Old vernacular features of Moroccan Arabic under the light of their Portuguese translation (16th century)

This study aims to examine six archaic linguistic forms of Moroccan Arabic found in early 16th-century documents. These vernacular features were collected in the Manuscripts 45 and 46 cataloged together with the documents written in Arabic script preserved in the Portuguese National Archive of Torre do Tombo. They consist of two letters authored by the commander Yaḥya u- Taʕfuft, who addressed them to the King of Portugal, in the context of the Portuguese occupation in Safi on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The two letters dated 1517 were written in Middle Arabic with a strong predominance of vernacular traits normally associated with the Arabic dialects of northern Morocco, but also with Jewish dialects and the dialects of old urban centers. To understand the original meaning of these old forms, reference is made to translations of the manuscripts into Portuguese dating from that same period, namely: I) a translation into Old Portuguese and II) a transcription of this translation into aljamia – Portuguese written in Arabic characters. A parallel is then established between the archaic forms and the genetically related variants found in Moroccan Arabic dialects today. In this way, the study identifies and presents at first hand the following old vernacular forms of Moroccan Arabic: I) the reflexive form of the verb ‘to go away’ جبد روح (*žbd rūḥ), II) the adverb ‘never’ عمر (*ʕmṛ), III) the verb ‘to pass’ جز (*žāz), IV) the verb ‘to be paid’ تخلص (*txlṣ), V) the lexicon item ط يڢ (*ṭyf) ‘lord’, and VI) the verb ‘to say good bye’ ص يڢط (*ṣyfṭ). It also shows how these forms seem to be related to current variants, such as: the verb dǝzbād ‘to go away’, the verb ʕǝmmǝṛ ma ~ ma ʕǝmmǝṛ ‘never’, the verb dāz ‘to pass’, the verb txǝllǝṣ ‘to be paid’, the lexicon item ḍīf ~ ḍăyf ‘master’ and the verb tṣīfǝṭ ‘to say goodbye’. These findings may be an initial contribution to fulfill the lack of information on dialectal Arabic spoken in Moroccan territory by that time. Keywords: Moroccan Arabic, Arabic Dialectology, Middle Arabic, Safi, Portuguese Aljamia