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Proto-Afro-Asiatic
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Proto-Afro-Asiatic is the hypothetical proto-language from which modern Afro-Asiatic languages are descended.
Ilya Yabonovich and other linguists, in examining the differences between the various members of the Afro-Asiatic family have realised that all of the old etymologies for this group were inherently semitocentric. The differences between Chadic, Omotic, Cushitic and Semitic, were wider than those seen between any members of the Indo-European family and as wide as some of the differences seen within and between separate language families, for example, Indo-European and Altaic.
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Proto-Afro-Asiatic is the hypothetical proto-language from which modern Afro-Asiatic languages are descended.
Ilya Yabonovich and other linguists, in examining the differences between the various members of the Afro-Asiatic family have realised that all of the old etymologies for this group were inherently semitocentric. The differences between Chadic, Omotic, Cushitic and Semitic, were wider than those seen between any members of the Indo-European family and as wide as some of the differences seen within and between separate language families, for example, Indo-European and Altaic. Certainly the exclusion of Afro-Asiatic from the controversial Nostratic family has simplified matters of phonemics, not having to include the complex patterns seen in Afroasiatic languages. It is today commonly accepted that proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken in Africa (perhaps the Northeastern Sahara, e.g.), but in the past a number of theories were expounded.
Alternative Afro-Asiatic Homelands
The Middle East
Alexander Militarev and V. Shairelman (1988) suggest that the Afro-Asiatic homeland is the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. They suggest that Proto-Afro-Asiatic was the language spoken by the Epi-Paleolithic (i.e. Mesolithic) Natufian culture of Israel and Syria. The Natufian culture is certainly well-documented. The earliest sites, in Israel, have been dated to 10,900 BCE and the culture continued to 7,800 BCE, during which it metamorphosed between 8,500 and 8,000 BCE into the first full-blown agricultural Neolithic Pre-Pottery A culture found throughout the Levant. This would correspond well with the date given by Igor Diakonoff for the Proto-Afro-Asiatic parent culture (i.e. approximately 12,000 years ago). The Natufian culture certainly did spread, northwards to Syria and Mesopotamia, and the Belbasi culture of interior Anatolia certainly was of clear Natufian derivation. To the southeast, the well-studied site of Al Beidha, about 4 kilometres north of Petra, and the rock shelter of Wadi al-Mataha has been extensively studied, and show its extension into the fringes of the arid Arabian sub-continent.
Allan Bomhard (1996) retains Afro-Asiatic within Nostratic, despite his admission that Proto-Afro-Asiatic is very different from the other members of the proposed linguistic Nostratic superfamily. As a result he suggests it was probably the first language to have split from the Nostratic linguistic superfamily. Whatever was the case, by 8,000 BCE the Natufian culture itself had begun to disperse. In Canaan, Natufian developed into the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) culture, first identified by Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978) in her 1950's excavations at Jericho. Kenyon also remarked at the hiatus and seeming abandonment of PPNA sites, and was followed by a limited extent of the PPNB culture that was very different. Rectilinear dwellings in the PPNB, from 7,000 BCE, replaced the round beehive dwellings seen since Natufian times, in the PPNA period. Since the 1960s, however, it has been shown that PPNB developed in an unbroken sequence from the Natufian cultures north of Damascus, forging a link between Canaan, Mesopotamia and the Anatolian cultures of Catal Huyuk, and Halicar, with which it shares some similarity. It has been suggested that this northern part of the range was developing as Proto-Semitic. Certainly, there is evidence that the PPNB culture, spread southwards to sites in Israel, lasting until 6,000 BCE ending with the brief spread of a more arid climate through the region. Christopher Edens (2001) has reported a bladelet tradition in South Western Saudi Arabia, possibly synchronous with the Epi-Paleolithic spread of tools of the Arabian bi-facial tradition which lasted from 5,000 - 3,000 BCE characterised by beautifully pressure-flaked arrowheads and knives. They also used scrapers and awls or drills, probably for working leather and making beads. The Bifacial tradition, seems to have been the period during which a hunting and gathering way of life was progressively replaced by a lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism from the north, which has since then characterised the Peninsula. This, it has been suggested, saw the first spread of the Semitic languages throughout Arabia.
Bomhard, following John Kern’s suggestion, proposed that further spread took the Afro-Asiatic languages across the Bab al Mandeb in Yemen into Ethiopia and thence into the Horn of Africa and further south. To the north, Afro-Asiatic languages are presumed to have crossed with the Neolithic revolution into Egypt, spreading from there into North Africa, and the Sudan, and thence across the Sahara to the area of Lake Chad.
Support for an Asiatic origin of Semitic, probably ultimately derived from a Natufian language, is found in the nouns of proto Semitic, which include 'ice'- practically unknown in East Africa- 'oak', 'horse' and 'camel'. The camel did not arrive in Africa until several thousand years until after Semitic languages were being written in Mesopotamia, which would make an African origin for them impossible. Extra support is found in the ancient Syrian language of Eblaite, a Semitic language which shows a very long residence in the Levant and a postition at the root of the Semitic language tree, with non Afro Asiatic names being almost non existant in it's lexicon. This would date the arrival of Semtiic languages into East Africa to about four thousand years BP.
Other Afro Asiatic languages show a very close link to to Semitic,Berber and Egyptian, which would suggest their arrival into North Africa when the neolithic farmers arrived from the near East. Berber in particular seems to match the arrival of the Capsian culture with it's imports of West Asian crops, livestock and incoming near Eastern farmers.
Problems with the Middle Eastern theory
This archaeology seems to pose problems to a theory of a Nostratic-linked Proto-Afroasiatic language in the Middle East. There is also significant linguistic evidence that suggests that this was not the area in which Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages first evolved. Afro-Asiatic linguistic diversity is far greater in Africa than it is in the Middle East. All six of the Afro-Asiatic families are found in the African continent, only one is found in the Middle East. Even in the case of the Middle Eastern Semitic language, the diversity of Semitic languages in Ethiopia, for instance, is greater than that in Arabia, Mesopotamia or the Levant, although this is due to the older Semitic languages of Asia being extinct.
The spread of Afro-Asiatic languages has recently been linked to the evolution of the Y chromosome E-M78/E1b1b1a (formerly known as or E3b1), which is believed to have arisen in North East Africa around 24,000 years ago, possibly being spread with the expansion of the Halfan culture into both the near East, North Africa and East Africa, associated with the Kebaran culture and Natufian culture of the Levant. It shows a very close match to the dispersal of the subclades of the Eurasian mitochondrial DNA haplotype M1 from the Southern Egypt area, which also match for dates, ranging from 22,000 to 26,000 years old. This would make Afro Asiatic, if indeed associated with the spread of E-M78 at least as likely to have been of Asian origin ultimately, as half of it's parentage is traceable to West Asia.
African homelands of PAA languages have been suggested. Igor Diakonoff (1988) suggested that the Urheimat of Afro-Asiatic was in the Southeastern Sahara, between Tibesti and Darfur.
Martin Bernal (1980) also suggests an African origin. Quoted by Bomhard, he states that:
Archaeological evidence from the Magreb, the Sudan and east Africa [makes it seem] permissible to postulate at least three branches of Afroasiatic existed by the 8th millennium BCE”. Bomhard concludes, “The implications of Bernal’s views are enormous. Although his views are highly speculative, they are by no means implausible. Should they turn out to be true, it would give substantial weight to the arguments that Afroasiatic is to be viewed as a sister language to Proto-Nostratic rather than a descendent.
Despite this caveat, Bomhard upholds the Middle Eastern origin by approvingly quoting at length from Kerns:
If we assume that the speakers of pre-Indo-European remained in the vicinity of the Caucasus to a fairly late period (say 7,500 BCE), with the Afroasiatic already extending through Canaan and into Egypt and eventually the rest of North Africa, but with its Semitic branch still in Northern Mesopotamia, high on the upper slopes of the fertile crescent, we have an explanation for the similarity in vocabulary. That this similarity existed to a late period is suggested by the shared words for field, bull, cow, sheep and goat, animals that were domesticated first in the Fertile Crescent. In addition, shared words for star, and seven suggest a common veneration for that number and perhaps a shared ideology…. If true, it suggests an association that is social as well as geographical .
See also
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