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Afro-Asiatic languages
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The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 living languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). Afro-Asiatic also includes several ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, and Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians).
The term "Afroasiatic" was coined by Maurice Delafosse (1914). It did not come into general use until it was adopted by Joseph Greenberg (1950) to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", following his demonstration that Hamitic is not a valid language family.
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The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 living languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). Afro-Asiatic also includes several ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, and Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians).
The term "Afroasiatic" was coined by Maurice Delafosse (1914). It did not come into general use until it was adopted by Joseph Greenberg (1950) to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", following his demonstration that Hamitic is not a valid language family. The name is now most often spelled "Afro-Asiatic", though both spellings are in use. Some replace "Afro-Asiatic" with "Afrasian". Individual scholars have called the family "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966) and "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972). The term "Hamito-Semitic" remains in use in the academic traditions of some European countries.
The Afro-Asiatic language family is usually considered to include the following branches:
While there is general agreement on these six families, there are some points of disagreement among linguists who study Afro-Asiatic. In particular:
- Most of them consider Omotic to represent the oldest split in the Afro-Asiatic family, while others have raised doubts about it being part of Afro-Asiatic at all, and a few retain it in Cushitic, where it was initially placed by Greenberg.
- The Afro-Asiatic identity of the Ongota language is broadly questioned, as is its position within Afro-Asiatic among those who accept it, due to the "mixed" appearance of the language and a paucity of research and data. Harold Fleming tentatively suggested some years ago that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afro-Asiatic. He has recently strongly confirmed this position (Fleming 2006), based in part on newly available data.
- The Beja language is sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afro-Asiatic but is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a high degree of internal diversity.
- Whether the various branches of Cushitic actually form a language family is sometimes questioned.
- There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five non-Omotic branches of Afro-Asiatic (see "Overview of classifications" below). This situation is not unusual, even among long-established language families: there are also many disagreements concerning the internal classification of the Indo-European languages, for instance.
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. He knew of Semitic through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
In the course of the 19th century, Europeans also began suggesting such relationships. In 1844, Theodor Benfey suggested a language family consisting of 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. He 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 Hamitic hypothesis).
Leo Reinisch (1909) proposed linking Cushitic and Chadic, while urging a more distant affinity to 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 branch, and proposed the new name "Afroasiatic" for the family. Nearly all scholars have accepted Greenberg's classification.
In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that what had previously been known as Western Cushitic is an independent branch of Afro-Asiatic, suggesting for it the new name Omotic. This proposal and name have met with widespread 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.
Subgrouping
Little agreement exists on the subgrouping of the five or six branches of Afro-Asiatic — Berber, Chadic, Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic (if Omotic is not included in Cushitic). However, Christopher Ehret (1979), Harold Fleming (1981), and Joseph Greenberg (1981) all agree that the Omotic branch split from the rest first.
Otherwise:
- Paul Newman (1980) groups Berber with Chadic and Egyptian with Semitic, while questioning the inclusion of Omotic in Afro-Asiatic. Rolf Theil (2006) concurs with the exclusion of Omotic, but does not otherwise address the structure of the family.
- Harold Fleming (1981) divides non-Omotic Afro-Asiatic, or "Erythraean", into three groups, Cushitic, Semitic, and Chadic-Berber-Egyptian. He later added Semitic and Beja to Chadic-Berber-Egyptian and tentatively proposed Ongota as a new third branch of Erythraean. He thus divided Afro-Asiatic into two major branches, Omotic and Erythraean, with Erythraean consisting of three sub-branches, Cushitic, Chadic-Berber-Egyptian-Semitic-Beja, and Ongota.
- Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova (1995) group Berber with Semitic and Chadic with Egyptian. They split up Cushitic into five or more independent branches of Afro-Asiatic, viewing Cushitic as a Sprachbund rather than a language family.
- Christopher Ehret (1995) groups Egyptian, Berber, and Semitic together in a "North Afro-Asiatic" subgroup.
- Igor M. Diakonoff (1996) subdivides Afro-Asiatic in two, grouping Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic together as East-West Afrasian (ESA), and Chadic with Egyptian as North-South Afrasian (NSA). He excludes Omotic from Afro-Asiatic.
- Lionel Bender (1997) groups Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic together as "Macro-Cushitic". He regards Chadic and Omotic as the branches of Afro-Asiatic most remote from the others.
- Alexander Militarev (2000), on the basis of lexicostatistics, groups Berber with Chadic and both more distantly with Semitic, as against Cushitic and Omotic.
Overview of classifications
Greenberg
(1963) | Newman
(1980) | Fleming
(post-1981) | Ehret
(1995) | Orel & Stobova
(1995) | Diakonoff
(1996) | Bender
(1997) | Militarev
(2000) |
|---|
• Egyptian
• Berber
• Western Cushitic
| • Berber-Chadic
• Egypto-Semitic
• Cushitic
(excludes Omotic)
| • Erythraean:
• Cushitic
• Ongota
• Chadic
• Berber
• Egyptian
• Semitic
• Beja
| • Cushitic
• Chadic
• Egyptian
• Berber
• Semitic
|
• Omotic
• Beja
• Agaw
• Sidamic
• Rift
| • Berber
• Cushitic
• Semitic
• Chadic
• Egyptian
(excludes Omotic)
| • Chadic
• Berber
• Cushitic
• Semitic
| • African North Afrasian:
• Chado-Berber
• Egyptian
• Semitic
• Omotic
• Cushitic
|
Position among the world's languages
Afro-Asiatic is one of the four language families of Africa identified by Joseph Greenberg in his book The Languages of Africa (1963). It is the only one that extends outside of Africa, via the Semitic branch.
There are no generally accepted relations between Afro-Asiatic and any other language family. However, several proposals grouping Afro-Asiatic with one or more other language families have been made. The best-known of these are the following:
- Apparently influenced by Möller (a colleague of his at the University of Copenhagen), Holger Pedersen included Hamito-Semitic (the term replaced by Afro-Asiatic) in his proposed Nostratic language family (cf. Pedersen 1931:336-338), which also included the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Yukaghir, and Eskimo languages. This inclusion was retained by subsequent Nostraticists, starting with Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky. Like all aspects of the Nostratic hypothesis, it is highly controversial.
- Joseph Greenberg (2000-2002) did not reject a relationship of Afro-Asiatic to these other languages, but he considered it more distantly related to them than they were to each other, grouping instead these other languages in a separate language family, which he called Eurasiatic, and to which he added Chukotian, Gilyak, Aleut, Korean, Japanese-Ryukyuan, and Ainu.
Original homeland and date
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. 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 suggests a linguistic homeland in the Levant (for instance Alexander Militarev; specifically, he identifies Afro-Asiatic with the Natufian culture), with Semitic being the only branch to stay put. . This is in someway supported by fact that Afro Asiatic terms dominate the nouns for early livestock and crops from Anatolia and Iran, and from the probable Asian origin of Semitic languages around 4,600 BP to 4,800 BP.
The Semitic languages are the only branch of Afro-Asiatic attested outside of Africa. Some scholars believe that, in historical or near-historical times, Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Eritrea. Others, such as A. Murtonen, dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia. 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 6000-5800 BCE, at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B phase in the Levant . 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 shores of the Red Sea and northeast around the edge of the "Fertile Crescent". In the Levant this development appears as the Minhata culture and later as the Yarmoukian culture, which came from the same semi-arid zone as the later Ghassulian and Semitic Amorite cultures. However, regarding resemblances among language subgroups, recent "research into the lexicon would seem to suggest a closer relationship between Chadic and ancient Egyptian" .
Roger Blench says of the apparent greater diversity of Semitic in Africa compared to Asia:
- The survival of epigraphic languages can be misleading; Semitic in the near East was probably once more diverse, with many languages never written and subsequently eliminated by the spread of Arabic. Some of that diversity is attested to in the records of Sabaean, the epigraphic languages of Yemen and the south Semitic languages spoken all along the coast of the Arabian peninsula and of Socotra.
Linguistic evidence for proto Semitic also does not support an African origin. It contains nouns for horse, camel, oak, pistachio, almond, ice, naphtha, bitumen and vineyards; all resources, flora or fauna not native to Africa. Camels and horses don't arrive in Africa until two thousand years after Semitic languages are being written in Mesopotamia.
Given the high diversity within the Afro-Asiatic family and the absence of a common vocabulary for agricultural items, it is suggested that the languages dispersed before the commencement of the Neolithic. Ehret suggests that early Afro-Asiatic languages were involved in the domestication of Ethiopian food crops, but this is disputed by others who suggest that the words concerned are found only in the Cushitic and possibly Omotic families and that common cognates for agriculture are not present.
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 Cushitic *k'od- 'receptacle'; Oromo k'odaa 'receptacle'; West Chadic *k'wad- 'calabash'; Dangla koda 'pot' (Bomhard 1996). Bomhard reconstructs these forms to a Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k'ud- / *k'od- 'vessel, pot'.
Given that wavy-line pottery is found widely in the Sahara from 8000 BCE, and that the Neolithic agricultural technologies arrived around 5000 BCE, 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, Lionel Bender suggests that this area of the Southern Nile was the centre from which the Afro-Asiatic languages dispersed. The dates of pottery and agriculture set approximate early and late dates for this linguistic dispersal. The date of Proto-Afro-Asiatic would thus lie somewhere between ca. 8000 and ca. 5000 BCE or, expressed differently, between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Climatically this was the time 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".
Some scholars argue that Afro-Asiatic is considerably older than this. Carleton T. Hodge (1991:141) states:
- Archeological evidence indicates that the time depth of the proto-language involved is over 16,000 years, possibly 20,000 (Munson 1977, Hodge 1978). The proportion of items attested as having survived over 4,000 years within Egyptian (Hodge 1975) gives us confidence in the relatability of languages at the greater time depth (Swadesh 1959: 27).
According to Christopher Ehret (1997):
- Afroasiatic is a family of much greater time depth than even most of its students realize; its first divergences trace back probably at least 15,000 years ago, not just 8,000 or 9,000 as many believe. This last point imparts a ... general lesson for historical linguists: the historical comparative method, in fact, works very well farther back in time than scholars have generally allowed, provided the family in question contains a sufficiently large number of languages from which evidence can still be obtained.
Common features
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.
In the verbal system, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (including Beja) all provide evidence for a prefix conjugation:
| English | Arabic (Semitic) | Kabyle (Berber) | Somali (Cushitic) | Beja (verb is "arrive") | Hausa (Chadic) | | he dies | yamuutu | yemmut | wudimta | iktim | yamutu | | she dies | tamuutu | temmut | wedimata | tiktim | tamutu | | they (m.) die | yamuutuun | mmuten | wedimtan | iktimna | sunmutu | | you (m. sg.) die | tamuutu | temmute? | wadimate | tiktima | kamutu | | you (m. pl.) die | tamuutuun | temmutem | wadimatan | tiktimna | sunmutu | | I die | ?amuutu | mmute? | wadimta | aktim | namutu | | we die | namuutu | nemmut | wadimana | niktim | munmutu |
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.
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.
Cognates
Some important Afro-Asiatic cognates are:
- b-n- 'build' (Ehret: *bin), attested in Chadic, Semitic (*bny), Cushitic (*min/*man '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 Mot, Canaanite god of death. (The Proto-Indo-European root *mor-/mr- 'die' is similar, evidence in favor of the classification of both Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European in the hypothetical Nostratic family.)
- s-n 'know', attested in Chadic, Berber, Egyptian and Semitic (Hebrew š-n 'learn, study').
- 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: *sum / *sim), 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'.
See also
Etymological bibliography
Some of the main sources for Afro-Asiatic etymologies include:
- Cohen, Marcel. 1947. Essai comparatif sur le vocabulaire et la phonétique du chamito-sémitique. Paris: Champion.
- Diakonoff, Igor M. et al. 1993-1997. "Historical-comparative vocabulary of Afrasian", St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies 2-6.
- Ehret, Christopher. 1996. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (University of California Publications in Linguistics 126). Berkeley, California.
- Orel, Vladimir E. and Olga V. Stolbova. 1995. Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a Reconstruction. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-10051-2.
Literature
- Barnett, William and John Hoopes (editors). 1995. The Emergence of Pottery. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
- Bender, Lionel et al. 2003. Selected Comparative-Historical Afro-Asiatic Studies in Memory of Igor M. Diakonoff. LINCOM.
- Bomhard, Alan R. 1996. Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Signum.
- Diakonoff, Igor M. 1996. "Some reflections on the Afrasian linguistic macrofamily." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 55, 293.
- Diakonoff, Igor M. 1998. "The earliest Semitic society: Linguistic data." Journal of Semitic Studies 43, 209.
- Ehret, Christopher. 1997. of "The lessons of deep-time historical-comparative reconstruction in Afroasiatic: reflections on Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic: Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (U.C. Press, 1995)", paper delivered at the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the North American Conference on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, held in Miami, Florida on March 21-23, 1997.
- Fleming, Harold C. 2006. Ongota: A Decisive Language in African Prehistory. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1950. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, 47-63.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. (Photo-offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor corrections.)
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University. (Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955.)
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. The Languages of Africa (2nd ed. with additions and corrections). Bloomington: Indiana University.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1981. "African linguistic classification." General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory, edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, 292-308. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000-2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1: Grammar, Volume 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Heine, Bernd and Derek Nurse. 2000. African Languages, Chapter 4. Cambridge University Press.
- Hodge, Carleton T. (editor). 1971. Afroasiatic: A Survey. The Hague - Paris: Mouton.
- Hodge, Carleton T. 1991. "Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic." In Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell (editors), Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 141-165.
- Huehnergard, John. 2004. "Afro-Asiatic." In R.D. Woodard (editor), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, Cambridge - New York, 2004, 138-159.
- Militarev, Alexander. "Towards the genetic affiliation of Ongota, a nearly-extinct language of Ethiopia," 60 pp. In Orientalia et Classica: Papers of the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies, Issue 5. ?oscow. (Forthcoming.)
- Ruhlen, Merritt. 1991. A Guide to the World's Languages. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
External links
- , 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;
- The North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, now in its 35th year
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