Afro-Asiatic languages

The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Hamito-Semitic" (deprecated), "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972), "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966).

The family includes the following language subfamilies:

Berber languages
Chadic languages
Egyptian languages
Semitic languages
Cushitic languages
Beja language (subclassification controversial; widely classified as part of Cushitic)
Omotic languages

Many people regard the Ongota language 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.^*

No agreement exists on where Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers lived, though it is generally believed to have originated in Northeast Africa^*." target="_blank" >Some scholars (such as Igor Diakonoff and Lionel Bender, for example) 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 tell-tale sign for a linguistic geographic origin. Other researchers (such as Christopher Ehret, for example) 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.[http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1680c

The Semitic languages form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily based outside of Africa. Some scholars believe that, in historical or near-historical times, Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Ethiopia and Eritrea, while others, such as A. Murtonen , dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia.

Tonal languages appear in the Omotic, Chadic, and South and East Cushitic branches of Afro-Asiatic, according to Ehret (1996). The Semitic, Berber and Egyptian branches do not use tones phonemically.

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,
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.

Some cognates include:

b-n- "build" (Ehret: *bĭn), attested in Chadic, Semitic (*bny), Cushitic (*mĭn/*măn "house") and Omotic (Dime bin- "build, create");
m-t "die" (Ehret: *maaw), attested in Chadic (e.g. Hausa mutu), Egyptian (mwt, 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.)
s-n "know", attested in Chadic, Berber, and Egyptian;
l-s "tongue" (Ehret: *lis' "to lick"), attested in Semitic (*lasaan/lisaan), Egyptian (ns, Coptic las), Berber (ils), Chadic (e.g. Hausa harshe), and possibly Omotic (Dime lits'- "lick");
s-m "name" (Ehret: *sŭm / *sĭm), attested in Semitic (*sm), Berber (ism), Chadic (e.g. 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".

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

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 pronoun suffixes.

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 known to him through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic).

In the course of the 19th century Europeans also began suggesting such relationships; thus in 1844 Th. Benfey suggested a language family containing 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, and 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 also Hamitic hypothesis.)

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 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 Afro-Asiatic for the family; almost all scholars 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, and this has met with general acceptance. 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.

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 to 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;
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.

Etymological bibliography

Some of the main sources for Afro-Asiatic 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. ISBN 9004100512. ^*

Sources

Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, African Languages, Cambridge University Press, 2000 - Chapter 4
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
Russell G. Schuh, Chadic Overview.
African Language History (pdf), Roger Blench

External links

NACAL The North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, now in its 35th year.
A comparison of Orel-Stolbova's and Ehret's Afro-Asiatic reconstructions
The Origins of Afroasiatic by Paul Newman (Requires Science Magazine subscription)

family tree at ethnologue.com