Dante Alighieri wrote in his 1302–05 essay "De vulgari eloquentia" that Sardinians, not being Italians () and having no of their own, resorted to aping Latin instead. Dante's view has been dismissed, as Sardinian had been following its own course in a way which was already unintelligible to non-islanders. In the popular 12th-century verse from Raimbaut de Vaqueiras' poem "Domna, tant vos ai preiada", Sardinian epitomizes outlandish speech along with German and Berber, having the troubadour's wife say «"No t'entend plui d'un Todesco / Sardesco o Barbarì"» ("I don't understand you any more than could a German / Sard or Berber"); the Tuscan poet Fazio degli Uberti refers to the Sardinians in his poem as «» ("a people that no one is able to understand / nor do they come to a knowledge of what other peoples say"). The Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived in Palermo, Sicily at the court of King Roger II, wrote in his work ("The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands" or, simply, "The book of Roger") that «Sardinia is large, mountainous, poorly provided with water, two hundred and eighty miles long and one hundred and eighty long from west to east. [...] Sardinians are ethnically , like the Berbers; they shun contacts with all the other nations and are people of purpose and valiant that never leave the arms». Indeed, Sardinian was perceived as rather similar to the Latin dialects once spoken by the Christian Berbers in North Africa, giving credit to the theory that vulgar Latin in both Africa and Sardinia displayed a significant wealth of parallelisms. J. N. Adams is of the opinion that similarities in certain words, such as "acina" (grape), "pala" (shoulderblade), or also "spanus" in African Latin and the Sardinian "spanu" ("light red"), could prove that there was a fair amount of vocabulary shared between Sardinia and Africa.