This great divide has made travel difficult so linguistic boundaries tend to be based on either side. p-Koman [95], "Afro-Asiatic" redirects here. Author: Martin Bernal Language: EnglishEdition: 1stBinding: HardcoverPages: 575Publisher: Rutgers Univ PressPublication Date: 304805601149 [197], There are two etymological dictionaries of Afroasiatic, one by Christopher Ehret, and one by Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova, both from 1995. Allan Bomhard's own reconstructions of Proto-Afroasiatic roots (and phonology) seem to be biased toward Proto-Indo-European and Nostratic roots . [11] Because the term "Afroasiatic" could be taken to mean that the family includes all the languages of Africa and Asia, the term "Afrasian" is sometimes used instead; this name was proposed by Igor Diakonoff (1980) and is mostly used by Russian scholars. These classifications of language sub-sets vary according to different texts. 28 July 1999. [137][d] Another common method of forming plurals is reduplication. Afroasiatic(Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasianand in older sources as Hamito-Semitic(Chamito-Semitic)[3]or Semito-Hamitic,[4]is a large language familyof about 300 languages. (abbrev. [152], A widely attested feature in AA languages is a consonantal structure into which various vocalic "templates" are placed. Berta The Egyptian prefix has a middle voice/intransitive/or passive meaning. [40] The latest possible date for the existence of Proto-Afroasiatic is c. 4000 BCE, after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are first attested; however, the languages must have diverged and evolved for some time before this. ), (Eg., Sem. Proto-Chadic reconstruction is in its infancy, Proto-Cushitic is even less developed, and according to Glottolog it's not demonstrable that Omotic languages are even related to each other, let alone as part of Afro-Asiatic. The Subclassification of Afroasiatic (Afrasian) Appendix 1. Akpes innovation: move > move toward), (probably demon., root #767+ *l n./adj. There is some evidence from Coptic, but this may be unrelated to AA. [16] Several issues with the label "Hamito-Semitic" have led to its decline in use by later scholars. Atlantic (Guinea) West Semitic brought forth such languages as Canaanite, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic (EL, p.906). as ELL). p-Central Chadic Gule Proto-Afroasiatic is a reconstructed language. [196] Additionally, because Egyptian is written without vowels before the Coptic period, its use for comparative purposes often relies on vocalic reconstructions that themselves depend on comparisons with other Afroasiatic languages. [179] However, there is no consensus on what the reconstructed set of Afroasiatic pronouns might have looked like. Such evidence may reveal plants known to early Afroasiatic speakers; but it does not diagnose whether they were cultivated or wild. [99], The majority of AA languages are tonal languages: phonemic tonality is found in Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, but absent in Berber and Semitic. Oko The following list of Proto-Afroasiatic reconstructions is from Ehret (1995). to different specific animals), (possible vowel reconstructions: *a, *aa, *e, or *o), (Sem., Ch. Kim Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. . Classification and Index of the Worlds Languages. except for Semitic, which is also spoken in the Middle-East and Malta, all branches of the [27] The first is the Numidian language, represented by over a thousand short inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet, found throughout North Africa and dating from the 2nd century BCE onward. p-Mande (p-W. Mandep-Mandekanp-Niger-Voltap-S. Mande) Therefore the root is considered ktb. When looking for roots it is important to remember that early Semitic only had consonants and vowels had to be inferred from the context (Atlas, p.78-79). innovation: 'grow' > 'live,' whence Eg. [127] These pronouns tend to show a masculine "u" and a feminine "i". innovation: specialization of meaning to plant growth), (Berber, e.g., Shilh agafay 'cloud,' implies a 2nd root shape *-gaap-), to impel, make move (by pushing, pulling), (root #311+old Afroasiatic pl. Natioro Each aspect of these reconstructions is substantiated in detail in an extensive etymological vocabulary of more than 1000 roots. Great variety is incorporated in one family and this makes Afro-Asiatic an interesting topic of study. Proto-Afroasiatic phonology has been the subject of several proposals for reconstruction that are not only different from each other, but also very divergent (cf. There is no general consensus over the location of the Urheimat, the original homeland from which began the migrations into the present locations of the speakers. 2.12. Africa is divided by geographical features, including the Sahara desert and the Ethiopian mountains. [156] It is unclear whether this system is a common AA trait;[157] the Chadic examples, for instance, show signs of originally deriving from affixes, which could explain the origins of the alterations in other languages as well. p-Chadic In the series University of California Publications in Linguistics 126. [83], A significant minority of scholars supports an Asian origin of Afroasiatic,[78] most of whom are specialists in Semitic or Egyptian studies. [156], There is no agreement about which tenses or aspects Proto-Afroasiatic might have had. [180] Also common are dependent/affix pronouns (used for direct objects and to mark possession). [115] James P. Allen has demonstrated that slightly different rules apply to Egyptian: for instance, Egyptian allows two identical consonants in some roots, and disallows velars from occurring with pharyngeals. Berkeley: University of California Press. [14], The term Semitic had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlzer, following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710. However, not one of Militarev's proposed 32 agricultural roots can be considered diagnostic of cultivation. [97] All Afroasiatic languages contain stops and fricatives; some branches have additional types of consonants such as affricates and lateral consonants. p-Ogoni p-Potou-Akanic [30] Most Chadic languages are located in the Chad basin, with the exception of Hausa. Tula-Waja Tiefo Kunama [88], Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, Omotic, and most languages in the Semitic branch all require a syllable to begin with a consonant (with the exception of some grammatical prefixes). There are approximately 400 Afroasiatic languages, either living or recorded but extinct. ), (Berber, Eg. Roots Beginning with P and B - Oleg Linkohr 2020-03-15 . Originally Posted by gihanga.rwanda. ; SC semantics: early beads were made of shell), (root of #48 + *c extend. [90], Syllable weight plays an important role in AA, especially in Chadic; it can affect the form of affixes attached to a word. If you are not satisfied with 225345861639 Dogon US$62.00 (softcover). innovation: 'send' > 'direct,' hence 'command, rule'), (Agaw *a allows PAA vowel reconstructions *a, *aa, *o, or *e), (Sem., Eg. p-Lower Cross River [30] A common characteristic of AA languages is the existence of a special set of "independent" pronouns, which are distinct from subject pronouns. to domestic animals in general, then narrowing in PS and Eg. [99] In Cushitic, the Ethiopian Semitic language Tigrinya, and some Chadic languages, there is no underlying phoneme [p] at all. For example, the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests the existence of a monophyletic "Hamitic" branch alongside Semitic. Afro-Asiatic is divided into six branches: Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic. ; PS, Eg., Ch. [32] It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers. Proto-Semitic was a contemporary of PIE. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. However, since the 1970s and '80s, comparisons of other Chadic subject pronouns with the Hausa ones have convinced most scholars that the similarity to the prefix conjugation is incidental. Adapted from Ruhlen 1987. and touches on external evidence from Afroasiatic cognate languages. ; *u < *i /#-p_C-#? [117] In the different languages, central vowels are often inserted to break up consonant clusters (a form of epenthesis). p-Igboid These are some known features common to more than one branch, though (Hodge 1971; Lecarme, Lowenstamm, and Shlonsky 2000; Frajzyngier and Shay 2012): It's impossible to tell exactly how old Proto-Afroasiatic is, or where it was spoken, but there are a few ideas. They can occur together with subject pronouns but cannot fulfill an object function. [174] It is found in Egyptian, Semitic, and possibly, in some relic forms, Berber. as denom. [31] Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria. The Afroasiatic language family is thought to have originated in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 15,000 years ago. [4] The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a de facto group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. Vol.1. [109] Additionally, he showed that Proto-Semitic restricted a sequence of two identical consonants in the first and second position of the triliteral root. innovation: *-VC- v. stems > *-CV-), (Eg., Sem. Under East Semitic rose Akkadian and Babylonian. Voegelin, C.F. p-Bantu (Swadesh list) [140] A common pattern in AA languages with case is for the nominative to marked by -u or -i, and the accusative to be marked by -a. [54] The "Hamitic theory" would serve as the basis for Carl Meinhof's highly influential classification of African languages in his book Die Sprache der Hamiten (1912). p-Nubian Consider also the debate over the origins of the Afroasiastic or Afrasan languages and cultures, a linguistic group with a wide geographical distribution covering the Middle East and Northern. ; short vowel required by derived verb #399), calabash (used as container, utensil, etc. in *n, as also in #323), (possible V reconstructions: *a, *aa, *e, or *o), (Sem., Eg., Ch. show more tr. Additional Proposed PAA Roots; Appendix 4. Nara suff. Linguistics 450 shared innovation: 'move, take' > 'take hold of'), (Cush., Ch., Eg., Sem. suff. The reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic is problematic and . Ehret's dictionary lists "Proto-South-Cushitic, original homeland of the Afroasiatic family, "The feminine endings *-ay and *-y in Semitic and Berber", "A reconstruction of the system of verb aspects in proto-Berbero-Semitic", Afro-Asiatic and Semitic genealogical trees, short annotations of the talks given there, The prehistory of a dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) farming lexicon, Once More About Glottochronology And The Comparative Method: The Omotic-Afrasian case, Root Extension And Root Formation In Semitic And Afrasian, A comparison of Orel-Stolbova's and Ehret's Afro-Asiatic reconstructions, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Afroasiatic_languages&oldid=1142726919, Linguist H. Fleming proposed that the near-exinct, Harold Fleming (1981) divides non-Omotic Afroasiatic, or "Erythraean", into three groups, Cushitic, Semitic, and Chadic-Berber-Egyptian. ), to get up to leave, start out, come or go forth, (Eg., Sem. Of all of the languages in the Afro-Asiatic line, Arabic is the most widely spoken language, stretching from Western Africa to the Middle East (ELL, p.51). [153][168][h], Some AA branches have what is called a "suffix conjugation", formed by using pronominal suffixes to indicate person, gender, and number and a verbal adjective. shared innovation: *als-/*ils- 'tongue': *a-/*i-attrib. Tivoid Proto-Afro-Asiatic is proposed to have been spoken 18,000 years ago near the Horn of Africa (eastern Africa). Tadaksahak, p-Niger-Congo If so, semantics are unclear), (pl. Mimi-D Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasian or Hamito-Semitic, Semito-Hamitic, or Erythraean is a large language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. One hypothesis places it in the Levant, as the language of the Natufian hunter-gatherers who were the first to adopt a farming lifestyle more than 10,000 years ago. From the earliest times we have written records from Northern Africa. [123], Some scholars postulate that Proto-Afroasiatic was a tonal language, with tonality subsequently lost in some branches: Christopher Ehret has postulated a tonal system of at least two tonal phonemes, falling tone, rising tone, and possibly a third tone, level tone. Ongota [155], The degree to which the AA verbal root was triliteral (having three consonants) is debated. suff. [38] The oldest text in a Cushitic language probably dates from around 1770. [112] Greenberg divided Semitic consonants into four types: "back consonants" (glottal, pharyngeal, uvular, laryngeal, and velar consonants), "front consonants" (dental or alveolar consonants), liquid consonants, and labial consonants. [68] In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that a group of languages classified as Cushitic by Greenberg were in fact an independent "Omotic" language family, a proposal that has been widely accepted but remains controversial. Gumuz [15] Mller assumed that there existed a distinct "Hamitic" branch of the family that consisted of Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic. [140] Some languages in AA have a marked nominative alignment, a feature which may date back to Proto-Afroasiatic. Root Structure Patterning in Proto-Kartvelian. In current scholarship, the most common names used for the family are Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic), Hamito-Semitic, and Semito-Hamitic. alternative feminine endings *-ay/*-y; corresponding vowel templates for verbal conjugations) which can be reconstructed for a higher-order proto-language (provisionally called "Proto-Berbero-Semitic" by Kossmann & Suchard (2018) and Van Putten (2018)). [8][9] Other proposed names which have not found widespread acceptance among the linguistic community include Erythraic, Lisramic, Noahitic, and Lamekhite. p-Agaw p-Oti-Volta (p-E. Oti-Voltap-C. Oti-Volta) innovation: narrowing of meaning to particular kind of joining, by sewing), to split in two, split one from the other, (proposed source: #502, with regular PAA * > PBA *n; Eg., Berber, Sem. [198] Andrzej Zaborski refers to Orel and Stolbova's reconstructions as "controversial", and Ehret's as "not acceptable to many scholars". New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996. [121] Such scholars postulate that tones developed to compensate for lost or reduced syllables, and note that certain tones are often associated with certain syllable-final consonants.[125]. p-Masa >I find it odd how Semitic is still Afroasiatic even though it's tied to a non-E haplogroup Egyptian and Semitic are both J. Cushitic is T and Chadic is J/R1b-V88. [40] Tom Gldemann, however, argues that less time may have been required than is commonly assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to language contact, as happened in the Chadic branch and probably also in Omotic. [147][148] Berber instead contrasts between the "free state" and the "annexed state," the latter of which is used for a variety of purposes, including for subjects placed after a verb and after certain prepositions. A main characteristic of Afro-Asiatic languages is the use of vowel changes in word formation. * "The Origins of Third Consonants in Semitic Roots: An Internal Reconstruction (Applied to Arabic)," Journal of Afroasiatic Languages 3, 2 (1989): 109-202. [183], Another factor making comparisons of AA numeral systems difficult is the possibility of borrowing. xvii + 557. (abbrev. New York: Elsevier, 1977. innovation: meaning shift, from avoiding per se to feeling a need or reason to avoid), to wear out, be used up, cease to function, (Eg., Cush., Ch.
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