Afro-Asiatic languages Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia. Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Hamito-Semitic" (deprecated), "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972), "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966.)The following language subfamilies are included:
- Berber languages
- Chadic languages
- Egyptian languages
- Semitic languages
- Cushitic languages
- Beja language (subclassification controversial; widely classified as part of Cushitic)
- Omotic languages (controversial; sometimes argued to be outside Afro-Asiatic)
It is not generally agreed on where Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken; Africa (eg Igor Diakonoff, Lionel Bender) has often been suggested, particularly Ethiopia based on the high diversity of its Afro-Asiatic languages, but the western Red Sea coast and the Sahara have also been put forward (eg Christopher Ehret.) Alexander Militarev suggests that their homeland was in the Levant (specifically, he identifies them with the Natufian culture.)
The Semitic languages are the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily based outside of Africa; however, in historical or near-historical times, some Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Ethiopia, so some modern Ethiopian languages (such as Amharic) are Semitic rather than belonging to the substrate Cushitic or Omotic groups. (A minority of academics, eg A. Murtonen (1967), dispute this view, suggesting that Semitic may have originated in Ethiopia.)
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2 Classification history 3 Sources |
Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages include:
Common features and cognates
Some cognates are:
In the verbal system, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (including Beja) all provide evidence for a prefix conjugation:
| English | Arabic (Semitic) | Kabyle (Berber) | Saho (Cushitic; verb is "kill") | Beja (verb is "arrive") |
| he dies | yamuutu | yemmut | yagdifé | iktim |
| she dies | tamuutu | temmut | yagdifé | tiktim |
| they (m.) die | yamuutuuna | mmuten | yagdifín | iktimna |
| you (m. sg.) die | tamuutu | temmuteḍ | tagdifé | tiktima |
| you (m. pl.) die | tamuutuuna | temmutem | tagdifín | tiktimna |
| I die | ˀamuutu | mmuteγ | agdifé | aktim |
| we die | namuutu | nemmut | nagdifé | niktim |
A causative affix s is widespread (found in all its subfamilies), but is also found in other groups, such as the Niger-Congo languages.
The possessive pronoun suffixes are supported by Semitic, Berber, Cushitic (including Beja), and Chadic.
Medieval scholars sometimes linked two or more branches of Afro-Asiatic together; already in the 9th century, the Hebrew grammarian Judah ibn Quraysh of Tiaret, Algeria perceived a relationship between Berber and Semitic (the latter being known to him through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.)
In the 1800's, Europeans began suggesting such relationships; thus in 1844 Th. Benfey suggested a language family containg 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. The traditional "Hamito-Semitic" family was named by Friedrich Müller in 1876 in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and defined as consisting of a Semitic group opposed to a "Hamitic" group containing Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; the Chadic group was not included. This classification was partly based on non-linguistic anthropological and racial arguments.
Leo Reinisch (1909) proposed to link Cushitic and Chadic, while urging a more distant affinity with Egyptian and Semitic, thus foreshadowing Greenberg; but his suggestion was largely ignored. Marcel Cohen (1947) rejected the idea of a distinct "Hamitic" subgroup, and included Hausa (a Chadic language) in his comparative Hamito-Semitic vocabulary. Joseph H. Greenberg (1950) strongly confirmed Cohen's rejection of "Hamitic", added (and sub-classified) the Chadic languages, and proposed the new name Afro-Asiatic for the family; his classification of it came to be almost universally accepted. In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed the recognition of Omotic as a fifth branch, rather than (as previously believed) a subgroup of Cushitic, and this has become generally accepted. Several scholars, including Harold Fleming and Robert Hetzron, have since questioned the traditional inclusion of Beja in Cushitic, but this view has yet to gain general acceptance.
There is little agreement on the subclassification of the five or six branches mentioned; however, Christopher Ehret (1979), Harold Fleming (1981), and Joseph H. Greenberg (1981) all agree that Omotic was the first branch to split from the rest. 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 rejecting the inclusion of Omotic; Fleming grouped together Beja, Chadic, Berber, and Egyptian against Cushitic and Semitic; and Lionel Bender (1997) advocates a "Macro-Cushitic" consisting of Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic, while regarding Chadic and Omotic as the most remote from the other branches. Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova (1995) group Berber with Semitic, Chadic with Egyptian, and split Cushitic into five or more independent subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic, seeing it as a Sprachbund rather than a valid subfamily. Alexander Militarev (2000), on the basis of lexicostatistics, groups Berber with Chadic and both, more distantly, with Semitic, as against Cushitic and Omotic.
Some of the main sources for Afroasiatic etymologies include:
Classification history
Sources
See also:
African Languages
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