent posting (1848) extended to an immersive study of the colonies’ indigenous languages. Faidherbe was mentored in Guadeloupe by Victor Schoelcher, a vehement anti-slavery abolitionist, to whom he later dedicated his detailed account of his time in Senegal (Brunel 1892: 4). The Director of the Engineer Corps in Guadeloupe wrote of his subordinate, Il s’occupe volontiers des langues étrangères et connaît un peu l’Italien et l’espagnol ‘He is interested in foreign languages and knows a bit of Italian and Spanish’. (Barrows 1974: 96). I cannot help wonder whether the Italian and Spanish that Faidherbe had picked up may in fact be words from Francified Lingua Franca to which he would been exposed during his three-year posting to Algeria. Weight is added to this theory by Faidherbe’s language exercises detailed below which reveal some knowledge of both Italian and Spanish as Lingua Franca’s lexifiers.

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France’s Archives Nationales Outre-Mer, located in Aix-en-Provence, are a trove of colonial data. There is a fonds Faidherbe which comprises both personal and professional information, orders, honours, and correspondence. There is one folder devoted to Études de langues ‘language studies’. There is much of note in this folder (113 APOM 5), although frustratingly almost no document bears a date, but perhaps the most directly relevant item to Faidherbe’s exposure to, and interest in, pidgins and patois is a 20-page hand-written booklet, comprising samples of 17 romance language pidgins, patois, and one creole—of Guadeloupe.1 These writings range in form—some are poetry, some prose, and others are songs. They also span centuries in terms of when the original texts were written: some are historic and recognized as definitive of their genre and epoch, such as the patois bourguignon (patois of Dijon) compositions, Noei compozai l’an MDCC en lai ruë deu tillo par Bernard de la Monnoye ‘Christmas carols of 1700 written in Rue Tillot [Dijon} by Bernard de la Monnoye’, and the transcription of an excerpt from Robert Wace’s 1160 Roman de Rou, an account of the Norman Conquest, written in Old Norman or the precursor to the dialect of Jersey, Jèrriais. Others appear to be more spontaneously produced, perhaps even elicited by Faidherbe himself. The Guadeloupe creole example is explicitly identified as a proclamation and is quite plausibly an announcement made while Faidherbe was posted to Guadeloupe as it declares the forced abdication of the French king, Louis Philippe in 1848, days after Faidherbe’s arrival on the Caribbean island. There is a pencil annotation, presumably Faidherbe’s, at the start of the text, adding Couté moin ‘Listen to me’ or ‘Lend me your ears’, which is how the speech also ends. There are key linguistic features of the creole which Faidherbe, in his 1884 article,2 identifies as invaluable simplifications of French to be emulated in any rudimentary teaching of the language. In the article, Faidherbe specifically refers to verbs which are represented

1  The booklet includes Dialecte corse, Langue romane, Franc-comtois, Patois languedocien, Patois normand, Langage creole de Guadeloupe, Patois limousine, Patois picard, Patois bressan, Patois bourguignon, Patois béarnais, Patois dauphinois, Patois lorrain, Patois Bourbonnais, Patois gascon, Patois Auvergnat, Langue bretonne. 2  Faidherbe’s 1884 article, published in the Revue Scientifique, is a highly detailed, prescriptive call for the teaching of a simplified form of French in France’s colonies as a means of spreading the language in a more accessible form to a greater proportion of their population.

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par un mot unique, généralement l’infinitif, plus ou moins modifié ou simplifié, comme fé pour faire, coué pour croire (le créole supprime très volontiers les r) by a single word, usually the infinitive, more or less modified or simplified, like fé for faire (to do), coué for croire ‘to believe’. (creole regularly suppresses the ‘r’ (Faidherbe 1884: 105; my translation)

This excerpt of Guadeloupian creole features examples of just such a simplification of verbs—pas coué c’est yon engrien ‘don’t believe that it’s nothing’, as well as multiple other verbs similarly declined. The passage ends, c’est saché, mangnioc pour défini…Vivre la Ypublique couté moin ‘Know this, now and forever, Long live the Republic, listen to / heed me!’ Again, the verbs are in the form specified by Faidherbe, with the stem ending in é, and there is the tonic pronoun,3 also recommended in his 1884 article as a single solution to the various pronouns used in French: Ajoutez une forme simplifiée du pronom et vous avez ainsi une conjugaison extrèmement réduite ‘add a simplified form of the pronoun, and you have thus an extremely reduced conjugation’ (Faidherbe 1884: 106). Another phrase from within the creole sample is moin ka pas menti ‘I’m not lying’. The combination of the tonic pronoun and the negative formed exclusively with pas are both features the creole shares with Français Tirailleur as will become evident in the next chapter. It would seem that the Guadeloupe creole, which evidently also shares features with Lingua Franca, had quite some influence on Faidherbe’s devising of a simplified version of French. Some of the examples of patois and pidgins are in Faidherbe’s distinctive handwriting, but several are not. There are a number, including the Guadeloupe creole and others designated patois languedocien, some of which discuss the merits of various cities of the Languedoc, written in someone else’s hand.4 Nevertheless, there are annotations on all these texts from Faidherbe, as there are on several others, including interlinear glossing (as well as—in most cases—side-by-side translations) and analysis. Of the linguistic idiosyncrasies Faidherbe identifies is an annotation beside an example of Corsican dialect, where he writes in parentheses (ces deux strophes sont en même temps en dialecte Sicilien) ‘these two verses are at the  The tonic pronoun is also a hallmark of Lingua Franca.  The author has made a copy of one of these, describing Montpellier, with a second piece of writing on the back, discussed later in the chapter. These are all within Faidherbe’s papers, frustratingly without date and explanation—leaving it to the researcher to interpret the language, linguistic features and hypothesize as to their relevance to Faidherbe. 3 4

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same time Sicilian dialect’, demonstrating his knowledge of both dialects and their similarity to one another. Later in the booklet, between the examples of patois languedocien and the Roman de Rou excerpt, he includes a Latin palindromic couplet, suggesting again a fascination with all linguistic phenomena: Distique latin qui peut le lire de gauche à droite ou de droite à gauche Signa te, signa temere, me tangis et angis, Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit amor. Latin couplet which can be read left to right or right to left Cross, cross yourself, you plague and vex me without need, For owing to my exertions, Rome, the object of your wishes, will soon be near. (trans. Dobson 1880)5

Faidherbe also observes how the following couplet functions both in Italian and Latin: in mare irato, in subita procella, Invoco te, nostra benigna te in an angry sea, in a sudden storm, I invoke you, our gracious one. (Chiabrera sixteenth century; my translation)6

This link with Latin is perhaps particularly pertinent, given that in his later 1884 essay, Faidherbe justifies a French simplified pidgin given how nous dont la langue est un peu au latin ce que le patois nègre est au français ‘our language is to Latin what the black patois is to French’ (Faidherbe 1884: 105; my translation). Faidherbe’s eye for detail and the weblike connections that exist between languages is evident in a concise comment on a word from his excerpt on patois Bourbonnais, a dialect of central France, a dialogue 5  I have used William Dobson’s translation, from his book, Literary Frivolities, Fancies, Follies and Frolics (1880), published a few decades later than the presumptive date of 1840s for Faidherbe’s notebook. His translation is an update of that published in 1826 in William Hone’s Everyday Book, which provided the palindrome’s context and gained its popular appeal. 6  Although Faidherbe does not refer to the provenance of this couplet, it is known as the Stella Maris, written in the late sixteenth century by Gabriello Chiabrera. Ironically, perhaps, it may well have been part of the ritualistic refrains of Lingua Franca-speaking corsairs along the Barbary Coast, where Faidherbe was posted in the 1840s.

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between a man and a woman discussing the potential marriage of their respective son and daughter. The mother speaks of her daughter in her biaud on a Sunday. Faidherbe translates this word as blouse blanche (white blouse) and, besides this, circled are the words biod blouse blanche en arabe abiod blanc (white blouse white blouse in Arabic abiod white) highlighting the potential lexical link between the patois and Arabic and, more importantly here, Faidherbe’s competence in Arabic. There are multiple other annotations to this particular text, with Faidherbe’s philological enterprise very much in evidence. His ability to establish French meanings of certain patois words given the inconsistent and unorthodox orthography is worthy of note. Another item within 113 APOM 5 is a keepsake album which houses a number of small paintings of scenes from Algeria and Guadeloupe, including one entitled ambulance, algérie ‘ambulance, algeria’, dated 1848, with a French soldier attending to a wounded comrade, bandaging his arm, while another holds their horses and a fourth keeps watch. There is a fifth  soldier lying down, apparently dead. This is plausibly a scene from Faidherbe’s time in Algeria, as is the second which depicts two Algerian women with a set of scales behind a counter. It is titled estanco ‘tobacconist’, from the Spanish but quite possibly also a Lingua Franca term (although not listed in the Dictionnaire 1830). There is also a painting of a woman’s head in profile, painted in Pitre, Guadeloupe in 1849. The majority of the album is, however, filled with transcriptions by Faidherbe of poetry in many languages: Spanish including Cervantes, Italian including Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, English featuring Byron, Shakespeare, and Milton, Latin with works of Ovid and Virgil, Portuguese, Greek works by Homer and Sappho, German with excerpts from Goethe, Hebrew, Arabic, French including Corneille, Rabelais, La Fontaine, and anonymous works in the following dialects and patois: Breton, Idiome de la France meridionale, Langue romane, Dialecte corse, Langue Romaique (modern Greek), Langue mallorquine, 15th–16th c French, and idiome barbaresque, an Arabic dialect. All these testify to the time and effort Faidherbe devoted to languages and an appreciation of both language and literature. There is a loose-leaf page tucked into the back of the book, in Faidherbe’s writing and dated Oran, April 1843. It is the fictionalized cri de guerre of a caid ‘commander’ of Algerian warriors, exhorting his troops with violent, bloody imagery to slaughter the Europeans or Les Roumis as he terms them, with the explanatory footnote, c’est par ce nom que les arabes de l’Algérie désignent les Européens; c’est une corruption de Romani

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‘it’s the name by which the Arabs of Algeria refer to Europeans; it’s a corruption of Romany’ (113 APOM 5; my translation). Faidherbe incorporates within his fictional rallying cry various Arabic terms goum ‘a contingent of Arab cavalry ready to fight’ and chabir ‘a particular spur with an iron spike attached to the heel with a strap’. He says of both these terms that they are regularly used by the French. Faidherbe also uses French phrases which are reminiscent of Lingua Franca such as mort aux chiens d’infidèles! ‘death to the infidel dogs!’ As Dakhlia observes, stereotypical insults such as cane or perro ‘dog’, cornuto ‘cuckolded’, and senza feda, senza fide ‘infidel’ form part of the ritualistic character of Lingua Franca (Dakhlia 2008: 350–1). Faidherbe’s understanding of, and insight into, the linguistic nuances of Arabic and Lingua Franca appear to be evidenced in this writing. Among Faidherbe’s loose papers within the études de langue ‘language studies’ file (113 APOM 5), there are additionally two undated sheets with what can also be assumed to be transcriptions or copies of written language excerpts. One is recognizable as a near copy,7 in the same hand (not Faidherbe’s), of one of the examples of Languedocien dialect in the aforementioned booklet, describing Montpellier. The second on the reverse of the paper appears to be in a similar dialect although it does not feature in the booklet. Both exhibit the dialect’s elements of language contact, potentially the writer’s own multilingual repertoire and the lack of standardized orthography, such that a reader must constantly bear in mind the orality of the writing. I cite this excerpt in full, in part because it recurs within Faidherbe’s papers as though of particular value to him, and also to highlight the overlap of features with Lingua Franca and the creole of Guadeloupe (and, in fact, the proclamation discussed earlier in the chapter from the booklet is written in the same hand as this example): Moumpéié – nostra bila n’es pa Tan ancienna qué nimes et qué toulousa. Mais kanta tcharmanta bila, moussu? Anas bous promenar sur la bella Proumenada daou Peyrou 7  It is noteworthy that even though it is essentially the same text as in the booklet, and written in the same hand, there are distinct orthographical differences, underlining the lack of standardization of writing, and especially in dialects (where much of the communication is oral), a challenge for later scholars.

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J. NOLAN

Beires de’ ben poulidas fennas, mesas Emb una grand’élégança --------Bantou, fossa la facultad de’ Paris…. A be’ fourni Caoukès homes distingas, n’en counouisse? Mais aiçi poudès pas faÿre un Pas sans recontra de savanz Medicis, de’ savanz chirurgiens, de’ savanz estudianz, de’ savan tchimistes, des savanz fabricanz de verdet, enfin de savanz de toute espeçs per ce ké regarde la médécine Mompéié é la capitale de Europa Montpellier – our town is not As old as Nimes Or as Toulouse, But what a Charming town, good sir? Here you can walk on the beautiful Promenade du Peyrou Watch the very refined ladies, dressed up With such elegance ----------People, if the faculty of Paris were, So well furnished With such distinguished men, you wouldn’t recognize it. But here you cannot take a Step without meeting learned doctors, learned surgeons, learned students, learned chemists, learned manufacturers of verdet,8 truly, learned men of every type because in terms of medicine, Montpellier is the capital of Europe

The text exhibits lexifying influences from various Romance languages, especially French and Spanish. There is Spanish-influenced orthography bila for ville ‘town’ and bous for vous ‘you pl’. There are several vowels aggregated to suggest the pronunciation of diphthongs (and monopthongs)—daou and faÿre, as well as the complicated ellier  of Montpellier which is rendered as éié, not dissimilar to laouboui ‘la bruit’ in the second excerpt below. 8  verdet is a form of Verdigris used in the treatment of ailments such as gangrene in the nineteenth century.

2  LOUIS FAIDHERBE, COLONIALIST AND LINGUIST 

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The second example, overleaf from the first, is lyrical by comparison: a l’oumbra dun bouskatche bêné d’entendre (daousi) laouboui lous bertches daou bilatche samusaran tout ioï, e yéou touta soulita en garden mous moutons pré duna por claréta esprimé mas doulour

There is potential for debate with this excerpt. I would suggest that a plausible translation is: in the shade of a thicket It is nice to hear the (sweet) sound Of the cows from the village All content While I all alone Watching my sheep Overcome by pure clarity Express such sadness

As is evident, the Languedocian is predominantly French-lexified with elements of Italian yéou touta souléta