The Amazigh language and the Amazigh alphabet
There are 7,000 living languages in the world, most of which are oral languages. Among these thousands of languages, only 50 languages have their own letters, Tifinagh is one of them, “as the official letter for writing the Amazigh language.” Hence the importance of this letter...
What is "Tifinagh"? It is an Amazigh word composed of two parts: "Tifi", which means innovation, invention, or design, and "Nagh", which means "our". Thus, Tifinagh means our innovation, design, or invention....
The Tifinagh letters appeared in North Africa, as suggested to us by rock engravings in the mountains and deserts, around 5000 years BC or more, so they are 7000 years old now. Thus, they are considered among the oldest alphabets in history, alongside Hebrew and Egyptian, and perhaps the oldest of all, as suggested by the two archaeologists, Matthews and “Deca” by analyzing these rock engravings with carbon acid 14, specific to the Tassili site in Algeria, thus the Amazigh language is superior in writing to the Greek language by about 1000 years and to the Phoenician language by about 2000 years.
Tifinagh is a local indigenous script that emerged and developed in its original homeland in North Africa until it reached what it is today.
The Greeks called them the Libyan letters, the Egyptians called them the Libyan letters, the Romans called them the Berber letters, while the Amazighs called them the Tifinagh letters.
Before 10,000 years BC, the Berbers relied on animal engravings and some symbols as encrypted messages, either for communication, religious rituals, or as an expression of the environment in which they lived and everything that existed and coexisted with their environmental surroundings, but after the appearance of the Tifinagh letters, they became the place of animal drawings and spread throughout North Africa. They were like signboards that indicated nomads and travelers about the locations of water and game for hunting, grass, mining, or even expression, and so on.
During the period of the emergence of education in North Africa, such as primary and university education, Greek sources and some excavations, especially at the University of Cyrene in northeastern Libya, indicate that the written Berber language was present and strong, and the Berbers did not know anything else except after the expansion of Carthage along the Mediterranean coast and the emergence of a new language, which is the so-called “Punic” language. After the Roman invasion, complete control over the northern half of North Africa, and the Vandal, Byzantine, and Islamic invasion, Berber writing disappeared and was replaced by Punic, Latin, and Arabic. It moved from writing on boards, skins, and rocks to carpets, walls, clothes, and tattoos. That is, it remained confined only to what is cultural, customs, and traditions.
However, “the country of the Tuareg” has preserved it in writing and written communication for thousands of years until today, due to the fact that their region has not been exposed to any cultural or linguistic invasion or the obliteration of their authentic Amazigh identity thanks to their isolation in the desert. “Thanks to them, the written Amazigh language has once again returned to the forefront,” and the voice of the Amazigh and the Amazigh movement began in all parts of the world. North Africa is strongly calling and demanding its ordination to return to what it was thousands of years ago. Thus, Morocco hastened to ordinate the Tifinagh letter in 2003 and the Amazigh language in 2011, just as Algeria also ordinated it in 2016. There are attempts in Libya and Tunisia, and one day Tifinagh will have a great importance and say to the world, “Here I am.” I died yet..
As the Moroccan thinker Ahmed Assid said, the Amazigh language, Tifinagh, is a miracle, as linguists told him, and that the languages that were contemporary with the Amazigh language, such as Greek, Roman, Syriac, and Egyptian hieroglyphs, became extinct, but the Amazigh language survived.
Source: websites