Tale
Tunisian Tales and Poems
Tunisische Märchen und Gedichte
Hans Stumme · 1893
Synopsis
Tales told by storytellers of Tunis and written down as they sound: the ghoula who devours children, the poor man who becomes sultan through a series of misunderstandings, Juha who always answers beside the point. Songs and verses collected in the same way are added. Each text is given in the speech of those who told it, with its translation facing.
Context
Hans Stumme was an orientalist from Leipzig who worked on dialectal Arabic at a time when the German university was interested only in the classical language: transcribing a spoken dialect was then a statement of position, since scholars regarded these languages as a degradation of the written language. He stayed in Tunisia and took down what was dictated to him in a phonetic script, in a system of his own devising, keeping even the hesitations of the speakers. His notation is so precise that dialectologists still use it to reconstruct the state of Tunisian speech in 1893. He also worked on Berber and Maltese, of which he produced the first grammar in German.
Who it is for
Tales in phonetic transcription with a German translation. The spelling takes a while to get used to.
Prizes and reception
This collection is the main early source on spoken Tunisian Arabic and is cited by all Maghrebi dialectologists.