From: Danny Wier
Message: 2939
Date: 2000-08-03
> Afroasiatic (= Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Erythraic) is a revampedThe Ethonologue has Chadic split every which way, almost like Bantu.
> 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).
> Egyptian is by no means "half unknown"; it is in fact a veryThank God for Coptic.
> 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.
> Despite all the difficulties some kind of genetic relationshipI'm too afraid we'll only get as far as Egyptian-Semitic-Berber. Back
> 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.