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Sent:
Wednesday, August 02, 2000 12:23 AM
Subject: [tied]
Re: IE, AA, Nostratic & Black Athena
Afroasiatic (= Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian,
Erythraic) is a revamped version of the old Hamito-Semitic family. The six major
groupings that are considered to belong to it are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic,
Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. They don't all stand on the same footing. Berber
is a grouping of closely related languages forming continuous dialect chains --
a sort of single-branch family. Semitic is a decent language family like IE; so
is Omotic (formerly classified as a branch of Cushitic), though it is
smaller and its internal structure is less clear. Chadic and Cushitic are rather
loose groupings which will perhaps have to be split into smaller taxa one day,
when more is known about them. The position of Egyptian is quite unique (see
below).
Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic are known only
from modern times, and Berber has some (very limited) historical attestation,
whereas Semitic includes many of the most ancient written languages (Akkadian,
Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.; of course all the Arabic dialects,
Amharic and some other modern languages also belong here). Egyptian has the
longest recorded history of all human languages (from ca. 3000 BC to the 14th
century, which gives it a documented time-depth of about 4500 years). All
through its evolution it showed a good deal of regional and sociolectal
variation, but there is no reason to divide it into smaller language-size units,
so the "Egyptian subfamily" in fact consists of a sole extraordinarily
long-lived isolate.
Egyptian is by no means "half unknown"; it
is in fact a very well-known language, with an immense literature that has been
studied by modern scholars for almost two hundred years. Its vocabulary and
grammatical structure don't pose too many serious problems. To be sure, its
phonology is only partly reconstructable because of the limitations of the Old
Egyptian writing system (which ignored vowels) and also because of the fact that
only internal evidence can be used in its reconstruction.
The best evidence for the reality of
Afroasiatic as a genetic unit involves the system of grammatical morphemes
(derivational affixes, inflections and pronouns). There's some reconstructable
proto-vocabulary as well, though this kind of evidence is less persuasive, given
the long history of interaction between the various subgroupings and the
possibility of extensive borrowing in the past. As the proto-phonologies of all
the branches (also Semitic, but particularly Chadic, Omotic etc.)
are constantly being revised, the Proto-Afroasiatic sound system is an
extremely difficult subject (the Semitic and Egyptian evidence isn't bad, but if
we ignore more than 200 languages in the African subfamilies, a strong
Semitocentric bias becomes a certainty). The most serious problem is that the
comparison is inherently unequal: on the one side we have old and well-studied
languages, on the other, a large number of exclusively modern dialects, many of
which are barely documented.
Despite all the difficulties some kind of
genetic relationship between Egyptian and Semitic seems to be more than a
reasonable working hypothesis, though it isn't clear yet in what manner either
of the two is related to Berber or to the remaining African branches. There are
several mutually exclusive taxonomic proposals at the moment, and only time can
tell which of them makes the most sense.
Piotr
Håkan asked:
And, since we are talking about Egyptian,
what are the relations between Egyptian and other Semitic/Afro-Asiatic
languages, like Hebrew or Arabic? Are they closely related or very different?
How much do we know about Egyptian today? Everything I've read about Egyptian
makes it seem like a language that's still half unknown. Piotr, you seem to
know Egyptian as well! Would you like to explain what is known about this
language?