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Christopher Ehret

 

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Christopher Ehret



 
 
Christopher Ehret (born in c. 1941), a professor of African History at UCLA since 1968, is a major figure in African history and African historical linguistics
Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archaeological record. His historical books include An African Classical Age, in which he argues for a conception of the period from 1000 BC to 400 AD in East Africa
East Africa

East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN subregion, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
 as a "classical age" during which a variety of major technologies and social structures took shape.






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Christopher Ehret (born in c. 1941), a professor of African History at UCLA since 1968, is a major figure in African history and African historical linguistics
Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archaeological record. His historical books include An African Classical Age, in which he argues for a conception of the period from 1000 BC to 400 AD in East Africa
East Africa

East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN subregion, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
 as a "classical age" during which a variety of major technologies and social structures took shape. His linguistic works include reconstructions of Afro-Asiatic
Afro-Asiatic languages

The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 living languages and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southwest Asia ....
, Nilo-Saharan
Nilo-Saharan languages

The Nilo-Saharan languages are a hypothetical group of African languages spoken mainly in the upper parts of the Chari River and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet....
, and on a smaller scale Southern Cushitic
Cushitic languages

The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages language family spoken in the Horn of Africa. They are named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Shem being the eponym origin of Semitic languages....
. These reconstructions are impeccably Neogrammarian in their insistence on regular sound changes, but have been criticized for frequently postulating surprising semantic shifts, and ignoring contrary data.

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