Ibn Tunart

Ibn Tunart
Born	1085 (1085) Qal'at Bani Hammad
Died	1172 Fez
Occupation(s)	scholar, linguist

Ibn Tunart or Ibn Tunirt, whose full name was Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ja'far al-Qaysi, was born in 1085 in the Qal'at Bani Ḥammad. He studied in Béjaïa then in Cordoba. He later became a teacher and judge in Fez. He died in the same city in 1172.

Works

Ibn Tunart wrote a sort of Arab-Berber lexicon or dictionary known as Kitāb Al-asmā’ (the book of names). There are only copies of this work, found in the Berber-speaking area of ​​the Chleuh variant (in Morocco), the oldest is dated 956 H./1549 (under the shelfmark ms. Or 23.333 in Leiden).

The observation is that the lexicon of the manuscript belongs mainly to Chleuh, spoken in the southwest of Morocco. However, we find terms belonging to other varieties and sometimes specific to a particular area or even restricted to particular dialects in Algeria:

• tagsturt, agstur = sabre: to our knowledge, currently attested only in Chaoui des Aurès, in Algeria (according to Naït-Zerrad 2002);
• aflɣad = bald on the front of the head: attested only in part of Kabylie (according to Naït-Zerrad 2002).

The manuscript contains terms that no longer seem to be alive in current dialects such as asarn = prophets; imrran = husbands (according to Naït-Zerrad 2003: 40).

The resemblance to modern Chleuh of certain terms is due to copyist alteration from the 16th century and probably differs from the original spelling of the medieval terms (11th century). Ibn Tunart's dictionary was also compiled in 1145, either before the conquest of its region by the Almohads, which makes it more likely that this dictionary was recovered and altered by Chleuh speakers in more recent times, given the four available copies of this text, which are several centuries later than the original work.