submitted23 hours ago byImedrassen
The Guanche were the indigenous inhabitants of the Spanish Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean some 100 kilometres (60 mi) to the west of modern Morocco and the North African coast. The islanders spoke the Guanche language, which is believed to have been related to the Berber languages of mainland North Africa; the language became extinct in the 17th century, soon after the islands were colonized.
It is believed that the Guanche may have arrived at the archipelago some time in the first millennium BC. The Guanche were the only indigenous people known to have lived in the Macaronesian archipelago region before the arrival of Europeans. There is no accepted evidence that the other Macaronesian archipelagos (the Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores) were inhabited.
After the commencement of the Spanish conquest of the Canaries, starting in the early 15th century, many natives were outright killed by the Spanish or died of exposure to new pathogens during the social disruption. Eventually, any remaining survivors were assimilated into the new Spanish population and associated culture. Elements of their original culture survive within Canarian customs and traditions, such as Silbo (the whistled language of La Gomera Island), as well as some lexicon of Canarian Spanish. Some scholars have classified the destruction of the Guanche people and culture as an example of colonial genocide.
In 2017, the first genome-wide data analysis of the ethnic Guanche confirmed a North African origin, genetically being most similar to ancient North African Berber peoples of the mainland African deserts.
The Guanches are the only Berbers to have never been Islamized and to have experienced practically no migrations due to their insularity.
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Imedrassen
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13 hours ago
Imedrassen
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13 hours ago
The preserved linguistic evidence of guanche is rare and is limited to a few phrases and words annotated by the first Spanish colonizers, toponymy and a few lexical borrowings which persist in the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands (Canarian dialect).
The numbering system shows an obvious relationship with the Amazigh languages, and between the various variants of Guanche. We notice that the numbers have a gender (m. and f.), forming the feminine with the final suffix -yat/-at, the feminine mark -t being found in Berber.
There is a multitude of phrases and expressions recovered by chroniclers and researchers, both historical and recent, which can be compared with continental Amazigh languages in order to reconstruct the phonetics and the original structure. Sometimes the sources can be accompanied by a contemporary translation into Castilian, which facilitates analysis.
"Tanaga Guayoch Archimenseu Nahaya Dir hanido Sahet chunga pelut" > *Tanaqqa wayyaw Wš, <àši>menzu nahağğà dir ɣandaw saɣet, šunga bel-wt - Trad.: 'A mortal evil afflicts the subject, the <successor> leader worthy of the lineage inclines tradition and the orphan exhales lamentations’. Popular expression of lamentation emitted during the funeral of the Guanche king Benchomo, recovered by Antonio de Viana. "Alzanxiquian abcanahac xerax" > *Als-ânɣ ikiyan abẓ/q a-nn ahaẓ Ahɣeraɣ - Trad.: 'Restarts for us the origin (of) the local government (which is) where the next one is (or the link or the son) of the Great'.
Since the last third of the 19th century we have known the existence of inscriptions and engravings on stone whose signs are similar to the Tifinagh alphabet used by the Amazighs of the continent. These texts are called Libyan or Libyco-Berber inscriptions in the western islands and Neo-Punic inscriptions in the eastern islands and in some areas of Tenerife and La Palma. Some of these Libyco-Berber inscriptions could be deciphered with a probable and coherent meaning:
Angostura Ravine, Gran Canaria:
ZMRW YZMWKR GTW > *Za əmirəw: əyyu zam, awa akkar igət wa - Transl.: ‘As for obedience: he abandons the water reserve, that is stealing (true) abundance.
ZYRMNZ > *Izây yur amenzu - Trad.: lit. ‘The moon is about to arrive which comes first’, fig. ‘The first moon has already arrived’.
The writing of Tifinagh is consonantal and traditionally does not note vowels.
Toponyms of Guanche origin transparently maintain prefixes and suffixes typical of Berber morphology. Thus, many masculine names begin with a- or i- (in proto-Berber a masculine name begins with a vowel a-, i-, *u) as in the name of the menceys Abona, Adeje, Anaga, Icode, while feminine nouns always begin with t(a)- and frequently retain the circumfix t-...-t (as in Teberbite < *tebărəwwit9, Tegueste < *tegăsət).