Afroasiatic languages

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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:

The Ongota language is considered to be Afro-Asiatic, but its classification within the family remains controversial (partly for lack of data.)

It is not generally agreed on where Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken; Africa (eg Diakonoff, 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 Ehret.) Alexander Militarev suggests that their homeland was in the Levant.

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.)

Common features and cognates

Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages include:

  • a two-gender system in the singular, with the feminine marked by the /t/ sound, and an epicene plural,
  • 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 prefixes and suffixes.

Some cognates are:

  • b-n- "build", attested in Chadic and Semitic;
  • m-t "die", attested in Chadic, Egyptian, and Semitic;
  • p-t-ḥ "open a door", attested in Egyptian and Semitic; and
  • s-n "know", attested in Chadic, Berber, and Egyptian.
  • l-s "tongue", attested in Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and Chadic
  • s-m "name", attested in Semitic, Berber, and Chadic

Classification history

The traditional "Hamito-Semitic" family was defined by Friedrich Müller in 1887 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. In his landmark classification of African languages, Joseph H. Greenberg (1950) rejected the idea of a "Hamitic" subgroup (as some, notably Marcel Cohen, had done previously), added Chadic, and proposed the new name Afro-Asiatic; 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 widely 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. Lionel Bender still considered it to group with Cushitic in 1981, but has since decided otherwise. 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; Fleming grouped together Beja, Chadic, Berber, and Egyptian against Cushitic and Semitic; and Bender formerly had a Northern branch (Berber, Egyptian, Semitic) opposed to three other branches: Chadic, Beja, and Cushitic+Omotic, and more recently (1997) advocates a "Macro-Cushitic" consisting of Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic, while regarding Chadic and Omotic as the most remote from the other branches. Orel and Stolbova (1995) opt for more rather than fewer branches, and split Cushitic into five or more independent subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic.

Some of the main sources for Afroasiatic etymologies include:

  • Marcel Cohen, Essai comparatif sur la 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

Sources

See also: African Languages

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