Afro-Asiatic Research Articles

The Origins of Afroasiatic

In their Review “Farmers and their languages: the first expansions” (25 Apr. 2003, p. [597][1]), J. Diamond and P. Bellwood suggest that food production and the Afroasiatic language family were brought simultaneously from the Near East to Africa by demic diffusion, in other words, by a migration

Research in Afroasiatic Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Research in Afroasiatic grammar ed. by Jacqueline Lecarme, Jean Lowenstamm, Ur Shlonsky Andrew Nevins Research in Afroasiatic grammar. Ed. by Jacqueline Lecarme, Jean Lowenstamm, and Ur Shlonsky. (Current issues in linguistic theory 202.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 250. ISBN 1556199805. $114 (Hb). This is a collection of papers from the Third Conference on Afroasiatic Languages (Sophia Antipolis, France, 1996). Though the papers are sequenced alphabetically by author, in discussing their content, I group them here thematically. Four papers discuss subject placement in Semitic. In ‘On the status of AgrS in some null subject languages’, Ahmed Akkal and Abdel-kader Gonegai propose that preverbal subjects in Standard Arabic (SA) are topics, thematically connected to a resumptive pronoun, namely verbal agreement. Elabbas Benmamoun accounts for the lack of number agreement in VS order in SA in ‘Agreement asymmetries and the PF interface’. He proposes that after the verb and subject undergo PF merger, the number feature is spelled out only once (by the DP). In ‘Word order in Hebrew’, Edit Doron tackles the question of whether VS order in Hebrew is the result of a VSO syntax, with the verb in IP, or a V2 syntax. After noting that topicalization in an embedded clause blocks extraction from that clause, she convincingly argues that Modern Hebrew has only the V2 strategy. Ur Shlonsky argues for a split-CP analysis of the left periphery in SA. In ‘Remarks on the complementizer layer of Standard Arabic’, he distinguishes topicalization from focalization (through criteria of case, resumption, and specificity) and discusses the syntax of ForceP, ultimately arriving at an articulated cartography for A’ movement. Four papers focus on NP/DP structure. Miriam Engelhardt discusses argument-taking nominals in Hebrew in ‘Bare NPs’. She argues that activity-nominals lack a determiner, leading to their inability to host subjects, agreement, or definiteness. In ‘Wolof genitive constructions and the construct state’, Alain Kihm shows that Wolof possessives are head-initial and spread definiteness, suggesting affinities with the Semitic construct state and hence, parallel analyses. In ‘Possession in sentences and noun phrases’, Jamal Ouhalla argues that in Moroccan Arabic possessive NPs, the possessor binds a variable in the possessee, while in possessive sentences, predication takes place, suggesting a wholly different syntax for the two constructions. In the especially clear and intriguing ‘Nonnominal constructs’, Tal Siloni discusses adjectival and gerundive construct-states in Hebrew, arguing that the construct phenomenon is cross-categorial and depends not on [−definite], but on [−tense]. Six papers are on morphology and phonology. In ‘Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission’, Morris Halle illustrates two postsyntactic operations in Semitic: impoverishment, which deletes features from a terminal node, and fission, which creates a secondary position of exponence for the unrealized features of a single terminal. In ‘Distributing features and affixes in Arabic subject verb agreement paradigms’, Abdelkader Fassi Fehri argues against Halle’s analysis, proposing that the prefixal nature of person morphemes and suffixal nature of number/gender morphemes in the imperfect conjugation calls for a syntactic analysis in which person is an incorporated pronoun in MoodP. Ali Idrissi argues in ‘On Berber plurals’ that some Berber plurals (in particular, A-plurals, which involve internal modification) are not derived from the corresponding singulars; rather, both are derived from a common nominal base. Jean Lowenstamm, in ‘The no straddling effect and its interpretation: A formal property of Chaha 2nd feminine singular formation’, discusses the exponent of feminine in the imperative, a classic Gurage floating feature that either triggers palatalization or surfaces as /i/. Lowenstamm’s proposal is that it’s a suffix without templatic support, and its mobility is due to a constraint that a governing relation cannot straddle a stem-affix boundary. Gábor Takács performs thorough lexical comparison in ‘Recent problems of Egyptian historical phonology at the present stage of comparative-historical Afroasiatic linguistics’ to illustrate the reconstruction process for, for example, the identity of Egyptian aleph. Philippe Ségéral discusses directional vectors of vocalic change to mark aspectual-temporal oppositions, focusing on Akkadian, in...

Time Depth in Historical Linguistics 1-2

Time depth constitutes one of the most difficult problems in historical linguistics. Its evaluation is crucial for any systematic comparison with archaeological or genetic data, and hence basic to any broader historical interpretatio. This was the focus for a meeting of some of the world's leading linguistics held in 1999 at the McDonald Institute. The oft-criticised techniques of glottochronology and lexicostatistics were formulated by their leading advocates with positive results, but were also critically examined by sceptics. Linguistic palaeontology, convergence processes and morphological approaches were discussed. Specific consideration was given to Info-European, Uralic, Afroasiatic, bantu, Austronesian and Tibeto-Burman language families. This book will be indispensable for anyone seriously concerned with issues of time depth in languages, and for all archaeologists and geneticists seeking an integration between their own discipline and the early history of languages. Contibutors: Raimo Anttila, Peter Bakker, William Baxter, Peter Bellwood, Robert Blust, Lyle Campbell, James Clackson, Bernard Comrie, Aharon Dolgopolsky, Christopher Ehret, Sheila Embleton, T V Gamkrelidze, Richard Hayward, Paul Heggarty, Dimitry Leschiner, Marisa Lohr, Alexis Manaster Ramer, James Matisoff, Yaron Matras, April and Robert McMahon, Alexander Militiarev, Daniel Nettle, Joanna Nichols, Mark Pagel, Ilia Peiros, Colin Renfrew, Sergei Starostin, Larry Trask and Kalevi Wilk.

The Metaphorical Use of the Kinship Term sn "Brother"

Ever since J. J. Clere1 wrote in the mid-fifties a comparative study about kinship terminology in various Afroasiatic languages including Ancient Egyptian, this field has aroused the interest of a growing number of Egyptologists. G. Robins2 and D. Franke,3 among others,4 have dealt with the basic and extended meanings of kinship terms. For instance, they showed evidence that the word sn, which means brother in its basic sense, encompasses a great range of family ties in its broader, extended meaning. Sn may in the latter case designate the uncle, the cousin, or the nephew.5 None of these scholars, however, has dealt extensively with the third and largest acceptation of the word sn, namely its metaphorical one.6 By metaphorical meaning, I understand the transfer of a kinship term from its literal sense into a more abstract context in which this term takes its most figurative and symbolic meaning.7 For example, the kinship term it, which means father in its basic sense, and grandfather or ancestor in its extended one, could metaphorically mean teacher,8 or protector,9

The Suffix Conjugation Pattern in Ancient Hebrew Tense and Modal Functions

This article seeks to define the various syntagmas in which the suffix conjugation is employed in biblical Hebrew. The tense functions: Present, Past and Future are discussed under their respective syntactical constructions which in turn are placed in the matrix of ancient discourse. The suffix conjugation is understood as a pattern derived from the stative adjective in the most ancient documented Afro-Asiatic languages, viz. Egyptian and Akkadian.

Constraining disharmony in Nilotic: What does an optimal system look like?

Vowel harmony systems of the so-called cross-height type are found throughout the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo language families, with an extension into neighbouring Afroasiatic languages. Whereas it is common practice to focus on the esthetic aspect of harmony, many systems in actual fact leak, with disharmony within words being an important inherent property of such systems as well. The present study focuses on disharmony in the Nilotic branch within Nilo-Saharan. Here disharmony can be shown to result from vowel shifts disrupting or complicating the system; alternatively, disharmony occurs as a result of the cliticisation and affixation of formerly free morphemes with their own independent vowel features. In tandem with these historical changes, one may observe a tendency to constrain the degree of disharmony. A historical comparison of different Nilotic languages shows, however, that individual languages have developed different constraints on disharmony in the sense of Pulleyblank (1993). The present contribution seeks to investigate some of the mechanisms behind these divergent developments.

Logophoric Marking and Represented Speech in African Languages as Evidential Hedging Strategies

Logophoric markers are common in two African language families, Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan. In addition, they are found in neighbouring Afroasiatic languages. Similar markers have been observed, for example, for Indo-European languages or Japanese. In contrast with a widespread view, I claim that the status of logophoric markers in these African languages differs from that in the latter languages in a number of respects. This, I argue, has important consequences for the way in which logophoricity operates in these languages.

A Grammar of Koyroboro (Koroboro) Senni (review)

Reviewed by: A grammar of Koyraboro (Koroboro) Senni by Jeffrey Heath Edward J. Vajda A grammar of Koyraboro (Koroboro) Senni. By Jeffrey Heath. (Westafrikanische Studien 19.) Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1999. Pp. xvi, 402. This book is but one of the products from the author’s ongoing research on the Songhay family, a group of closely related languages (often referred to as dialects) spoken predominantly along or near the great bend of the Niger River in Mali. Other recent monographs by Jeffrey Heath include A grammar of Koyra Chiini: The Songhai of Timbuktu (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998); Texts in Koroboro Senni (Köln: Köppe Verlag, 1998); and Texts in Koyra Chiini (Köln: Köppe Verlag, 1998). All of these publications are significant, as little detailed information on the synchronic structure of Songhay languages was formerly available in print. H’s extensive descriptions, all based on recent fieldwork with native speakers, will be particularly valuable as databases for future explorations into the family’s external genetic relations or for the study of local processes of language mixing (the genesis of certain [End Page 183] Songhay languages may have included interesting creolization processes involving neighboring Afroasiatic languages). Clearly unrelated to the other language families of western Africa, Songhay has been included in the Nilo-Saharan phylum (Joseph Greenberg, Languages of Africa, 2nd edn., The Hague: Mouton, 1966), but H and most Songhay specialists remain sceptical that such a connection will ultimately be confirmed. The book begins with a map showing the modern distribution of Songhay languages (xv) and an introduction (Ch. 1) with basic historical and dialectal data on the family. This discussion is continued in three appendices at the end of the book which describe in detail the structural features that distinguish local varieties of Koyraboro Senni: riverine dialects east of Gao (366–72), riverine dialects west of Gao (373–80), and the Fulan Kirya dialect of the Gourma (381–89). Examples from all of these varieties appear in the discussion. The book’s remaining chapters provide a highly structured description (without theory-specific formalisms) of the variety of Koyraboro Senni spoken in and around the city of Gao: typological overview (Ch. 2); phonology (Ch. 3); nouns, pronouns, and nominal derivation (Ch. 4); nominal inflection and NP syntax (Ch. 5); verbal voice and verb derivation (Ch. 6); VP structure (Ch. 7); discourse-related constructions (Ch. 8); sentence-level syntax and semantics (Ch. 9); and a final chapter entitled ‘Anaphora, logophorics, and reported speech’ (Ch. 10). Some of the many interesting typological highlights include a basic SOV word order, with certain verbs (mainly those having a less tangible relationship between subject and object, such as ‘see’, ‘believe’, etc.) requiring SVO; also, there is a series of mood-aspect-negation particles which follow the subject NP but precede both the object and the verb itself. The book finishes with a brief bibliography (390), a morpheme list (391–98), and a subject index (399–402). As is true of H’s other monographs (see above), this book is now the authoritative reference for the varieties of Songhay it describes. One can only anticipate more such excellent descriptions of modern West African languages. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality Ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall (review)

444LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) REFERENCES Anttila, Raimo. 1972. Historical and comparative linguistics. New York: Macmillan. Bender, Marvin L. 1974. Omotic: A new Afro-Asiatic language family. (Southern Illinois University Museum Series 3.) Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Bendor-Samuel, John (ed.) 1989. The Niger-Congo languages. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bennett, Patrick R., and Jan P. Sterk. 1977. South Central Niger-Congo: A reclassification. Studies in African Linguistics 8.241-73. Bimson, Kent. 1978. Comparative reconstruction of proto-Northern-Western Mande. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Crowley, Terry. 1996. Introduction to historical linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, David. 1973. The comparative tonology of Southwestern Mande nomináis. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. ------. 1974. The historical development of Southwestern Mande consonants. Studies in African Linguistics 5.59-94. ------. 1989. Mande. In Bendor-Samuel, 44-55. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The languages of Africa. The Hague: Mouton. Gudschinsky, Sarah. 1956. The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology). Word 12.175-210. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1962. Historical linguistics: An introduction. New York: Holt. Meinhof, Carl. 1906. Grundztlge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen. Berlin. 2nd edn. Hamburg: Reimer, 1948. Welmers, William E. 1970. Language change and language relationships in Africa. Language Sciences 12.1-8. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die westlichen Sudansprachen und ihre Beziehungen zum Bantu. Berlin: de Gruyter. Department of English Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306 [hstahlke@bsu.edu] Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality. Ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 460. Reviewed by Sara Trechter, California State University, Chico Anna Livia and Kira Hall present 25 diverse articles concerning gay and lesbian expression that are a significant contribution to the growing field of queer language studies. Like most collections in language, gender, and sexuality, there is variety in the analytic approaches of the articles. They draw on literary theory, discourse analysis, phonology, semantics, and anthropology and include data from AAVE, ASL, French, Hausa, Hindi, and Japanese. Individual authors focus on a broad range of linguistic and queer concerns. For example, Tina Neumann describes the parallel discourse structures emergent in the double identity of a deaf lesbian's ASL comingout narrative. Elizabeth Morrish draws on critical discourse analysis to tease apart the presuppositions , themes, and intertextual connections of mainstream British newspapers as they stereotypically construct homosexuals. Bruce Bagemihl offers an extended analogy for understanding the same-sex desire of transsexuals by comparing transsexual queers to languages which express sounds through surrogate phonologies, using lutes, drums, etc. Given L & H's purposeful inclusion of such diverse material, their introduction provides a theoretical link connecting the articles to linguistic performativity and performativity to queer theory. The problem they see for the investigation of queer language is that past analyses relied on either linguistic determinism or social constructionism, the former leading researchers to dismiss the existence of gay culture unless it was encoded and the latter to eschew cross-cultural generalizations because discourse is specific to time and place (10). To solve the conundrum of an essentialist definition of gay vs. the inability to make any statement about liminal language REVIEWS445 at all, L & H locate their book at the crossroads of Butler's (1990) queer theory adaptations of performativity and its linguistic roots in Austin (1975). A focus on 'what people do with words' potentially offers analyses abstract enough to accommodate disparate cultures and historical change (13). Its success depends on the extent to which individual researchers succeed in defining performative commonalities for queering language without returning to identity as definition, e.g., 'Queering language is what queers do with language'. The book divides into three sections: (1) 'Liminal lexicality'—items denoting alternative sexual identities; (2) 'Queerspeak'—discourse strategies that might be taken as gay; and (3) 'Linguistic gender-bending'—the transformation of gendered linguistic systems. Several common themes arise out of this consideration of language of the periphery. These include a tension between resistance as secrecy/silence and performed opposition with uptake of intentional irony, the linguistic restrictions on ludic responses, and adequate definitions of the object of analysis when the goal of queering is resistance to hegemonic definition. An introduction to each of the three major sections would have helped...

On Being "First": Making History by Two's in Southern Ethiopia

Southern Ethiopia is a structuralist's delight. Here are dozens of cultural groups, many small, in historical interaction for millennia, all different in one way or another, but all resembling one another as well. Had his personal history been different, Lévi-Strauss might well have made Ethiopia his laboratory, and most of his structuralist points would have emerged as clearly as in South America. Structuralist insights are important, but here I would like to argue for an ultimately different approach that attempts to look at cultural variation in the context of regional historical processes. If one takes the example of dual organization, Lévi-Strauss seized upon it because dualism epitomized for him the logically simplest and most sociologically elegant way of institutionalizing the principle of reciprocity: all of society is divided into As and Bs, and the continuance of social life depends upon the give-and-take between these two. In this way, Lévi-Strauss soared from the details of obscure South American ethnography to the most fundamental assumptions about sociality and "the structure of the human mind." My own bent is to stay closer to the ground and to attempt to base comparison in the contours of regional histories. The immediate difficulty that one faces is, of course, that we know so little, in fact, about the long-term history of southern Ethiopia. What we do know is that the Ethiopian highlands were a center of proliferation of extremely ancient languages and cultures. The family of Afro-Asiatic languages includes Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber, Chadic, and Ancient Egyptian. Of [End Page 21] these six, three occur in present-day Ethiopia, making it a plausible point of origin and dispersal for all of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Over the past two millennia, one of the most consequential processes in northeast African history has been the creation and expansion of northern, mostly Semitic-speaking empires into the south. Donald Levine has analyzed this process in Greater Ethiopia (2000), and a collection of essays edited by Wendy James and myself, The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia (Donham and James 2002), took up the particularities of the period from the late nineteenth century to 1974. Looked at overall, this history of the expansion of the power of Semitic-speakers and the eventual assimilation of many Cushitic- and Omotic-speaking groups to Semitic language and culture is understood now, at least in outline. Only one of the residues of this complicated history is the presence of words in Amharic for spiritual beings other than God that have been borrowed from both Cushitic and Omotic languages. As Levine has argued, northern Ethiopians' possession of the book, and as others have suggested, their dependence upon the plow, made the dynamics of the expansion somewhat different from that typically found in the rest of Africa. But any similar understanding of the outlines of the long-term cultural history of Omotic- and Cushitic-speakers is less developed. Some work has been done on the Oromo expansion, but a large-scale regional synthesis remains to be done. Part of the problem is, of course, a lack of historical data on an area without written indigenous languages. Another difficulty is understanding Cushitic- and Omotic-speaking cultures in their own terms—not just as they contribute to a supposed Ethiopian synthesis. This paper is a preliminary attempt to analyze a recurrent theme in southern Ethiopian history. It is speculative to a degree, and because it proceeds largely from one small group—the Maale—rather than covering the vast array of southern peoples and cultures, it will inevitably be biased. How does one do a comparison in a historically sensitive way in a context in which we in fact know very little history—at least history of the conventional sort? Here, I take my lead from Igor Kopytoff's stimulating essay (1987) on the frontier in African history...

The peopling of sub-Saharan Africa: the case study of Cameroon.

This study analyzes the distribution of ten protein genetic polymorphisms in eighteen populations from the most densely inhabited areas of Cameroon. The languages spoken belong to three different linguistic families [Afro-Asiatic (AA), Nilo-Saharan (NS) and Niger-Kordofanian (NK)]. The analysis of variation of allele frequencies indicates that the level of genetic interpopulation differentiation is rather low (F(st) = 0.011 +/- 0.006) but statistically significant (p < 0.001). This result is not unexpected because of the relatively small geographic area covered by our survey. This value is also significantly lower than the one estimated for other groups of African populations. Among the factors responsible for this, we discuss the possible role of gene flow. There is a considerable genetic differentiation among the AA populations of north Cameroon as is to be expected because they all originated from the first agriculturists of the farming "savanna complex." The Podowko and Uldeme are considerably different from all the other AA groups, probably due to the combined effect of genetic drift and isolation. In the case of the Wandala and Massa, our analyses suggest that genetic admixture with allogeneous groups (especially with the Kanuri) played an important role in determining their genetic differentiation from other AA speaking groups. The Bantu speaking populations (Bakaka, Bamileke Bassa and Ewondo, NK family, Benué Congo subfamily) settled in western and southern Cameroon are more tightly clustered than AA speaking groups. This result shows that the linguistic affinity among these four populations coincides with a substantial genetic similarity despite their different origin. Finally, the Fulbe are genetically distinct from all the populations that belong to their same linguistic phylum (NK), and closer to the neighboring Fali and Tupuri, eastern Adamawa speaking groups of north Cameroon.

Black God. The Afroasiatic Roots of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Religions

A comparative study of the Afroasiatic traditional religions of northern Africa and Arabia. The author argues that there is a common Afroasiatic language in those regions, so is there a common family of religions. He compares traditions as diverse as those in Yemen and Nigeria.

The Use of Arabic in Biblical Hebrew Lexicography (review)

Hebrew Studies 39 (1998) 196 Reviews THE USE OF ARABIC IN BIBLICAL HEBREW LEXICOGRAPHY . By John Kaltner. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series, 28. Pp. vii + 122. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1996. Paper, $7.50. This well-researched monograph is a critical examination of several purported Arabic cognates to the Biblical Hebrew lexicon. It conclusively demonstrates that even well-known Hebraists have erred in some of their comparisons for several basic reasons. Two of the worst offenders cited by the author are Alfred Guillaume and G. R. Driver; however, other prominent scholars featured for false equations include Edward Ullendorff and the late Marvin Pope. I might add that another notorious overuser of the Arabic lexicons in his work on cognate Semitic languages has been John Gray (1913- ); (see, e.g., as typical his The Legacy of Canaan, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957). It is somewhat surprising that his name does not appear in the book undergoing review. One of the characteristics all of the aforementioned scholars have had in common is their phenomenal productivity. The book consists of five chapters and two appendices. Chapter I, "The Problem and the Resources" (pp. 1-21), surveys the long history of the utilization of Arabic in Biblical Hebrew lexicography. Discussing this area in terms of the larger field of Comparative Semitics, Kaltner incorrectly refers to the related (so-called) Hamitic languages (p. 3). Almost all comparativists today reject the idea that Proto-Hamito-Semitic (= ProtoAfroasiatic = Proto-Af~asian) split into Proto-Semitic and Proto-Hamitic. Consequently, there is no Hamitic linguistic grouping, and other designations which use this term, such as Chado-Hamitic, have been thoroughly discredited. Let us hope that the designation "Hamitic" drops out of contemporary usage, since it is a relic of an era which displays a misunderstanding of the interrelationship of the Afroasiatic languages. An interesting section of this chapter is devoted to medieval Jewish comparative lexicography, as reflected in the work of Sa'adya Gaon, Judah Ibn Qoreish, Judah l;Iayyiij, Jonah Ibn Janatt, and Ibn Bariin. Sa'adya Gaon (882-942), probably the best-known of the aforementioned scholars, listed and commented on the hapax legomena in the Bible and also wrote a grammar of Hebrew; however, his major achievements may be his commentary on many of the books of the Bible (in Arabic) and his Arabic translation of the Bible. Since he was born in Upper Egypt, Arabic was his mother tongue. Hebrew Studies 39 (1998) 197 Reviews The author devotes a section to the field of Arabic lexicography per se ('ilm lugha) and includes a discussion of the first Arab lexicographer, alKhah1 ibn'Atunad (ca. 718-790), author of the Kitab al-'Ayn (pp. 11-12). As is well known, the Arabic dictionary tradition is the world's oldest (p. 11) after Chinese (cf. HsU Shen's Shuo Wen, first century CE), although Akkadian and Sumerian word lists predate both by many centuries. In rejecting the comparative work of others, Kaltner makes use of the following excellent dictionaries, on which he offers some background information for the non-specialist: (1) AI-Jamhara jil-Lugha of Ibn Duraid; (2) AI-Tah6fb jil-Lugha of AI-Azhari; (3) AI-SihalJ of AI-Jawhari (incorrectly translated as "The Crown of Language and the Correct [Forms] of Arabic," p. 13); (4) the Lisan AI-'Arab of Ibn M~; (5) AIQaml2s AI-MulJfC of AI-Firuzabadi; and (6) the Taj AI-'Arl2s of Al-Zabidi. He rightly cautions against the use of Hans Wehr's dictionary (A Dictionary of Modern Wrillen Arabic, edited by J. Milton Cowan, Ithaca: Spoken Language Services, 1976), since it is devoted to modem usage (although it does contain many germane classicisms and is certainly an excellent dictionary). Similar sentiments are expressed concerning J. G. Hava's Arabic-English Dictionary (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1951). He states quite rightly of the latter that it is "not a reliable source" (p. 20). Chapter 2, "Restricting the Semantic Range: Tunnel Vision" (pp. 22~6) discusses linguistic researchers who (1) focus on extremely rare or secondary meanings of an Arabic root as reported in various dictionaries, (2) rely on only one source for a meaning, or (3) do not...

A Sketch of Phonetic and Phonological Systems of Afro-Asiatic Languages: Consonantal Features

A Sketch of Phonetic and Phonological Systems of Afro-Asiatic Languages: Consonantal Features

Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction

The language of Ancient Egypt has been the object of careful investigation since its decipherment in the nineteenth century, but this is the first accessible account which uses the insights of modern linguistics. Antonio Loprieno traces Ancient Egyptian's historical development from Old Egyptian to Coptic, and, combining diachronic and synchronic viewpoints wherever possible, he looks at the hieroglyphic system and its cursive varieties (Hieratic and Demotic), the phonology of Classical Egyptian and Coptic, the phonology and syntax of the literary languages, and semantic and pragmatic constraints on syntax. He also looks at the genetic connections of Egyptian within the Afroasiatic family, especially with Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Arabic, and Hebrew. This book will be essential reading for linguists and Egyptologists alike.

Some Reflections on the Afrasian Linguistic Macrofamily

Previous articleNext article No AccessSome Reflections on the Afrasian Linguistic MacrofamilyIgor M. DiakonoffIgor M. Diakonoff Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 55, Number 4Oct., 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/373865 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Vit Bubenik Development of Tense/Aspect in Semitic in the Context of Afro-Asiatic Languages, 337 (Apr 2017).https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.337 Bibliography, (May 2015): 225–270.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666540448.225Christopher Ehret, S. O. Y. Keita, Paul Newman The Origins of Afroasiatic, Science 306, no.57025702 (Dec 2004): 1680–1680.https://doi.org/10.1126/science.306.5702.1680c

Drift and Noun Plural Reduplication in Afroasiatic

Noun plurals showing partial reduplication appear sporadically in a wide variety of Afroasiatic languages, particularly in the Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic groups. In past treatments it has generally been assumed that these examples are remnants of a widespread proto-Afroasiatic process of plural formation by reduplication. The following paper argues on empirical and theoretical grounds that it is more likely that reduplication as such was not a means of plural formation in proto-Afroasiatic and that a reduplicated plural only occurred as a morpho-phonologically conditioned variant of the prosodically extended stem (or ‘nternal-a’) plural. This paper seeks to demonstrate that in those languages where reduplication does occur as a major means of plural formation it is more easily interpreted as an innovation rather than as a conservative retention.

Géométrie des restrictions de cooccurrence de traits en sémitique et en berbère: synchronie et diachronie

AbstractThe main goal of this article is to provide a more global approach to the question of cooccurrence restrictions which hold among classes of segments in Hamito-Semitic languages. It is demonstrated that the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) combined with the directionality conventions is not sufficient to predict all of the observed cooccurrence restrictions found in the Classical Arabic verb root and that it is necessary to postulate two other constraints that interact with the OCP. By establishing a parallel between the facts observed in Classical Arabic and the labial dissimilations in two other Hamito-Semitic languages, Akkadian and Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber, it is argued that, at the Proto-Hamito-Semitic stage, the OCP hierarchically dominated the Multiple Association Constraint operative at the level of articulator nodes, but that this hierarchy is no longer synchronically manifested in languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The existence of a constraint that imposes a minimal sonority distance on rising sonority contours is also postulated to account for an asymmetry indicating a tendency to prefer certain sequences of segments over the reverse order.

Genetic variation in North Africa and Eurasia: Neolithic demic diffusion vs. paleolithic colonisation

The hypothesis that both genetic and linguistic similarities among Eurasian and North African populations are due to demic diffusion of neolithic farmers is tested against a wide database of allele frequencies. Demic diffusion of farming and languages from the Near East should have determined clines in areas defined by linguistic criteria; the alternative hypothesis of cultural transmission does not predict clines. Spatial autocorrelation analysis shows significant gradients in three of the four linguistic families supposedly affected by neolithic demic diffusion; the Afroasiatic family is the exception. Many such gradients are not observed when populations are jointly analyzed, regardless of linguistic classification. This is incompatible with the hypothesis that major cultural transformations in Eurasia (diffusion of related languages and spread of agriculture) took place without major demographic changes. The model of demic diffusion seems therefore to provide a mechanism explaining coevolution of linguistic and biological traits in much of the Old World. Archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence agree in suggesting a multidirectional process of gene flow from the Near East in the neolithic. However, the possibility should be envisaged that some allele frequency patterns can predate the neolithic and depend on the initial spread of Homo sapiens sapiens from Africa into Eurasia.

A Neglected Ethiopian Contribution to Semitic and Afroasiatic Reconstruction

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Historical Issues in African Linguistics (1994)