Proto-Berber language
Encyclopedia
Proto-Berber is the reconstructed proto-language
from which the modern Berber languages
stem. Proto-Berber was an Afroasiatic language, and its descendants (the Berber languages
) are sisters to the Egyptian language
, Cushitic languages
, Semitic languages
, Chadic languages
, and the Omotic languages
.
In the third millennium BC, proto-Berber speakers spread across the area from the central North Africa
to Middle Kingdom of Egypt
. In the last millennium BC, another Berber expansion created the Berber peoples noted in Roman
records. The final spread occurred in the first millennium BC, when the Tuareg moved into the central Sahara
, by then possessing camels; (in the past, the northern parts of the Sahara were much more inhabitable than they are now.)
The fact that there are reconstructions for all major species of domestic ruminant
except for the camel
in Proto-Berber implies that its speakers produced livestock and were pasturalists.
reconstructs Proto-Berber as having a 5-vowel
system, with /a/, /i/, /u/, short /ă/, and /ə/, while Allati gives /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ and /o/. The following table shows a third variant, a 3-vowel system with additional vowel quantity.
Most Berber consonants have a homorganic
tense
counterpart, with the exception of these pairs: dˤ~tˤtˤ, w~ggw, γ~qq.
The consonants *j and *g have remained distinct in some Zenati languages
:
Eastern Berber languages
: → tˤ
Proto-Berber *-əβ has become -i in Zenati. For example, *arəβ "write" becomes ari. (This change also occurs in varieties including the Central Atlas Tamazight dialect of the Izayan
, Nafusi, and Siwi
.)
Proto-Berber palatal stops c and ɟ, corresponding to k and g in non-Zenati varieties, become š and ž in Zenati (although a fair number of irregular correspondences for this are found). For example, căm "you (f. sg.)" becomes šəm. (This change also occurs in Nafusi and Siwi.)
Ghadamès
and Awjila are the only Berber languages to preserve proto-Berber *β as β; elsewhere in Berber it becomes h or disappears.
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
from which the modern Berber languages
Berber languages
The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
stem. Proto-Berber was an Afroasiatic language, and its descendants (the Berber languages
Berber languages
The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
) are sisters to the Egyptian language
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
, Cushitic languages
Cushitic languages
The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken in the Horn of Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt. They are named after the Biblical character Cush, who was identified as an ancestor of the speakers of these specific languages as early as AD 947...
, Semitic languages
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, Chadic languages
Chadic languages
The Chadic languages constitute a language family of perhaps 200 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon, belonging to the Afroasiatic phylum...
, and the Omotic languages
Omotic languages
The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others. They are fairly agglutinative, and have complex tonal systems .-Language list:The North and South Omotic...
.
History
Proto-Berber is a very different language from all other branches of Afroasiatic, but modern Berber languages are relatively homogeneous, suggesting that whereas the split from the other known Afroasiatic branches was very ancient, on the order of 8000~9000BP, the split from the common language from which modern Berber languages come may be as recent as 3000 BP, according to Naima Louali.In the third millennium BC, proto-Berber speakers spread across the area from the central North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
to Middle Kingdom of Egypt
Middle Kingdom of Egypt
The Middle Kingdom of Egypt is the period in the history of ancient Egypt stretching from the establishment of the Eleventh Dynasty to the end of the Fourteenth Dynasty, between 2055 BC and 1650 BC, although some writers include the Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties in the Second Intermediate...
. In the last millennium BC, another Berber expansion created the Berber peoples noted in Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
records. The final spread occurred in the first millennium BC, when the Tuareg moved into the central Sahara
Sahara
The Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
, by then possessing camels; (in the past, the northern parts of the Sahara were much more inhabitable than they are now.)
The fact that there are reconstructions for all major species of domestic ruminant
Ruminant
A ruminant is a mammal of the order Artiodactyla that digests plant-based food by initially softening it within the animal's first compartment of the stomach, principally through bacterial actions, then regurgitating the semi-digested mass, now known as cud, and chewing it again...
except for the camel
Camel
A camel is an even-toed ungulate within the genus Camelus, bearing distinctive fatty deposits known as humps on its back. There are two species of camels: the dromedary or Arabian camel has a single hump, and the bactrian has two humps. Dromedaries are native to the dry desert areas of West Asia,...
in Proto-Berber implies that its speakers produced livestock and were pasturalists.
Phonology
Some earlier attempts to derive the phonemic inventory of proto-Berber were very Tuareg-influenced, due to the perception of it being particularly archaic.Vowels
Christopher EhretChristopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret , a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a writer on African history and African historical linguistics, particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record...
reconstructs Proto-Berber as having a 5-vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
system, with /a/, /i/, /u/, short /ă/, and /ə/, while Allati gives /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ and /o/. The following table shows a third variant, a 3-vowel system with additional vowel quantity.
| *PB | Zenaga | Tuareg / Ghadamsi | Others |
|---|---|---|---|
| *a | a | ɐ | Ø |
| *i,*u | i,u | ə | Ø |
| *aa | a | a | a |
| *ii | i | i | i |
| *uu | u | u | u |
Consonants
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Dental | Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain | Pharyngealized | Plain | Labialized | |||||||
| Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
Voiceless Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate... |
t | c | k | ʔ | |||||
| Voiced Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate... |
b | d | dˤ | ɟ | g | |||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
Voiceless Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate... |
f | s | x | h | |||||
| Voiced Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate... |
β | z | zˤ | γ | ||||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ||||||||
| Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular.... |
r | |||||||||
| Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth.... |
l | |||||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
j | w | ||||||||
Most Berber consonants have a homorganic
Homorganic consonants
Homorganic consonants is a phonetics term for consonant sounds which are articulated in the same position or place of articulation in the mouth, such as , or...
tense
Tenseness
In phonology, tenseness is a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. It has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in consonants. Unlike most distinctive features, the feature [tense] can be interpreted only relatively, that is, in...
counterpart, with the exception of these pairs: dˤ~tˤtˤ, w~ggw, γ~qq.
The consonants *j and *g have remained distinct in some Zenati languages
Zenati languages
The Zenati languages, named after the medieval Zenata tribe, are a subgroup of the Northern Berber language family, spoken in North Africa, proposed in Destaing They are distributed across the central Maghreb, from northeastern Morocco to just west of Algiers, and the northern Sahara, from...
:
| PB | Tam. | Ghad. Ghadamès language Ghadamès is a language spoken mainly by some Libyan Berbers. It is spoken in Ghadames, a small oasis town near the Libyan border with Algeria and Tunisia. It is spoken by 2,000 people in Libya, and 2,000 elsewhere. It has two dialects, Ayt Waziten and Elt Ulid.... | Rif Rif languages According to the Ethnologue, the Rif languages are a genetic subgroup of the Zenati languages including two languages and dialects spoken in the Rif area of Morocco. Other sources regard Senhaja de Srair as non-Zenati, and thus see "Rif languages" as an areal rather than genetic grouping:*Senhaja... | Chen. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| *j | g | ɟ | ʒ | ʒ |
| *g | g | ɟ | y | g |
Eastern Berber languages
Eastern Berber languages
The Eastern Berber languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic family and are spoken in Libya and Egypt. They include Awjila, Sokna and Fezzan , Siwi, and Ghadamès. Kossmann divides them into two groups:...
: → tˤ
Proto-Berber *-əβ has become -i in Zenati. For example, *arəβ "write" becomes ari. (This change also occurs in varieties including the Central Atlas Tamazight dialect of the Izayan
Zayanes
Zayanes are a Berber people in the Khenifra region in the central Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco....
, Nafusi, and Siwi
Siwi language
Siwi is a Berber language of Egypt, spoken by about 15,000 to 30,000 people in the oases of Siwa and Gara, near the Libyan border. The language has been heavily influenced by Egyptian Arabic, to a greater degree than most Berber languages...
.)
Proto-Berber palatal stops c and ɟ, corresponding to k and g in non-Zenati varieties, become š and ž in Zenati (although a fair number of irregular correspondences for this are found). For example, căm "you (f. sg.)" becomes šəm. (This change also occurs in Nafusi and Siwi.)
Ghadamès
Ghadamès language
Ghadamès is a language spoken mainly by some Libyan Berbers. It is spoken in Ghadames, a small oasis town near the Libyan border with Algeria and Tunisia. It is spoken by 2,000 people in Libya, and 2,000 elsewhere. It has two dialects, Ayt Waziten and Elt Ulid....
and Awjila are the only Berber languages to preserve proto-Berber *β as β; elsewhere in Berber it becomes h or disappears.