Afro-Asiatic languages

Afro-Asiatic
Geographic distribution:	Horn of Africa, North Africa, northern Central Africa, northern West Africa, Southwest Asia
Genetic classification:	One of the World's major language families
Subdivisions:	Egyptian Berber group Chadic group Cushitic group Omotic group Semitic group Birale (unclassified)
ISO 639-2:	`afa`
Distribution of Afro-Asiatic shown in yellow

The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, northern West Africa, northern Central Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic).

The term "Afroasiatic" was coined by Joseph Greenberg to replace the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic" (see The Languages of Africa). It is now most often spelled "Afro-Asiatic".

The family is sometimes called "Afrasian". Other names that have been given to it are "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966) and "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972).

The Afro-Asiatic language family includes the following subfamilies:

Berber
Chadic
Egyptian
Semitic
Cushitic
Omotic (sometimes classified as part of Cushitic)

Beja (subclassification controversial; widely classified as part of Cushitic)

Many people regard Ongota as Omotic, but its classification within the family remains controversial, partly for lack of data. Harold Fleming tentatively suggests treating it as an independent branch of non-Omotic Afro-Asiatic.[1]

1 Classification history
2 Position among the world's languages
3 Original homeland (Urheimat)
4 Common features
5 Cognates
6 See also
7 Etymological bibliography
8 References
9 Sources
10 External links

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. The latter group was known to him 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 languages, and proposed the new name "Afroasiatic" for the family. Almost all scholars have accepted his classification.

In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed the recognition of Omotic as a fifth branch, rather than, as previously believed, a subgroup of Cushitic. This proposal has met with general acceptance. Several scholars, including Fleming and Robert Hetzron, have since questioned the traditional inclusion of Beja in Cushitic, but this view has yet to gain general acceptance.

Little agreement exists on the sub-classification of the five or six branches mentioned. However, Christopher Ehret (1979), Harold Fleming (1981), and Joseph Greenberg (1981) all agree that the Omotic branch split from the rest first. Otherwise:

Ehret groups Egyptian, Berber, and Semitic together in a North Afro-Asiatic subgroup;
Paul Newman (1980) groups Berber with Chadic and Egyptian with Semitic, while questioning the inclusion of Omotic;
Harold Fleming (1981) divided non-Omotic Afroasiatic, or "Erythraean", into three groups, Cushitic, Semitic, and Chadic-Berber-Egyptian; he later added Semitic and Beja to the latter, and proposed Ongotá as a tentative new third branch of Erythraean;
Lionel Bender (1997) advocates a "Macro-Cushitic" consisting of Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic, while regarding Chadic and Omotic as the most remote branches;
Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova (1995) group Berber with Semitic, group Chadic with Egyptian, and split Cushitic into five or more independent branches of Afro-Asiatic, seeing Cushitic as a Sprachbund rather than a valid family;
Alexander Militarev (2000), on the basis of lexicostatistics, groups Berber with Chadic and both, more distantly, with Semitic, as against Cushitic and Omotic.

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 spoken outside of Africa.

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:

Hermann Möller (1906) argued for a relation between Hamito-Semitic (the term subsequently replaced by Afro-Asiatic) and the Indo-European languages. This proposal was accepted by some linguists (e.g. Holger Pedersen and Louis Hjelmslev) but has little currency today.

Apparently influenced by Möller (a colleague of his at the University of Copenhagen), Holger Pedersen included Hamito-Semitic in his proposed Nostratic language family (cf. Pedersen 1931), which also included the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, 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.^{[citation needed]}

Joseph Greenberg (2000, 2002) did not reject a possible relationship of Afro-Asiatic to these other languages, but he considered it far more distantly related to the other languages included in Nostratic than they were to each other, proposing instead to group these other languages into a separate language family, which he termed Eurasiatic.

Original homeland (Urheimat)

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^[1]^[2]. 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 (such as Alexander Militarev) suggest a linguistic homeland in the Levant (specifically, he identifies Afro-Asiatic with the Natufian culture), with Semitic being the only branch to stay put.^[3]

The Semitic languages form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily extant outside of Africa. Some scholars believe that, in historical or near-historical times, Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Eritrea, while others, such as A. Murtonen, dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia^[4]. 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 6,000-5,800 BCE, at the end of the pre-pottery neolithic (PPNB) phase in the Levant ^[5]. 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 shore of the Red Sea, and north eastwards around the edge of the "fertile crescent". In the Levant this development appears as the Minhata, and later Yarmoukian culture, which came from the same semi-arid zone as did the later Ghassulian and Semitic Amorites cultures^[6]^[7].

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.

Given the diversity that exists within the Afro-Asiatic group, and the lack of common vocabulary for agricultural items, it is suggested that the languages dispersed before the commencement of the Neolithic. 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- "receptical"; Oromo k'odaa "receptacle"; West Chadic *k'wad- "calabash"; Dangla koda "pot" gives Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k'ud-/*k'od- "Vessel, pot"^[8].

Ehret ^[9] suggests that early Afro-Asiatic languages were involved in the domestication of Ethiopian food crops, but this is disputed by others who suggest these words were found only in the Cushitic and possibly Omotic families, and common cognates for agriculture are not present. Given that wavy line pottery is found widely in the Sahara from 8,000 BCE^[10], and that the neolithic agriculture technologies arrived 5000 BCE^[11], 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, linguist Lionel Bender suggests that this area of the Southern Nile was the centre from which the Afro-Asiatic languages dispersed^[12]. The dates of pottery and agriculture set approximate early and late dates for this linguistic dispersal. 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"^[13]^[14].

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")
he dies	yamuutu	yemmut	wudimta	iktim
she dies	tamuutu	temmut	wedimata	tiktim
they (m.) die	yamuutuuna	mmuten	wedimtan	iktimna
you (m. sg.) die	tamuutu	temmuteḍ	wadimate	tiktima
you (m. pl.) die	tamuutuuna	temmutem	wadimatan	tiktimna
I die	ˀamuutu	mmuteɣ	wadimta	aktim
we die	namuutu	nemmut	wadimana	niktim

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.

Cognates

Some cognates of the Afro-Asiatic languages are:

b-n- "build" (Ehret: *bĭn), attested in Chadic, Semitic (*bny), Cushitic (*mĭn/*măn "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 similar to the PIE base *mor-/mr-. "die", evidence in favor of both the Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European language families' classification in the hypothetical Nostratic superfamily.) Also, Mot (Semitic god) of death.
s-n "know", attested in Chadic, Berber, and Egyptian.
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: *sŭm / *sĭm), 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".

Etymological bibliography

Some of the main sources for Afro-Asiatic etymologies include:

Marcel Cohen, Essai comparatif sur le vocabulaire et la phonétique du chamito-sémitique, Champion, Paris 1947.
Igor M. Diakonoff et al., "Historical-Comparative Vocabulary of Afrasian", St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies Nos. 2-6, 1993-7.
Christopher Ehret. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (University of California Publications in Linguistics 126), California, Berkeley 1996.
Vladimir E. Orel and Olga V. Stolbova, Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a Reconstruction, Brill, Leiden 1995. ISBN 90-04-10051-2. [2]

References

^ The Origins of Afroasiatic - Ehret et al. 306 (5702): 1680c - Science
^ http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0011-3204%28199802%2939%3A1%3C139%3ATALPAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J&size=LARGE
^ http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1680c
^ Fleming, Harold C. (1968), "Ethiopic Language History: Testing Linguistic Hypotheses in an Archaeological and Documentary Context" in Ethnohistory, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn), pp. 353-388
^ Midant-Reynes, Beatrix (2000), The Prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first Pharaohs (Blackwell) pp.73-75
^ Perrot J. (1964), "Les deux premieres campagnesde feuilles a Munhata" Syria XLI pp323-45
^ Mellaart, James (1975), The Neolithic of the Near East (London: Thames and Hudson), pp. 239-241
^ Bomhard, Alan R (1996), "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" (Signum)
^ Ehret, Christopher (1982), "On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia" Journal of African History (Uni of Calif. Berkeley Press)
^ Barnett, William & Hoopes, John (Eds.) (1995). The Emergence of Pottery. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
^ Midant-Reynes, Beatrix (2000), The Prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first Pharaohs (Blackwell)
^ Bender, Lionel (1997), "Upside Down Afrasian"Africanistiche Arbeitspapiers 50, pp19-34
^ Fagan, Brian (2004), The Long Hot Summer: how climate changed civilisation (London: Grant Books)
^ Burroughs, William J. (2005), Climate Change in Prehistory:the end of the reign of Chaos (Cambridge University Press)

Sources

Barnett, William & Hoopes, John (Eds.) (1995). The Emergence of Pottery. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, African Languages, Cambridge University Press, 2000 - Chapter 4
Huehnergard, John (2004)“Afro-Asiatic,” in Woodard R. D. (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, Cambridge-New York, 138-159
Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1991.
Lionel Bender et al., Selected Comparative-Historical Afro-Asiatic Studies in Memory of Igor M. Diakonoff, LINCOM 2003.
Ethnologue entry for Afro-Asiatic
Russell G. Schuh, Chadic Overview.
African Language History (pdf), Roger Blench
Carleton T. Hodge (ed.), Afroasiatic: a survey. The Hague - Paris: Mouton 1971.