Türkçe ansiklopedi, sözlük, genel başvuru ve bilgi sitesi   
  		  Yardım
  Rastgele    

Afro-asiatic

Afro-Asiatic
Geographic
distribution:		 Horn of Africa, North Africa, northern Central Africa, northern West Africa, Southwest Asia
Genetic
classification:		 }}
Subdivisions:
ISO 639-2:afa
Distribution of Afro-Asiatic shown in yellow
The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family (Languages of Africa) with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Hamito-Semitic" (French and European scholars), "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972), "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966).

The family includes the following language subfamilies: 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.[1]

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[2][3]. 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.[4]

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 Ethiopia and Eritrea, while others, such as A. Murtonen, dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia[1]. 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 [2]. 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[3][4].

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. 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, tumble"; 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 Kushitic *k'od- "receptical"; Oromo k'odaa "receptical"; West Chadic *k'wad- "calabash"; Dangla koda "pot" gives Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k'ud-/*k'od- "Vessel, pot"[5].

Ehret [6] 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[7], and that the neolithic agriculture technologies arrived 5000 BCE[8], 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 it was out of this area of the Southern Nile that was the centre for dispersion of the Afro-Asiatic languages occurred[9]. The dates of pottery and agriculture sets approximate early and late dates for this linguistic dispersal. Climatically this was a period 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"[10][11].

Common features and cognates

Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages include: Some cognates include: In the verbal system, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (including Beja) all provide evidence for a prefix conjugation:
EnglishArabic (Semitic)Kabyle (Berber)Somali (Cushitic)Beja (verb is "arrive")
he diesyamuutuyemmutwudimteiktim
she diestamuututemmutweedimatetiktim
they (m.) dieyamuutuunammutenwedimteniktimna
you (m. sg.) dietamuututemmuteḍwadimatetiktima
you (m. pl.) dietamuutuunatemmutemwadimatentiktimna
I dieˀamuutummuteɣwadimteaktim
we dienamuutunemmutwadimaneniktim


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.

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 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, 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 split from the rest first. Otherwise:

See also

Etymological bibliography

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

References

1. ^ 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
2. ^ Midant-Reynes, Beatrix (2000), The Prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first Pharaohs (Blackwell) pp.73-75
3. ^ Perrot J. (1964), "Les deux premieres campagnesde feuilles a Munhata" Syria XLI pp323-45
4. ^ Mellaart, James (1975), The Neolithic of the Near East (London: Thames and Hudson), pp. 239-241
5. ^ Bomhard, Alan R (1996), "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" (Signum)
6. ^ Ehret, Christopher (1982), "On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia" Journal of African History (Uni of Calif. Berkeley Press)
7. ^ Barnett, William & Hoopes, John (Eds.) (1995). The Emergence of Pottery. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
8. ^ Midant-Reynes, Beatrix (2000), The Prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first Pharaohs (Blackwell)
9. ^ Bender, Lionel (1997), "Upside Down Afrasian"Africanistiche Arbeitspapiers 50, pp19-34
10. ^ Fagan, Brian (2004), The Long Hot Summer: how climate changed civilisation (London: Grant Books)
11. ^ Burroughs, William J. (2005), Climate Change in Prehistory:the end of the reign of Chaos (Cambridge University Press)

Sources

External links

The Horn of Africa (alternatively Northeast Africa, and sometimes Somali Peninsula) is a peninsula of East Africa that juts for hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea, and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden.
..... Click the link for more information.
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, separated by the Sahara from Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Northern Africa includes the following seven territories:


..... Click the link for more information.
Central Africa is a core region of the African continent often considered to include: Middle Africa
..... Click the link for more information.
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa (which coincides with common reckonings of the region) includes the following 16 countries distributed over an area of around 5 million
..... Click the link for more information.
Southwest Asia or Southwestern Asia (largely overlapping with the Middle East) is the southwestern portion of Asia. The term Western Asia is sometimes used in writings about the archeology and the late prehistory of the region, and in the United States subregion
..... Click the link for more information.
A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics.
..... Click the link for more information.
Berber languages / Tamazight are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. A very sparse population extends into the whole Sahara and the northern part of the Sahel. They belong to the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum.
..... Click the link for more information.
Chadic languages constitute a language family spoken across northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon, belonging to the Afro-Asiatic phylum. The most widely spoken Chadic language is Hausa, the lingua franca of much of West Africa.
..... Click the link for more information.

 Egyptian}}} 
Writing system: hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic and Coptic (later, occasionally Arabic script in government translations)
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: egy
ISO 639-3: egy
..... Click the link for more information.
Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 300 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. They constitute the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only branch of this group spoken in Asia.
..... Click the link for more information.
Cushitic languages are a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic. They are spoken in the Horn of Africa. The most prominent language is Oromo with about 25 million speakers, followed by Somali (in Somalia, Ethiopia,
..... Click the link for more information.
The Omotic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages spoken in northeastern Africa. Most Omotic speakers live in southwestern Ethiopia. The Omotic languages are fairly agglutinative.

The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages.
..... Click the link for more information.
ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as "Alpha-3" codes. There are 464 language codes in the list.
..... Click the link for more information.
A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics.
..... Click the link for more information.
Languages of Africa are a diverse set of languages, many of which bear little relation to one another. European language has a great deal of influence due to the recent history of colonization.

There are an estimated 2000 languages spoken in Africa.
..... Click the link for more information.
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, separated by the Sahara from Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Northern Africa includes the following seven territories:


..... Click the link for more information.
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easternmost region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:
..... Click the link for more information.
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa (which coincides with common reckonings of the region) includes the following 16 countries distributed over an area of around 5 million
..... Click the link for more information.
Central Africa is a core region of the African continent often considered to include: Middle Africa
..... Click the link for more information.
Southwest Asia or Southwestern Asia (largely overlapping with the Middle East) is the southwestern portion of Asia. The term Western Asia is sometimes used in writings about the archeology and the late prehistory of the region, and in the United States subregion
..... Click the link for more information.
al-‘Arabiyyah in written Arabic (Kufic script):  
Pronunciation: /alˌʕa.raˈbij.ja/
Spoken in: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman,
..... Click the link for more information.
Berber languages / Tamazight are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. A very sparse population extends into the whole Sahara and the northern part of the Sahel. They belong to the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum.
..... Click the link for more information.
Chadic languages constitute a language family spoken across northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon, belonging to the Afro-Asiatic phylum. The most widely spoken Chadic language is Hausa, the lingua franca of much of West Africa.
..... Click the link for more information.

 Egyptian}}} 
Writing system: hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic and Coptic (later, occasionally Arabic script in government translations)
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: egy
ISO 639-3: egy
..... Click the link for more information.
Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 300 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. They constitute the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only branch of this group spoken in Asia.
..... Click the link for more information.
Cushitic languages are a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic. They are spoken in the Horn of Africa. The most prominent language is Oromo with about 25 million speakers, followed by Somali (in Somalia, Ethiopia,
..... Click the link for more information.
The Omotic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages spoken in northeastern Africa. Most Omotic speakers live in southwestern Ethiopia. The Omotic languages are fairly agglutinative.

The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages.
..... Click the link for more information.
Beja (also called Bedawi, Bedauye, To Bedawie) is an Afro-Asiatic language of the southern coast of the Red Sea, spoken by about two million nomads, the Beja, in parts of Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea.
..... Click the link for more information.
Ongota (also known as Birale/Birayle) is a moribund language of southwest Ethiopia. In 2000, it was said to be in a state of decline with only 8 elderly native speakers, the rest of their small village on the west bank of the Weyt'o River having adopted the
..... Click the link for more information.
Harold C. Fleming is an anthropologist and historical linguist. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American Anthropology he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology in solving anthropological problems.
..... Click the link for more information.


This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.