126-601: Parkwa (Parəkwa), also Podoko , is an Afro-Asiatic language of Cameroon. The Parekwa traditionally inhabit the Parekwa massifs, located to the west and southwest of Mora, Cameroon , in the cantons of Gouvaka, Godigong, and Oudjila ( Mora commune, Mayo-Sava department, Far North Region). However, like all the ethnic groups of the Mandara Mountains , the Parekwa have spread widely to the surrounding plains and towns. They number about 30,000 speakers. This article about
252-641: A Biu-Mandara language is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Afro-Asiatic language The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic , sometimes Afrasian ), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic , are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia , North Africa , the Horn of Africa , and parts of the Sahara and Sahel . Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting
378-486: A pitch accent . At present, there is no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic grammar, syntax, or morphology, nor one for any of the sub-branches besides Egyptian. This means that it is difficult to know which features in Afroasiatic languages are retentions, and which are innovations. Moreover, all Afroasiatic languages have long been in contact with other language families and with each other, leading to
504-559: A where the other languages also have a , and French k occurs elsewhere, the difference is caused by different environments (being before a conditions the change), and the sets are complementary. They can, therefore, be assumed to reflect a single proto-phoneme (in this case *k , spelled ⟨c⟩ in Latin ). The original Latin words are corpus , crudus , catena and captiare , all with an initial k . If more evidence along those lines were given, one might conclude that an alteration of
630-480: A "regular correspondence" between k in Hawaiian and t in the other Polynesian languages. Similarly, a regular correspondence can be seen between Hawaiian and Rapanui h , Tongan and Samoan f , Maori ɸ , and Rarotongan ʔ . Mere phonetic similarity, as between English day and Latin dies (both with the same meaning), has no probative value. English initial d- does not regularly match Latin d- since
756-509: A Cushitic-Omotic group. Additionally, the minority of scholars who favor an Asian origin of Afroasiatic tend to place Semitic as the first branch to split off. Disagreement on which features are innovative and which are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic produces radically different trees, as can be seen by comparing the trees produced by Ehret and Igor Diakonoff . Responding to the above, Tom Güldemann criticizes attempts at finding subgroupings based on common or lacking morphology by arguing that
882-455: A branch of Afroasiatic persisted as late as the 1980s. In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that a group of languages classified by Greenberg as Cushitic were in fact their own independent "Omotic" branch—a proposal that has been widely, if not universally, accepted. These six branches now constitute an academic consensus on the genetic structure of the family. Greenberg relied on his own method of mass comparison of vocabulary items rather than
1008-431: A different cluster must be reconstructed for each set. His reconstructions were, respectively, *hk , *xk , *čk (= [t͡ʃk] ), *šk (= [ʃk] ), and çk (in which ' x ' and ' ç ' are arbitrary symbols, rather than attempts to guess the phonetic value of the proto-phonemes). Typology assists in deciding what reconstruction best fits the data. For example, the voicing of voiceless stops between vowels
1134-417: A large set of English and Latin non-borrowed cognates cannot be assembled such that English d repeatedly and consistently corresponds to Latin d at the beginning of a word, and whatever sporadic matches can be observed are due either to chance (as in the above example) or to borrowing (for example, Latin diabolus and English devil , both ultimately of Greek origin ). However, English and Latin exhibit
1260-406: A linguist might attempt to investigate the possibilities that either what was earlier reconstructed as *b is in fact *m or that the *n and *ŋ are in fact *d and *g . Even a symmetrical system can be typologically suspicious. For example, here is the traditional Proto-Indo-European stop inventory: An earlier voiceless aspirated row was removed on grounds of insufficient evidence. Since
1386-422: A majority of scholars: There is no agreement on the relationships between and subgrouping of the different Afroasiatic branches. Whereas Marcel Cohen (1947) claimed he saw no evidence for internal subgroupings, numerous other scholars have made proposals, with Carsten Peust counting 27 as of 2012. Common trends in proposals as of 2019 include using common or lacking grammatical features to argue that Omotic
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#17328553558351512-491: A non-distinctive quality of both. That example of the application of linguistic typology to linguistic reconstruction has become known as the glottalic theory . It has a large number of proponents but is not generally accepted. The reconstruction of proto-sounds logically precedes the reconstruction of grammatical morphemes (word-forming affixes and inflectional endings), patterns of declension and conjugation and so on. The full reconstruction of an unrecorded protolanguage
1638-406: A noun or a verb, there is evidence for the existence of distinct noun and verb roots, which behave in different ways. As part of these templates, the alternation ( apophony ) between high vowels (e.g. i, u) and a low vowel (a) in verbal forms is usually described as one of the main characteristics of AA languages: this change codes a variety of different functions. It is unclear whether this system
1764-593: A prefix m- which creates nouns from verbs, evidence for alternations between the vowel "a" and a high vowel in the forms of the verb, similar methods of marking gender and plurality, and some details of phonology such as the presence of pharyngeal fricatives . Other features found in multiple branches include a specialized verb conjugation using suffixes (Egyptian, Semitic, Berber), a specialized verb conjugation using prefixes (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), verbal prefixes deriving middle (t-), causative (s-), and passive (m-) verb forms (Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic), and
1890-408: A regular correspondence of t- : d- (in which "A : B" means "A corresponds to B"), as in the following examples: If there are many regular correspondence sets of this kind (the more, the better), a common origin becomes a virtual certainty, particularly if some of the correspondences are non-trivial or unusual. During the late 18th to late 19th century, two major developments improved
2016-407: A rigorous methodology for historical linguistic comparisons and proposed the existence of an Indo-European proto-language, which he called "Scythian", unrelated to Hebrew but ancestral to Germanic, Greek, Romance, Persian, Sanskrit, Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. The Scythian theory was further developed by Andreas Jäger (1686) and William Wotton (1713), who made early forays to reconstruct
2142-406: A shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language. Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to fill in gaps in
2268-557: A single language family, and in 1876 Friedrich Müller first described them as a "Hamito-Semitic" language family. Müller assumed that there existed a distinct "Hamitic" branch of the family that consisted of Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic. He did not include the Chadic languages, though contemporary Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius argued for the relation of Hausa to the Berber languages. Some scholars would continue to regard Hausa as related to
2394-586: A single language with multiple dialects. Other scholars, however, argue that they are a group of around twelve languages, about as different from each other as the Romance or Germanic languages. In the past, Berber languages were spoken throughout North Africa except in Egypt; since the 7th century CE, however, they have been heavily affected by Arabic and have been replaced by it in many places. There are two extinct languages potentially related to modern Berber. The first
2520-415: A single original phoneme : "some sound changes, particularly conditioned sound changes, can result in a proto-sound being associated with more than one correspondence set". For example, the following potential cognate list can be established for Romance languages , which descend from Latin : They evidence two correspondence sets, k : k and k : ʃ : Since French ʃ occurs only before
2646-413: A single parent language called the ' proto-language '. A sequence of regular sound changes (along with their underlying sound laws) can then be postulated to explain the correspondences between the attested forms, which eventually allows for the reconstruction of a proto-language by the methodical comparison of "linguistic facts" within a generalized system of correspondences. Every linguistic fact
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#17328553558352772-405: A spread of migrating farmers into Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures. Ehret, in a separate publication, argued that the two principles in linguistic approaches for determining the origin of languages which are the principles of fewest moves and greatest diversity had put “beyond reasonable doubt” that the language family “had originated in
2898-502: A subgroup of Indo-European that Russian does not belong to, the Germanic languages . The division of related languages into subgroups is accomplished by finding shared linguistic innovations that differentiate them from the parent language. For instance, English and German both exhibit the effects of a collection of sound changes known as Grimm's Law , which Russian was not affected by. The fact that English and German share this innovation
3024-411: A suffix used to derive adjectives (Egyptian, Semitic). In current scholarship, the most common names for the family are Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic ), Hamito-Semitic , and Semito-Hamitic . Other proposed names that have yet to find widespread acceptance include Erythraic / Erythraean , Lisramic , Noahitic , and Lamekhite . Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic to describe
3150-497: A syllable to begin with a vowel; however, in many Chadic languages verbs must begin with a consonant. In Cushitic and Chadic languages, a glottal stop or glottal fricative may be inserted to prevent a word from beginning with a vowel. Typically, syllables begin with only a single consonant. Diakonoff argues that proto-Afroasiatic did not have consonant clusters within a syllable. With the exception of some Chadic languages, all Afroasiatic languages allow both open syllables (ending in
3276-518: A vowel) and closed syllables (ending in a consonant); many Chadic languages do not allow a syllable to end in a consonant. Most words end in a vowel in Omotic and Cushitic, making syllable-final consonant clusters rare. Syllable weight plays an important role in AA, especially in Chadic; it can affect the form of affixes attached to a word. Several Afroasiatic languages have large consonant inventories, and it
3402-501: Is Afroasiatic at all, due its lack of several typical aspects of Afroasiatic morphology. There are between 40 and 80 languages in the Semitic family. Today, Semitic languages are spoken across North Africa, West Asia, and the Horn of Africa, as well as on the island of Malta, making them the sole Afroasiatic branch with members originating outside Africa. Arabic, spoken in both Asia and Africa,
3528-413: Is a common AA trait; 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. Comparative method In linguistics , the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from
3654-481: Is a consonantal structure into which various vocalic "templates" are placed. This structure is particularly visible in the verbs, and is particularly noticeable in Semitic. Besides for Semitic, vocalic templates are well attested for Cushitic and Berber, where, along with Chadic, it is less productive; it is absent in Omotic. For Egyptian, evidence for the root-and-template structure exists from Coptic. In Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, verbs have no inherent vowels at all;
3780-405: Is a large variety of vocalic systems in AA, and attempts to reconstruct the vocalic system of Proto-Afroasiatic vary considerably. All branches of Afroasiatic have a limited number of underlying vowels (between two and seven), but the number of phonetic vowels can be much larger. The quality of the underlying vowels varies considerably by language; the most common vowel throughout AA is schwa . In
3906-481: Is against two different labial consonants (other than w ) occurring together in a root, a constraint which can be found in all branches but Omotic. Another widespread constraint is against two non-identical lateral obstruents , which can be found in Egyptian, Chadic, Semitic, and probably Cushitic. Such rules do not always apply for nouns, numerals, or denominal verbs , and do not affect prefixes or suffixes added to
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4032-501: Is attested in Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic: it usually affects features such as pharyngealization, palatalization , and labialization . Several Omotic languages have " sibilant harmony", meaning that all sibilants (s, sh, z, ts, etc.) in a word must match. Restrictions against the co-occurrence of certain, usually similar, consonants in verbal roots can be found in all Afroasiatic branches, though they are only weakly attested in Chadic and Omotic. The most widespread constraint
4158-458: Is based on their concepts of how to proceed. This step involves making lists of words that are likely cognates among the languages being compared. If there is a regularly-recurring match between the phonetic structure of basic words with similar meanings, a genetic kinship can probably then be established. For example, linguists looking at the Polynesian family might come up with a list similar to
4284-477: Is by far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language today, with around 300 million native speakers, while the Ethiopian Amharic language has around 25 million; collectively, Semitic is the largest branch of Afroasiatic by number of current speakers. Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language, and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic,
4410-700: Is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. Other major Afroasiatic languages include the Cushitic Oromo language with 45 million native speakers, Chadic Hausa language with over 34 million, the Semitic Amharic language with 25 million, and the Cushitic Somali language with 15 million. Other Afroasiatic languages with millions of native speakers include
4536-417: Is common, but the devoicing of voiced stops in that environment is rare. If a correspondence -t- : -d- between vowels is found in two languages, the proto- phoneme is more likely to be *-t- , with a development to the voiced form in the second language. The opposite reconstruction would represent a rare type. However, unusual sound changes occur. The Proto-Indo-European word for two , for example,
4662-497: Is defined as transmission across the generations: children learn a language from the parents' generation and, after being influenced by their peers, transmit it to the next generation, and so on. For example, a continuous chain of speakers across the centuries links Vulgar Latin to all of its modern descendants. Two languages are genetically related if they descended from the same ancestor language . For example, Italian and French both come from Latin and therefore belong to
4788-423: Is difficult. While Greenberg ultimately popularized the name "Afroasiatic" in 1960, it appears to have been coined originally by Maurice Delafosse , as French afroasiatique , in 1914. The name refers to the fact that it is the only major language family with large populations in both Africa and Asia. Due to concerns that "Afroasiatic" could imply the inclusion of all languages spoken across Africa and Asia,
4914-428: Is first attested in writing around 3000 BCE and finally went extinct around 1300 CE, making it the language with the longest written history in the world. Egyptian is usually divided into two major periods, Earlier Egyptian (c. 3000–1300 BCE), which is further subdivided into Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian, and Later Egyptian (1300 BCE-1300 CE), which is further subdivided into Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Coptic
5040-620: Is included, spoken around the Horn of Africa and in Sudan and Tanzania. The Cushitic family is traditionally split into four branches: the single language of Beja (c. 3 million speakers), the Agaw languages, Eastern Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic. Only one Cushitic language, Oromo , has more than 25 million speakers; other languages with more than a million speakers include Somali , Afar , Hadiyya , and Sidaama . Many Cushitic languages have relatively few speakers. Cushitic does not appear to be related to
5166-523: Is likely that this is inherited from proto-Afroasiatic. All Afroasiatic languages contain stops and fricatives ; some branches have additional types of consonants such as affricates and lateral consonants . AA languages tend to have pharyngeal fricative consonants, with Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic sharing ħ and ʕ . In all AA languages, consonants can be bilabial , alveolar , velar , and glottal , with additional places of articulation found in some branches or languages. Additionally,
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5292-417: Is no consensus among historical linguists as to precisely where or when the common ancestor of all Afroasiatic languages, known as Proto-Afroasiatic , was originally spoken. However, most agree that the Afroasiatic homeland was located somewhere in northeastern Africa, with specific proposals including the Horn of Africa, Egypt, and the eastern Sahara. A significant minority of scholars argues for an origin in
5418-481: Is no information on whether Egyptian had tones. In contemporary Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, tone is primarily a grammatical feature: it encodes various grammatical functions, only differentiating lexical roots in a few cases. In some Chadic and some Omotic languages every syllable has to have a tone, whereas in most Cushitic languages this is not the case. Some scholars postulate that Proto-Afroasiatic may have had tone, while others believe it arose later from
5544-485: Is not considered "related" to Arabic. However, it is possible for languages to have different degrees of relatedness. English , for example, is related to both German and Russian but is more closely related to the former than to the latter. Although all three languages share a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European , English and German also share a more recent common ancestor, Proto-Germanic , but Russian does not. Therefore, English and German are considered to belong to
5670-436: Is not the academic consensus. M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli write that there are about 400 languages in Afroasiatic; Ethnologue lists 375 languages. Many scholars estimate fewer languages; exact numbers vary depending on the definitions of " language " and " dialect ". The Berber (or Libyco-Berber) languages are spoken today by perhaps 16 million people. They are often considered to constitute
5796-529: Is now classified as a Canaanite language , while the Elamites are ascribed to Shem despite their language being totally unrelated to Hebrew. The term Semitic for the Semitic languages had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer , following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710. Hamitic was first used by Ernest Renan in 1855 to refer to languages that appeared similar to
5922-420: Is part of a whole in which everything is connected to everything else. One detail must not be linked to another detail, but one linguistic system to another. Relation is considered to be "established beyond a reasonable doubt" if a reconstruction of the common ancestor is feasible. The ultimate proof of genetic relationship, and to many linguists' minds the only real proof, lies in a successful reconstruction of
6048-601: Is presented as the common progenitor of various people groups deemed to be closely related: among others Shem was the father of the Jews , Assyrians , and Arameans , while Ham was the father of the Egyptians and Cushites . This genealogy does not reflect the actual origins of these peoples' languages: for example, the Canaanites are descendants of Ham according to the Table, even though Hebrew
6174-702: Is reconstructed as *dwō , which is reflected in Classical Armenian as erku . Several other cognates demonstrate a regular change *dw- → erk- in Armenian. Similarly, in Bearlake, a dialect of the Athabaskan language of Slavey , there has been a sound change of Proto-Athabaskan *ts → Bearlake kʷ . It is very unlikely that *dw- changed directly into erk- and *ts into kʷ , but they probably instead went through several intermediate steps before they arrived at
6300-419: Is seen as evidence of English and German's more recent common ancestor—since the innovation actually took place within that common ancestor, before English and German diverged into separate languages. On the other hand, shared retentions from the parent language are not sufficient evidence of a sub-group. For example, German and Russian both retain from Proto-Indo-European a contrast between the dative case and
6426-529: Is still frequently used in the scholarship of various other languages, such as German. Several issues with the label Hamito-Semitic have led many scholars to abandon the term and criticize its continued use. One common objection is that the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests that a monophyletic "Hamitic" branch exists alongside Semitic. In addition, Joseph Greenberg has argued that Hamitic possesses racial connotations , and that "Hamito-Semitic" overstates
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#17328553558356552-694: 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. The second is the Guanche language , which was formerly spoken on the Canary Islands and went extinct in the 17th century CE. The first longer written examples of modern Berber varieties only date from the 16th or 17th centuries CE. Chadic languages number between 150 and 190, making Chadic
6678-487: Is the lack of agreement on the subgroupings of Afroasiatic (see Further subdivisions ) – this makes associating archaeological evidence with the spread of Afroasiatic particularly difficult. Nevertheless, there is a long-accepted link between the speakers of Proto- Southern Cushitic languages and the East African Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (5,000 years ago), and archaeological evidence associates
6804-511: Is the only stage written alphabetically to show vowels, whereas Egyptian was previously written in Egyptian hieroglyphs , which only represent consonants. In the Coptic period, there is evidence for six major dialects, which presumably existed previously but are obscured by pre-Coptic writing; additionally, Middle Egyptian appears to be based on a different dialect than Old Egyptian, which in turn shows dialectal similarities to Late Egyptian. Egyptian
6930-461: Is to use a computational methodology such as lexicostatistics , with one of the earliest attempts being Fleming 1983. This is also the method used by Alexander Militarev and Sergei Starostin to create a family tree. Fleming (2006) was a more recent attempt by Fleming, with a different result from Militarev and Starostin. Hezekiah Bacovcin and David Wilson argue that this methodology is invalid for discerning linguistic sub-relationship. They note
7056-557: The Gothick and the Celtick , though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. The comparative method developed out of attempts to reconstruct the proto-language mentioned by Jones, which he did not name but subsequent linguists have labelled Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The first professional comparison between
7182-531: The Indo-European languages that were then known was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1816. He did not attempt a reconstruction but demonstrated that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit shared a common structure and a common lexicon. In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel first stated the importance of using the eldest possible form of a language when trying to prove its relationships; in 1818, Rasmus Christian Rask developed
7308-453: The Latin , and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both
7434-501: The Levant . The reconstructed timelines of when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary extensively, with dates ranging from 18,000 BC to 8,000 BC. Even the latest plausible dating makes Afroasiatic the oldest language family accepted by contemporary linguists. Comparative study of Afroasiatic is hindered by the massive disparities in textual attestation between its branches: while the Semitic and Egyptian branches are attested in writing as early as
7560-702: The Nilotic languages ; it is unclear whether the Dizoid group of Omotic languages belongs to the Northern or Southern group. The two Omotic languages with the most speakers are Wolaitta and Gamo-Gofa-Dawro , with about 1.2 million speakers each. A majority of specialists consider Omotic to constitute a sixth branch of Afroasiatic. Omotic was formerly considered part of the Cushitic branch; some scholars continue to consider it part of Cushitic. Other scholars have questioned whether it
7686-508: The Omotic languages to constitute a sixth branch. Due to the presumed distance of relationship between the various branches, many scholars prefer to refer to Afroasiatic as a "linguistic phylum" rather than a "language family". G.W. Tsereteli goes even further and outright doubts that the Afro-Asiatic languages are a genetic language family altogether, but are rather a sprachbund. However, this
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#17328553558357812-665: The Proto-Cushitic speakers with economic transformations in the Sahara dating c. 8,500 ago, as well as the speakers of the Proto-Zenati variety of the Berber languages with an expansion across the Maghreb in the 5th century CE. An origin somewhere on the African continent has broad scholarly support, and is seen as being well-supported by the linguistic data. Most scholars more narrowly place
7938-451: The accusative case , which English has lost. However, that similarity between German and Russian is not evidence that German is more closely related to Russian than to English but means only that the innovation in question, the loss of the accusative/dative distinction, happened more recently in English than the divergence of English from German. In classical antiquity , Romans were aware of
8064-410: The comparative method of demonstrating regular sound correspondences to establish the family. An alternative classification, based on the pronominal and conjugation systems, was proposed by A.N. Tucker in 1967. As of 2023, widely accepted sound correspondences between the different branches have not yet been firmly established. Nevertheless, morphological traits attributable to the proto-language and
8190-443: The fourth millennium BC , Berber, Cushitic, and Omotic languages were often not recorded until the 19th or 20th centuries. While systematic sound laws have not yet been established to explain the relationships between the various branches of Afroasiatic, the languages share a number of common features. One of the most important for establishing membership in the branch is a common set of pronouns. Other widely shared features include
8316-492: The glottal stop ( ʔ ) usually exists as a phoneme, and there tends to be no phonemic contrast between [p] and [f] or [b] and [v]. In Cushitic, the Ethiopian Semitic language Tigrinya , and some Chadic languages, there is no underlying phoneme [p] at all. Most, if not all branches of Afroasiatic distinguish between voiceless , voiced , and " emphatic " consonants. The emphatic consonants are typically formed deeper in
8442-404: The "Hamites", the originators of Hamitic languages, with (supposedly culturally superior) "Caucasians", who were assumed to have migrated into Africa and intermixed with indigenous "Negroid" Africans in ancient times. The "Hamitic theory" would serve as the basis for Carl Meinhof 's highly influential classification of African languages in his 1912 book Die Sprache der Hamiten . On one hand,
8568-652: The "Hamitic" classification was justified partially based on linguistic features: for example, Meinhof split the presently-understood Chadic family into "Hamito-Chadic", and an unrelated non-Hamitic "Chadic" based on which languages possessed grammatical gender. On the other hand, the classification also relied on non-linguistic anthropological and culturally contingent features, such as skin color, hair type, and lifestyle. Ultimately, Meinhof's classification of Hamitic proved to include languages from every presently-recognized language family within Africa. The first scholar to question
8694-458: The 9th or 10th century AD, Yehuda Ibn Quraysh compared the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic but attributed the resemblance to the Biblical story of Babel, with Abraham, Isaac and Joseph retaining Adam's language, with other languages at various removes becoming more altered from the original Hebrew. In publications of 1647 and 1654, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn first described
8820-514: The African branches of Afroasiatic are very diverse; this suggests the rapid spread of Semitic out of Africa. Proponents of an origin of Afroasiatic within Africa assume the proto-language to have been spoken by pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers , arguing that there is no evidence of words in Proto-Afroasiatic related to agriculture or animal husbandry. Christopher Ehret, S.O. Y. Keita, and Paul Newman also argue that archaeology does not support
8946-550: The Canaanite languages (including Hebrew), as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Ge'ez and Amharic. The classification within West Semitic remains contested. The only group with an African origin is Ethiopian Semitic. The oldest written attestations of Semitic languages come from Mesopotamia, Northern Syria, and Egypt and date as early as c. 3000 BCE. There are also other proposed branches, but none has so far convinced
9072-472: The Danish scholars Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) and Karl Verner (1846–1896), and the German scholar Jacob Grimm (1785–1863). The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto-language was August Schleicher (1821–1868) in his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen , originally published in 1861. Here is Schleicher's explanation of why he offered reconstructed forms: In
9198-423: The Horn of Africa”. A significant minority of scholars supports an Asian origin of Afroasiatic, most of whom are specialists in Semitic or Egyptian studies. The main proponent of an Asian origin is the linguist Alexander Militarev , who argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by early agriculturalists in the Levant and subsequently spread to Africa. Militarev associates the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic with
9324-529: The Levantine Post- Natufian Culture , arguing that the reconstructed lexicon of flora and fauna, as well as farming and pastoralist vocabulary indicates that Proto-AA must have been spoken in this area. Scholar Jared Diamond and archaeologist Peter Bellwood have taken up Militarev's arguments as part of their general argument that the spread of linguistic macrofamilies (such as Indo-European, Bantu, and Austro-Asiatic) can be associated with
9450-575: The Semitic Tigrinya and Modern Hebrew , the Cushitic Sidaama , and the Omotic Wolaitta language , though most languages within the family are much smaller in size. There are many well-attested Afroasiatic languages from antiquity that have since died or gone extinct , including Egyptian and the Semitic languages Akkadian , Biblical Hebrew , Phoenician , Amorite , and Ugaritic . There
9576-484: The Semitic languages, but were not themselves provably a part of the family. The belief in a connection between Africans and the Biblical Ham, which had existed at least as far back as Isidore of Seville in the 6th century AD, led scholars in the early 19th century to speak vaguely of "Hamian" or "Hamitish" languages. The term Hamito-Semitic has largely fallen out of favor among linguists writing in English, but
9702-443: The ancestral forms from which the semantically corresponding cognates can be derived. In some cases, this reconstruction can only be partial, generally because the compared languages are too scarcely attested, the temporal distance between them and their proto-language is too deep, or their internal evolution render many of the sound laws obscure to researchers. In such case, a relation is considered plausible, but uncertain. Descent
9828-580: The application of the comparative method to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European since Indo-European was then by far the most well-studied language family. Linguists working with other families soon followed suit, and the comparative method quickly became the established method for uncovering linguistic relationships. There is no fixed set of steps to be followed in the application of the comparative method, but some steps are suggested by Lyle Campbell and Terry Crowley , who are both authors of introductory texts in historical linguistics. This abbreviated summary
9954-611: The baselessness of the assumption that the non-Indian Indo-European languages were derived from Old-Indian ( Sanskrit ). The aim of the comparative method is to highlight and interpret systematic phonological and semantic correspondences between two or more attested languages . If those correspondences cannot be rationally explained as the result of linguistic universals or language contact ( borrowings , areal influence , etc.), and if they are sufficiently numerous, regular, and systematic that they cannot be dismissed as chance similarities , then it must be assumed that they descend from
10080-425: The centrality of the Semitic languages within the family. By contrast, Victor Porkhomovsky suggests that the label is simply an inherited convention, and doesn't imply a duality of Semitic and "Hamitic" any more than Indo-European implies a duality of Indic and "European". Because of its use by several important scholars and in the titles of significant works of scholarship, the total replacement of Hamito-Semitic
10206-475: The change, the accent shifted to initial position. Verner solved the puzzle by comparing the Germanic voicing pattern with Greek and Sanskrit accent patterns. This stage of the comparative method, therefore, involves examining the correspondence sets discovered in step 2 and seeing which of them apply only in certain contexts. If two (or more) sets apply in complementary distribution , they can be assumed to reflect
10332-470: The development *b → m would have to be assumed to have occurred only once. In the final step, the linguist checks to see how the proto- phonemes fit the known typological constraints . For example, a hypothetical system, has only one voiced stop , *b , and although it has an alveolar and a velar nasal , *n and *ŋ , there is no corresponding labial nasal . However, languages generally maintain symmetry in their phonemic inventories. In this case,
10458-618: The development of agriculture; they argue that there is clear archaeological support for farming spreading from the Levant into Africa via the Nile valley. Afroasiatic languages share a number of phonetic and phonological features. Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, Omotic, and most languages in the Semitic branch require every syllable to begin with a consonant (with the exception of some grammatical prefixes). Igor Diakonoff argues that this constraint goes back to Proto-Afroasiatic. Some Chadic languages allow
10584-446: The different languages, central vowels are often inserted to break up consonant clusters (a form of epenthesis ). Various Semitic, Cushitic, Berber, and Chadic languages, including Arabic, Amharic, Berber, Somali, and East Dangla, also exhibit various types of vowel harmony . The majority of AA languages are tonal languages : phonemic tonality is found in Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, but absent in Berber and Semitic. There
10710-487: The establishment of cognates throughout the family have confirmed its genetic validity . There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant is c. 4000 BCE , after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary. The estimations offered by scholars as to when Proto-Afroasiatic
10836-473: The evidence of other Indo-European languages . For instance, the Latin suffix que , "and", preserves the original *e vowel that caused the consonant shift in Sanskrit: Verner's Law , discovered by Karl Verner c. 1875, provides a similar case: the voicing of consonants in Germanic languages underwent a change that was determined by the position of the old Indo-European accent . Following
10962-426: The evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples. Likewise, no consensus exists as to where proto-Afroasiatic originated. Scholars have proposed locations for the Afroasiatic homeland across Africa and West Asia. Roger Blench writes that the debate possesses "a strong ideological flavor", with associations between an Asian origin and "high civilization". An additional complicating factor
11088-566: The existence of "Hamitic languages" was Marcel Cohen in 1924, with skepticism also expressed by A. Klingenheben and Dietrich Westermann during the 1920s and '30s. However, Meinhof's "Hamitic" classification remained prevalent throughout the early 20th century until it was definitively disproven by Joseph Greenberg in the 1940s, based on racial and anthropological data. Instead, Greenberg proposed an Afroasiatic family consisting of five branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic. Reluctance among some scholars to recognize Chadic as
11214-468: The family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1876). The variant Semito-Hamitic is mostly used in older Russian sources. The elements of the name were derived from the names of two sons of Noah as attested in the Book of Genesis 's Table of Nations passage: "Semitic" from the first-born Shem , and "Hamitic" from the second-born Ham (Genesis 5:32). Within the Table of Nations, each of Noah's sons
11340-509: The first sound-law based on comparative evidence showing that a phonological change in one phoneme could depend on other factors within the same word (such as neighbouring phonemes and the position of the accent ), which are now called conditioning environments . Similar discoveries made by the Junggrammatiker (usually translated as " Neogrammarians ") at the University of Leipzig in
11466-505: The following (their actual list would be much longer): Borrowings or false cognates can skew or obscure the correct data. For example, English taboo ( [tæbu] ) is like the six Polynesian forms because of borrowing from Tongan into English, not because of a genetic similarity. That problem can usually be overcome by using basic vocabulary, such as kinship terms, numbers, body parts and pronouns. Nonetheless, even basic vocabulary can be sometimes borrowed. Finnish , for example, borrowed
11592-463: The fourth-largest language family after Indo-European , Sino-Tibetan , and Niger–Congo . Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber , Chadic , Cushitic , Egyptian , Semitic , and Omotic . The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent , including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch. Arabic , if counted as a single language,
11718-505: The historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between languages. The comparative method emerged in the early 19th century with the birth of Indo-European studies , then took a definite scientific approach with the works of the Neogrammarians in the late 19th–early 20th century. Key contributions were made by
11844-436: The homeland near the geographic center of its present distribution, "in the southeastern Sahara or adjacent Horn of Africa." The Afroasiatic languages spoken in Africa are not more closely related to each other than they are to Semitic, as one would expect if only Semitic had remained in a West Asian homeland while all other branches had spread from there. Likewise, all Semitic languages are fairly similar to each other, whereas
11970-400: The languages and b in only one of them, if *b is reconstructed, it is necessary to assume five separate changes of *b → m , but if *m is reconstructed, it is necessary to assume only one change of *m → b and so *m would be most economical. That argument assumes the languages other than Arapaho to be at least partly independent of one another. If they all formed a common subgroup,
12096-874: The largest family in Afroasiatic by number of extant languages. The Chadic languages are typically divided into three major branches, East Chadic, Central Chadic, and West Chadic. Most Chadic languages are located in the Chad Basin , with the exception of Hausa . 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. It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers. Eight other Chadic languages have around 100,000 speakers; other Chadic languages often have few speakers and may be in danger of going extinct. Only about 40 Chadic languages have been fully described by linguists. There are about 30 Cushitic languages, more if Omotic
12222-453: The late 19th century led them to conclude that all sound changes were ultimately regular, resulting in the famous statement by Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff in 1878 that "sound laws have no exceptions". That idea is fundamental to the modern comparative method since it necessarily assumes regular correspondences between sounds in related languages and thus regular sound changes from the proto-language. The Neogrammarian hypothesis led to
12348-534: The later forms. It is not phonetic similarity that matters for the comparative method but rather regular sound correspondences. By the principle of economy , the reconstruction of a proto-phoneme should require as few sound changes as possible to arrive at the modern reflexes in the daughter languages. For example, Algonquian languages exhibit the following correspondence set: The simplest reconstruction for this set would be either *m or *b . Both *m → b and *b → m are likely. Because m occurs in five of
12474-432: The method's effectiveness. First, it was found that many sound changes are conditioned by a specific context . For example, in both Greek and Sanskrit , an aspirated stop evolved into an unaspirated one, but only if a second aspirate occurred later in the same word; this is Grassmann's law , first described for Sanskrit by Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini and promulgated by Hermann Grassmann in 1863. Second, it
12600-598: The method's inability to detect various strong commonalities even between well-studied branches of AA. A relationship between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and the Berber languages was perceived as early as the 9th century CE by the Hebrew grammarian and physician Judah ibn Quraysh , who is regarded as a forerunner of Afroasiatic studies. The French orientalist Guillaume Postel had also pointed out similarities between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic in 1538, and Hiob Ludolf noted similarities also to Ge'ez and Amharic in 1701. This family
12726-627: The mid-20th century, a number of linguists have argued that this phonology is implausible and that it is extremely unlikely for a language to have a voiced aspirated ( breathy voice ) series without a corresponding voiceless aspirated series. Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov provided a potential solution and argued that the series that are traditionally reconstructed as plain voiced should be reconstructed as glottalized : either implosive (ɓ, ɗ, ɠ) or ejective (pʼ, tʼ, kʼ) . The plain voiceless and voiced aspirated series would thus be replaced by just voiceless and voiced, with aspiration being
12852-738: The name "Afrasian" ( Russian : afrazijskije ) was proposed by Igor Diakonoff in 1980. At present it predominantly sees use among Russian scholars. The names Lisramic —based on the Afroasiastic root *lis- ("tongue") and the Egyptian word rmṯ ("person")—and Erythraean —referring to the core area around which the languages are spoken, the Red Sea —have also been proposed. Scholars generally consider Afroasiatic to have between five and eight branches. The five that are universally agreed upon are Berber (also called "Libyco-Berber"), Chadic , Cushitic , Egyptian , and Semitic . Most specialists consider
12978-513: The original k took place because of a different environment. A more complex case involves consonant clusters in Proto-Algonquian . The Algonquianist Leonard Bloomfield used the reflexes of the clusters in four of the daughter languages to reconstruct the following correspondence sets: Although all five correspondence sets overlap with one another in various places, they are not in complementary distribution and so Bloomfield recognised that
13104-589: The other Afroasiatic languages, but the idea was controversial: many scholars refused to admit that the largely unwritten, " Negroid " Chadic languages were in the same family as the " Caucasian " ancient civilizations of the Egyptians and Semites. An important development in the history of Afroasiatic scholarship – and the history of African linguistics – was the creation of the " Hamitic theory " or "Hamitic hypothesis" by Lepsius, fellow Egyptologist Christian Bunsen , and linguist Christian Bleek . This theory connected
13230-435: The poor state of present documentation and understanding of particular language families (historically with Egyptian, presently with Omotic). Gene Gragg likewise argues that more needs to be known about Omotic still, and that Afroasiatic linguists have still not found convincing isoglosses on which to base genetic distinctions. One way of avoiding the problem of determining which features are original and which are inherited
13356-483: The possibility of widespread borrowing both within Afroasiatic and from unrelated languages. There are nevertheless a number of commonly observed features in Afroasiatic morphology and derivation, including the use of suffixes , infixes , vowel lengthening and shortening as a morphological change, as well as the use of tone changes to indicate morphology. Further commonalities and differences are explored in more detail below. A widely attested feature in AA languages
13482-420: The presence or absence of morphological features is not a useful way of discerning subgroupings in Afroasiatic, because it can not be excluded that families currently lacking certain features did not have them in the past; this also means that the presence of morphological features cannot be taken as defining a subgroup. Peust notes that other factors that can obscure genetic relationships between languages include
13608-499: The present work an attempt is made to set forth the inferred Indo-European original language side by side with its really existent derived languages. Besides the advantages offered by such a plan, in setting immediately before the eyes of the student the final results of the investigation in a more concrete form, and thereby rendering easier his insight into the nature of particular Indo-European languages , there is, I think, another of no less importance gained by it, namely that it shows
13734-516: The primitive common language. In 1710 and 1723, Lambert ten Kate first formulated the regularity of sound laws , introducing among others the term root vowel . Another early systematic attempt to prove the relationship between two languages on the basis of similarity of grammar and lexicon was made by the Hungarian János Sajnovics in 1770, when he attempted to demonstrate the relationship between Sami and Hungarian . That work
13860-523: The principle of regular sound-changes to explain his observations of similarities between individual words in the Germanic languages and their cognates in Greek and Latin. Jacob Grimm , better known for his Fairy Tales , used the comparative method in Deutsche Grammatik (published 1819–1837 in four volumes), which attempted to show the development of the Germanic languages from a common origin, which
13986-455: The regular sound-correspondences exhibited by the lists of potential cognates. For example, in the Polynesian data above, it is apparent that words that contain t in most of the languages listed have cognates in Hawaiian with k in the same position. That is visible in multiple cognate sets: the words glossed as 'one', 'three', 'man' and 'taboo' all show the relationship. The situation is called
14112-778: The root. Roots that may have contained sequences that were possible in Proto-Afroasiatic but are disallowed in the daughter languages are assumed to have undergone consonant dissimilation or assimilation . A set of constraints, developed originally by Joseph Greenberg on the basis of Arabic, has been claimed to be typical for Afroasiatic languages. 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 . He showed that, generally, any consonant from one of these groups could combine with consonants from any other group, but could not be used together with consonants from
14238-507: The same family, the Romance languages . Having a large component of vocabulary from a certain origin is not sufficient to establish relatedness; for example, heavy borrowing from Arabic into Persian has caused more of the vocabulary of Modern Persian to be from Arabic than from the direct ancestor of Persian, Proto-Indo-Iranian , but Persian remains a member of the Indo-Iranian family and
14364-551: The same group. Additionally, he showed that Proto-Semitic restricted a sequence of two identical consonants in the first and second position of the triliteral root. These rules also have a number of exceptions: Similar exceptions can be demonstrated for the other AA branches that have these restrictions to their root formation. 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. There
14490-503: The similarities between Greek and Latin, but did not study them systematically. They sometimes explained them mythologically, as the result of Rome being a Greek colony speaking a debased dialect. Even though grammarians of Antiquity had access to other languages around them ( Oscan , Umbrian , Etruscan , Gaulish , Egyptian , Parthian ...), they showed little interest in comparing, studying, or just documenting them. Comparison between languages really began after classical antiquity. In
14616-419: The throat than the others; they can be realized variously as glottalized , pharyngealized , uvularized , ejective , and/or implosive consonants in the different branches. It is generally agreed that only the obstruents had a contrast between voiceless and voiced forms in Proto-Afroasiatic, whereas continuants were voiceless. A form of long-distance consonant assimilation known as consonant harmony
14742-604: The vowels found in a given stem are dependent on the vocalic template. In Chadic, verb stems can include an inherent vowel as well. Most Semitic verbs are triliteral (have three consonants), whereas most Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic verbs are biliteral (having two consonants). The degree to which the Proto-AA verbal root was triliteral is debated. It may have originally been mostly biconsonantal, to which various affixes (such as verbal extensions ) were then added and lexicalized. Although any root could theoretically be used to create
14868-477: The word for "mother", äiti , from Proto-Germanic *aiþį̄ (compare to Gothic aiþei ). English borrowed the pronouns "they", "them", and "their(s)" from Norse . Thai and various other East Asian languages borrowed their numbers from Chinese . An extreme case is represented by Pirahã , a Muran language of South America, which has been controversially claimed to have borrowed all of its pronouns from Nheengatu . The next step involves determining
14994-429: The written ancient languages known from its area, Meroitic or Old Nubian . The oldest text in a Cushitic language probably dates from around 1770; written orthographies were only developed for a select number of Cushitic languages in the early 20th century. The Egyptian branch consists of a single language, Egyptian (often called "Ancient Egyptian"), which was historically spoken in the lower Nile Valley. Egyptian
15120-624: Was formally described and named "Semitic" by August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781. In 1844, Theodor Benfey first described the relationship between Semitic and the Egyptian language and connected both to the Berber and the Cushitic languages (which he called "Ethiopic"). In the same year T.N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and the Hausa language, an idea that was taken up by early scholars of Afroasiatic. In 1855, Ernst Renan named these languages, related to Semitic but not Semitic, "Hamitic," in 1860 Carl Lottner proposed that they belonged to
15246-467: Was found that sometimes sound changes occurred in contexts that were later lost. For instance, in Sanskrit velars ( k -like sounds) were replaced by palatals ( ch -like sounds) whenever the following vowel was *i or *e . Subsequent to this change, all instances of *e were replaced by a . The situation could be reconstructed only because the original distribution of e and a could be recovered from
15372-509: Was later extended to all Finno-Ugric languages in 1799 by his countryman Samuel Gyarmathi . However, the origin of modern historical linguistics is often traced back to Sir William Jones , an English philologist living in India , who in 1786 made his famous observation: The Sanscrit language , whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek , more copious than
15498-526: Was replaced by Arabic as the spoken language of Egypt, but Coptic continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church . The c. 30 Omotic languages are still mostly undescribed by linguists. They are all spoken in southwest Ethiopia except for the Ganza language , spoken in Sudan. Omotic is typically split into North Omotic (or Aroid) and South Omotic, with the latter more influenced by
15624-419: Was spoken vary widely, ranging from 18,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE. An estimate at the youngest end of this range still makes Afroasiatic the oldest proven language family. Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact , with
15750-618: Was the first language to branch off, often followed by Chadic. In contrast to scholars who argue for an early split of Chadic from Afroasiatic, scholars of the Russian school tend to argue that Chadic and Egyptian are closely related, and scholars who rely on percentage of shared lexicon often group Chadic with Berber. Three scholars who agree on an early split between Omotic and the other subbranches, but little else, are Harold Fleming (1983), Christopher Ehret (1995), and Lionel Bender (1997). In contrast, scholars relying on shared lexicon often produce
15876-401: Was the first systematic study of diachronic language change. Both Rask and Grimm were unable to explain apparent exceptions to the sound laws that they had discovered. Although Hermann Grassmann explained one of the anomalies with the publication of Grassmann's law in 1862, Karl Verner made a methodological breakthrough in 1875, when he identified a pattern now known as Verner's law ,
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