Talk:Afri

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It's simply not correct that the Romans called the Carthaginians 'Afer/Afri'. Their name for Carthaginians was only ever Punicus/Punici.

The term Afer was a later generic term for anyone coming from the Roman province of Africa, some of which were demonstrably not indigenous to it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.184.115.220 (talk) 09:18, 15 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the article misinforms the reader. I know for sure that a Greek or Roman historian (Diodorus? Herodotus? Polibius? Pliny? I don't recall) mentioned "glorious deeds against the Afri" which were conducted by a Carthaginian military commander (I think Magon though I also don't recall it currently). I. e. he clearly differentiated between the Phoenician Carthaginians and their Libyan adversaries, the Afri. 12.11.149.5 (talk) 11:14, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You guys are right that Afri does not specifically refer to the Carthaginians, who could be called K/Carthaginenses, Poeni and Phoenices, but not Punici, because Punicus was the adjective only. I've corrected the mistaken claim I'd introduced several years ago with proper sources – my small dictionary at home was clearly wrong there. Sorry.

However, I've found another probable mistake, one I haven't introduced: the word ʿafar appears not to be attested in Phoenician, only in Hebrew, see Wiktionary, the STARLING database and Militarev 2010 (p. 58). Since Phoenician is closely related to Hebrew, Hebrew is often used as a stand-in, but that does not mean that you can relabel any Hebrew word Phoenician, just like you can't simply take any Latin word and label it Oscan, or take any Danish word and label it Swedish. Closely related languages are still not identical, and a word that may be attested in one language may not even exist in the other. Note that the source given (Venter & Neuland 2005) is not an expert source and does not seem to cite any expert source. It just reports a widespread popular etymology which does not appear to have been picked up by linguists. The source is fine for the purpose of confirming that this etymology circulates indeed, but not that such a word actually exists in Phoenician (as opposed to Hebrew, where it is attested), because it is not reliable for linguistic claims. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:57, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]