Afro-asiatic_languages

The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic).

The term "Afro-Asiatic" was coined by Joseph Greenberg to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic".

Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972), and "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966).

The family includes the following language subfamilies:

• Berber languages
• Chadic languages
• Egyptian language
• Semitic languages
• Cushitic languages
• Omotic languages (sometimes classified as part of Cushitic)

• Beja language (subclassification controversial; widely classified as part of Cushitic)

Many people regard the Ongota language as Omotic, but its classification within the family remains controversial, partly for lack of data. Harold Fleming tentatively suggests treating it as an independent branch of non-Omotic Afro-Asiatic.[1]

Original homeland (Urheimat)

No agreement exists on where Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers lived (i.e. the Afro-Asiatic Urheimat), though the language is generally believed to have originated in Northeast Africa[2][3]. Some scholars (such as Igor Diakonoff and Lionel Bender) have proposed Ethiopia, because it includes the majority of the diversity of the Afro-Asiatic language family and has very diverse groups in close geographic proximity, often considered a telltale sign for a linguistic geographic origin. Other researchers (such as Christopher Ehret) have put forward the western Red Sea coast and the Sahara. A minority (such as Alexander Militarev) suggest a linguistic homeland in the Levant (specifically, he identifies Afro-Asiatic with the Natufian culture), with Semitic being the only branch to stay put.[4]

The Semitic languages form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily extant outside of Africa. Some scholars believe that, in historical or near-historical times, Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Ethiopia and Eritrea, while others, such as A. Murtonen, dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in EthiopiaFleming, Harold C. (1968), "Ethiopic Language History: Testing Linguistic Hypotheses in an Archaeological and Documentary Context" in Ethnohistory, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn), pp. 353-388. A third view, based upon similarities between Semitic and ancient Egyptian, is that the two languages developed from a common ancestral tongue along the Nile, crossing the Sinai with the dry phase from 6,000-5,800 BCE, at the end of the pre-pottery neolithic (PPNB) phase in the Levant Midant-Reynes, Beatrix (2000), The Prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first Pharaohs (Blackwell) pp.73-75. Hunter-gatherers of the el-Harif mesolithic culture, crossing the Sinai and from Northern Egypt, and adopting animal domestication but not agriculture could then have created what Juris Yarins calls the Syro-Arabian nomadic pastoralism complex, spreading south along the shore of the Red Sea, and north eastwards around the edge of the "fertile crescent". In the Levant this development appears as the Minhata, and later Yarmoukian culture, which came from the same semi-arid zone as did the later Ghassulian and Semitic Amorites culturesPerrot J. (1964), "Les deux premieres campagnesde feuilles a Munhata" Syria XLI pp323-45Mellaart, James (1975), The Neolithic of the Near East (London: Thames and Hudson), pp. 239-241.

Tonal languages appear in the Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic branches of Afro-Asiatic, according to Ehret (1996). The Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian branches do not use tones phonemically.

Given the diversity that exists within the Afro-Asiatic group, and the lack of common vocabulary for agricultural items, it is suggested that the languages dispersed before the commencement of the Neolithic. The finding of a common vocabulary for pottery containers, however, suggests that this technology was known.

For example Proto-Semitic *k\'ad-ah- "vessel", found in Arabic kadah "drinking bowl, cup, goblet, glass, tumbler"; Sabaean m-kdh(m,n) "cup; Ethiopic / Geez kadho "vessel, gourd", ma-kdeht "jar, jug, bucket"; Lowland East Cushitic *k\'adad- "vessel, gourd; Oromo k\'odaa "vessel, gourd; Egyptian qd "pot"; Lowland East Kushitic *k\'od- "receptical"; Oromo k\'odaa "receptacle"; West Chadic *k\'wad- "calabash"; Dangla koda "pot" gives Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k\'ud-/*k\'od- "Vessel, pot"Bomhard, Alan R (1996), "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" (Signum).

Ehret Ehret, Christopher (1982), "On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia" Journal of African History (Uni of Calif. Berkeley Press) suggests that early Afro-Asiatic languages were involved in the domestication of Ethiopian food crops, but this is disputed by others who suggest these words were found only in the Cushitic and possibly Omotic families, and common cognates for agriculture are not present. Given that wavy line pottery is found widely in the Sahara from 8,000 BCEBarnett, William & Hoopes, John (Eds.) (1995). The Emergence of Pottery. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8, and that the neolithic agriculture technologies arrived 5000 BCEMidant-Reynes, Beatrix (2000), The Prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first Pharaohs (Blackwell), this sets a possible context for Proto-Afro-Asiatic dispersal. As it is known that the Ethiopian farmers moved into the highlands from the direction of Nubian Sudan, and attempts to translate the Meroitic script found in this area show significant Afro-Asiatic characteristics, linguist Lionel Bender suggests that it was out of this area of the Southern Nile that was the centre for dispersion of the Afro-Asiatic languages occurredBender, Lionel (1997), "Upside Down Afrasian"Africanistiche Arbeitspapiers 50, pp19-34. The dates of pottery and agriculture set approximate early and late dates for this linguistic dispersal. Climatically this was a period of a "wet Sahara" phase with large rivers and lakes. The dispersal of Afro-Asiatic may thus have been a response to the recent operation of the "Sahara pump"Fagan, Brian (2004), The Long Hot Summer: how climate changed civilisation (London: Grant Books)Burroughs, William J. (2005), Climate Change in Prehistory:the end of the reign of Chaos (Cambridge University Press).

Common features and cognates

Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages include:

• a two-gender system in the singular, with the feminine marked by the /t/ sound,
• VSO typology with SVO tendencies,
• a set of emphatic consonants, variously realized as glottalized, pharyngealized, or implosive, and
• a templatic morphology in which words inflect by internal changes as well as with prefixes and suffixes.

Some cognates include:

• b-n- "build" (Ehret: *bĭn), attested in Chadic, Semitic (*bny), Cushitic (*mĭn/*măn "house"), Berber (*bn) and Omotic (Dime bin- "build, create");
• m-t "die" (Ehret: *maaw), attested in Chadic (for example, Hausa mutu), Egyptian (mwt *muwt, mt, Coptic mu), Berber (mmet, pr. yemmut), Semitic (*mwt), and Cushitic (Proto-Somali *umaaw/*-am-w(t)- "die"). (Also similar to the PIE base *mor-/mr-. "die", evidence in favor of both the Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European language families\' classification in the hypothetical Nostratic superfamily.) Also, Mot (Semitic god) of death.
• s-n "know", attested in Chadic, Berber, and Egyptian;
• l-s "tongue" (Ehret: *lis\' "to lick"), attested in Semitic (*lasaan/lisaan), Egyptian (ns *ls, Coptic las), Berber (ils), Chadic (for example, Hausa harshe), and possibly Omotic (Dime lits\'- "lick");
• s-m "name" (Ehret: *sŭm / *sĭm), attested in Semitic (*sm), Berber (ism), Chadic (for example, Hausa suna), Cushitic, and Omotic (though some see the Berber form, ism, and the Omotic form, sunts, as Semitic loanwords.) The Egyptian smi "report, announce" offers another possible cognate.
• d-m "blood" (Ehret: *dîm / *dâm), attested in Berber (idammen), Semitic (*dam), Chadic, and arguably Omotic. Compare Cushitic *dîm/*dâm, "red".

In the verbal system, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (including Beja) all provide evidence for a prefix conjugation:

All Afro-Asiatic subfamilies show evidence of a causative affix s, but a similar suffix also appears in other groups, such as the Niger-Congo languages.

Semitic, Berber, Cushitic (including Beja), and Chadic support possessive suffixes.

Classification history

Medieval scholars sometimes linked two or more branches of Afro-Asiatic together; as early as the 9th century the Hebrew grammarian Judah ibn Quraysh of Tiaret in Algeria perceived a relationship between Berber and Semitic (the latter group known to him through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic).

In the course of the 19th century Europeans also began suggesting such relationships; thus in 1844 Th. Benfey suggested a language family containing Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (calling the latter "Ethiopic"). In the same year, T. N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and Hausa, but this would long remain a topic of dispute and uncertainty. Friedrich Müller named the traditional "Hamito-Semitic" family in 1876 in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and defined it as consisting of a Semitic group plus a "Hamitic" group containing Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; he excluded the Chadic group. These classifications relied in part on non-linguistic anthropological and racial arguments. (See also Hamitic hypothesis.)

Leo Reinisch (1909) proposed to link Cushitic and Chadic, while urging a more distant affinity with Egyptian and Semitic, thus foreshadowing Greenberg; but his suggestion found little resonance. Marcel Cohen (1924) rejected the idea of a distinct "Hamitic" subgroup, and included Hausa (a Chadic language) in his comparative Hamito-Semitic vocabulary. Joseph Greenberg (1950) strongly confirmed Cohen\'s rejection of "Hamitic", added (and sub-classified) the Chadic languages, and proposed the new name Afro-Asiatic for the family; almost all scholars have accepted his classification. In 1969 Harold Fleming proposed the recognition of Omotic as a fifth branch, rather than (as previously believed) a subgroup of Cushitic, and this has met with general acceptance. Several scholars, including Harold Fleming and Robert Hetzron, have since questioned the traditional inclusion of Beja in Cushitic, but this view has yet to gain general acceptance.

Little agreement exists on the sub-classification of the five or six branches mentioned; however, Christopher Ehret (1979), Harold Fleming (1981), and Joseph Greenberg (1981) all agree that the Omotic branch split from the rest first. Otherwise:

• Ehret groups Egyptian, Berber, and Semitic together in a North Afro-Asiatic subgroup;
• Paul Newman (1980) groups Berber with Chadic and Egyptian with Semitic, while questioning the inclusion of Omotic;
• Fleming (1981) divided non-Omotic Afroasiatic, or "Erythraean", into three groups, Cushitic, Semitic, and Chadic-Berber-Egyptian; he later added Semitic and Beja to the latter, and proposed Ongotá as a tentative new third branch of Erythraean;
• Lionel Bender (1997) advocates a "Macro-Cushitic" consisting of Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic, while regarding Chadic and Omotic as the most remote branches;
• Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova (1995) group Berber with Semitic, group Chadic with Egyptian, and split Cushitic into five or more independent branches of Afro-Asiatic, seeing Cushitic as a Sprachbund rather than a valid family;
• Alexander Militarev (2000), on the basis of lexicostatistics, groups Berber with Chadic and both, more distantly, with Semitic, as against Cushitic and Omotic.

See also

• African languages

Etymological bibliography

Some of the main sources for Afro-Asiatic etymologies include:

• Marcel Cohen, Essai comparatif sur la vocabulaire et la phonétique du chamito-sémitique, Champion, Paris 1947.
• Igor M. Diakonoff et al., "Historical-Comparative Vocabulary of Afrasian", St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies Nos. 2-6, 1993-7.
• Christopher Ehret. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (University of California Publications in Linguistics 126), California, Berkeley 1996.
• Vladimir E. Orel and Olga V. Stolbova, Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a Reconstruction, Brill, Leiden 1995. ISBN 90-04-10051-2. [5]

References

Sources

• Barnett, William & Hoopes, John (Eds.) (1995). The Emergence of Pottery. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
• Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, African Languages, Cambridge University Press, 2000 - Chapter 4
• Huehnergard, John (2004)“Afro-Asiatic,” in Woodard R. D. (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, Cambridge-New York, 138-159
• Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World\'s Languages, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1991.
• Lionel Bender et al., Selected Comparative-Historical Afro-Asiatic Studies in Memory of Igor M. Diakonoff, LINCOM 2003.
• Ethnologue entry for Afro-Asiatic
• Russell G. Schuh, Chadic Overview.
• African Language History (pdf), Roger Blench
• Carleton T. Hodge (ed.), Afroasiatic: a survey. The Hague - Paris: Mouton 1971.

External links

• NACAL The North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, now in its 35th year.
• A comparison of Orel-Stolbova\'s and Ehret\'s Afro-Asiatic reconstructions
• Afro-Asiatic and Semitic genealogical trees, presented by Alexander Militarev at his talk “Genealogical classification of Afro-Asiatic languages according to the latest data” (at the conference on the 70th anniversary of V.M. Illich-Svitych, Moscow, 2004; short annotations of the talks given there(Russian))
• family tree at ethnologue.com

v • d • e Afro-Asiatic-speaking nations

v • d • e Berber  Algeria  Egypt  Libya  Mali  Mauritania  Morocco  Niger  Tunisia v • d • e Chadic  Cameroon  Central African Republic  Chad  Niger  Nigeria v • d • e Cushitic Cushitic  Djibouti  Eritrea  Ethiopia  Kenya  Somalia Beja  Egypt  Eritrea  Sudan v • d • e Egyptian    Egypt v • d • e Omotic  Ethiopia v • d • e Semitic Arabic / Maltese  Algeria  Bahrain  Egypt  Iraq  Israel  Jordan  Kuwait  Lebanon  Libya  Malta  Mauritania  Morocco  Oman  PNA  Qatar  Saudi Arabia  Sudan1  Syria  Tunisia  UAE  W. Sahara  Yemen Northwest Semitic2  Iraq  Israel  Syria South Semitic  Eritrea  Ethiopia  Oman  Yemen 1 excluding Southern Sudan.    2 Aramaic and Hebrew.

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