From Siwa to Goulmima: A Date Palm Lexicon
Some time ago, while I was working on a previous blog entry devoted to date palm tree cultivation in Goulmima (from a text in the A. Roux archives) , I leafed through a number of dictionaries, looking for words relating to said tree. I found little that was specific to the date palm, compared to the doum palm ( Hyphaene thebaica ). Benamara’s Figuig dictionary could have offered more, but without knowing tifiyyeyt lexicon, I had no entry points. As for Amaniss’s unpublished dictionary, there is some date palm vocabulary, with some overlap with Goulmima’s, but sometimes with a different realization. I initially decided to build a spreadsheet, using the ar.wikipedia page for “ نخلة التمر ” as a source vocabulary list, search through Chafik, and map onto the bilingual list the vocabulary of my home region. Unfortunately, in Chafik, I found more doum than Phoenix dactylifera . The same goes for the IRCAM dictionary, as well. With the recent publication of Valentina Schi...