Re: [TIED] Re: AfroAsiatic

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2613
Date: 2000-06-04

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Dennis Poulter
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2000 2:24 PM
Subject: [TIED] Re: AfroAsiatic

Dennis wrote:
the African branches of AfroAsiatic show a common development in phonology and morphology, such as the loss of laryngeals and emphatics (ejectives)...
 
 
Dennis,
 
Whatever their deeper origin, Arabic or Berber "emphatics" are pharyngealised coronals and uvulars/pharyngeals, produced with the normal pulmonic airstream mechanism (which means that they are NOT ejectives). Most of the traditional transcription systems do their utmost to obscure the phonetic details. True ejectives (as well as other "glottalics", such as implosives) abound in Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, and also in Amharic, Tigrinya and other Ethiopic Semitic languages. As recently revised (Loprieno 1995, Satzinger 1997), the Old Egyptian sound system had a set of "glottalised" (read "ejective") obstruents.
 
Many Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic languages are known only from sketchy grammatical descriptions or unverified word-lists, etc. Few of them have any recorded history to speak of. It will take some time before we are able to talk about their genetic relationships with anything approaching confidence.
 
Piotr